Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization

Apparently, His Holiness is to announce his establishment of a new dicastery of the Curia – a Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization.  

Its remit?  To oversee (episkopein) the fresh proclamation of the Gospel in Europe, North America and the rest of the West (surely including Australia and New Zealand) – and even in some parts of Latin America – where belief and practice of the Faith has alarmingly declined now for many decades; where, in fact, the Christian identity has been lost.

It will be, in other, blunter words, the equivalent of Propaganda Fide for non-Christian or "mission" countries: it will supervise the mission to reconvert post-Christian lands.  How ironic that Australia only ceased being under Propaganda in 1976, was it, and now a generation later we are ranked thus!

I wonder if there will be any self-questioning of the methods by which the post-Conciliar madness has lead to a dumbing-down of the Faith, indeed to stirring up dissent against it, and to worship "in the beauty of holiness" becoming "the banality of ugliness"...

The fact that the West will come under this dicastery, while the flourishing churches of the rest of the world will not, is a terrible indictment of the churches of the West – which, how surprisingly, by ineptitude and permission of dissent have compassed their own destruction.

I'm not sure I like the polyanna sound of "New Evangelization", one of those John Paul II coinages; it sounds so positive – and of course spreading the true Gospel is – but it neglects the sad fact that bishops, priests and laity have all conspicuously failed to transmit the Faith to the next generation.  If I had a dollar for every Catholic couple who've told me, "We paid to send our kids to Catholic schools, and none of them have kept the Faith..."

Then again, "Remedial Evangelization" sounds a bit wrong.

In any case, if this is to be but another Vatican source for long, fine-sounding documents that no one reads nor implements, then it will but add to the (quite tiny) bureaucracy in Rome.  If it really attempts what it declares, it will need to have significant powers, like those of Propaganda Fide of old, over bishops and dioceses, to strongly promote the true preaching the Faith, the Faith that saves.

I really hope it won't just be a front for promoting some of the Catholic Church's strange "new religious communities", such as the Neo-Cats.