What do Charles and John Wesley have to teach Catholics in the United States about the New Evangelization? With the release of Disciples Called to Witness: The New Evangelization (USCCB, 2012) and the Catholic Church’s upcoming synod on the “New Evangelization,” these two ministers seem as relevant as ever to how we think about evangelization in the modern world.
Charles and John Wesley were ordained in eighteenth century England, a time when the sacrament of Holy Communion was often regarded with indifference or neglect. Church historian John Bowmer remarks that the sacraments and Christian life were widely disparaged in this “new age of reason,” and most people in the Church of England aimed for the minimums of religious practice””receiving the Eucharist three times a year and treating it as an historic custom, rather than encounter with the living God. Unsurprisingly, most in the Church of England were not looking outward to form disciples or share the Gospel. In fact, many clergy and laity in the Church of England believed that England’s growing urban masses were beyond influence and simply had “no taste” for Christian liturgy and sacraments. Christianity was on its way to becoming a fruitless cultural niche.
This creeping indifference characterizes many U.S. Catholics today….
In the Wesleys’ time Holy Communion was administered once a month in some city churches but about 4 times a year in most parishes in the country and less frequently in many of the colonies. The common Church of England Sunday service was Morning Prayer, Litany, and Ante-Communion (the Communion service through the sermon and ending sometimes with the Prayer for the Whole State of Christ’s Church militant here in earth and sometimes (more frequently in the American colonies) with a collect. Communicants commonly were about 10 per cnt of attenders. The number tended to increase in the American colonies as clergy stayed longer in the parish and found more people “ready and desirous.” Since there were no bishops in America only a few were confirmed on trips to England and most were admitted to communion by parish clergy under the rubric put in the 1662 Prayer Book after the Restoration.
There seem to be two reasons for what we see as infrequent communion. One was a Reformation reaction to the multiplication of Masses and increased attention to preaching as the most important event in worship; another continued the practice of devout preparation for communion and thus infrequent reception.