|
A message of liberation
103. The Good News of the
Kingdom of God, which proclaims salvation, includes a "message of
liberation". (341) In preaching this Kingdom, Jesus addressed the
poor in a very special way: "Blessed are you poor, yours is the kingdom of
God. Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are
you that weep now, for you shall laugh" (Lk 6,20-21) The Beatitudes
of Jesus, addressed to those who suffer, are an eschatological proclamation of
the salvation which the Kingdom brings. They note that painful experience to
which the Gospel is so particularly sensitive: poverty, hunger and the
suffering of humanity. The community of the disciples of Jesus, the Church,
shares today the same sensitivity as the Master himself showed them. With great
sorrow she turns her attention to those "peoples who, as we all know, are
striving with all their power and energy to overcome all those circumstances
which compel them to live on the border line of existence: hunger, chronic
epidemics, illiteracy, poverty, injustice between nations... economic and cultural
neo-colonialism". (342) All forms of poverty, "not only
economic but also cultural and religious" (343) are a source of
concern for the Church.
As an important dimension of her mission,
"the Church is duty bound—as her bishops have insisted—to proclaim the
liberation of these hundreds of millions of people, since very many of them are
her children. She has the duty of helping this liberation, of bearing witness
on its behalf and of assuring its full development". (344)
104. To prepare Christians
for this task, catechesis is attentive, amongst other things, to the following
aspects:
– it shall situate the message of liberation
in the prospective of the "specifically religious objective of
evangelization", (345) since it would lose its raison d'être
"if it were divorced from the religious basis by which it is sustained
which is the kingdom of God in its full theological sense; (346) thus,
the message of liberation "cannot be confined to any restricted sphere
whether it be economic, political, social or doctrinal. It must embrace the
whole man in all his aspects and components, extending to his relation to the
absolute, even to the Absolute which is God"; (347)
– catechesis, in the ambit of moral
education, shall present Christian social morality as a demand and consequence
of the "radical liberation worked by Christ"; (348) in
effect, the Good News which Christians profess with hearts full of hope is:
Christ has liberated the world and continues to liberate it; this is the source
of Christian praxis, which is the fulfilment of the great commandment of love;
– at the same time, in the task of
initiating mission, catechesis shall arouse in catechumens and those receiving
catechesis "a preferential option for the poor", (349) which
"far from being a sign of individualism or sectarianism, makes manifest
the universality of the Church's nature and mission. This option is not
exclusive" (350) but implies "a commitment to justice,
according to each individual's role, vocation and circumstances". (351)
|