ROME — Pope Francis has called on young people in America to “bring the Lord” to their friends and families and all who “do not know Jesus.”
In a video message to participants in the National Catholic Youth Conference (NCYC) taking place in Indianapolis from November 21-23, the pope sends his “very affectionate greeting” and prayers, asking God that the meeting may “light your missionary hearts with the courage and strength to live in and with the Lord in and out of church!”
“Today, as in the beginning, we need to go out to meet each person, moreover, it is our mission to do so, especially from the farthest and the suffering,” Francis said. “We must reach the existential peripheries of our world!”
While urging young people to evangelize their contemporaries and bring the name of Jesus even to the digital world, the pope cautioned against a hard-sell approach based on argumentation, inviting them instead to witness to Christ’s goodness.
“You know your contemporaries, you know that many are alone, that many do not know Jesus,” he said. “Go, go and bring the Lord, go and fill your environments, even the digital, not of convictions, not to convince, not to proselytize, but to witness to the tenderness and mercy of Jesus.”
The pope has often warned against “proselytism,” which he understands as overly zealous efforts to convince others of the Christian message.
Last September Francis delivered a similar message in meeting with his fellow Jesuits in Mozambique.
On that occasion the pope suggested that many Evangelicals in the United States do not preach the real gospel of Jesus and should not be considered Christians.
“They preach Christ, yes, but their message is not Christian,” Francis said. “It has nothing to do with the preaching of a Lutheran or any other serious evangelical Christianity.”
“These so-called ‘evangelicals’ preach prosperity,” he continued. “They promise a Gospel that does not know poverty, but simply seeks to make proselytes. This is exactly what Jesus condemns in the Pharisees of his time. I’ve said it many times: proselytism is not Christian.”
The pope went on to describe his deep disappointment on meeting a young woman who was excited about having brought two people to Christ.
“Today I felt a certain bitterness after a meeting with young people,” he said. “A woman approached me with a young man and a young woman. I was told they were part of a slightly fundamentalist movement. She said to me in perfect Spanish: ‘Your Holiness, I am from South Africa. This boy was a Hindu and converted to Catholicism. This girl was Anglican and converted to Catholicism.’ But she told me in a triumphant way, as though she was showing off a hunting trophy. I felt uncomfortable and said to her, ‘Madam, evangelization yes, proselytism no.’”
“What I mean is that evangelization is free! Proselytism, on the other hand, makes you lose your freedom,” he said. “Proselytism is incapable of creating a religious path in freedom. It always sees people being subjugated in one way or another. In evangelization the protagonist is God, in proselytism it is the I.”
“Proselytism is widespread, we know that. But it doesn’t have to be the case with us. We must evangelize, which is very different from proselytizing,” he said.
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