The New Evangelization, sans puns: Scott Hahn’s “mission manual.”

ead­ers who expect with each new book to find Scott Hah­n’s trade­mark puns in the sub­ti­tles won’t find them here. I admit that was the first thing I noticed about Evan­ge­liz­ing Catholics. It was a bit disappointing—but only bit; it’s a good book. The life of the mind is not in the pun. (Some­one once told me, with a grave shake of his head, that Dr. Hah­n’s puns will only get him more time in Pur­ga­to­ry.)

The title of his new book—Evan­ge­liz­ing Catholics, now avail­able from Our Sun­day Visitor—might make one think that it is all about whip­ping pick-and-choose Catholics into shape, whether they be of the right or the left. And to be sure, Dr. Hahn does include this very har­row­ing fig­ure:

Sta­tis­tics tell us that 85 per­cent of the young peo­ple who are con­firmed will leave the Church with­in the next fif­teen years. Most of them will leave the Church in col­lege, where 70 per­cent of the stu­dents who enter prac­tic­ing their faith leave not prac­tic­ing the faith.

Those are large num­bers; imag­ine that: The Catholic Church keeps only one quar­ter of it its mem­bers past the age of thir­ty. That needs to be addressed. That needs a mis­sion man­u­al.

But Evan­ge­liz­ing Catholics is not mere­ly about bring­ing oth­ers to the Church, or back to the Church, or shap­ing up those weak and slop­py Catholics. It is—in part; for Dr. Hahn does point out the “over­abun­dance of Catholics who don’t know the faith to which they’re called to bear wit­ness.” But the New Evan­ge­liza­tion is also, at bot­tom, about evan­ge­liz­ing our­selves.

[T]ransformation is the heart of the New Evan­ge­liza­tion. It’s what a life of ongo­ing conversion—of falling ever more deeply in love with God—is all about. It’s also the goal, both for our­selves and for those we week to reach.

God’s grace will get us to that goal. Only grace can make the trans­for­ma­tion pos­si­ble. But we par­tic­i­pate in that process through the use of our intel­lect and well. It falls to us to strive to know what we pro­claim as Catholics, and it falls to us to coop­er­ate with the grace God gives us to live by these truths. It falls to us to strive to grasp the depths of the Gospel.

It falls to us: Dr. Hahn knows how to use the anapho­ra.

Evan­ge­liz­ing Catholics is divid­ed into three sec­tions.

In sec­tion 1, Dr. Hahn writes about what the New Evan­ge­liza­tion is and why our popes, since Vat­i­can II, have said that it is the pri­ma­ry mis­sion of the whole Church. This is not an apolo­getic tfor Vat­i­can II, addressed to skep­tics, but a call to the laity to do what the Church says is our pri­ma­ry duty in the world. Dr. Hahn tells us why it is not just for Protes­tants to preach Christ to oth­ers, but Catholics too.

In sec­tion 2, Dr. Hahn writes about “mod­els and meth­ods for the New Evan­ge­liza­tion”: the first evan­ge­lists and ear­ly Church, our own homes and fam­i­lies, and our indi­vid­ual apos­to­lates. (A key dis­tinc­tion that Dr. Hahn explains in this sec­tion is between an “apos­to­late,” which the laity have, and a “min­istry,” which priests have.) And he writes about how the fam­i­ly is the “epi­cen­ter” of the New Evan­ge­liza­tion. As they say, so does Dr. Hahn: It begins at home.

Final­ly, in part 3, Dr. Hahn writes about the “con­tent” of the New Evan­ge­liza­tion: the nature of sin, atone­ment, the covenant fam­i­ly of God, and trans­for­ma­tion of the self through the Eucharist.

But the true cen­ter of Evan­ge­liz­ing Catholics is this truth, which Dr. Hahn first read in Pope St. John Paul II’s 2003 encycli­cal Eccle­sia de Eucharis­tia (online here): “The Eucharist thus appears as both the source and the sum­mit of all evan­ge­liza­tion.”

At first, as Dr. Hahn tells it, he did not know what the pope meant; he still was pris­oned by the Protes­tant way of think­ing about evan­ge­liza­tion. First you say that God loves us but we have sinned; then, that Christ died for us and we must respond with faith. The end. But lat­er Dr. Hahn read sim­i­lar words from Car­di­nal George: “All evan­ge­liz­ers pro­claim who Christ is. Catholic evan­ge­liz­ers pro­claim a Eucharis­tic Christ.” Dr. Hahn also quotes Pope Bene­dict XVI (as Car­di­nal Ratzinger) to the same effect.

The point, as Dr. Hahn explains it, is that you evan­ge­lize the Gospel, and the Gospel is Christ, and Christ is the Eucharist. Christ is the sacra­ments. All evan­ge­liza­tion starts from the sacra­ments and points back toward the sacra­ments. The Eucharist is the life of the faith because Christ is the life of the faith.

Scott Hahn has the rare gift of mak­ing com­plex ideas sim­ple; he is a schol­ar who takes schol­ar­ship and opens it up, sim­ply, for all read­ers. That is sel­dom more true than in this fine book. Evan­ge­liz­ing Catholics is the New Evan­ge­liza­tion explained as only he can do so. If you’ve not read it, get it today.