Posted on 02/23/2018 4:54:46 PM PST by GoldenState_Rose
Since at least the 1960s – swathes of the Western world have witnessed unprecedented religious change and (for the most part) decline. We have simultaneously witnessed a series of social and cultural revolutions, most recently the technological and media revolution driven by the internet. That alone has profoundly changed the way people think and act...
This “new evangelisation” requires that we (and I mean all Christians) are embarking on a centuries-long endeavour. And given this, we need to approach it in the right frame of mind, fortified with a spirituality of patience and perseverance.
While we tend to think of the initial Christianisation of the Roman world to have been accomplished near-miraculously swiftly, even this occurred over the course of centuries (and within a total population somewhat smaller than today’s Midwest). Furthermore, we all remember its great evangelising and miracle-working saints – Paul, Gregory the Wonderworker, Augustine of Canterbury – and rightly so. Recent research suggests, however, that the real “engine room” of the first evangelisation lay, instead, in the slow and simple passing on of the faith from (seemingly) ordinary believer to ordinary believer, and especially from parent to child. As Benedict XVI said, “The mission has not changed, just as the enthusiasm and courage that moved the Apostles and first disciples must not change.”
Now, it seems to me that our difficulty is for Christians to persevere; for us to retain our ardour, our motivation, at a time – almost certainly a long, long time – of small successes.
And it is here that we return to Newman, and his sermon (preached in 1830), “Jeremiah, a Lesson for the Disappointed”. The prophet “Jeremiah’s ministry may be summed up in three words: good hope, labour, disappointment.” Newman draws from this a universal lesson about the nature of human undertakings.
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicherald.co.uk ...
I don’t see how.
Most Europeans are hopelessly lost and evil.
I pray I’m wrong.
In Europe? I highly doubt that. Atheism is very much on the rise there.
ALL Islamic Nations are former Christian Nations. When a nation forgets God, they try secularism for a time until they fall to Satan’s counterfeit: Islam. There will be no revival for these European nations until Jesus comes back and destroys Islam...Luke 18:8
Can’t have a revival from the grave.
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
French conservative rising star and leader, 28 yr old Marion Marechal-Le Pen, ended her speech at CPAC yesterday with that quote from Gustav Mahler. Her speech indicates that the flame still flickers...
Indeed, they are. But they were that way around AD 52, when Paul of Tarsus crossed the Bosphorus into Europe for the first time, so there's hope.
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