It’s an important read, After laying out the Catholic/Christian roots of the Americas, the contemporary obstacles to evangelization, he proceeds to offer a model:
A Snapshot From New Mexico, February 1634
As I see it, my friends, the obstacles we face in the new evangelization of America are cultural.
The question then is what are we going to do about these things, how are we going to evangelize this culture, this new America? As we think about how to answer that question, ten years after the Synod for America, I’d like to read you an excerpt from an early account of the missions in New Mexico. It was written by a Spanish Franciscan, Fray Alonso de Benavides, in February 1634. He writes:
In every pueblo where a friar resides, he has schools for the teaching of praying, singing, playing musical instruments, and other interesting things. Promptly at dawn, one of the Indian singers, whose turn it is that week, goes to ring the bell for [morning prayer] . . . . [After that] the bell is rung for Mass. All go into the church, the friar says Mass and administers the sacraments. . . . Mass over . . . all kneel down by the church door and sing the Salve [Regina] in their own tongue.
Fray Alonso goes on to describe how after Mass every day the friars and their Indian converts would spend time serving the poor and the sick. The missionaries oversaw schools and visited neighboring pueblos to baptize converts, hear confessions, and to offer guidance and advice. They were involved in the local economy, helping people run their farms and raise cattle and sheep.
Fray Alonso says, and I quote: “One of the greatest tasks of the friars is to [mediate] the disputes of the Indians among themselves, for, since they look upon him as a father, they come to him with all their troubles, and he has to take pains to harmonize them.” He concludes his report by commemorating the martyrs, saying that their work to spread the Gospel has been “watered with the blood and lives of ten of their brethren” (Documents of American Catholic History, I:15–17).
I wanted to share this little snapshot from our country’s first evangelization because in it I think we can find insights for our own work of the new evangelization.
What Fray Alonso is giving us, really, is a picture of how to evangelize a culture. Notice that the friars and their lay associates are involved in every area of the people’s lives— education and social service, work and worship; they’re also trying to shape the arts, teaching singing and music.
These first evangelizers cared for the people’s material and spiritual needs. One of their greatest tasks was being peacemakers, reconciling opposing factions in their communities, seeking social harmony and the common good. Notice that their days were centered on the Eucharist and prayer, and that people were taught to pray in their own language. Finally, these first evangelizers recognized that they belonged to a communion of saints—they remembered the martyrs who had died to help them spread the faith. To Meet the Living God in Christ
There are many lessons here for us, my friends.
Like America’s first evangelists, we must go fearlessly into the heart of our culture, into the heart of our people’s lives—bringing the Gospel into their homes, into all their many occupations, into their schools and into their arts and sciences, into the media and into the political arena.
Why did the first evangelists here teach music and song to their converts? Because there is nothing truly human that is alien to the Gospel. And no authentic human culture can close itself off from God, who is the source of all truth, goodness, and beauty.
So, my brothers and sisters, we must once more open our culture—our poetry and literature, our music and movies, our art and all our ordinary work and conversation—to the transcendent, to the mystery of God.
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