A bishop who saw the essential connection between Church-wide renewal and one-on-one relationships
Two seminal events in Church history helped define the totality of Bishop John R. Gaydos’s 56 years as a priest and 28 years as a bishop.
They are the Second Vatican Council and the New Evangelization.
The Council drew the world’s bishops, along with their advisors and many observers, to the Vatican for four lengthy sessions between 1962 and 1965.
Their purpose was to consider how the timeless truth entrusted to the Church could be shared in a more open, more effective, less institutional manner.
The key, they recognized, is for every Catholic to spend a lifetime pursuing holiness and to cultivate a deep relationship with God and with the people all around them.
Only then could the Church most effectively draw others to him and help reshape society in his image.
“Evangelization cannot happen unless disciples do it,” Bishop John R. Gaydos pointed out in a 2012 keynote address during a gathering in the diocese of the Northern Lieutenancy of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem.
The call to “go forth and make disciples” dates from the Great Commission Jesus gave to his Apostles before ascending into heaven, after dying and rising from the dead (Matthew 28:19-20).
But as many Western societies have become less and less institutionally Christian during the past three-quarters of a century, the need for a “new evangelization” has become evident.
In keeping with the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, this new evangelization seeks to equip every Catholic to re-evangelize those who have become lax in their faith, and to help bring about an encounter with Christ among people who have not yet heard the Good News.
“All Christians are called to discipleship,” Bishop Gaydos noted. “However, most Christians think of disciples only as special people, thus belying one of the great chasms of Christian life: ‘Me? A disciple? Can’t be!’
“But, it’s precisely ‘me,’ with all my gifts and all my limitations, that Christ has made a disciple!” the bishop pointed out. “And it’s only when we come to consider ourselves as disciples that we can begin to get a handle on the gifts that Christ has given each of his followers — gifts that equip them to evangelize.”
Bishop Gaydos presented his remarks three weeks before the opening of the Year of Faith that Pope Benedict XVI (+2005-13) had called for to mark the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council.
Pope Benedict and his predecessor, Pope St. John Paul II (+1978-2005), repeatedly identified the need for a New Evangelization in the Church.
They pointed to the Holy Spirit-fueled speed and vigor with which the Gospel spread in the Church’s earliest days, despite persecutions and other setbacks.
John Paul and Benedict insisted that the Church was long overdue for another such springtime, and Bishop Gaydos set about articulating and promoting the harvest that would eventually be yielded if that springtime ever came about.
Popes John Paul, Benedict and Francis (+2013-25) all agreed that the New Evangelization involves forming meaningful relationships with people who are lukewarm in their faith or who have never been exposed to the Gospel, and following the path to Christ together.
This sort of evangelization flows naturally through authentic relationships, presence, and witness by example.
Winter’s onset
Bishop Gaydos looked back to Oct. 11, 1962, the day the Second Vatican Council began.
The future bishop was in his second year at Cardinal Glennon College Seminary in St. Louis.
Cardinal Joseph E. Ritter of St. Louis was heading to Rome to participate in the Council. He asked every parish and religious household in the archdiocese to offer the Mass of the Holy Spirit at the same time Pope St. John XXIII and all the Council Fathers were offering it in St. Peter’s Basilica.
“The Mass at the Vatican was taking place at 10 o’clock in the morning,” Bishop Gaydos noted. “Since there’s a seven-hour difference between this part of the United States and the Vatican, the seminarians at Cardinal Glennon College began our celebration at 3 o’clock in the morning!”
It was a Solemn High Mass.
“It was all in Latin but for the sermon,” Bishop Gaydos noted. “All the proper and common parts of the Mass were sung in the prayer modes of Gregorian Chant.”
The future bishop was in the choir loft during the Mass, singing as a member of the Cardinal Glennon Schola.
“It was very special. Very prayerful. And VERY holy,” he recalled.
Many in the United States wondered why an ecumenical council of the Church — the first in nearly a century — was necessary.
“But, anyone who had been a man or woman of faith, experiencing the two World Wars and the Great Depression of the first 50 years of the 20th century, and the little effect the Church and her teachings made on those horrible events —would have known that the stunned tranquility immediately after the Second World War wasn’t going to last,” said Bishop Gaydos.
Indeed, the Church would need what Pope St. John XXIII called ‘Aggiornamento.’
“They told us that Italian word meant an ‘updating,’ and that sounded nice,” said Bishop Gaydos. “But very few would refer to the more difficult side of the Aggiornamento task.”
Three years later, the future bishop, by then a student at the Pontifical North American College in Rome, was at a talk given by Bishop John Wright of Pittsburgh.
“The last session of the Council was drawing to a conclusion,” Bishop Gaydos recalled. “Bishop Wright told us that the Council had planted the seeds for a glorious springtime for the Church and for Christianity.
“But,” Bishop Gaydos continued, “he also said we would first have to endure a very long and very severe winter.”
How long and how severe?
Only as long as the deep-seated complacency with which many Catholics, especially in Europe and the United States, were approaching their faith.
That complacency in the face of a changing world contributed to a steady erosion of belief and participation in the sacramental life of the Church.
Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York issued an urgent call to action: “No more taking our Catholic faith for granted! No more relaxing in the great things the Church has accomplished in the past! Cynicism is replaced by confidence, hand-wringing is replaced by hand-folding, dullness by daring.”
With that same mindset, Pope Benedict called the entire Church to observe a Year of Faith to reinvigorate the faith of Catholics around the world and help them put it into better practice.
Pope Benedict wanted everyone to profess the faith — especially in the Eucharist — “in fullness and in renewed conviction, with confidence and hope,” and rediscover the content of the faith that is credibly professed, celebrated, lived and prayed.
Bishop Gaydos was convinced that all of these things would acquaint more Catholics with the New Evangelization, and help ensure “that we can see our place in a more dynamic evangelizing Christian community.”
He emphasized that evangelization is not any easier or any more difficult than it was for the early Christian Church.
“We often think that evangelization, living the Christian way, had to have been easier for those early Christians,” said Bishop Gaydos. “So fresh in their experience of Jesus, so flush with miracles and other astonishing witnesses of faith. So intense in their faith!”
People tend to romanticize the times of “the holy monks in the desert, the wandering monks in northern Europe, the crusaders filled with hope, the followers of St. Francis and St. Dominic freely bringing about Christian renewal as they wandered their neighborhoods.”
“Our minds get filled with fervent Jesuits converting thousands in Latin America or even in far-off Asia, or religious communities deep in the Safari of Africa bringing about astonishing numbers of conversions to Christianity that occurred in the 20th Century,” said Bishop Gaydos. “They all seemed to have it so easy!
“Catholicizing the culture — evangelization — is colored with greater romance when it seems farther away and ancient,” he stated.
Then again, there are the stories of the martyrs, whose deaths looked like defeat; the frustrating disappointments of missionaries through the ages; and the tentative hold the faith always seems to have in any culture.
In fact, the task of evangelizing probably always seemed as daunting as it does today, especially without sufficient faith and confidence.
“Evangelization always looks difficult if not impossible, given the state of the Church,” Bishop Gaydos noted. “We easily remember the heroic figures or the special eras of history. But it’s hard to have a memory of the ordinary Christians that formed the background of all these 20 centuries of Christian life.”
Nonetheless, despite how difficult it may still seem, “something is happening,” Bishop Gaydos insisted. “The longed-for springtime may well be upon us after all.”
Season’s greetings
Bishop Gaydos called to mind three important factors pertaining to evangelization: discipleship, encounter and the peer dimension.
“When we live as the disciples we are, the wall of caution with which we surround ourselves starts to disintegrate,” he said.
“Once we become aware of our discipleship, then we can begin to see how faith occurs in the everyday encounters of our lives,” he continued.
He pointed to the powerful one-to-one moments the Scriptures recount of Jesus and his followers.
Each of these moments had profound eternal consequences.
“Encounter this adventure!” Bishop Gaydos implored. “It flows from the human adventure of living, of coming to be who we are, of always being unfinished, always needing to grow and change.”
He pointed out that no true change happens completely alone.
“When our life changes through the presence and influence of others, they accompany us on our adventure,” he said. “They become a part of our story, our history.”
Evangelization is a spiritual encounter that begins in human encounter — “in the caring that we have for one another, our willingness to let people into our lives, the trusting love that’s the essential possibility of this kind of human interchange,” said Bishop Gaydos.
These fundamental principles of discipleship and encounter lead to the next level of evangelization: transforming the culture.
“The Gospel spreads from person to person, mostly in peer relationships,” Bishop Gaydos noted. “There’s a relationship built upon a give-and-take exchange of peace, of association, of friendship, that undergirds the growth of God’s Good News.”
However, no one can give what he or she does not have.
“In order to participate in the great work of transforming our culture, we must continue to grow in our own faith, particularly in our knowledge and love of Jesus Christ, through deep encounters with Jesus daily, in the Scriptures, in prayer, in the Sacraments,” said Bishop Gaydos.
He would continue to touch on these themes throughout his time as bishop, daring people to step close to the altar with open eyes and open hearts, to be filled with God’s grace and inspiration.
“Just like in Biblical times, there was no ‘plan b,’” he noted on several occasions. “Just you and me and all of us, branches that must stay connected to the vine in order to yield good fruit.”
