by Inos Biffi
L'Osservatore Romano, August 8, 2014
That the Church not only prays for but also dedicates her
total commitment to the conversion of all men to Christ is part of her
essential mission. After his
Resurrection Christ entrusted to his Church a precise command: “All power in heaven and earth has been given
to me. Go therefore and teach all
nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit."
This Christian discipleship, evangelization in every place, of “all peoples” and of all creatures, this is the mindful intention of Christ, and in fact from her very beginnings the Church has understood herself in terms of this radical missionary effort.
This permanent and universal mission to the world is part of
the Church’s very nature. If this were
in any way diminished, she would no longer be the Church of Christ. To announce the Gospel means to proclaim that
only in the Gospel message and its acceptance is it possible for one to be
saved. The words of Jesus are
peremptory: “Whoever believes and is
baptized will be saved; but whoever does not believe will be condemned” (Mark
16, 16). To affirm that someone in good
faith who adheres to a religion can be saved means instead to recognize that
the will to universal salvation operates in the life of those who carry out the
good by heeding an upright and clear
conscience.
Whatever truth or holiness there is in every religion is
objectively the imprint of Christ and a desire for Him. Therefore this shows how misleading it is to
hold , in order to show respect to all religions, that one must avoid the
proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the only Savior, and, if
anything, one need only to see to it
that someone remain in a full and coherent fidelity to his own “credo”.
Certainly religions are to be respected. No one can be
forced to believe in the Gospel. God
Himself is the safe-keeper of interior religious freedom. But this does not entail making all religions
equivalent to the Gospel or the obfuscation of Christ as the only Savior for
all time and for everyone.
The passionate desire of the heart of Christ was that the
sons of Abraham would welcome Him as the Messiah. In fact Christianity is founded on the faith
of the Jews who did believe in Christ, as his mother, Mary, Joseph, Zachery,
Elizabeth, John the Baptist, Simeon and Anna, the Apostles and the whole Church
of God, (Galatians 1,13), from the beginning, those who saw in Jesus the
fulfillment and the telos of the Law
(Romans 10,4). All too often we forget
that this “Church of God” is born from the faith of Jews who believed in
Christ, and that these are not limited
to Paul alone. If they had not welcomed Jesus as the Messiah, Christianity
would have been extinguished at the very beginning.
And we see here the reason for which the relationship between
Christianity and Judaism is not comparable to the relationship of Christianity with
other religions. The God of the
Christians is the same God of Genesis, who “in the beginning created heaven and
earth”(Genesis 1,1) and who in Jesus has been revealed as Father, Son and Holy
Spirit. And He is the God that the
Church proclaims to all men, preaching Jesus, the only-begotten Son, the one
Savior of all. In this proclamation the
Church follows the same mission of Christ and therefore the deep purpose of
Revelation begun with Genesis. She has
the awareness that, if she were to admit other saviors along side with Christ,
she would be placing her own faith in idols; and that if she turned her back on
the full revelation of God who created heaven and earth in the Trinity shown
forth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, she would reject God the Creator
himself. The origin, cause and the
content of the missionary purpose of the Church came about in this way. And the Church is called to answer only to
Jesus Christ, and to share with him the work of evangelization.
This does not mean that the Church rejects “dialogue” with
religions. Whatever the purpose of this
dialogue is, it will never be able to destroy the belief of the Church that only
in the Gospel, in the same way for all, is there salvation.; that the command
received from Christ is to proclaim the Gospel as necessary and not
prescindable for every man. Nor can it ever be put into doubt that the Church
herself in every time and place must use all of her strength to make
all men disciples of the Lord. Moreover,
this is how it has always been from the very beginning of the life of the
Church.
If a “weak” proclamation of the Gospel had prevailed;
or if Christians had worked to help the building of pagan temples with their
gods; or if they had been satisfied to seek out what united them at a
minimalistic level with other religions without a clear stress on the
“differentness” of being a Christian, we would not have had the witness of the
martyrs. Dialogue does not entail the risk of martyrdom, which, surely, is
always in its own way a tragic instance.
But together with this we would no longer have either the Faith nor the
Church, if she were to water down the Faith and become a mere ghost of herself in
an act that leads to death, when the
missionary effort that is at the heart of her life becomes exhausted, when her missionary effort becomes a source
of anxiety, when she loses that certainty that there is “only one God” in
confronting those who say that there is space for many gods who are in the end
just idols, when she falters in proclaiming that there is “only one Lord”, the
Son of God, who the Church in her very being is called to preach to the whole
world.
Translated by Rorate's Father Richard G. Cipolla
