With the beginning of 21th century, many people, designating the coming period Age of Culture, expect that culture will be the major subject in 21th century. As this century begins, in fact, culture in modern society has dominantly led the world and c...
With the beginning of 21th century, many people, designating the coming period Age of Culture, expect that culture will be the major subject in 21th century. As this century begins, in fact, culture in modern society has dominantly led the world and come upfront to our society. Especially for the development of mass-communication, Mass-Culture as a feature of modern culture has been changing our life by making our daily lives stay inside of cultural boundary. Reading news papers, turning on the TV, we repeatedly start a day, experience new challenge through movie and books, get information, and fill the extra time everyday. And which makes our routine life to be transformed into the one with mass-media. It took a long time in the past for people to hold the benefit one another by means of exchanging their language, writings and drawing in effort to form a new type of culture, however, culture itself forms and changes incomparably fast in current well-developed communication age.
In the meantime, we should carefully consider what the Mass-Culture with an advance of mass-communication would mean to us. Its very easy to grab any newspapers, magazines around us but they usually appear rather in negative aspect such as violence, sex, injustice, immorality, and commercialization of people. Church shouldnt be an exception for these bad effects of mass-culture either. Modern christian churchs are suffering from peoples indifference to religion, atheism, indignity so far, and Christian faiths are even forced to be in crisis by declined number of pre-faiths.
At this point, Catholic churches are supposed to find the best solution to deliver the gospels armed with freshened spirit and enthusiastic social activities.
New Evangelization should be resulted from positive endeavors to advance our lives by newly uniting the words of gospel and ordinary peoples lives. For those effects, moreover, its the role of the church to actively get involved in current historical situations with clear insight, and to newly experience the actual existence of God in every historical moments.
Especially, New Evangelization at Mass-Culture age of 21C ultimately intends to the Culture-Evangelization in which gospel goes in harmony with mass-culture and finally get united with it. Evangelization of culture is subject to the conversation between gospel and mass-culture since it is the process of the initiative conversation between them. This conversation should be like that we share the most important things each other and accept what they are, and be absorbed into them in the end. As a result, the effort of church to evangelize the mass-culture shall be the endeavor to find the mutual channel for both of gospel and mass-culture in great hopes of absorbing the words of gospel into that.
This mutual channel, enabling the conversation between gospel and mass-culture, has been called and described by church Gods present and New language so far, and modern church has emphasized it as a tool of spreading the words of gospel to the world, and has focused on churchs role in participating mass-media and mass-culture.
New Evangelization makes new atmosphere in everyones life so as to unify the words of gospel into them, rather than preaching the gospel to the people in traditional way, which makes it possible for everyone to hold the voice of gospel by themselves and eventually accept the words of gospel as they are. At this stage, mass-culture reflecting the voice of gospel should be able to eliminate all the negative components of culture and to purify all the fallacies and evils so that it itself not only contains the full of clarified voice of gospel, but finally establish the newly born culture of gospel.
It is sure that active evangelization of culture through utilizing Catholic mass-media should be the very best implements for Catholic churches in 21C, and should be a significant mission to us.