Putting on Ayres in Evangelization

Published: Nov. 3, 2018, 10 a.m.

b'

Gomer and Luke interview Fr. Harrison Ayre from Canada to talk evangelization, especially if it is \'too Protestant\' in those Missionary Discipleship circles. We talk things like parish renewal, the emphasis on commitment vs. sacraments, how they do/don\'t complement one another, and Church of the Nativity gets put on blast yet again.

Support Catching Foxes

Links:

  • The Lutheran Satire — Vicar and a gentleman lament why the kids aren\'t coming to Mass.
  • Apostolic Journey to France: Meeting with representatives from the world of culture at the Coll\\xe8ge des Bernardins in Paris (September 12, 2008) | BENEDICT XVI — First and foremost, it must be frankly admitted straight away that it was not their intention to create a culture nor even to preserve a culture from the past.\\xa0 Their motivation was much more basic.\\xa0 Their goal was: quaerere Deum.\\xa0 Amid the confusion of the times, in which nothing seemed permanent, they wanted to do the essential \\u2013 to make an effort to find what was perennially valid and lasting, life itself.\\xa0 They were searching for God.\\xa0 They wanted to go from the inessential to the essential, to the only truly important and reliable thing there is.\\xa0 It is sometimes said that they were \\u201ceschatologically\\u201d oriented.\\xa0 But this is not to be understood in a temporal sense, as if they were looking ahead to the end of the world or to their own death, but in an existential sense: they were seeking the definitive behind the provisional.\\xa0 Quaerere Deum: because they were Christians, this was not an expedition into a trackless wilderness, a search leading them into total darkness.\\xa0 God himself had provided signposts, indeed he had marked out a path which was theirs to find and to follow.\\xa0 This path was his word, which had been disclosed to men in the books of the sacred Scriptures.\\xa0 Thus, by inner necessity, the search for God demands a culture of the word or \\u2013 as Jean Leclercq put it: eschatology and grammar are intimately connected with one another in Western monasticism (cf. L\\u2019amour des lettres et le d\\xe9sir de Dieu).\\xa0 The longing for God, the d\\xe9sir de Dieu, includes amour des lettres, love of the word, exploration of all its dimensions.\\xa0 Because in the biblical word God comes towards us and we towards him, we must learn to penetrate the secret of language, to understand it in its construction and in the manner of its expression.\\xa0 Thus it is through the search for God that the secular sciences take on their importance, sciences which show us the path towards language.\\xa0 Because the search for God required the culture of the word, it was appropriate that the monastery should have a library, pointing out pathways to the word.\\xa0 It was also appropriate to have a school, in which these pathways could be opened up.\\xa0 Benedict calls the monastery a dominici servitii schola.\\xa0 The monastery serves eruditio, the formation and education of man \\u2013 a formation whose ultimate aim is that man should learn how to serve God.\\xa0 But it also includes the formation of reason \\u2013 education \\u2013 through which man learns to perceive, in the midst of words, the Word itself.\\n\\n
'