I have very dear people in my life who are not Catholic, and I want them (may the Inquisitor forgive me) to convert. I want them to be baptized, to go to confession, to receive Communion, to die in the grace of God. I want this with all my strength and without apologizing to anyone. If that makes me a proselytizer, I accept the charge.
The Note A Path of Hope, published on September 16 by the Dicasteries for the Doctrine of the Faith, for Christian Unity, and for Interreligious Dialogue, approved by Leo XIV on June 22, devotes its number 54 to telling us that “the notion that proselytism is the only way to relate to others no longer makes sense in a world that increasingly resembles a global, interconnected, and constantly evolving village.” The reason given for sidelining proselytism is neither theological nor biblical. It is sociological. The world has changed, there are more planes and more screens, and therefore the desire to convert one’s neighbor has expired like a yogurt.
The authors have covered their backs with two words: “only way.” No one in the Church claims that the only possible relationship with a Muslim is to baptize him, so the sentence, strictly speaking, condemns a phantom. But when Rome dedicates a paragraph to refuting a thesis that no one defends, it means that in reality it wants to say something else and does not dare to say it fully. What has been understood throughout the world, in wire-service headlines and in Sunday homilies, is what was meant to be understood: proselytism no longer makes sense. The nuances are left to the canonists; the message has already reached the parishes.
And the message is lethal for the ordinary Catholic. The father who prays for his son’s conversion. The wife who has spent twenty years asking for her husband’s baptism. The young man who dares to speak of Christ in the office. All of them have been told, with the seal of the Holy See, that their desire smells of mothballs. That what is modern, interconnected, and fermented is to leave everyone in their place.
The most serious thing is that the Note uses the word “proselytism” without defining it, and not by oversight. In 2007 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published a doctrinal Note on certain aspects of evangelization that did exactly the opposite. It explained that “proselytism” has meant for centuries, quite simply, missionary activity, and that only in recent times the word has been twisted to designate religious propaganda by unworthy means: coercion, deception, the buying of souls. That text also denounced as a growing confusion the idea that any attempt to persuade another in religious matters violates his freedom, and it countered those who see intolerance in the claim of having received the fullness of Revelation.
Nineteen years later, the same dicastery falls into the very confusion its predecessor had diagnosed. It knew how to define the word and preferred not to. Because defining it would have required saying that unworthy proselytism has always been condemned and that the other kind—the noble kind, of asking and persuading and praying for the conversion of a friend—remains a duty. And that sentence did not fit the climate of the document.
We are told that the Note celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of Nostra aetate. Nostra aetate has a number 2 that says two things in the same paragraph: that the Church looks with respect on what is true and holy in other religions, and that it proclaims and has the constant duty to proclaim Christ, in whom men find the fullness of religious life. The Council upheld both affirmations with one hand. The 2026 Note has dropped the second and kept the first, and calls that fidelity to the Council. It is fidelity to half the Council, which is the most elegant way of betraying it.
The same Vatican II approved Ad gentes, where it is written that the Church is missionary by her very nature. It approved Dignitatis humanae, where it says that no one can be forced to believe. The conciliar fathers saw no contradiction, because there is none. Faith is not imposed, and precisely for that reason it must be proposed with all one’s strength, to everyone, always. Whoever turns religious freedom into an excuse for silence has understood neither freedom nor religion.
Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them, says Matthew 28. There is no other name under heaven by which we can be saved, says Peter in Acts 4. Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel, says Paul in First Corinthians. How will they believe if no one preaches to them, he asks in Romans 10. Someone would have to explain to Saint Paul that the global village has left him without a job.
The good Muslim wants me to convert, and he says so without beating around the bush. He wants to give me what he considers the greatest good of his life. It has never occurred to me to reproach him for it, because I understand that his desire to convert me is a form of esteem. A Muslim who did not want my conversion would be telling me that I am of no consequence to him.
I want him to be baptized. I want him to understand that God became incarnate and is still here. I want him to know the Eucharist, sacramental forgiveness, divine filiation. I want for him the best that I have. What would degrade my relationship with that neighbor is the spiritual non-aggression pact that the Note seems to propose as an ideal: each with his own truth, all very fraternal, no one bothers anyone. That is not interreligious dialogue. It is relativism and neighborly courtesy elevated to a theological category.
I ask the signatories, with no deference beyond what truth demands: do you want the people I love, who are not Catholic, to remain where they are? There are two possible answers, and neither is comfortable for number 54.
If the answer is no, if you desire for them the grace of the sacraments and the fullness of faith, then you desire their conversion exactly as I do, and the entire paragraph is an exercise in pleasing the world that you cannot sustain in conscience. If the answer is yes, if you truly believe that a Muslim, a Buddhist, or an atheist is fine as they are and that asking for their conversion is a rudeness belonging to other times, then you have ceased to believe that Christ is necessary for salvation, and what is needed is not a Note but an examination of conscience. There is no third way, no matter how many polyhedra are invoked.
I reclaim proselytism in its clean and original sense. Without coercion, without tricks, without contempt for the other. Made of love, of patient friendship, of arguments, of example, of stubborn prayer and of the word spoken when the time is right. A proselytism that knows that no man converts another and that faith is a gift of God, but that also knows that God makes use of men and that comfortable silence has a name.
To ask someone to abandon error, to embrace Christ, to receive the grace of His sacraments, is the greatest act of love a Catholic can offer, because it is giving the best one has, the best one knows, and the best one can give. To renounce it so as not to seem outdated before the global village would be to treat those I love as if they did not deserve the whole truth.
Guilty, then, of being a proselytizer, with the aggravating circumstance of recidivism and without purpose of amendment. And with a warning to those who sign documents from Rome: the Church that taught me to pray and act for the conversion of those I love has no authority to ask me now to stop doing so, because that request is not backed by the Gospel, nor by the Council, nor by any Pope before this paragraph. It is backed only by the desire to be liked. And no one died on a cross for the sake of being liked.