Digital evangeliser

Digital evangeliser
Martin O’Brien discovers that Pope Francis has taken evangelisation to a new level

Edward Sri, husband of Elizabeth, father of seven (another child is on the way) teacher, theologian, bestselling author and EWTN broadcaster is one of the most accomplished communicators of the Catholic faith in the world today.

Articulate and compelling he is one of the leaders of a new breed of Catholic evangelists who deploy the latest technologies to communicate the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the new digital age.

A quick Google search shows 17 of his books including Pope Francis and the Joy of the Gospel, a particularly well received work on the theology of the body and his latest, Love Unveiled: The Catholic Faith Explained.    

Dr Sri is Professor of Theology and Scripture at the Augustine Institute in Denver, Colorado, the city where Pope St John Paul II chose to hold World Youth Day 1993 as a launching pad for the New Evangelisation, a bold initiative that grew out of Vatican II aimed at re-evangelising a world that has become de-Christianised.

The establishment of the Augustine Institute in 2005 under the guidance of Archbishop Charles Chaput OFM Cap., was inspired by John Paul II’s visit to Denver and it is seen as a leading think tank of the New Evangelisation.

Celebration

Denver saw a massive celebration of, in St John Paul’s words there “the new Life which only Christ can give”.

In the multitude listening to the Pope and future saint that day, the Feast of the Assumption, 1993 was a 24-year-old Edward Sri, who was brought up in Chicago, the son of a devout Italian Catholic mother from Tuscany “from whom I learned my relationship with God” and a Thai father.

Visiting Belfast Dr Sri recalled: “We were inspired by John Paul II in Denver. He was saying now is the time to proclaim the Gospel from the roof tops. It was a call to bring the Gospel to the secular city, to the secular world.”

Dr Sri was in Ireland because Fr Edward O’Donnell, parish priest of St Brigid’s, Belfast was so impressed by his writings that he invited him to come to Ireland for the first time to deliver the St Brigid’s Lecture that has become one of the highlights in the Church calendar in the North.

With such a big hitter coming other invitations followed and Dr Sri ended up delivering 11 talks in four days in Belfast, Derry and Cork.

Edward Sri says that as a student at Indiana University he was “confronted by two challenging dynamics”.

One was encountering lots of evangelical Protestants who were proselytising Catholics and asking searching questions of his Church, to which he had to find answers.

The other dynamic took the form of the questions he was facing from the secular world, like what is the point of faith anyway and why is Christianity so judgemental?

These are questions that Sri, the holder of a doctorate in sacred theology from the Angelicum University in Rome, tries to address in his many books, articles and talks, and particularly in the pioneering resource that is Symbolon: The Catholic Faith Explained, a dramatic library of videos and DVDs, many of which are presented by Dr Sri and are available on-line having been produced by the Augustine Institute.

Symbolon is a state of the art tool for re-evangelisation that is already being used in 5,000 parishes worldwide via symboloncatholic.org and it operates under the umbrella of Formed.org which Dr Sri describes as “a revolutionary online gateway to the best Catholic videos, audio talks, eBooks and movies”.

Formed.org brands itself as “the best Catholic content all in one place” and also includes Bishop Robert Barron’s Catholicism, Scott Hahn’s Journey Through Scripture, audio talks from Lighthouse Catholic Media and e-Books and movies from Ignatius Press.

Dr Sri likes to cite Dr Tim Gray, the president of the Augustine Institute who has said: “St John Paul said the New Evangelisation must be new in method and expression. We’re really trying to do that with the technology.”

The amazing potential and sheer smartness of that technology could hardly have been envisaged by Edward at the first or second of “the three pivotal moments” that changed the direction of his life which he shared with me in a long conversation in Fr O’Donnell’s presbytery.

The first of these came in his second year in university in Indiana during a retreat when a priest asked him to “meditate on the Gospel story of the rich young man who wanted to be good and to put myself into that story”.

“I remember that Saturday night kneeling down in that chapel and telling Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament that I did not want to be that young man anymore. It was a profound realisation on my part that I wanted Jesus to be first in my life.”

Before that retreat “I was searching for happiness, success, money, career, having a girlfriend, having a fun social life but these are not where our happiness is ultimately to be found”.

Afterwards he desired to attend Mass every day and “had this great desire to share the Faith”.

Edward was an outstanding student and the second pivotal moment came after graduating with highest distinction in journalism.

He won a coveted place with Dow Chemical, a Fortune magazine top 20 company, in their communications division.

He hesitated, wondering if he should be working for the Church instead but his “prophetic pastor” told him that the message of Vatican II was that the Church needed lay people active in the secular world.

“My pastor was prophetic. He said ‘say after a while you decide that you are supposed to work in the Church you will have acquired all the God-given [communications and PR] skills and experiences that you can use for the sake of His Kingdom’.”

And that is precisely what happened.

After two years, Edward left Dow Chemical and the prospect of a lucrative career there to begin graduate studies in theology, experience John Paul II in Denver, train catechists, become a speaker at Catholic conferences, complete a Masters in Theology with highest honours and a doctorate on Mary which became a book Queen Mother (Emmaus Road 2005).

Early into a nine-year stint (1997–2006) as Assistant Professor of Theology at Benedictine College in Kansas Dr Sri co-founded with Curtis Martin the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) which today has branches in 114 university campuses in 36 American states as well as Washington DC.

Its mission is to invite students into a relationship with Jesus and to spread the Catholic faith.

Dr Sri recalls the birth of FOCUS and what can only be described as a miraculous transformation in Benedictine College where, under his leadership, a small group of seven students in the first six weeks of the first semester in 1998 prayed and fasted for the conversions of fellow students.

Witnesses

This resulted in numerous students seriously practising their faith “and they in turn becoming witnesses”.

Within two years one third of the 750 students were attending Bible classes and attending daily Mass and producing 10 vocations a year to the priesthood or religious life.

Today he says there are even more vocations per year and the student numbers have more than doubled in a college where the practice of the faith remains phenomenal. It has, he says, the second largest theology department in the US.

The third “pivotal moment” in Edward’s life came in 2006.

Although he loved Benedictine College and had a secure job there – an important consideration for a man with a wife and young family – he discerned “that God was calling me on a new adventure” to become part of the team leading the establishment of the Augustine Institute in Denver with its mission to provide formation for the New Evangelisation, particularly for the laity.

Accent marks

Dr Sri sees “no disrupture” between St John Paul and Benedict XVI on one hand and Pope Francis although the Pope has introduced “new accent marks”.

He acknowledges that John Paul II and Benedict provided “great theology, great tools for evangelisation” but that Pope Francis “has taken it to the next step” by asking “what practically can we do? He is focussing on how we can take this [the Gospel] on to the streets and into our parishes.”

Edward Sri and the Augustine Institute appear to have the tools for that.