VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter
Francis X. Rocca Catholic News Service | Mar. 13, 2014
ANALYSIS
VATICAN CITY
As leader of the universal church, a pope must direct his ministry in both of the ways traditionally described by the Latin terms “ad intra” and “ad extra”: inwardly to the church itself, and outwardly to the rest of the world.
Pope Francis has accordingly spent the first year of his pontificate pursuing two ambitious projects: revitalizing the church’s efforts at evangelization and reforming the church’s central administration.
As he wrote in his first apostolic exhortation in November, Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”), Catholics must go out into the world to share their faith with “enthusiasm and vitality” — not “like someone who has just come back from a funeral.”
He wrote that the church’s message “has to concentrate on the essentials, on what is most beautiful, most grand, most appealing and at the same time most necessary,” namely, the “saving love of God made manifest in Jesus Christ who died and rose from the dead.”
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