You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute,

an Apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

Welcome to Form Now. I'm Tim Gray, president of the Augustine Institute. And our topic for today is a wonderful topic that I'm very excited about, is God's gift to the 21st century, St. John Paul

the 2nd, or really St. John Paul the Great. And we have a special guest.

I'm very excited to have Douglas Bushman join us.

He's a professor of theology here at the August Institute.

And we're going to talk about John Paul the second, especially in light of, you know, he is a great

gift of the church.

And, you know, one of his great rallying cries that so many people know him by is this idea

of the new evangelization. He really summoned

the church to a new evangelization. And, you know, let's just start Douglas with what did St. John

Paul II mean by the new evangelization? You know, I can think of the talk he gave to the American

bishops at Haiti in 1983, where he gave some of the characteristics,

but it's really something that he had at the beginning of his pontificate.

He talked about new evangelization right at the beginning when he went to Poland for the first trip,

but it's something that grew with his pontificate, isn't it?

It did grow.

In fact, you can see an evolution in his understanding of it, not radically different.

For example, in Redemptory Smycio, which has a status of an encyclical, so 1990, he said that the new evangelization is focused on reaching out to what we say is lapsed Catholics. He actually uses pretty

strong language, baptized Catholics who live as if God doesn't even exist. Wow, yeah, he's

blunt. Blunt. Secularized Catholics. So he said that. There's the mission ad gentis to the places

where Christ has not been proclaimed. There's ongoing pastoral, catechetical work to help people grow in their faith throughout. But then

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