Rediscovering the Catholic Faith

Through the Scriptures

Some Preliminaries
1) Re-discovering?
2) Faith vs. Religion 3) Catholicity

4) The Scriptures

Context:
AUF Responding to the

Challenge of the New Evangelization in the Year of Faith

The New Evangelization

is a Call to a Rediscovery

of the Catholic Faith is an invitation to lead people to that Rediscovery

How we can
Carry out a more effective

Transmission of the Catholic Faith By leading people to an Encounter with Jesus

In

the Church Through the Scriptures

OUTLINE
Introduction: Objective 1) Jesus & the Samaritan Woman 2) New Evangelization 3) Personal Encounter with Jesus Christ in the Church 4) The Occasions of Encountering Jesus & Listening to the Scriptures

Objective of Synod on NE:

To sustain and direct the preaching and teaching of the Gospel

in

the diverse contexts in which the Church finds herself today to give witness.

3 verbs related to the Gospel:

Preaching Teaching To give witness

Paul VI, 1975

Modern man listens

more willingly to witnesses than to teachers

and if he does

listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.

GREEK: marturia
Tagalog: Magpatotoo

The Gospel remains the same.

It is the situations or

contexts for the witnessing that change.

People find themselves in different situations.

comparable to that of the Samaritan woman by the well.

1) Jesus & the Samaritan Woman John 4:5-42

With an empty bucket

no man or

woman who, in one's life, would not find oneself beside a well with an empty bucket,

Umiigib ng maiinom upang mapawi ang pagkauhaw

with

the hope of finding the fulfillment of the heart's most profound desire, that
which alone could give full meaning to life.

MEANING is

a universal issue for whatever race, color, or creed

It is as essential as WATER.
More precious

resource than gold, silver, diamonds, copper, or iron.

Today, many wells

offer themselves to quench humanity's thirst

but we must discern in order to avoid polluted waters.

Same with meaning

What will give us

true happiness & fulfillment in life?

FM says,
We must orient the search properly so as not to fall prey to disappointment, which can be damaging.

Inspiration from THE LITTLE PRINCE?

The desert

is beautiful because it is hiding a well

TO EVANGELIZE is to be
like Jesus at the well of

Sychar It is to sit beside today's men and women

Highlights in the narrative:

a) Jesus asks for a drink himself. I THIRST!

b) The woman puts up a barrier: You are a Jew; I am a Samaritan, a woman

Jesus twists the situation

If you only

knew youd be the one who would ask for water from me

Womans reaction

You have

no bucket. The well is deep.

c) Jesus offers a free-flowing well (no need for a bucket)

d) The woman says,Give me that water so that I wouldnt need to keep coming back to this well.

Go, call your husband

Woman: I have

none. Jesus: You are right

e) His way of saying, Youve been living an empty life Or: Youve been drawing from polluted wells.

The woman is surprised.

How did he know??
Later she would tell the

other Samaritans:
He

told me everything I have done. (i.e., He knows me inside out.)

When people see that we know or understand

where theyre coming from, they lay down their defenses.

You must be a prophet!

A PROPHET (for the woman):

One who is able to allow God to

speak to peoples deepest desires; One who is able to know what is there that lies in their inmost thoughts (which they think are secret)

FM says:
Only Jesus can read
the depths of our heart and reveal the truth about ourselves

He told me everything I have done

This word of proclamation is united to the question that opens up to faith:

Could he possibly be the Messiah?

Remember Zaccheus?

Remember Nathanael?

And Simon (Peter)?

CONVERSION
To suddenly realize you are

before Gods Chosen One To be so overwhelmed by the encounter, you go and bring others to Him

Others
who are also

thirsting like yourself.

It begins with a wondering:

Could He be

the Messiah?

Many people started following Jesus because of this wondering.

John 6 (Bread of

Life) Same sense as John 4 but different metaphor: Food People follow him, hungering for bread.

Jesus tells them:

Do not seek the bread that

perishes Seek rather the Living Bread; I am the Living Bread

(parallel

to Jn 4: Living Water)

FM says (of the Samaritan woman)

whoever receives new

life from encountering Jesus

cannot

but proclaim truth and hope to others.

The sinner who was converted becomes a messenger of salvation and leads the whole city to Jesus.

Like the fisherman who says

Leave me,

Lord, I am a sinner! Whom Jesus now turns into a fisher of men.

The DISCIPLE
becomes an APOSTLE: one who is chosen from the disciples and becomes one who is sent.

The FM further says,

The people pass from welcoming her testimony to personally experiencing the encounter

(John 4:42) They say:

We no longer believe because of your word; for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world.

What being evangelized is about:

Recall the two questions posed to the disciples (Mark 8:27-30): Who do people say Who do you say

The Growth into full maturity

of the community of disciples into a community of apostles is what we desire for the Philippine Church (PCP II: renewed integral evangelization).

We have heard and we know

that this truly is the SAVIOR OF THE WORLD That he alone can lead us to the well, to the water weve been looking for.
CONVERSION

= to declare, I have

found the well!

We declare to you what was

1 John 1:1ff
what

from the beginning,

we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life

2. A New Evangelization

Leading the men and women of our time to Jesus, to the encounter with him

is a necessity that touches all the regions of the world,

those

of the old and those of the recent evangelization.

Then and Now:

We address the

common longing for the encounter with the Living Water (the freeflowing well).

The FM, further says:

Everywhere indeed

we feel the need to revive a faith that risks eclipse in cultural contexts that hinder

(Note the shift in imagery.)

its

taking root in persons and its presence in society, the clarity of its content and the coherence of its fruits.

SHIFT
from the

drawer of water and the well to the sower and the seed.

The faith has been sown

Has it taken

root? Is it growing? Is it bearing fruit?

Mark 4: Parable of the Sower

What is preventing

the seed from taking root, growing, and bearing fruit?

The sowing presupposes the earlier tasks of plowing, weeding, irrigating, fertilizing to make sure the seed falls on good soil.

What is the good soil

on which the seed of the Gospel must fall?

The seed of faith grows only on the good soil of hope and charity/ love. (1 Cor 13)

The seed of the Gospel can grow

wherever we find people who are hopeful and are disposed to love unconditionally.

Recall VDs definition of FAITH:

The human response

to the God who speaks to usthe God who loved us first

If the good soil does not yet exist

then evangelization requires soil preparation: the plowing, the weeding, the irrigating, the fertilizing

FM:
NE is not a matter of starting again, but of entering into the long path of proclaiming the Gospel with the apostolic courage of Paul who would go so far as to say:
Woe

to me if I do not preach the Gospel! (1 Corinthians 9:16).

It includes accepting

that there are no shortcuts: We need to be patient. NB. The parable of the seed that grows slowly.

REVIEW HISTORY:
Throughout history, from

the first centuries of the Christian era to the present, the Gospel has edified communities of believers in all parts of the world.

Whether small or great, these are the fruit of the dedication of generations of witnesses to Jesus missionaries and martyrs whom we remember with gratitude.

The changed social, cultural, economic, civil and religious scenarios

call us to something new: to live our communitarian experience of faith in a renewed way and to proclaim it through an evangelization that is new
in

its ardor, in its methods, in its expressions as John Paul II said.

Pope Benedict XVI (in his homily at the Synods Inauguration) said,
The New evangelization is

directedprincipally at those who, though baptized,

have

drifted away from the Church and live without reference to the Christian life...

 to help these people encounter the

Lord,
who

alone fills our existence with deep meaning and peace; and

to favor the rediscovery of the faith, that source of grace which brings

joy and hope to

personal, family and social life

3. Personal encounter with Jesus Christ in the Church:

Before saying anything about the forms that this new evangelization must assume, we feel the need to tell you with profound conviction that
the

faith determines everything in the relationship that we build with the person of Jesus who takes the initiative to encounter us.

The work of the new evangelization consists in

presenting once more the beauty

and perennial newness of the encounter with Christ to the often distracted and confused heart and mind of the men and women of our time,
above

all to ourselves.

We invite you all to contemplate the face of the Lord Jesus Christ,
to enter the mystery of his life given for us on the cross, reconfirmed in his resurrection from the dead as the Father's gift and imparted to us through the Spirit.

In the person of Jesus,

the mystery of God the Father's love

for the entire human family is revealed.

He

did not want us to remain in a false autonomy. Rather

he reconciled us to himself in a renewed

pact of love.

The Church is the space offered by Christ in history

where we can encounter him, because he

entrusted to her
his Word, the Baptism that makes us God's children, his Body and his Blood, the grace of forgiveness of sins above all in the sacrament of Reconciliation, the experience of communion that reflects the very mystery of the Holy Trinity and the strength of the Spirit that generates charity towards all.

We must form welcoming communities in which all outcasts find

a home,
concrete experiences of communion which attract the disenchanted glance of contemporary humanity with the ardent force of love See how they love one another! (Tertullian, Apology, 39, 7).

The beauty of faith must particularly shine

in the actions of the sacred Liturgy,

above all in the Sunday Eucharist. It is precisely in liturgical celebrations that

the

Church reveals herself as God's work and makes the meaning of the Gospel visible in word and gesture.

It is up to us today
to render experiences of the Church concretely accessible,
to multiply the wells where thirsting men and women are invited to encounter Jesus, to offer oases in the deserts of

life.

Christian communities (and, in them, every disciple of the Lord) are responsible for this: an irreplaceable testimony has been entrusted to each one,
so

that the Gospel can enter the lives of all.

This requires of us holiness of

life.

4. The occasions of
encountering Jesus

and listening to the Scriptures

Someone will ask how to do all this

We need not invent new strategies as if

the Gospel were a product to be placed in the market of religions. We need to rediscover the ways in which Jesus approached persons and called them,
in

order to put these approaches into practice in today's circumstances.

We recall, for example,

how Jesus engaged

Peter, Andrew, James and John in the context of their work,

how Zaccheus was able

to pass from simple curiosity to the warmth of sharing a meal with the Master,

how the Roman

centurion asked him to heal a person dear to him,

how the man born

blind invoked him as liberator from his own marginalization,

how Martha and Mary

saw the hospitality of their house and of their heart rewarded by his presence.

By going through
the pages of the Gospels as well as
the apostles' missionary

experiences in the early Church, we can discover

the

various ways and circumstances in which persons' lives were opened to Christ's presence.

The frequent reading of the Sacred Scriptures is

not only necessary for

knowing the very content of the Gospel,

which

is the person of Jesus in the context of salvation history,

It also helps us to discover

opportunities to encounter Jesus,
truly evangelical approaches rooted in

the fundamental dimensions of human life:

the

family, work, friendship, various forms of poverty and the trials of life, etc.