Announcing the gospel in Europe : facing the challenges of cultural changes and religious and ethnic divisions

Abstract

"The evangelization of the European continent" is a phrase first used by John Paul H at the IVth symposium of European bishops in Rome in 1979. He had just chaired the plenary assembly of the Latin American Bishops' Council in Puebla. The theme of this assembly was "the evangelization of Latin America, today and tomorrow." When John Paul 11 addressed the CCEE, which is the European equivalent of the CELAM, although in a far less structured manner - it was natural that he drew the bishops' attention to the "evangelization of the European continent." This relaunching was to turn out to be one of the great design's of his pontificate. Afterwards, John Paul H also spoke of the new evangelization, or even of re-evangelization. In these words, especially in the term "re- evangelization", a pejorative judgement of the recent style of the evangelization of the Catholic Church, or even of other Churches, was sometimes perceived. In fact, the word re-evangelization" is very rarely used by John Paul H, who essentially envisages a "new quality of evangelization", new in its capacity to reformulate the message of salvation for our contemporaries.