Authentic proselytism is the work of God and his action in souls and human cooperation
As many of you may have noticed, YouTube videos are constantly being interrupted by ads for Mormon missionaries with phrases like: I am Elder Ávila…, I am Sister Palma Reyes…, etc.
It is his most recent proselytizing method on the Internet in the last two years. Now they not only work in the streets or knocking on doors, but they also do it online to seek to attract more attention from people who do not know them, but also to try to confuse more than one person (especially Catholics) by presenting themselves as a Christian Church when they really it is not.
They present themselves as people who want to help others, who want to talk about God with you, so that later two missionaries will come to your house and present their gospel to you, and in the process they will leave you the Book of Mormon. We must remember that one of the fundamental features of sects or “new religious movements” is that they are “fanatically proselytizing.”
Father Manuel Guerra in his work Nuevos Movimientos Religiosos-Sectas, Editorial Eunsa, teaches that:
It can be said that in the sects the fanatical proselytism of their members belongs to the latter. Ordinarily it is the most visible and what makes someone qualify as sectarian despite being a less essential feature, since it only affects the communication to others of one’s own convictions and beliefs.
The author continues by saying:
But the Christian as the Church proposes, does not impose anything, respects people and cultures, and stops before the tabernacle of conscience. For this reason, interreligious dialogue does not violate freedom, not even in the form of testimony and direct announcement of Christ and his own beliefs.
The same author in his work Catholic Encyclopedia of Sects when he speaks of the term proselytism, difference between the good and the fanatic or bad. The good one is the one we find in the Scriptures and in the Saints:
The term proselytism comes from the Greek word proselytos and passed from Judaism to the Christian tradition. The term proselytos appears only four times in the New Testament: once in Saint Matthew (23.15) and three in the Acts of the Apostles (2.11; 6.5; 13.43). The Gospel text is the one in which the scope of the term is most clearly expressed. The scribes and Pharisees were concerned with finding people who were in a position to understand and live the faith in the one God. It is therefore a word of deep Christian tradition and use in the Church, but always well understood.
Therefore, it is not disputed that Christ be made known, nor the Gospel, Jesus himself commanded us to preach his Gospel Mateo 28:19-20: Go all over the world and preach my gospel to every creature, make my disciples…”. What is questioned and rejected in all this is the way to do it. In the case of the Mormons, they initially used the missionaries to go house to house doing proselytizing or to stop you in a park and tell you their life testimony and encourage you to be one of them, There was even a time when they gave you the “Book of Mormon” well now they add to all that proselytizing marketing on the Internet, specifically on YouTube.
It is no longer just in their videos, but in almost all the most visited videos and especially Christian-themed ones that you play, an ad appears where they advertise and propagate their “congregation”. They therefore fall into a persistent, insistent proselytism, looking for how to “consume their product” which would be “how to make an appointment with you to make your gospel known.” We must remember that they are not Christians because their baptism is not valid. This is because they do not believe in the Trinity, and therefore cannot be considered a Christian group.
Authentic proselytism is the work of God and of his action in souls and of human cooperation, always remembering what Benedict XVI taught: The Church does not impose, but freely proposes the Catholic faith (Address to the Bishops of Central Asia on visit ad limina, October 2, 2008), a clear and precise exposition of Christian truth without impositions, without insistence, leaving man free to choose.
With information from Religion in Liberty
Published in the weekly print edition of The Observer of April 9, 2023 No. 1448
