In the gospel of today, Christ identified his followers by the following criterion: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them and they follow me.” (John 10:27)
A Christian is not just an admirer of Christ. He has to pay attention to the voice of Christ, and we find this voice in written form in the Bible. Besides, Christ also founded the Church, which Saint Paul calls “the mystical body of Christ.”
The voice of Christ is found in the Church, in the deposit of tradition, because not everything He said was written down. But it is not enough to listen to Christ’s voice. We have to follow it.
On one occasion, Christ compared the Christian life to the activity of construction.
“Everyone who hears my words and acts upon them is like a wise man who built his house on rock. And the rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, but it did not fall because it was built on rock.” (Matthew 7:24-26)
The opposite happens with those who only hear the words of Christ but fail to act on them. They are constructing over sand—there is no solid foundation, and the house built on that foundation would easily be wiped away by the elements.
Bearing this in mind, we can say that there are not enough true followers of Christ; that is, people who not only profess the name “Christian” but who act on their beliefs and really follow Christ in their daily life and have been impregnated by a Christian spirit.
But due to the neglect of the Christian life, many of these institutions have lost their Christian orientation and sometimes even their basic human values.
For example, the idea of having a place where sick people can be cared for both medically and humanly—I am referring to hospitals—started out as a Christian response of charity to the neglect of the sick.
In the middle ages, there were many such institutions fostered by the Church or by well-meaning Christian souls. Now, quite frequently, the Christian spirit is getting lost, to be replaced by a kind of consumeristic mentality.
The main motivation is no longer charity, but commercial gain. In some places, hospitals have even been disassociated from basic human values, as when a hospital becomes a center of killing the weak (abortion and euthanasia) and mutilation of the strong (sterilization). We can say something similar about many other institutions that actually received their initial impulse from the Christian life—universities, orphanages, homes for the aged, etc.
In this connection, we can see the relevance of the Holy Father’s call for a re-evangelized culture. There is a need to bring the Christian message once again to civilizations and cultures that were once Christian but have now lost the Christian spirit out of years and decades of neglect—where the words of Christ were once heard, but not put into practice, thereby becoming easy prey to the winds and tempest of laicism, secularization and materialism.
This re-evangelization is a task of all those who still claim to be followers of Christ, and it has to start with our daily life.