By Editorial Board December 24 

​JESUS OF Nazareth was born a displaced person. As the writer Garry Wills relates it: “He comes from a despised city and region. Yet he cannot be allowed a peaceful birth in that backwater. His parents are displaced by decree of an occupying power that rules his people. For the imperial census to be taken, Joseph his father must return to his place of birth. . . . Joseph does not even have relatives left in his native town, people with whom he can stay. He seeks shelter in an inn, already crowded with people taken away from their own homes and lives. Because of this influx of strangers, he is turned away. There is no bed left, even for a woman far advanced in pregnancy. She must deliver her child in a barn, where the child is laid in a hay trough.” Soon afterward, the infant and his family become fugitives from King Herod as he seeks out the child he fears will one day replace him on the throne. And so it went.

Long ago, John Milton wrote, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” But well before that, governments were showing their ability to do much the same thing: to bring either peace, order and a measure of prosperity to their people or to create a place where destruction, hunger and hopelessness drive many into the deserts and overseas.

This Christmas there are many such people fleeing violence, living hand-to-mouth, without warmth or medical help or food, desperately seeking refuge wherever they can find it for themselves and their children. In prosperous Europe, the most encouraging response has come from Germany and its chancellor, Angela Merkel, the conscience-driven leader of a nation that, three-quarters of a century ago, created its own version of hell on Earth. But this openness to the dispossessed and the desperate has not been entirely matched in other parts of Europe or even remotely so in our own country. In part this is because of fears about possible violence by some small number of the refugees and in part because of anxiety about the burden they might place on Western societies. As always, domestic politics has played a role for better and worse — here and in Germany and elsewhere.

Christmas has become an almost universal holiday, celebrated, observed or at least tacitly acknowledged as a festive occasion even by peoples who have no history of Christianity. And, indeed, many of the values of that faith are universal, if sometimes honored only in the breach. But the word “Christian” is often misused in our times, in a way that implies some allegiance to a particular political party, economic doctrine or set of moral strictures that are not representative of large numbers of true Christians. (The media are often complicit in this confusion.) There is a broader concept of the term, one that is succinct, relevant and all but imperative in this season when we face a humanitarian crisis that tests our character and our compassion. It comes from the Gospel of Matthew and is stated as an ideal voiced by Jesus:
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“I was hungry and you gave me food.
I was thirsty and you game me drink.
I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

Catholics Need a Pope for the 'New Evangelization'

The next pontiff must nurture Catholicism where it is growing and revive it where it is not.

By GEORGE WEIGEL

The challenges facing the successor of Pope Benedict XVI come into sharper focus when we widen the historical lens through which we view this papal transition. Benedict XVI will be the last pope to have participated in the Second Vatican Council, the most important Catholic event since the 16th century. An ecclesiastical era is ending. What was its character, and to what future has Benedict XVI led Catholicism?

Vatican II, which met from 1962 to 1965, accelerated a process of deep reform in the Catholic Church that began in 1878 when the newly elected Pope Leo XIII made the historic decision to quietly bury the rejectionist stand his predecessors had adopted toward cultural and political modernity and to explore the possibilities of a critical Catholic engagement with the contemporary world. That reform process, which was not without difficulties, reached a high point of ecclesiastical drama at Vatican II, which has now been given an authoritative interpretation by two men of genius, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, both influential figures at the Council. According to that interpretation, the church must rediscover and embrace its vocation as a missionary enterprise.

Evangelical Catholicism—or what John Paul II and Benedict XVI dubbed the "New Evangelization"—is the new form of the Catholic Church being born today. The church is now being challenged to understand that it doesn't just have a mission, as if "mission" were one of a dozen things the church does. The church is a mission. At the center of that mission is the proclamation of the Gospel and the offer of friendship with Jesus Christ. Everyone and everything in the church must be measured by mission-effectiveness. And at the forefront of that mission—which now takes place in increasingly hostile cultural circumstances—is the pope, who embodies the Catholic proposal to the world in a unique way.

So at this hinge moment, when the door is closing on the Counter-Reformation church in which every Catholic over 50 was raised, and as the door opens to the evangelical Catholicism of the future, what are the challenges facing the new pope?

Catholicism is dying in its historic heartland, Europe. The new pope must fan the frail flames of renewal that are present in European Catholicism. But he must also challenge Euro-Catholics to understand that only a robust, unapologetic proclamation of the Gospel can meet the challenge of a Christophobic public culture that increasingly regards biblical morality as irrational bigotry.

The new pope must be a vigorous defender of religious freedom throughout the world. Catholicism is under assault by the forces of jihadist Islam in a band of confrontation that runs across the globe from the west coast of Senegal to the eastern islands of Indonesia.

Christian communities in the Holy Land are under constant, often violent, pressure. In the West, religious freedom is being reduced to a mere "freedom of worship," with results like the ObamaCare Health and Human Services contraceptive mandate.

Thus the new pope must be a champion of religious freedom for all, insisting with John Paul II and Benedict XVI that there can be neither true freedom nor true democracy without religious freedom in full. That means the right of both individuals of conscience and religious communities to live their lives according to their most deeply held convictions, and the right to bring those convictions into public life without civil penalty or cultural ostracism.

This defense of religious freedom will be one string in the bow of the new pope's responsibility to nurture the rapidly growing Catholic communities in Africa, calling them to a new maturity of faith. It should also frame the new pope's approach to the People's Republic of China, where persecution of Christians is widespread. When China finally opens itself fully to the world, it will be the greatest field of Christian mission since the Europeans came to the Western Hemisphere. Like his two immediate predecessors, the new pope should recognize that the church's future mission in China will be imperiled by any premature deal-making with the Chinese Communist regime, which would also involve an evangelical betrayal of those Chinese Christians who are making daily sacrifices for fidelity to Jesus Christ.

The ambient public culture of the West will demand that the new pope embrace some form of Catholic Lite. But that counsel of cultural conformism will have to reckon with two hard facts: Wherever Catholic Lite has been embraced in the past 40 years, as in Western Europe, the church has withered and is now dying. The liveliest parts of the Catholic world, within the United States and elsewhere, are those that have embraced the Catholic symphony of truth in full. In responding to demands that he change the unchangeable, however, the new pope will have to demonstrate that every time the Catholic Church says "No" to something—such as abortion or same-sex marriage—that "No" is based on a prior "Yes" to the truths about human dignity the church learns from the Gospel and from reason.

And that suggests a final challenge for Gregory XVII, Leo XIV, John XXIV, Clement XV, or whoever the new pope turns out to be: He must help an increasingly deracinated world—in which there may be your truth and my truth, but nothing recognizable as the truth—rediscover the linkage between faith and reason, between Jerusalem and Athens, two of the pillars of Western civilization. When those two pillars crumble, the third pillar—Rome, the Western commitment to the rule of law—crumbles as well. And the result is what Benedict XVI aptly styled the dictatorship of relativism.

What kind of man can meet these challenges? A radically converted Christian disciple who believes that Jesus Christ really is the answer to the question that is every human life. An experienced pastor with the courage to be Catholic and the winsomeness to make robust orthodoxy exciting. A leader who is not afraid to straighten out the disastrous condition of the Roman Curia, so that the Vatican bureaucracy becomes an instrument of the New Evangelization, not an impediment to it.

The shoes of the fisherman are large shoes to fill.

Mr. Weigel is the author of "Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church," just published by Basic Books.

A version of this article appeared February 13, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Catholics Need a Pope for the 'New Evangelization'.

By JOHN A. MURRAY Last month, the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) unveiled a new brand strategy to address America's needs, as well as a name change to "the Y." After surveying "a cross section of Americans to learn more about the most pressing issues and challenges facing their communities today," the Y had found that only 51% of Americans were optimistic about the future while 49% were not.

"This is a very important, exciting time for the Y," said Neil Nicoll, president and CEO of YMCA of the USA. "For 160 years, we've focused on changing lives for the better… . People are concerned about the problems facing their communities. Like the Y, they understand that lasting change will only come about if we work together to improve our health, strengthen our families and support our neighbors. Our hope is that more people will choose to engage with the Y."

Problems? Change? Hope? This "new brand strategy" is a puzzle. While the Y's written mission still declares putting, "Christian principles into practice through programs," the newly rolled-out strategy does not mention the change and hope found in Christ.

So, is this organization still the YMCA? Or is this a new brand under the title of the Y, no longer with an emphasis on the "C"?

The Y's new key areas of focus—youth development, healthy living and social responsibility—are no different from the ones YMCA founder Sir George Williams set out to address when he founded the first chapter in London in 1844. What is missing today is the original mission's answer to these needs: the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Unbeknownst to most, there is much more to the YMCA than the Village People impart to us in their disco-era ditty. The organization's original motto—taken straight from Jesus' prayer for believers—reflected its goal to cross denominational racial, and social barriers: "That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me." (John 17:21)

Men like Williams and those who followed for decades to come sought to develop the whole person—mind, body and spirit. Thus, to the YMCA's founders, the 160 years of what Mr. Nicoll recently called "changing lives for the better" began with the transforming power found in Jesus Christ.

And herein lies the challenge that began when the YMCA moved away from its evangelical mission in the 1930s and continues today—what to do with the C in the YMCA. Speaking to the national council of the YMCA in the 1970s, evangelist Billy Graham said that to change society was to "change men's hearts first." Take, for example, the conversion experience of Cornell student and future Nobel Peace Prize winner John Mott.

In regard to the YMCA's role in Mott's life, historian Clarence P. Shedd noted that Mott had come to Cornell "to get away from religion." But upon hearing a YMCA-sponsored talk at Cornell by famed Cambridge athlete Kynaston Studd in 1886, three sentences forever changed Mott's life: "Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not. Seek ye first the Kingdom of God."

After graduating from Cornell in 1888, Mott was named executive president of the YMCA. During this time, Christian orthodoxy began to disappear from the curriculum and administration of American universities. Yet it was strongly maintained in the undergraduate body through the YMCA and Mott's work. His inspiration and leadership, and the Intercollegiate Movement of the YMCA fostered a missionary zeal at home and abroad, influencing new generations of young men and women to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as documented in Mott's 1905 book, "The Evangelization of the World in this Generation."

In his book "The Soul of the American University," Notre Dame professor George Marsden demonstrates the impact of the YMCA in an era when more than 3,000 of the American missionaries who went aboard from 1899-1915 were products of the YMCAs and YWCAs. "By 1921, the YMCAs reached their numerical peak with 731 chapters on the approximately 1,000 [college] campuses in the country; they had enrolled well over 90,000 members, or about one in seven, in a student population of about 600,000."

Regarding youth development, healthy living and reaching out to neighbors, Mott's work fostered "equality, justice and mutual respect"—which was later noted at his Nobel Prize Ceremony—as he encouraged Christian schools, hospitals and businesses abroad. Traveling to 68 countries from Europe to Asia, to the Far and Near East—Mott served as a Christian diplomat and dedicated missionary to the world—the work of which led to his Nobel Peace Prize in 1946.

Reflecting on the example of John Mott, I believe that it will take more than a brand strategy and a name change to meet our generation's needs today. I cannot help but remember the generational challenge issued by another Nobel Prize winner—Alexander Solzhenitsyn—to Harvard graduates in 1978:

"The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer... We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life."

That is why the "C" needs to remain in the YMCA.

Mr. Murray is headmaster of Fourth Presbyterian School in Potomac, Md.