The Vatican’s War on Evangelism

Rev. Jules Gomez

On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally became global meme fodder. Mullally conferred an interfaith award on Osama bin Laden apologist Maulana Hafiz Ashrafi. The photograph went viral. Mullally, an über-feminist who had pledged to wipe out misogyny in the Church, was caught on camera, grinning like a barracuda alongside Ashrafi and his wife, who was dressed like a sarcophagus. Ashrafi’s daughter, masked like a Ninja at a Halloween party, put the finishing touches on the comedy of the absurd.

A week later, desperate to compete with his partner in interfaith suicidal empathy, Pope Leo XIV approved a declaration titled “A Journey of Hope.” The document suffers from a diarrhea of words and a constipation of theology. It urges greater dialogue with Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and other religions. It elevates Islam to a key fraternal partner. It castigates perpetrators of “Islamophobia.” It does not preach Jesus’ uniqueness. And it reads the riot act to Christians who engage in the unforgivable sin of “proselytism.”

In effect, the declaration is Pope Leo’s ultimatum to St. Paul. “Put your aggressive proselytizing on mute,” Leo is telling Paul. “Cool the sales pitch. Cut the converts. Quit cruising around the Mediterranean persuading Jews and Greeks to follow Jesus. It’s ruining the Vatican’s interreligious dialogue with devotees of Artemis, Zeus, and Hermes and killing our fraternity with disciples of Dionysus, Isis, and Mithras.

Leo’s document does not define “proselytism,” leaving room for weaponized ambiguity. Not once does the document use the term “evangelism,” my preferred term for proselytism. One has to turn to the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines “proselytism” as “the making or seeking of converts.” The root word is proserkhesthai, ‘to approach.’ You’ve got to approach someone if you wish to convert them.

European Court Affirms What the Vatican Negates

It is striking that while the Vatican anathematizes proselytism, the European Court of Human Rights approves proselytism as a bona fide manifestation of religion. The ECHR recognized this in the landmark Kokkinakis v Greece case, wherein a Jehovah’s Witness challenged his conviction for attempting to convert a Greek Orthodox Christian on a home visit. Kokkinakis was arrested more than 60 times for proselytism. He was also imprisoned several times.

The court based its verdict on the European Convention on Human Rights (Article 9), which asserts that the right to freedom of religion includes the right to change one’s religion (as does Article 18 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights).

“Proselytism is linked to freedom of religion; a believer must be able to communicate his faith and his beliefs in the religious sphere as in the philosophical sphere,” Judge Pettiti stated. “Believers and agnostic philosophers have a right to expound their beliefs, to try to get other people to share them and even to try to convert those whom they are addressing.”

According to the court, proselytism is valid since religious conversion, as permitted by Article 9, often involves being persuaded by others. “Indeed, without proselytism, the right to change religion ‘would be likely to remain a dead letter,’” Andrew Hambler, an expert in employment law, writes in his peer-reviewed article in the Industrial Law Journal.

Hambler might as well have quoted the apostle Paul. Writing to the Romans, Paul strings together a series of rhetorical questions: “How then will they call on him [Jesus] in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” (Romans 10:14). In this sense, proselytism has the strongest claim to legitimacy, Hambler emphasizes.

Leo’s Strategy: “Don’t Preach, Simply Wait!”

Sadly, “proselytism” bashing is now a staple of papal pontificating. During his visit to the Rimini Meeting of Friendships Among Peoples, Leo “recalled that his predecessors have repeated on several occasions, ‘the Church does not engage in proselytism,’” Vatican News reported. In a letter to the cardinals, Leo slammed “the temptation of proselytism.” Pope Francis frequently attacked proselytism. “Proselytism is solemn nonsense; it makes no sense,” he famously said.

For Rome, “the view that proselytism is the only way to engage with the other no longer make[s] sense in a world that increasingly resembles an interconnected and constantly evolving global village.” So how does one preach Christ? Sure, Rome isn’t calling for “renouncing the truth” but “proclaiming it in a manner befitting the Gospel: with esteem, listening, and charity.”

But the exaggerated emphasis on interreligious dialogue can lead to “grave confusion,” as Bishop Joseph Strickland warns. He contends that Leo’s document risks placing dialogue above evangelization, suggesting that non-Christian religions are authentic paths to God and raising doubts about the Church’s missionary mandate. The New Testament scholar Robert Gagnon observes that Leo’s document “at the very least depresses or discourages evangelism (what it calls ‘proselytism’), if not outright rejecting it.” Gagnon calls the document “utter nonsense,” adding: “It is heretical to discourage conversion to Christianity from other faiths. This Pope and his Vatican cohorts have made many missteps in a relatively short time, but this is the worst.”

I would applaud if Leo warned against using coercion, cajolery, or crookery in proselytism.

But Leo redefines evangelistic outreach as the supine expectation of a lover whose words “do not disturb others,” do not “make demands or oblige,” but “only lead others to marvel at such love.” Christians must not proactively seek to convert others but, like a lover, “simply wait[s] for them to inquire about the love that has filled his or her life.”

This is pious humbug. No great love story would be penned, or no great romantic movie would find an audience if all the lover did was to “simply wait.” Even a peacock proactively opens his feathers and dances to attract a peahen. Jesus didn’t ask his disciples to “simply wait” but to go to the very ends of the earth to proclaim the gospel.

St. Paul Didn’t “Simply Wait”

Paul did the very opposite of “simply waiting.” He went around the Mediterranean on three missionary journeys. He preached to Jews and Gentiles. Jewish and Christian scholars agree that Paul wasn’t trying to “convert” Jews to “Christianity” or to “Roman Catholicism.” Saul the Jew never became Paul the Christian. He remained a Jew to his death. In the highly fraught sectarian context of Second Temple Judaism, where the Jesus Movement emerged as one of the many Jewish sects, Paul was preaching to the Jews that their Scriptures had been fulfilled and their Jewish Messiah had come in the person of Jesus. Paul is emphatic that the gospel is “to the Jew first.” Much of his preaching takes place in synagogues. The embryonic “churches” are actually synagogue sub-groups comprised of Jewish Jesus followers who keep Torah, Paul Treblico argues in his monograph Self-designations and Group Identity in the New Testament.

Paul didn’t “simply wait” for Jews or Gentiles to enquire about Jesus. For example, in the synagogue at Thessalonica, “for three weeks he argued with them from the [Hebrew] scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, ‘This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Messiah.’” Luke, the author of Acts, notes that “some of them were persuaded” (Acts 17:3-4). The five verbs: arguing, explaining, proving, proclaiming, and persuading, suggest that Paul was proactively proselytizing the Jews.

In Athens, Paul “argued” in “the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the market place every day with those who chanced to be there” (17:17). Rather than “esteem” other religions, “his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols” (17:16). The Greek word for “provoked” is paroxyno, from which we get our English word “paroxysm.” In Corinth, he “argued in the synagogue every sabbath and persuaded Jews and Greeks” (18:4). In Ephesus, he “entered the synagogue and for three months spoke boldly, arguing and pleading about the kingdom of God” and “argued daily in the hall of Tyrannus” for two years (19:8-10).

Non-Jewish proselytes did indeed attend synagogues. In his magnum opus Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World, Jewish historian Louis Feldman argues that Judaism possessed a robust spirit of proselytism and attracted large numbers of converts and proselytes throughout the Greco-Roman world before the rise of early Christianity.

What’s Wrong With Conversion or Proselytism?

Ironically, while Pope Leo is shying away from proselytism, Islam is making massive inroads with dawa. In July, Muslim organizations launched aggressive proselytization campaigns using the FIFA World Cup series to recruit new converts in 16 cities of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The Muslim Ummah of North America (MUNA) kicked off its dawa at SoFi Stadium in California with banners inviting football fans to “discover Islam” as a “faith of peace, purpose, and submission to the Creator.”

MUNA missionaries offered free copies of the Qur’an in English, Spanish, Bengali, and other languages, promoting the Islamic text as a book that “has inspired billions of people for over 1,400 years” and Islam as a religion “regardless of race, language, nationality, or background.”

But scholars and ex-Muslims are warning the West that dawa is not simply the sharing of Islamic faith in the Christian sense of “evangelism.” “Dawa as practiced by radical Islamists employs a wide range of mechanisms to advance their goal of imposing Islamic law (sharia) on society,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a human rights activist and former Muslim, explains in her book The Challenge of Dawa: Political Islam as Ideology and Movement and How to Counter It. “The ultimate goal of dawa is to destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with the rule of sharialaw.”

Like Catholics, many evangelicals are not only failing to understand the sinister aspects of Islamic dawa but, unlike Paul, are unwilling to confront it with robust argumentation and challenge.

Am I Not Good Enough for Your Religion?

I find it difficult to comprehend why certain religious groups resent proselytizing others or having their members proselytized. If Jews tried to convert me, I’d feel honoured. In fact, I’d joyfully go with my Jewish proselytizers to the synagogue. Since I read Hebrew, I can join in the prayers. As a chaplain at a London university, I had excellent relations with hardline Muslim leaders. They’d tell me they respect me but loathe my liberal Anglican clergy colleagues. “We know you are trying to convert us and you know we are trying to convert you,” they’d say. In turn, I respected and loved them for their convictions and passion for dawa (Islamic proselytism).

My Hindu students were candid: “You’re wasting your time. Britain is a post-Christian country. We are here to convert Britons to Hinduism,” they’d say. On campus, even Buddhists, Stoics, and atheists proselytized unapologetically. It was a playground of ideas. I am richer for my interactions with the evangelists of these religions and philosophies. Likewise, my mission was to preach the gospel and pray that they would come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. With Paul, I would remind myself daily: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16).

While I was a student in Cambridge, Catholics and Orthodox unrelentingly tried to convert me to their “one, true church.” I felt flattered. A religion that doesn’t proselytize is essentially saying: “We are a closed club. We don’t want you. You are not good enough for us.” On my part, I’ve never missed an opportunity to evangelize. I did this for eight hours while I was flying back from India to England to defend my doctoral thesis, with a Briton who had left Christianity for Buddhism, even though I desperately needed the time to prepare for my viva voce. At the end of our conversation, the Buddhist promised to reconsider the claims of Christ.

Leo doesn’t believe in proselytism because he doesn’t understand the transformative power of the gospel. In India, millions of Dalits (untouchables) have been liberated from three millennia of the caste system because missionaries proselytized them. In the Islamic world, millions of Muslims have been unshackled from the slavery of Islam because someone shared Christ with them—as my ex-Muslim colleagues at the Ideological Defense Institute would testify.

Paul said: “I’m compelled to do it, and doomed if I don’t!” (1 Corinthians 9:16, The Message). He ends his life and ministry incarcerated in Rome, “expounding the gospel [to his fellow-Jews] from morning till evening, testifying to the kingdom of God and trying to convince them about Jesus both from the law of Moses and from the prophets” (Acts 28:23).

In the landmark Mbuyi v Newpark Childcare Ltd employment tribunal case, Sarah Mbuyi, a Christian nursery worker, framed her workplace proselytism in these terms: “I believe what I have got is a gift and a desire to share.” That’s why I love the Sri Lankan theologian D.T. Niles’ definition of evangelism as “one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.”

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