INICIO

1. The Challenges for the New Evangelization of Latin America 
1.1. The Divine-Human Project
They reached the chapel. The leader of the assailants demanded that the superior of the community open the tabernacle. They had already searched the whole house and had not found the money. The superior assured him that he would not find it in the tabernacle. At his insistence, she opened it. The thief, having ascertained the absence of the money, made the sign of the cross with the hand that held the weapon, while saying: "Forgive me, little God".
We are not satisfied with the incomplete evangelization of Latin American Catholics. We all wish to achieve the New Evangelization in our continent. Will we succeed? We can affirm it if we rely on the unfailing help of the Holy Spirit. But the law of the Incarnation also requires us to do our part and asks us to have a positive attitude. The Church is made up of God and mankind. God will do his part, but what about us?
1.2. The possible paths of the New Evangelization
The New Evangelization needs some basic conditions in order to be realized. We can note the following:
* That there be a solid and coherent foundation of our action with the sources of Revelation.
* That all Pastors acquire the internal conviction and take the necessary steps to carry out this mission. It is more difficult to achieve this point, because it will require some to change acquired attitudes and routines, although the majority will take substantial steps forward.
* That the practical means provided are applied to the desired goal. This point is even more difficult, because it will require all the agents involved in this ecclesial task to discover the adequate means, to make the practical effort to overcome apathy and laziness, and to put attitudes of sincere communion.
1.3. Some relevant historical parameters of analysis
A depersonalized pastoral predominates. If we analyze the first evangelization, the basic means was man's dialogue with God and with his brothers and sisters. It was not the only means, but it achieved the authentic communication of the Gospel. Dialogue among men and with God is such an obvious way that it has not received the attention and importance it deserves.
In many sectors of the Church, ministers are forced to a massive, hurried, depersonalized action. How many of the baptized know their bishop by name? What percentage of believers have personally and at length dialogued with their parish priest at least once a year? The personal communication of the Gospel, the sharing of Christian values, authentic giving and the commitment of evangelizers and the evangelized remain fundamental.
We are suffering from rampant secularization. The first evangelization was carried out by agents and to recipients who had God as the highest value of human existence. But evangelization has not run at the same speed as the development of the super-profane culture. The vertiginous secularization is entering Latin America. It presses with the technical and economic mentality and with the invasion of material values.
The laity are an evangelizing power. The first evangelizers were priests and religious. Clerics and consecrated persons constituted the active force of the ecclesial missions. Today, the laity have matured in their personality, they are children of their time and have acquired a clear awareness of their role within the Church. This awareness has implied a sudden transition from a passive attitude to an attitude of participation. We suffer from a lack of integral agents. The history of conversions during the first evangelization was achieved through the witness of authentic Christians. The sincere testimony of the committed evangelizing agent conquered more than thousands of speeches. In many cases, moreover, the missionaries were sons of aristocratic families who selflessly gave their lives to evangelization. 
We can deservedly give the title of aristos (the best) to most of them. However, it is common today to find evangelizing agents who are poorly trained, both spiritually and humanly. Fundamentalist sects permeate the environment. The founding evangelization sowed the faith on the pagan world. And there was no competition. The Spanish Crown, decidedly opposed to nascent Protestantism, spread the Gospel with no other obstacle than paganism.
Now, however, we are faced with the devalued Protestantism of the fundamentalist sects. This competition in the work of evangelization is also supported by liberal capitalism, both in materialistic cultural conceptions and in economic and strategic support.
We live on a common continent. The first evangelization acted on a wide variety of peoples, cultures and languages. The New Evangelization faces today a continent very uniform in language and cultural substrates, because the miscegenation and the social laws maintained by Spain produced common dominators, not far from those established by Portugal. What was and is the support of the political authority and cultural forces? The first evangelization advanced with the support of the political authorities.
Today, the New Evangelization finds unequal support of the people established in the Latin American governments and diminished support of the men of culture, very vitiated of rational illuminism, when not of Marxism. Evangelization today has less human support. In other words, the first evangelization had no obstacles in the civil community. Today it has many.
1.4. Sociological parameters that have an impact on evangelization
The massification of the baptized demands a pastoral action directed to multitudinous masses. The excessive urbanization and mobility of people does not allow us to take advantage of the territorial structure as before. We are experiencing a decrease and weakening of the primitive intimacy in the Christian community. It is urgent to develop the current structures or to find new structures with more vitality, without the need to destroy the existing ones.
The need for belonging is manifest. Today's man is confronted every day with problems so varied and complicated that he cannot help but feel insecure and incomplete to solve them on his own. Once again man alone, harassed and threatened, instinctively seeks the support and reinforcement of others who, in similar situations, think like him and are willing to join forces in common solutions. But the community grows every day. The Catholic feels anonymity within the ecclesial body. The development of sects has been strongly motivated by this natural need of people to belong to a defined social group.
The New Evangelization needs to address this need to belong. There is the work of the archisolicited priest. A glance at the normal functioning of our parishes presents the majority of the faithful condemned to live a very limited religiosity, marginalized from true Christian experiences. They are far from the personal attention of the Pastors. The bishop does not know his faithful; the priests are too busy with the multiplicity of demands. The breadth of demand is often so great that it makes it impossible for them to give a better service of the Word, of Bread, of Forgiveness. They cannot enter into a personal and profound relationship with those who receive their attention. 
The New Evangelization can break this barrier with the growth of vocations to the priesthood and consecrated life. But what can be done as long as there is not a sufficient number of priests and consecrated souls? Popular religiosity runs the risk of anemia. The almost inevitable result of these considerations is the weakening and limitation of popular religiosity, and the New Evangelization requires a strong religiosity that can be achieved with a revitalized popular religiosity. We lack intermediate levels of evangelization.
The accelerated process of secularization and de-Christianization produces dissolving effects on the unprepared. Theological studies have reached very high levels in this century and the Popes have greatly enriched the baggage of doctrinal content for the Church. But the scholars and the great documents of the Church do not reach the masses because the decrease in vocations has weakened the agents in charge of connecting the ecclesial apex with the base. The New Evangelization requires agents who act as intermediate links in the social structure of the Catholic community. We live in a society that still depends primarily on the family. Cultural change cannot be brought about by external factors, since they are transitory and superficial. Change is brought about by capable and active people. But all people depend religiously on the family, since it is there that values and anti-values are fundamentally transmitted, and faith is a value. The New Evangelization must have its axis in the family.
It is also a society in feminine hands. The transmission of values takes place primarily in the family and depends mainly on women. It is an established phenomenological fact: women are the vital agent in the transmission of the faith. This does not mean that she alone must transmit it; but, in any case, she occupies a neuralgic role in the evangelizing action. In the past, the parish priest gave solidity and the necessary stability to so many women who were the focus of home or parish evangelization. Now, with the proportional decrease of vocations, there is a lack of male evangelizers to support so many women engaged in evangelization. Women become, therefore, the recipients and privileged agents of the New Evangelization.
Theological and Pastoral Foundations for a New Evangelization in Latin America
2.1. Ecclesiological Foundations for a New Evangelization of Latin America
We need an ecclesiology of communion and communication, because evangelization needs the collaboration of all (1).
The ecclesiology of proclamation reminds us that the evangelizing action is to communicate the Gospel (2) and this communication is carried out by word, by works-witness and by the values-force that impel the spiritual life. A good evangelization cannot do without these three elements. Let us stimulate the ecclesiology of mission, because our work calls for the transmission of the Gospel message beyond the frontiers of the ecclesial community (3). The New Evangelization seeks to reach all the people of the continent.    
2.2. Christocentric foundations
Evangelization must be a Christocentric action. Christ must be the criterion, the center and the model of all evangelizing action. We can consider this Christocentrism from various angles:
* Christ the Prophet: Christ speaks of the things of God in His name. Evangelization should imitate him with the direct action of the word.
* Christ the Redeemer-Priest: Evangelizing action must sacrifice the self for others. It will require living evangelical renunciation, poverty and humility (5).
* Christ the Shepherd dedicated to others: Evangelization needs dedicated agents with full and qualified time for the service of others (6).
* Guadalupana Mariology. The Nican Mopohua expresses: "Am I not your mother? Evangelization must be carried out according to the model of Mary's faith and docility, above human pride and self-sufficiency.
2.3. Other theological foundations
To seek integral salvation. Because the painful and changing reality of Latin America calls for a vision of the New Evangelization based on an integral soteriology. The evangelizing action must offer man a terrestrial and transcendent development (7). To promote liturgy and popular religiosity as points of arrival and starting point. We cannot eliminate them nor reduce Christian life to them. It is a matter of living the Gospel outside the temple, not to stop frequenting it to live the celebration of the history of salvation. We must embrace all values and fight for them. We must be governed by an ethic of interior commitment and convinced axiology. Because it is not enough to comply with some laws or to polarize the Gospel in some exclusive values. We require a global and convinced vision of the Christian life, solid of options and open to its demanding hierarchy, not accommodating or circumstantial. Because that is what the Gospel is. We can only evangelize with evangelizing agents who hold firm the essential values, in spite of the adverse current.
2.4. Some pastoral criteria
To promote effective pastoral evangelization. We must place the accent of evangelizing efficacy on grace. But this criterion must be complemented by the Catholic vision of the need for the intervention of human freedom. We are not going to take away God's role, but we cannot fall into a Lutheranism that eliminates the human part of ecclesial action. Let us give priority to the evangelizing agent.
In order to be effective, evangelization must attend to the main element, otherwise it will fall by the wayside, and the main element is the evangelizing agent. We cannot think that it is the social or ecclesial structures, these have their importance but they depend on the action of the agent. Structures without agents do not produce fruits. Nor can we seek evangelization by external means alone, but by the action of the agents (8).
The lay agent is the primary point of support. We know that evangelization requires the co-responsibility of hierarchy and laity to live the ecclesial communion (9). This principle will require some Pastors to give more prominence to the action of the laity in their pastoral work (10), and not only in theory or in a few sectors of diocesan or parish pastoral work. It also requires that the laity render obedience and docility to their Pastors, because co-responsibility does not eliminate charisms (11). In any case, it is good to emphasize that the laity have an irreplaceable role in evangelization (12), both because of their characteristics and because of God's plan. Let us give vital importance to the family in evangelization. 
We have given priority to the agent over structures. But, if a social structure should be privileged, it should be the family. Evangelization should pay more attention to the family structure than to other social structures, because these are changeable and unstable. And the family is not. Let us promote an evangelization of freedom to guarantee a personal commitment over transient or tornadic mechanisms. In negative, we must avoid processes that move people spontaneously but without a conscious motivation.
Let us try to structure the evangelizing processes mainly on the goals, that is to say, not to rely primarily only on techniques, structures or programs, but to subordinate and update these to the goals. Because the world changes very quickly and methods and programs easily become obsolete, but the goals will always guide us at all times. Finally, let us cultivate a sense of vigilance in the face of our own limitations and in the face of a distorting or provocative environment, that is, let us strive to achieve a Christian attitude that strikes a balance between a critical spirit and abandonment to God's designs. Because the salvation of human beings and the construction of the kingdom of God can be spoiled by our pettiness and can be magnified by the invisible power of God.
Notes
1. See Christifideles laici, 15, 23; Redemptoris missio, 27.
2. See Redemptoris missio, 20.
3. See John Paul II, Address to the Bishops of CELAM, Santo Domingo, 12/10/1984. [Back to top]
4. See Redemptoris missio, 23.
5. See Redemptoris missio, 11. [Back to top] 6.
6. See Christifideles laici, 14.
7. See Redemptoris missio, 11, 14.
8. See Gaudium et spes, 42.
9. See Apostolicam actuositatem, 10, 22, 24, 25, 31.
10. See Redemptoris missio, 2.
11. See Christifideles laici, 20.
12. See Christifideles laici, 28, 30. [Back to top] 12.