Auspice Maria Ep. 13: Evangelizing Culture
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Transcript:
Welcome to our Auspice Maria podcast. I'm Bishop James Rugiri of the Diocese of Portland in Maine. And this week's episode is entitled, Evangelizing Culture.
I hope to dive into a theme that touches every part of our lives, culture, and we as missionary disciples, the challenge to evangelize the culture.
Again, as always, I invoke the Holy Spirit to accompany us and recognizing that the Spirit is ever present to us and given to us so beautifully first through the sacrament of baptism. Just, come Holy Spirit, fill our hearts, open our minds, open our eyes, help us to live more intentionally as your witnesses in the world. Amen.
In our last episode, we reflected on justice, mercy, and evangelization, how the gospel comes alive in concrete actions of love and works of mercy and in our commitment to justice. Today's topic flows directly from that, because when we talk about works of mercy, when we talk about living the gospel in daily life, we're talking about evangelizing the culture.
The mission of the Church is to proclaim Jesus Christ, to lead people into an encounter with him, and to build the kingdom of God here and now. That's not an abstract mission. It happens in the real world: in the languages we speak, the music we hear, the art we create, the way we educate, the way we vote, the way we treat our neighbors. In other words, it happens in culture. If we want to evangelize effectively, we can't stay in a bubble. We have to engage culture, not to destroy it, but to transform it.
When we talk about evangelizing culture, we first have to ask, what is culture? Culture is not just music or food or fashion. Those are pieces of it, but culture is much more. Culture is how people express their humanity. It's the shared story a community tells about what matters. It's the soil where our values and hopes grow.
The Second Vatican Council said it very well in the document Gaudium et Spes, section number 53. It says, "the word culture in its general sense indicates everything whereby man develops and perfects his many bodily and spiritual qualities. He strives by his knowledge and his labor to bring the world itself under his control. He renders social life more human, both in the family and the civic community, through improvement of customs and institutions. Throughout the course of time, he expresses, communicates, and conserves in his works great spiritual experiences and desires, that they might be of advantage to the progress of many, even of the whole human family."
Very beautiful words from Gaudium et Spes. Again, if I may simplify, culture is how we grow as human beings and how we hand on meaning to the next generation.
Pope St. John Paul II explained this beautifully when he addressed the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the acronym UNESCO, in Paris in 1980. He said, "Culture is that through which man as man becomes more man, is more, has more access to being. The fundamental meaning of culture consists in the fact that it is a characteristic of human life as such. Man lives a truly human life thanks to culture. Culture is the specific way of man's existing and being."
This quote from his address to UNESCO in 1980, St. John Paul II is telling us that culture isn't an accessory to life, it's essential to who we are as human beings.
And Pope Benedict XVI took it further when he spoke to the world of culture at a university in Paris in 2008. He said, "what gave Europe's culture its foundation? The search for God and the readiness to listen to him remains today the basis of any genuine culture. A purely positivistic culture which tried to exclude the question about God as an unscientific question would be the collapse of culture."
Pope Benedict's words are very clear. If you take away the search for God, you don't just weaken culture, you cause it to collapse.
The Church has never been called to run from culture. We are called to enter into it, to heal it, to purify it, to elevate it.
Think for a moment with me about the story of Saint Francis of Assisi. Saint Francis renounced his inheritance and his father's wealth. He stripped himself of privilege and status to follow the poor Christ. But notice what Francis did not do. He didn't renounce Assisi. He didn't flee his town or his people. He stayed there. He lived the gospel in the middle of his culture and that transformed it.
Francis shows us that evangelizing culture doesn't mean abandoning it. It means living the gospel right where you are so the culture is changed from within.
And then there's the story of the wolf of Gubbio. The town of Gubbio was terrorized by a wolf that attacked livestock and even people. The townsfolk were afraid. They tried everything, traps, weapons, threats, nothing worked. St. Francis, as the story goes, heard of the wolf and instead of forming a hunting party, he went to meet the wolf himself. He didn't bring weapons, he brought the cross.
When he encountered the ferocious wolf menacingly coming toward him, he spoke to the wolf, "Brother Wolf, in the name of Christ, stop." And the wolf stopped. Francis spoke to the wolf about its hunger. He brokered peace between the wolf and the people. The people agreed to feed the wolf. The wolf agreed not to harm them.
Sometimes we look at secular culture the way the townspeople of Gubbio saw the fierce wolf. We see what's broken, what's violent, what's threatening. As we recognize the dangers of the culture, our first instinct at times is to attack it, to destroy it, or to run away.
St. Francis shows another way. He didn't destroy the wolf. He converted the relationship between the wolf and the people. He converted the wolf by acknowledging its hunger and confronting it with truth. The harm it was doing had to stop. So St. Francis brokered peace with truth. That's our mission too. The church doesn't have to be afraid of the wolf, of secular culture. We are called to meet it with faith, with peace, with courage, and to transform it, to call out its errors, and to recognize the need we all have for truth, beauty, and goodness.
So how do we do this today? How do we evangelize the culture in 2025? I'd like to start by talking about media.
Let's start here because media is the air we breathe. Most of us wake up and check our phones before we even pour a cup of coffee. Our news, our entertainment, our humor, even our sense of what's normal, all of it is shaped by what flows through our screens. This is why we can't talk about evangelizing culture without talking about media.
Media isn't neutral. Every post, every video, every article carries a vision of the human person, either one that lifts or one that tears down. So the question is, what are we putting into the world? And what are we letting into our hearts? As Catholics, we are called to be discerning consumers and intentional creators.
Discerning consumers ask, does this show, this song, this meme reflect what is good, true, and beautiful, or does it distort it? Intentional creators ponder if you are posting on social media, does this post reflect Christ? Does this bring light or just add to the noise?
Media can be an incredible tool for evangelization. Sharing a verse that comforts a story that inspires an image that uplifts, but it can also be a place where anger, cynicism, and gossip take root. Evangelizing culture through media doesn't mean flooding the internet with pious slogans. It means showing the face of Christ in the digital space. Sometimes that's sharing a story of hope. Sometimes it's refusing to share that cutting comment. Sometimes it's responding with gentleness where others expect sarcasm. If we want a culture transformed by the gospel, we have to transform the media we use every day, because what we like, what we share, what we watch is shaping the world's imagination.
Let's look now at arts, the arts. The church has always understood that beauty evangelizes. Let's think for a minute about Michelangelo. When you look up at the Sistine Chapel ceiling in the Vatican, one image attracts your attention more than any other, the creation of Adam. God is reaching out, his finger almost touching Adam's. Adam, wide-eyed, reaches back.
That space between the fingers has captivated the imagination of the world for over 500 years. Why? Why the space? Because it really speaks the deepest truth. We are made for God, and God is always reaching for us. That image embodies beauty, its composition, its form, its balance. It embodies truth, the truth that our life comes from God. And it embodies goodness, the goodness of creation, the goodness of the human person made in God's image. This is the power of art in evangelizing culture. It bypasses arguments, it goes straight to the heart.
Two other areas quickly I'd like to talk about are education. Schools and universities shape how generations think. Supporting Catholic education and forming students to integrate faith and reason means planting seeds that will bear fruit for decades. And then politics. Politics is also a part of culture, though often an uncomfortable one. Evangelizing culture here doesn't mean aligning with one party. It really means being a prophetic voice for gospel values. Life, peace, justice, care for the poor, no matter how unpopular it may be.
Let's confront reality in this moment. Most of us will never paint a ceiling or write laws, but we shape culture every day in the way we run our businesses, raise our children, speak to coworkers, and welcome strangers. Culture is not out there. Culture is in our daily choices.
Now I would like to get even more practical. How can you, listening to this podcast, evangelize culture right now? Perhaps ask yourself, what culture am I creating at home? Are faith, prayer, and kindness part of my family's daily rhythm? Are the shows I watch and the music I listen to lifting me up and others, or rather pulling me and others down? I would ask you also to examine your conversations. Are you sowing division in cynicism or hope and truth? Also, maybe the question about cultural spaces of hope. Can we support cultural spaces of hope? And something like that could be as simple as attending a parish concert of sacred music, encouraging a Catholic school teacher, or maybe volunteering to lead a study, a Bible study, or some sort of catechetical study or lecture.
What about the elderly? Our culture too often sidelines the aged. A visit to a nursing home or even a regular phone call evangelizes culture by restoring honor to those whom society has sometimes a tendency to forget. We can also be advocates for beauty, planting flowers at the parish or even around our own houses or apartments, supporting local artists, bringing light to the world literally and figuratively. Each of these choices, small as they may seem to us, each influences the culture. Maybe we could even say bends the culture towards Christ.
Let's now return to where we began. The mission of the church is to proclaim Christ, lead people to him, and build the kingdom. But that mission isn't just idealistic. It needs to take root in culture and the languages we speak, the values we hold, the art we create, the way we live. St. John Paul II said culture is how man becomes more man. Pope Benedict XVI reminded us that if we remove God from culture, culture collapses. Saint Francis of Assisi didn't flee his culture, he stayed, lived the gospel, and changed it. He even, according to the legend, tamed a wolf, not with violence, but with the peace of Christ.
That's our call, not to run from culture, not to fear it, but to enter it, to feed it with truth, to heal it, to transform it. Imagine a culture that reflects Christ's light. Imagine a culture where the hungry are fed, the lonely are visited, the unborn are protected, the elderly are honored, and God is not silenced, but praised. That's not a fantasy. That's the mission. May we be brave enough like St. Francis to face the wolf. May we be patient enough to listen and bold enough to speak. And may the Holy Spirit lead us not just to live in culture but to evangelize it for the glory of God and the salvation of the world.
Thank you for joining me and, as always, I simply would like to conclude by entrusting all of this to the protection and loving intercession of Mary, our mother. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
