Thanksgiving cannot be divorced from freedom. When the Pilgrims joined together with the Native Americans in the autumn of 1621, they celebrated their first successful harvest. They also reveled in their newly acquired freedom of religion.
Today the discoveries of science and technology open new possibilities for human development. Yet, when uprooted from a moral context, they exalt reason to the level of self-destructive autonomy. Relativism ignores the objective order of truth and extols the tolerance of all convictions as equal truths.
Evangelization is all about the Church growing and welcoming all. For many Catholics, the word ‘evangelization’ sounds uncomfortably non-Catholic. We are indebted to Pope John Paul II for reintroducing us to a word that is part of our biblical heritage