Making The Truth Beautiful

At a conference last month, Bishop James D. Conley of the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska said:

Our New Evangelization must work to make truth beautiful. By means both ancient and new, we must make use of beauty – to infuse Western culture, once more, with the spirit of the Gospel… By means of earthly beauty, we can help our contemporaries discover the truth of the Gospel. Then, they may come to know the eternal beauty of God.

There are many ways of doing this, Conley notes, by exposing the world to the rich artistic imagination of the Church, which extends from the time of Christ to today. Music, literature, architecture, paintings, sculptures, and stories of the human experience – these all are tools of earthly beauty that help us to see the eternal beauty of God.

Stories of the Saints are also beautiful testimonies that can bring all of us closer to the Father, especially stories of those in our own back yard. Familiarize yourself with and share the stories of Fr. Emil Kapaun and Cora Evans. Both from the United States, these holy witnesses could soon be named among the saints!

Six Tips For The New Evangelization

At the Catholic Press Association's Catholic Media Conference in June, Fr. Robert Barron, Rector of Chicago’s Mundelein Seminary and founder of Word on Fire ministries, gave a presentation on “Media, Beauty and the New Evangelization.” Here he offered six suggestions for evangelizing in an effective way:

1. Lead with beauty
2. Don’t dumb down the message
3. Preach with ardor
4. Tell the great story of salvation history
5. Stress the Augustinian anthropology
6. Use Ireneaus’ doctrine of God

For more details on what these six tips mean, read the Our Sunday Visitor blog here. For more on what this New Evangelization is all about, check out the Blessed John Paul II Shrine website.

Evangelizing With Stories

Joshua Mercer on Catholic Pulse reminds us that Washington, D.C. isn’t the only city in need of a New Evangelization. Hollywood is a city that reaches Americans every day with its movies and shows. 

As Blessed John Paul II wrote in his Letter to Artists, “Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. It is an invitation to savor life and to dream of the future.” At the heart of this culture, there is an attraction to beautiful stories, images, and words. Let us support the artists in our Christian communities, that they may be empowered to bring the world closer to Christ with their work. 

Their Reply, Their Beauty

I put my question to the earth, and it replied, “I am not he”;

I questioned everything it held, and they confessed the same.

I questioned the sea and the great deep,

and the teeming live creatures that crawl,

and they replied,

“We are not God; seek higher.”

I questioned the gusty winds,

and every breeze with all its flying creatures told me,

“Anaximenes was wrong: I am not God.”

To the sky I put my question, to sun, moon, stars,

But they denied me: “We are not the God you seek.”

And to all things which stood around the portals of my flesh

I said,

“Tell me of my God.

You are not he, but tell me something of him.”

Then they lifted their mighty voices and cried,

“He made us.”

My questioning was my attentive spirit,

And their reply, their beauty.

-St. Augustine of Hippo