Reports on Benedict XVI’s outreach to Jews and Muslims during his first papal trip abroad last August provoked in me a set of paradoxical reflections on the nature of evangelization.

Does our concern for spreading the faith sometimes, and in subtle ways, unduly emphasize the church as institution, rather than as living embodiment of the gospel? And can our concern for spreading and promoting the faith be driven by a too human search for security, one dependent on the church’s presence and temporal influence in the world rather than on Christ’s promise to be with us all days, and, especially, on his injunction to us to be like his heavenly Father? To put it another way, can we fail in our obligation to be Christ to the world under the guise of being his apologists?

We know that what is unique in Christ’s instruction to spread the good news to the ends of the earth is that we love—without qualification: that we love others as ourselves, including enemies, strangers, those who do not share our beliefs, even those who hate us. One wonders how much this sublime love and this faith in Christ abiding with us through time are the prevailing motivations when, to cover up church scandals, we spend millions that might otherwise have gone to works of mercy (love!); when, over the centuries, we have found reason to demonize those not with us—Jews, Muslims, secular humanists, nonbelievers, prochoicers, even other Christians—rather than flood the world with love and forgiveness; when we seem to invest more energy in political clout, material presence, and numerical considerations than in massive, overwhelming charity in our dealings with the world.

This is not to say we haven’t been directed to preach the gospel incessantly, but to propose that our verbal proclamations can only be as effective as our revolutionary Christian behavior. George Santayana observed that while he admired Christianity greatly, he’d never really met a Christian. Perhaps the ultimate evangelization will blossom when saints no longer stand out as exceptions in our communities; when ordinary Christians move, en masse and in the (super)natural course of things, among the poor, the diseased, the outcast, the afflicted, with a compassion and mercy and freedom from judgment that will ring greater than any preaching imaginable. Perhaps the best prolife arguments will take place not in demonstrations outside clinics or in political maneuvering or in the enunciation of logical propositions, but in our so embracing and honoring the lives of all we encounter—rich and poor, born and unborn, law-abiding and criminal—that the world will be moved to see as we do. A woman once told me about attending a party where a renowned artist was present. At dusk, the guests casually watched the sun go down on San Francisco Bay. Suddenly, the room grew quiet as the guests noticed the artist gazing westward in total absorption. And then, my friend recounted, the group began to see what the artist saw—to see as she saw. The artist had said nothing, but her very being conveyed more than words ever could.

If God’s plan is to be revealed gradually over time, it is reasonable to expect something like mystery to mark its evolution—something in its resolution that transcends our limited visions, our secular strategies. Is it not possible that the best evangelization will express itself, not in theological treatises or moral crusades, but in the wordless preaching of individual lives bearing witness to the transcendent triumph of love? I remember how, years ago, people hostile to the church would note, as exceptions, the nursing sisters at Catholic hospitals whose compassion and selfless charity did more to assuage prejudices than any church rack full of pamphlets.

This may all sound like a cop-out in terms of the public defense of the faith. But some apologists, it seems to me, appear so angry, so polemical, so harsh, so sarcastic, so suspicious, so condescending, so judgmental, so—well, defensive—in their service of the church as to leave little room for those movements of the heart that express charity. The church as rock is not (as I once felt) a bastion against the world, but an island of life, a shore to which the world’s seas are ever driven. Our task is not to build walls but to reach out as rescuers. The truth—and the truths we live by—will not become manifest so much in what we say as in how we become that truth for a questing world.