One of the consistent themes in the life of the Catholic Church is the theme of renewal: the personal renewal of believers and the corporate renewal of the Church itself.

Since Vatican Council II, both forms of renewal have received a high priority on a Papal, Regional Church and Particular Church level. Each level of renewal requires a lifelong openness to and commitment to conversion.

One of the methods the Church has been using to facilitate personal and corporate renewal during the last two pontificates has been to choose a theme of concentration for a particular year and offer programmes to assist the believing community in the process of reflecting on the theme. For example, in recent years the Church has celebrated the Year of the Family and the Eucharistic Year.

The Holy Father’s announcement

On June 28, 2007, during a Vesper Service in the Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls, Pope Benedict XVI announced that a special year will be dedicated for the 2000th anniversary of the Apostle’s birth (historians date Paul’s birth between 7 and 10 AD in Tarsus which is in modern day Turkey). It will be called the Pauline Year. It will open on June 28, 2008 and close on June 29, 2009.

The letter from the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples

In September of 2007, the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, the missionary department of the Vatican, issued a letter to all Residential Bishops who are dependent on the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.

In his letter, Cardinal Ivan Dias stated that the Pauline Year had special relevance for the Congregation which, similar to Paul the Apostle, is directly involved in proclaiming Jesus Christ to the nations. He stressed that many people in the world still do not accept Jesus as the only Saviour of the world who alone is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

The Cardinal communicated two important observations about the Pauline Year:
1) that at one time in our family’s history we were all pagans who benefited from the missionary vocation of the Church; and
2) that we must all praise God in thanksgiving for the gift of the Christian faith that we have received.

The missionary vocation of the Church

In his Encyclical Letter, On The Permanent Validity of the Church’s Missionary Mandate, Pope John Paul II described three situations of contemporary evangelisation:
a) Situations in which the Church’s missionary activity address people for whom Christ and the Gospel are not known or which lack Christian communities sufficiently mature to be able to incarnate the faith. This is the mission ad gentes in the strict sense.

b) Situations in which Christian communities have adequate structures and are fervent in faith, morals and commitment to the universal mission of the Church. The Church carries out her missionary activity through these communities.

c) Situations in which entire groups of the baptised have lost a living sense of the faith,  may even no longer consider themselves members of the Church and live a life far removed from Christ and his Gospel.
These three categories form the context of the Pauline Year.

The celebration of the Pauline Year

The practical questions for all of us regarding the Pauline Year are: How shall we celebrate the Pauline Year? How can we build Church during the Pauline Year? How can we benefit spiritually and pastorally from the Pauline Year? Let us consider two options of response to the questions:

Pastoral

1) The missionary vocation of the Church is the responsibility of all who have accepted Baptism and Confirmation. During the Pauline Year the people of the Archdiocese could opt for collaborating more closely with the Commission for Evangelization to reach out to lapsed Catholics (confer ‘c’ above) in prayer, witness and ministry to invite them to return to an active relationship with the Lord.

2) The Pauline Year coincides, in part, with the schedule for the Archdiocesan Synod during the last two weekends of October. As with the 2003 and 2005 sessions of the Synod, it is a time for listening, dialoguing, evaluating and planning. It is a time to build Church and to move forward with Catholic initiatives to build the future of the archdiocese. Prepare for Synod in parishes, become delegates and implement Synod zealously.

3) The Pauline Year raises consciousness about the world of modern media. It invites us to collaborate with the newly restructured Communications Department of the Archdiocese (CAMSEL) and build on the creative and zealous initiatives of St Paul as a Proclaimer of the Faith to a pagan world by responding to the wonderful opportunities modern media offers for contact with a secularised and, unfortunately, increasingly neo-pagan world.

4) Paul’s concern for the poor motivates us to collaborate in a special way during the Pauline Year with the initiatives of the Commission for Social Justice, the St Vincent de Paul Society and to raise the level of contributions for the Pontifical Mission Societies.

Personal

1) To use the Pauline Year to study and reflect on the writings of Paul to deepen our spirituality and to energize our ministry for the Lord.

2) To join pilgrimages to Rome and other sites of Pauline history and ministry to deepen our understanding of the historical context and writings of Paul.

3) As we read and reflect on Paul’s outstanding zeal for ministry and Church, we can use the Pauline Year to examine our consciences about the level of zeal in our lives as we serve the Lord.

4) To allow the Pauline Year to motivate us to collaborate with the Catechetical Department of the Archdiocese in term of becoming catechists, forming people in the faith as catechists and giving those being catechized a sense of the missionary vocation of the universal Church.

Conclusion

No matter how you celebrate the Pauline Year, make sure you celebrate – do not pass on the opportunity for personal and pastoral growth.