Evangelii Nuntiandi

Paul VI

Libreria Editrice Vaticana

Vatican City

1975

Copyright 1975 Libreria Editrice Vaticana

EVANGELII NUNTIANDI

APOSTOLIC EXHORTATION

OF HIS HOLINESS

POPE PAUL VI

TO THE EPISCOPATE, TO THE CLERGY

AND TO ALL THE FAITHFUL

OF THE ENTIRE WORLD

Venerable brothers and dear sons and daughters:

health and the apostolic blessing.

1. There is no doubt that the effort to proclaim the Gospel to the people of today, who are buoyed up by hope but at the same time often oppressed by fear and distress, is a service rendered to the Christian community and also to the whole of humanity.

For this reason the duty of confirming the brethren—a duty which with the office of being the Successor of Peter1 we have received from the Lord, and which is for us a “daily preoccupation,”2 a program of life and action, and a fundamental commitment of our Pontificate—seems to us all the more noble and necessary when it is a matter of encouraging our brethren in their mission as evangelizers, in order that, in this time of uncertainty and confusion, they may accomplish this task with ever increasing love, zeal and joy.

2. This is precisely what we wish to do here, at the end of this Holy Year during which the Church, “striving to proclaim the Gospel to all people,”3 has had the single aim of fulfilling her duty of being the messenger of the Good News of Jesus Christ—the Good News proclaimed through two fundamental commands: “Put on the new self”4 and “Be reconciled to God.”5

We wish to do so on this tenth anniversary of the closing of the Second Vatican Council, the objectives of which are definitively summed up in this single one: to make the Church of the twentieth century ever better fitted for proclaiming the Gospel to the people of the twentieth century

We wish to do so one year after the Third General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, which as is well known, was devoted to evangelization; and we do so all the more willingly because it has been asked of us by the Synod Fathers themselves. In fact, at the end of that memorable Assembly, the Fathers decided to remit to the Pastor of the universal Church, with great trust and simplicity, the fruits of all their labors, stating that they awaited from him a fresh forward impulse, capable of creating within a Church still more firmly rooted in the undying power and strength of Pentecost a new period of evangelization.6

3. We have stressed the importance of this theme of evangelization on many occasions, well before the Synod took place. On June 22, 1973, we said to the Sacred College of Cardinals: “The conditions of the society in which we live oblige all of us therefore to revise methods, to seek by every means to study how we can bring the Christian message to modern man. For it is only in the Christian message that modern man can find the answer to his questions and the energy for his commitment of human solidarity.”7 And we added that in order to give a valid answer to the demands of the Council which call ...