11-07-24 Tantangan Evangelisasi di Era Digital: Belajar dari Orang Kudus yang Mengubah Dunia

Thursday 14th week in ordinary time "Mt 10:7-15" Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. You received without paying, give without pay. Take no gold, nor silver, nor copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, nor two tunics, nor sandals, nor a staff; for the labourer deserves his food. And whatever town or village you enter, find out who is worthy in it, and stay with him until you depart. This is an interesting lesson for us, apostles of the New Evangelization. It worked. You see? The early Christians turned the world upside down without the Internet, Facebook and smartphones! Saints didn't waste a second of their lives complaining about what they didn't have, but used what they did have. We certainly need means; but we don't need to be worried about them. We are only worried about souls, and God does the rest. Think about this: in the end, the success of the Apostles didn't depend on what they 'had', but on what they 'were': saints! Bl. Dominic Barberi was an Italian priest who came to England so as to preach and convert many souls. He wasn't very welcome; an eyewitness explains how, on entering a town, "the crowds rushed out to gape at and insult him, as if he were a savage beast... the more respectable citizens joined in the hideous outcry against the 'Demon, the Papist, the Devil!', as they called him." His English was very poor. The 'th' in words was always an insuperable obstacle. Thus, he warned them that to meditate well they had to be good 'tinkers'; or to make the point that without faith we can't be saved, his actual words were: "Without face it is impossible to be shaved" (which is also true, anyway.) But with all his difficulties, he eventually received hundreds of people into the Catholic faith, including St John Henry Newman. A book on the second spring of Catholicism in England (also called the reconversion of England) explains how it "did not begin when Newman was converted nor when the hierarchy was restored. It began on a bleak October day of 1841, when a little Italian priest in comical attire shuffled down a ship's gangway at Folkstone" (J. Brodrick). Bl. Dominic Barberi arrived with no other means than love for God and zeal for souls. Holy Mary, Queen of the Apostles, help me to become an apostle for the New Evangelization.