In a somewhat obscure passage in a 1997 pastoral-catechetical document, the Church describes the sacraments as “means” of evangelization (See Congregation for the Clergy, General Directory for Catechesis (GDC) 46). Since the Eucharist is one of the seven sacraments, is it right to say the Eucharist is such a “means” in the context of the sacramental celebration of the Mass? After all, the Eucharist contains “the whole spiritual good of the Church” (Presbyterorum Ordinis, 5). Is the idea of the Mass being a “means” of any kind beneath its dignity since the Eucharist is the summit and font of the whole Christian life? And, doesn’t this kind of language open the liturgy to all kinds of monopolization for pastoral purposes, turning it into something that it’s not? Moving as we are into a necessarily missionary orientation to broader society, in the years ahead we will need to think clearly about the liturgy’s evangelizing power. These questions, then, are important to engage.

Evangelization and Liturgy

It’s important first to recognize that when the Church uses this term “evangelization,” she means it in a much broader sense than we typically presume. Following from Pope St. Paul VI, evangelization is the Church’s “deepest identity,” indeed, the reason for her existence (Evangelii Nuntiandi, 14). Rather than being conceived more narrowly as the initial proclamation of the kerygma to unbelievers or the sharing of one’s testimony to the power of God, evangelization also encompasses the entire process of disciple-making: from bearing witness to the Gospel to the deeper, lifelong encounters and formation of the sacramentally initiated (See GDC, 47 and Directory for Catechesis (2020), 31-32). In this sense, every human person is in need of being evangelized, from the person who does not know Christ and has not yet been “plunged into the Paschal Mystery” (Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC), 6) through the waters of baptism to the believing sacramentalized Catholic who is progressing in a life of sanctity over many decades. In other words, evangelization is meant to occur all the way through a person’s life. Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl (1904–1964) describes the Christian life as a life of encounter that leads to profound change: “Alive, [the words of the Gospel] are themselves like the initial leavening that will attack our dough and ferment it into a new way of life.”¹ Each of us, no matter where we are on the journey into sanctity, has “dough” that needs to be attacked and fermented.

Understood in this broader sense, the Mass is indeed a means of evangelization, where we encounter both Christ proclaiming his Gospel (SC, 7) and the Paschal Mystery made present and accessible (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1104) as sources of grace and healing. The Catholic life consists of living in and from this liturgical encounter, which serves as a catalyst for the metanoia and christification of each of us and our broader human communities. Pope John Paul II describes well the necessity of the sacraments to the conversion of the Christian when he wrote, “it is in the sacraments, especially in the Eucharist, that Christ Jesus works in fullness for the transformation of human beings” (Catechesi Tradendae, 23). Our conversion, the gradual conforming of ourselves to Christ, is a work of God in us, with which we must freely cooperate. It is the evangelistic work of a lifetime, beginning with the first movement of grace and ending as we take our final breath. The Mass and the other sacraments, as primary sources of grace, and also where the Gospel is most powerfully proclaimed, are central to this process of becoming more and more like the One whom we follow as members of the baptized, as disciples.

Let’s consider the Mass and how it evangelizes and then, in the next installment, the important pastoral question today of who the liturgy is meant to evangelize.

Language of the Liturgy

How does the liturgy evangelize us? The Paschal Mystery of Christ, which is the source of every grace and movement towards conversion, is made present to us in the liturgy through the use of a sacramental language system.

One important 20th-century liturgical theologian, Benedictine Father Aidan Kavanagh, provides a helpful description for understanding the nature of this sacramental language system. While Kavanagh here is describing how the liturgy “teaches,” his language can be equally applied to evangelization and is helpful to us. Kavanagh puts it this way: “[A]lthough the liturgy does indeed ‘teach,’ it teaches as any other ritual does—experientially, nondiscursively, richly, ambiguously, elementally. In which case it is better left alone to go its repetitious, archaic way so long as the symbols that make up its vocabulary are respected and left to voice their own robust chords of color, food and drink, movement…touch and smell, life and death, sound and rhythmic repetition. Symbols such as these, and the ritual language they go to make up, are imprecise, communicating not by removing ambiguity but by flooding the senses with it. Much meaning is drawn together into foci that are so complex they do not permit exhaustive verbal definitions concerning what any one focal point means. What, for example, do gold rings on the hands of a couple married 50 years ‘mean’?”²

The whole of the liturgical life employs deep, sense-oriented, and wonderfully imprecise sacramental language, where the Mystery of Christ is encountered through the medium of sacramental signs and symbols. The senses are flooded with the lavish ambiguity of sacramental signs, and profound movements of self-emptying love are revealed and expressed. God loves us and pours out his grace by way of these sacramental signs, and our adoration and praise also rises to God through the use of this same language.³ This exchange of love with God happens in ways that engage all of our senses. Through this language, passed down in the liturgy from the earliest generations, we are placed into proximity to the Paschal Mystery of Christ, the cause of all grace and conversion. Every aspect of this experience evangelizes.

Liturgical evangelization is quite distinct from how we evangelistically communicate the Mystery of Christ when we proclaim it or share a testimony. The evangelist, for instance, works hard to be unambiguous and clear in proclamation, teaching, testimony, and exhortation. But that kind of clarity isn’t to be found in the extravagant symbolic structure of sacramental celebrations. Yet, this extravagance is necessary and good! This is the Paschal Mystery we encounter, after all, made accessible to us through what we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell throughout the liturgical celebration. This is the mystery of mysteries and we should, in fact, expect it to be not so easily categorized and immediately understood. Benedictine Father Jeremy Driscoll explains, with memorable imagery: “[I]t goes without saying that we do not understand the Mass as well as we should, but it would be a mistake to think that the Mass should be immediately understandable to all. How could it be? It is the summit of the Christian life. One does not begin at the summit; a summit is arrived at slowly and with effort. People—believers and unbelievers alike—cannot expect to come in off the street and demand to have something immediately meaningful to them. And who defines meaningful in any case? I will not get very far in understanding the Mass if I think I have the right to have it be meaningful to me in ways that I define. That would take away all possibility of receiving the Mass as a gift from another, from God. He defines it. It is His initiative, His action.”⁴

For the Young and Not-So-Young

While the liturgy evangelizes us over the course of a lifetime and has had the capacity to draw even the greatest of saints more deeply into the Mystery of Christ, it also can evangelize those who are very young in their Christian life. In my own experience, I was 14 years old when I first became alert to the Mystery in which I was enveloped at Mass. This moment of awakening didn’t unfold for me on a retreat or at a youth conference. Rather, it happened in the midst of the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday. Divine providence placed my family in a parish where the music was beautiful, the members of the assembly were clearly invested in the prayer of the Mass, and the pastor prayed the ritual intently. And it was there on Holy Thursday that the Holy Spirit helped me see truly who this was, who was made present when the Eucharistic host was elevated and the pastor prayed “through him, with him, and in him….” Sacramental language, in its beauty and mystery, spoke convincingly to me that night. This language speaks across the generations as well. We know, of course, that this language speaks powerfully to children as well as to adults. Perhaps it speaks most clearly to the little ones. That great pioneer of children’s catechesis, Sofia Cavalletti, once wrote: “It is a fact that the child seems capable of seeing the Invisible, almost as if it were more tangible and real than the immediate reality…. [C]hildren penetrate effortlessly beyond the veil of signs and ‘see’ with utmost facility their transcendent meaning, as if there were no barrier between the visible and the Invisible.”⁵

Children can indeed be profoundly evangelized through their encounter with this language in the celebration of the liturgy. A close friend of mine, Elizabeth Siegel, describes this reality vividly, recounting an early memory of a profound, deeply formative Easter vigil liturgy. She writes: “The waiting was long—we had come early to get seats, but I did not get sleepy. I loved the hushed darkness, for I could sense a shared anticipation in the people gathered, who waited too. And when the towering abbey doors swung open, revealing the first light of the Paschal Candle, I was spell-bound. The light danced as the acolyte moved, casting strange shadows on the plain white abbey walls. We responded in loud unison, ‘Thanks be to God,’ as the candle was lifted high. Strangers passed on to us the light of the Easter fire, and we held it each in our hands. Then the abbot began the Exsultet, and my heart trembled within me. I heard power. I heard majesty. I heard nobility. I heard the proclamation of something far greater than I…. And all the places I have heard the Exsultet…chanted in Latin in the twelfth century Cistercian monastery in Fribourg, Switzerland, or at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington DC, and in parish churches everywhere…my heart always swells and I become more.”⁶

The Crisis of Liturgical Boredom

The liturgy has this kind of evangelistic influence. Yet, in our parishes today, a significant problem confronts us. A great many of us, especially many children and teenagers, would say that we are “bored” at Mass. The beauty and power and irreplaceability of the liturgy in the Christian life has not yet been perceived on a wide scale within many of our parishes. And if we are bored, disconnected, uninterested, and distracted, it is unlikely we will be influenced, converted, sanctified, and ultimately divinized. Christ Jesus may indeed, hearkening back to St. John Paul II’s words, be working in fullness for our transformation, but if we are “bored” then such a transformation is unlikely to be the result of our experience, closed and disinterested as we are before the movement of grace. This is particularly true when we live without the supports of an accompanying Catholic community either in our homes or parish. While it is highly likely that there were many Catholics three and four generations ago who may have been—at least once or twice in their lifetimes (humor intended here)—“bored” at Mass, it was unlikely back then that they would have fallen away from sacramental practice for this reason. Today, of course, for a variety of cultural reasons, we are in significantly different waters. The U.S. Bishops insightfully point out what sets apart 21st-century Catholic young people from those of previous generations: “Young people are taught both by the excitement generated by technology and by the effervescence of popular culture to reject something if it bores them—and often the only things that do not bore them are those that seduce or titillate” (National Directory for Catechesis (2005), 12). Today, that which is boring is not endured until meaning might be discovered in it; rather, such practices today are easily abandoned, frequently at a very young age.

Therefore, on the one hand, the sacred liturgy is an experience that Pope Benedict XVI once likened to nuclear fission on the spiritual level (Sacramentum Caritatis, 11): it is a locus of the power of God and will make even the worst of us into great saints, provided we cooperate with its grace. And, on the other hand, if our interior disposition is not attuned to the movement of God in the Mass, if we don’t freely cooperate with the grace we encounter, then on the subjective level our boredom will close us off to the Mystery which is made present to us.

What are pastoral leaders to do, facing the complexities of this issue? In the next installment, we will constructively engage one contemporary model which, I believe, approaches this issue wrongly. And then, we will consider some ideas I hope are helpful to our navigation of this problem today.

1. Madeleine Delbrêl, The Dazzling Light of God: A Madeleine Delbrêl Reader (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2023), 44.
2. Aidan Kavanaugh, OSB, “Teaching Through the Liturgy,” Notre Dame Journal of Education 5, no. 1 (Spring 1974), 40-41.
3. For more on these upwards and downwards movements in the liturgy, see Jeremy Driscoll, OSB, What Happens at Mass (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2011).
4. Jeremy Driscoll, OSB, What Happens at Mass (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2011), v-vi.
5. Sofia Cavalletti, The Religious Potential of the Child: Experiencing Scripture and Liturgy with Young Children, trans. Patricia M. Coulter and Julie M. Coulter (Chicago: Catechesis of the Good Shepherd Publications, 1992), 43.
6. These words are published in James C. Pauley, Liturgical Catechesis in the 21st Century: A School of Discipleship—revised edition (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2022), 103.