TOKYO (UCAN) -- June 28 marks the beginning of the Pauline Year celebrating the second millennial anniversary of Saint Paul's birth. Of course, we do not know exactly when Paul was born, but the presumption seems to be that celebrating it in 2008-9 will be close enough and may actually include his actual 2,000th birthday. Paul, though a great quibbler in life, will probably not complain.

Father William Grimm

The main activity of the Pauline Year will probably be a rerun of the hoopla that surrounded the Great Jubilee Year 2000. Remember that? Even three years before it happened, every document or talk produced by a hierarch finished with a peroration linking whatever he had said with the jubilee. Often, the links were rather hard to perceive.

In any case, most people were too concerned about their day-to-day affairs or fears of Y2K wiping out the programs and data in their computers to pay heed. The year 2000 came and went with neither a new birth of fervor in the Church nor the collapse of the world's computers.

So, should we simply leave the Pauline Year to bishops who want to prove to the "head office" that they are "on message" by adding an obligatory paragraph of Pauline praise when they speak or write?

We could, but we could also use the Pauline Year as an opportunity to take a close look at a man whom Catholics tend to overlook except when we are looking for proof texts. In many ways, we have let Paul become a Protestant saint. After all, the Reformation began when Martin Luther tried to approach Paul's theology without scholastic presuppositions.

Saint Paul may, in fact, have something to offer our age, something he might not have had even 100 years ago. Paul can be the Apostle to the Globalized.

There have been, perhaps, three periods in history when the Church was called upon to evangelize in a globalized world.

The first was the age in which Saint Paul lived. People living in the Mediterranean basin two thousand years ago were only vaguely aware of the existence of China and India "out where the sun rose" (the likely origin of the word "Asia"). Even much of Northern and Western Europe was outside the scope of people's knowledge or concern. However, throughout the world as they understood it, there was globalization. The Greek and Latin languages, an international transportation and communication system of roads and Roman economic, political and military power tied people together throughout that world.

That globalization allowed Saint Paul to travel freely from place to place and ensured that when he arrived anywhere, people would understand his speech. And, in fact, he apparently stayed within that globalized culture. There is a tradition that he went outside that world to Spain, but also that he soon returned to Rome, presumably because of the difficulties he faced in a foreign language and culture.

That global world where Christianity was born and matured ended when the Roman Empire fell due to internal weakness and external invasion.

The next globalized world, still centered on Europe and lacking parts of the empire that had become Islamic, was that of the Middle Ages. Once again, a language, Latin, made possible the movement of people and ideas. Thus it was that Saint Anselm, the Italian abbot of a French monastery, could become archbishop of Canterbury in England. In place of the political power of the Roman Empire, the religious power of the Catholic Church provided a unifying identity for people of various political entities.

The period saw a flowering of theology, the development of the Scholasticism fathered by Anselm. That global age, too, eventually came to an end, brought about by internal corruption in the Church and external forces of nationalism and the Reformation.

Now, we are in the early stages of a third globalization, this time one that truly includes the entire world. The English language serves as a lingua franca for much of this world, but even more, American-dominated popular culture provides links among people, especially the young, who may not in fact know that language. Multinational corporations and organizations, and the ever-evolving means of electronic communication provide some of the "glue" that empire and Church once provided.

Like it or not, this is the age in which we live today and in which the Church will probably live for generations, if not centuries. What has Saint Paul to offer us in evangelizing this world?

Paul wrote in the unifying language of his age, Greek. He used the philosophic and cultural presuppositions of his audience to express the truth of Jesus Christ. He ignored geographic and cultural limits on that proclamation, making use of Roman roads and seafaring technology to carry the Good News.

That is Saint Paul's challenge in this Pauline Year and beyond. Is a Church that often seems nostalgic for the second globalization ready to follow Paul's example in the third? Are we willing to invest the personnel and resources to really speak the language of this world? Are we willing to adapt our language and concepts to make them understandable to our neighbors? Are we ready to imitate Saint Paul in going throughout our own globalized world proclaiming Jesus Christ, and him crucified?

That is not something for a single year. However, this single Pauline Year can be an opportunity to commit ourselves to be a Church that is an Apostle to the Globalized.
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Maryknoll Father William Grimm is editor-in-chief of Katorikku Shimbun, Japan's Catholic weekly.

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