Well, I certainly did not expect to find myself defending a Catholic bishop for insisting that the Church should bring people to Jesus Christ this week. Yet Bishop Robert Barron’s criticism of Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco has generated precisely that controversy. Apparently, the really embarrassing thing is not a cardinal suggesting that the Church is not there to convert, but another bishop objecting to his saying it, can you believe the times we are living in?
In case you have absolutely no idea what I am talking about, this controversy began when Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco, Archbishop of Algiers, suggested in an interview with Belgian Catholic publication CatholBel that the Church’s mission should focus on fraternity and dialogue with other religions rather than seeking conversions. The news broke on Wednesday (28th October) and I first read Niwa Limbu’s report on it in AdVaticanum. Lots of people were commenting and the argument pretty quickly divided into two ideological groups which seemed to me to be progressives suporting Cardinal Vesco and Catholics who were questioning what he said. Then, Bishop Robert Barron bravely publicly challenged his remarks, insisting that bringing people to Christ is fundamental to the Church’s mission and explicitly commanded by Jesus in the Great Commission which is pretty much Catholicism 101, am I right? But Bishop Barron’s intervention prompted the harshest of criticism, particularly from wacky extremist agitator Mike Lewis and a Jesuit priest, Fr Jeremy Zipple, who argued that the American bishop failed to appreciate the precarious position of Christians in Muslim-majority Algeria. Critics have also pointed to Barron’s 2011 praise for the Trappist monks murdered in Algeria, suggesting an inconsistency in his position. However, the controversy goes deeper than pastoral sensitivity: Vesco had already argued in 2022 that Christians should move away from the idea that they must evangelise and bring others to embrace their faith, raising serious questions about the distinction between prudent Christian witness and abandoning conversion as an objective of evangelisation. Does Cardinal Vesco have a point? Well, I think there is a serious pastoral question here. Christians in Algeria inhabit circumstances very different from those of Catholics in Minnesota or Essex and reckless words can have serious consequences for people who have to live alongside neighbours, officials and religious authorities long after an international argument on X has moved on. We should recognise that important context, but it does not settle the theological question: does Christian fraternity include the hope that our neighbour might come to know Jesus Christ?
For me this all goes back to and exposes rather well a problem that developed under Pope Francis. Under his papacy a legitimate distinction between evangelisation and improper methods of seeking converts became entangled with language that seemed to all and sundry to make seeking conversion itself sound improper. Pope Benedict XVI supplied the famous formulation and Pope Francis repeatedly employed it, but his repetition did not always preserve its clarity, in fact quite the opposite!
Let’s begin at Aparecida in 2007 (which, if you don’t know, is the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, held from 13–31 May 2007 at the Marian shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida in Brazil), Pope Benedict opened the conference, and the then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (the future Pope Francis) chaired the committee responsible for drafting its final document. This conference is probably the key to understanding Pope Francis. In his opening address, Pope Benedict explained the Church’s growth through attraction by locating its source in Christ’s love, supremely manifested in the Cross. In the same homily he urged courageous missionary discipleship. Attraction described the power animating the mission; it did not abolish the mission’s purpose. [1] That interpretation is reinforced by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 2007 note on evangelisation, which Pope Benedict approved. It rejected the idea that religious freedom makes seeking another person’s conversion illegitimate. Helping someone freely encounter Christ was a service, while coercion and dishonest persuasion were excluded. Its discussion of ecumenism also protected the freedom of a convinced non-Catholic Christian to seek full Catholic communion. [2] This is intelligible Catholic teaching, right? Faith cannot be forced, grace cannot be manufactured and neither proposition makes explanation, argument or invitation an offence against someone’s freedom.
The difficulty with Francis was not that he formally abolished that teaching. That was not the way he tended to work (although perhaps Traditiones custodes was an exception to that rule). In fact Evangelii Gaudium calls for a “creative apologetics” and describes intellectual arguments as instruments of evangelisation. Its account of personal encounter allows explicit proclamation as well as witness through actions and I cannot honestly write those passages out of his record. [3] It is possible that there was a ghostwriter who understood all this much better than Pope Francis, but whatever assistance went into its drafting, the exhortation was issued under his authority. The relevant comparison is between his published teaching and his recurring public formulations which were, I found, incredibly disturbing.
Consider his audience of 11 January 2023. Francis said evangelisation should begin with witness rather than trying to convince, then explained that communicating Christ’s beauty would convince people, before distinguishing our convincing from the Lord’s. The surrounding catechesis emphatically affirmed missionary zeal. Nevertheless, the movement between these formulations left a distinction that required explanation rather than supplying one. [4] The charitable reading is clear enough: conversion comes through God’s initiative, and the missionary must communicate Christ rather than promote himself. But why should that require making human persuasion sound like an alternative to divine action? God can work through a reasoned argument as surely as through an act of kindness. Explaining why Christianity is true need not amount to trusting our ingenuity instead of His grace and as Teresa of Ávila, famously pointed out “Christ has no body now but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours...”.
In Rabat in 2019, Francis stressed that mission was not measured by numbers and that Christians should act as leaven within society. Great, OK, there is much to welcome in that, but he also insisted that Jesus had not sent Christians to become more numerous and warned against proselytism, without explicitly affirming in the same address that inviting others freely to embrace the faith and receive baptism remained an essential part of the Church’s mission. Surely that omission is vital in this context: there is a considerable difference between rejecting numerical growth as the measure of missionary success and appearing to discourage the conversion through which the Church grows! [5] I agree that numbers cannot measure the whole fruitfulness of the Church but it does not follow that welcoming another person into her sacramental life is somehow an embarrassing ambition.
Pope Francis repeatedly spoke as though witness and persuasion, attraction and proclamation, were competing approaches to evangelisation, but this simply does not make much sense because clearly these activities belong together: a Christian can bear witness through his life, explain why the faith is true and invite another person to embrace it, all in dependence on God’s grace and with complete respect for that person’s freedom. His repeated warnings against proselytism, without consistently explaining what distinguished it from legitimate efforts to bring someone to Christ, obscured this basic point. The resulting confusion made the desire to share the faith and seek another person’s conversion sound like something Catholics ought to distrust. And he kept going back to it. It was one of his regular topics and it always left me scratching my head. What exactly was he trying to say because it just made no sense to me!
