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Evangelii Nuntiandi, Chapter III
The
Content of Evangelization,Nos. 32-36
No reduction or ambiguity


There are many good people who see the Church as merely a temporal organization and do not grasp the spiritual and religious side of her mission.  They don’t know how she fits into the liberation movement.  They want to contain her solely in the sphere of earthly things.  They want to contain her activity to solely material prosperity.

      If that were a true picture of the Church, “She would have lost her essential meaning.”  Her message of liberation would be open to misinterpretation and posturing by various political parties or other groups.  She would lose her authority to preach in Jesus’ name.

For this reason the Third Synod of Bishops considered it important enough to recall the need to restate the religious aim of evangelization.  Evangelization is for preaching the Kingdom of God in all its purity.  It has to do with all the other forms of liberation, but only in so far as they help the truly religious goal of evangelization, that is, the Kingdom of God.

The liberation, therefore, that the Church preaches concerns not merely the economic, social or cultural aspects of man, but the whole of man in all his dimensions, including his relation to God.  It is based on an idea of man that includes his spiritual side.  It includes all the other areas of human activity too, but always with the relationship to Jesus, the Son of God, and the kingdom he came to establish. 

The Church knows that not every concept of liberation is consistent with the Gospel vision of things.  The other concepts of prosperity and development have as their finality earthly things, not the Kingdom.  Temporal and political liberation movements have within themselves the seeds of their own destruction and cannot achieve the high goals that they set for themselves because they do not have as their last end the establishment of justice in charity and their driving force is not spiritual virtue or the winning of eternal salvation and blessedness in God.  This is true even when the liberation movement tries to justify itself by quotes from Scripture or by theological conclusions. 

The Church considers it good to set up structures for liberation that are more human, more just, and more respectful of the human person, but she knows that all this will not help unless the hearts of those who run these new structures are converted.  She cannot accept violence, especially military violence, as a way to liberation.  Violence begets violence, and leads to forms of oppression worse than the ones from which man was to be liberated.  It can cause the goals of liberation to move farther away instead of bringing them closer.  Violence is not in accord with the Gospel.  The sudden changing of structures by force would be deceitful, ineffective and below the dignity of the people.