Evangelize by offering hope, Pope suggests
October 14, 2013
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By their lives Christians should testify to “God’s mercy and tenderness toward every creature,” Pope Francis said in an October 14 address to the members of the Pontifical Council for New Evangelization.
“In our time we often encounter an attitude of indifference towards faith, which is no longer considered relevant to human life,” the Pope said. By the witness of their lives, Christians should prompt their neighbors to ask questions about their faith, he said; those questions would furnish the opportunities for effective evangelization.
Millions of people are living without hope, the Pope continued. Christians should “reawaken everywhere this hope, especially where it is suffocated by difficult and at times inhuman existential conditions, where hope cannot breathe.” Once someone is attracted to the faith, he added, the Church must provide a place—“the house where the doors are always open”—and a means of continuing catechesis so that instruction in the faith “is not left to chance or improvisation.”
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Posted by: John J Plick -
Oct. 20, 2013 9:30 PM ET USA
Billy Graham who is about to launch perhaps his final appeal for faith in November to the American people, is offering salvation along the same lines, that because God exists, there is always "hope..." May God have mercy on all Christians who through weakness allow ourselves to become emotionally engulfed by current circumstances and do not offer a true reflection of "the God of hope" to those still wandering in unbelief!
