PORTO, Portugal (CNS) -- On a four-day visit to Portugal, Pope Benedict XVI turned the Church’s attention to Fatima and offered a new perspective on the continuing relevance of Mary’s appearances and messages there.
But the larger purpose of his May 11-14 trip, a point enunciated at each of his three stops, was to prod Catholics to adopt a more forceful and direct way of evangelizing in a largely secularized society.
In talk after talk, the pope spoke about how to be a missionary in the modern world, challenging Portugal’s Catholic majority -- and its bishops -- to stop acquiescing in a kind of silent surrender as the faith is marginalized and even ridiculed.
In the northern city of Porto May 14, in the final big event of the trip, the pope told 200,000 people at a Mass that their duty as followers of Christ was to announce his Gospel in every sector of society.
“We need to overcome the temptation to limit ourselves to what we already have, or think we have, that is safely our own: that would be a slow death for the Church as a presence in the world,” he said.
In Porto, the pope said that to reach out more effectively, the Church’s traditional idea of evangelizing must change. In today’s increasingly multicultural societies, he said, the Church needs to be able to mix dialogue with proclamation and witness of the faith.
He said the Church’s missionary map is no longer geographical, however. Those awaiting the Gospel message are “not only non-Christian populations and distant lands,” but entire social and cultural areas that cut across national or continental boundaries.
Arriving in Lisbon May 11, he told civil authorities that the Church was happy to live in a pluralistic society, which challenges its members to articulate their beliefs and put them into practice.
Addressing an overflow crowd at Mass in one of Lisbon’s main squares, he encouraged Catholics to be “radiant witnesses” of their faith in key social areas: the family, culture, the economy and politics.
In Fatima, the pope’s attention focused on Mary and the devotional movement that has developed around the sanctuary there.
He connected Mary’s apparitions with the evangelizing task and, in an evening prayer service with priests and Religious, said Mary remains the model Christian for the modern Church.
Leading a nighttime Rosary recital May 12 for tens of thousands of pilgrims, he said the faith in many places seems like a light in danger of being “snuffed out forever.” The Church’s absolute priority today, he said, is “to make God visible in the world and to open for humanity a way to God.”
In a talk the next day to Catholics who work in social programs, the pope took aim at two issues that have illustrated the waning influence of the Church in Portuguese society: the liberalization of legal abortion in 2007 and the imminent approval of a gay marriage law. He called both developments “insidious and dangerous threats to the common good.”
The pope paid homage to Mary at Fatima, praying before her statue and at the tombs of the three shepherd children to whom she appeared in 1917.
Celebrating Mass for an estimated 500,000 people at the sanctuary May 13, the anniversary of the first apparition, the pope emphasized that the prophetic mission of Fatima had not ended, and indeed has special relevance for a world still caught in a “cycle of death and terror.”
The pope made it clear that he sees the messages and secrets of Fatima not as apocalyptic predictions, but as a continual call for conversion for a suffering Church and a suffering world.