Fair notice: this post contains an extended reference to my just-published book, The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age (Berlin and Boston, De Gruyter, 2014). Of course I have a material interest in every reader of my blog purchasing at least ten copies of the book. I have consulted Atwater, Bianchi and Haywood-Papadopoulos, Handbook of Blogging Ethics: Since the main thesis of the book is relevant to many issues regularly discussed in the blog, it is ethical to draw attention to the book in the blog, commercial considerations notwithstanding. In any case, I quote my favorite Zulu proverb: â??If I donâ??t beat my drum, who will?â? As I have quoted this wise saying before in these pages, I will add yet another piece of African wisdom: â??If you are not going to plagiarize from yourself, who are you going to plagiarize from?â?
The phrase â??The New Evangelizationâ? was first used by the Italian Catholic student group â??Communion and Liberationâ?, founded in the 1960s and since grown into an officially approved international movement . The phrase was used by Pope John Paul II in 1983, in an important address to a meeting of Latin American bishops. The evangelization was to target â??an entire group of the baptized who have lost a living sense of the faith, or even no longer consider themselves members of the Church, or live a life far removed from Christ and his gospelâ?. The phrase was taken up forcefully by Pope Benedict XVI, who in 2010 established the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization, with the purpose of seeking strategies for promoting the truth of Catholic Christianity in a situation characterized by â??the presence of secularizationâ?.
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