“The Pope is making a distinction between proselytizing and evangelizing. Its a distinction lost on most.”
Would you be so kind as to articulate what your understanding is, of how he sees the difference between the two?
It would appear to the great unwashed masses who only own dictionaries, that the first attempts to convert someone from their current religious belief to a new one. The second attempts to convert someone from their current religious belief to a new one.
What say you, to enlighten FR with the correct definitions, and after that we can discuss if the pope is correct?
I know what the distinction between the two is. Here's a quick summary I saw online:
Technically speaking, proselytism and evangelism are synonyms for the act of advocating for one's own cause and seeking to bring others to belief in that cause. In recent decades though, and in religious parlance, some have used the term proselytism to refer to "hard sell" techniques for gaining converts that often are disrespectful of the conscience, human dignity, and personal convictions of the person who is being proselytized, while evangelism is used is refer to respectful means of witnessing to one's own faith while respecting those who are being evangelized.If the more recent distinction between the two terms is recognized, then Catholics are called to evangelism and not to proselytism.
That's a post Vatican II development of the concepts that can be debated separately.
Admittedly, I do not know how the Pope sees the difference, because he and the Vatican have not offered any clarification of the words in his interview.
And there's the rub.
proselytizing is usually done with misinformation and not rooted in the “love of the other person” if more about scoreing points of getting someone to come to “my religion” Pope Francis as seen “proselytizing” done by groups such as JW, Adventist and some of the Fundalmentalist Bob Jones type Protestants in South America.
Evangelization is seen as revealing Christ by word and deed and let them encounter him thru his Bride the Church, which all baptized are part of, it does not, versus Proselytizing, rely on false accusations and agressive apologetics that misrepresents what someone believes. As someone who has been here at FR a long time, but does not post as much as it is same stuff different day around here [and same members of the Protestant Fundie brigades], aggressive proselytizing can be empirically observed by watching many FR Prots post here, in my view.