By Bridget Spinks
PERTH Archbishop Barry Hickey will lead a high profile list of heavy-hitters to help hundreds of Sydney youth connect with Pope John Paul II’s ‘New Evangelisation’ at a major conference in Sydney on 12-17 July.
Archbishop Hickey, vice-president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, will address the second Sydney Congress Embracing the New Evangelisation (SCENE) with organiser Sydney Auxiliary Bishop Julian Porteous, Lismore Bishop Geoffrey Jarrett, Port Pirie Bishop Greg O’Kelly SJ and Sandhurst Bishop Joseph Grech.
The congress will include pub talks, street evangelisation, daily adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in the crypt of St Mary’s Cathedral and workshops.
Sydney’s first New Evangelisation congress was held last year around the anniversary of World Youth Day 2008 “to consolidate that enlivening experience and revitalisation of the faith” that young people experienced at WYD08, Bishop Porteous, chairman of the Congress, told The Record.
The “New Evangelisation” is a term coined by the late Pope John Paul II referring to the Gospel being presented in a new way to countries – mainly in the West – that have seen an erosion of faith due to the rise of secularism and relativism, a term also frequently used by Pope Benedict XVI.
“The New Evangelisation is the challenge to find fresh and vital ways to engage with people and present Christ to people who may presume that they are Christian or who have dismissed Christianity as now irrelevant,” Bishop Porteous, the Sydney Archdiocesan Episcopal Vicar for Renewal and Evangelisation, said.
Bishop Porteous, who has been involved in evangelisation for over 30 years, says he’s learnt that any mission work needs to be multi-faceted to reach people at different stages with different needs.
“You need to offer a whole range of options and possibilities that will both attract people and then provide them with an opportunity of some spiritual conversion,” he said.
SCENE 2010 will include many of the same elements as its 2009 programme, including pub talks, street evangelisation, adoration and the return of New York’s Franciscan Friars of the Renewal who form the Catholic Underground, a cultural apostolate through music and lyrics.
Prior to the conference, Fr Antoine Thomas – a priest of the European Religious Order called the Community of St John, will visit Sydney Catholic schools from 28 June to 11 July with Br Leopold as part of the “Children of Hope” tour, a programme Fr Thomas developed to introduce young children to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.
Similar international New Evangelisation congresses held in European capital cities like Paris and Budapest from 2003 to 2007 have been used as a template for the Sydney conference.
The five day Sydney programme will include daily morning Catechesis followed by testimonies and Mass. This year’s theme is centered on Christ, focusing on one aspect of Him a day such as ‘Christ as Source of Hope’; ‘Christ as Fount of Truth’; ‘Christ as Eternal Word’.
Bishop Porteous said that, first and foremost, a congress on the New Evangelisation needs to provide people with an opportunity to understand what the New Evangelisation is. It is also an actual work of evangelisation, he added.
“Most Catholics find it very daunting to directly speak to somebody about Christ. But when they actually are engaging in conversations that are very fruitful or when they see some small result from their efforts they get very encouraged and they realise its not as bad or hard as they thought it was,” he told The Record.
Leading up to his priestly ordination in 1974, Bishop Porteous was involved in more socially oriented youth activities during his seminary years, and remembers having “a deep conviction that what was needed was to help young Catholics grow in their faith”. This mission is at the heart of the concept behind SCENE.
He carried this mission on in practical, popular ways in his first few years as a priest.
In 1979, inspired by Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Evangelii Nuntiandi, he organised a parish mission.
In 1983, when he had moved to Manly parish on Sydney’s northern beaches, he organised a public mission on the rugby oval called “Jesus Christ at Manly Oval” and 5,000 people came.
The following year, he held another public mission on a football field called “Jesus Christ at Belmore Oval”.
With each mission, Bishop Porteous says he saw “significant spiritual fruit” with people going through conversions and coming back to the Church.
“Open the doors to Christ” – among the words with which Pope John Paul II concluded his inaugural papal homily – captures for Bishop Porteous what is the essential goal of evangelisation: “to enable a person to come into a living relationship with Christ … Evangelisation is principally a matter of the heart, which then flows to the head. It’s not just intellectual conviction but it’s a recognition of a personal need for Christ’s presence, Christ’s saving power to be at work in our life.”
For more info email scene@sydneycatholic.org or visit www.scene.org.au