The working document of the Synod on Synodality, meeting in Rome through Oct. 27, has repeated assertions that the Church is fundamentally missional and evangelizing and therefore, that this is one of the primary purposes behind the synod. And yet there is, in reality, both last year and so far this year, little focus on this topic at all.

This is a shame and, in my view, a wasted opportunity to emphasize once again that evangelization is not one task among many others but the product of a mandate from Christ and the very essence of the Church’s reason for existing.

After the Resurrection, Jesus appears to his disciples and gives them the great missionary commission:

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19).

And ever since then the Church has endeavored to follow this commandment and has indeed gone into the entire world in an effort to bring the liberating message of Christ to everyone.

It could not have been lost on the disciples that what Jesus was commanding them to do in his evangelizing commission was directly connected to the fact that the kingdom of God had now arrived in a definitive manner that had changed everything from the ground up. The revolution was upon them, and the world and its rulers had been defeated and turned upside down.

What cannot be emphasized enough is that it is only in the light of the reality of the Resurrection that any of this made sense. And the central point is that this involved a fundamental reorientation of the natural world through the eruption into time and history of a grand supernatural event that had now transformed the world from within as something oriented toward eternity and away from the annihilation that awaits all “merely” finite things.

The moldering and smoldering stench of Satan’s sting — death — has been defeated and reversed. This is why the mission of the disciples is a universal one, and this is why the Church must evangelize. And if she does not evangelize, then she has no reason to exist.

The Church must be missional, and she must evangelize because she alone possesses the only true fulcrum upon which all of reality is balanced: Christ. Only Christ is the foundation of true human fraternity. Only Christ is he who possesses the fire of this revolution from within. Only Christ has conquered sin and death. Only Christ is capacious enough to contain within himself every single human being who has ever lived.

This is why the dogmatic constitution on the Church at Vatican II is called Lumen Gentium (Light of the Nations). The Church is first and foremost the mysterious sacrament of God’s presence to the entire world, in and through Christ, and this is why the Church is missional and evangelizing. To do anything less would be an admission via the praxis of omission that the Church no longer believes that it is this sacrament of God’s presence in the world.

Christ exists in order to “draw all people” to himself (John 12:32), and therefore not to evangelize is tantamount to saying, “Christ does no such thing.”

This then gets to the nub of the current crisis in the Church: a crisis of belief in both her central mission and in the binding and absolute universal significance of Christ. There is no way to sugarcoat this or to put a positive spin on it. What we have invading the Church is the smothering and choking religious relativism that sees the Church as a purely human construct and as a voluntary society that is the mere aggregate of those who think fond thoughts about Jesus. It is the overgrowth of a false “pluralism” that views Christ as little more than a projection of the human mythopoetic imagination.

There is a downstream consequence to this marginalization of Christ, as the absolute inbreaking of God into history, and that is that such a Christ — a Christ of mythopoesis only — cannot act as the point of solidarity for humanity. The pivot point of history and the key element that “enacts” human fraternity is thereby no longer an elevation into God via Christ.

Instead, this mythopoetic marginalization is an acidic solvent that dissolves the true integrity of our finitude by reducing it to a mere conglomeration of sub-personal forces and “parts.” And this then creates a cynical destruction of the higher “goods” that have been classically associated with human nature: Justice becomes veiled revenge, love is merely veiled lust, reason is a veiled will to power, and the moral good is merely a veiled form of manipulation in the run of enlightened self-interest.

This solvent, sometimes called “globalism,” has as its theme song John Lennon’s Imagine, the message of which can be distilled into the claim that if we can just dissolve every tie that binds, then the liberation that will ensue will bring peace to the world. But it is the peace of a de-Christified history that will in reality only see the return of the strong gods of Blut und Erde (blood and soil). And these strong gods, like the archons of old, will reinvigorate the connections between a death that is once again viewed as final and irreversible and the entire realm of the erotic.

When death returns as the final word of history, it is not long before the apotheosis of the sexual ensues. It will be a world — if it not already is — of pornography and Swiss suicide pods.

Returning then to where I began, responding to the “signs of the times” therefore demands a robust doubling down by the Church on her core message that it is only Christ that can form the foundation for a true solidarity. But in the current synod there is little emphasis being placed on evangelization as the Church’s raison d’être. And even though many synod participants are concerned with this issue, what we have seen in the press conferences shows little evidence of an emphasis on this topic.

But here we see the quintessentially modern impulse to focus on the erotic and the egalitarian. And there is a strange connection between those two fixations, because, with the democratization of everything comes the destruction of the classical prudential principles of the discernment of spirits. Those principles are grounded in a hierarchical concept of the “Good” as the only legitimate end point of our various “desires” and is thus the only true barometer for adjudicating between them in a Christian manner. But now our synodal “listening” is to be geared toward a form of ecclesial reception that makes no such adjudications and treats all such expressed desires as the very voice of the Holy Spirit.

It is hard to see how any of this relates to the great missionary commandment of Christ to his disciples. It appears instead as a deflection from this commandment in the name of a false “listening to the world” that seeks a common ground for “dialogue” that “brackets” Christ as a hindrance to a global fraternity, the grounds of which are sought in various abstractions drawn from the lexicon of modern secular notions about global community.

But this is a corrosive solvent that will lead us nowhere.