Thus the New Evangelisation requires radically converted disciples, and bold leaders who call the timid to the fullness of conversion. It requires disciples and leaders who are unfailingly pro-life, and who are capable of rebutting the spurious charge that to be pro-life is to be anti-woman. It requires disciples and leaders who are prepared to defend religious liberty in full, and who refuse to concede that religious liberty can be whittled down to freedom of worship. It requires disciples and leaders who are pro-family and pro-marriage, and who are prepared to defend their advocacy against the charge that they are "homophobic." It requires disciples and leaders prepared to speak truth to power, especially when coercive state power is deployed to impose the agenda of the dictatorship of relativism.

And to form these disciples and leaders, the demands of the New Evangelisation require the Church throughout the Anglosphere to learn the lesson that Blessed John Henry Newman tried to teach more than a century ago, and that the sad fate of liberal Protestantism and the disintegration of the Anglican Communion illustrate in our time: that "religion as mere sentiment [...] is a dream and a mockery." Religion as "mere sentiment" is our search for God, which inevitably ends up in the sandbox of our own self-absorption, where anything may be countenanced as an expression of my "authenticity." Biblical religion, by contrast, is about God's search for us, and our learning to take the same path through history that God is taking: a journey guided, Catholics affirm, by the doctrines of the Church and the regula fidei, the rule of life that is the sacramental system. The New Evangelisation requires teachers who teach that, pastors who support that, and disciples who believe that — and believe it, not as a personal lifestyle option, but as the revealed truth of the world, which has been given into our completely unworthy and often trembling hands. It requires evangelical Catholic communities in mission like St Patrick's, Soho.

The late French journalist André Frossard was a convert to Catholicism from the fashionable atheism of his class, an atheism that was once a Parisian intellectual fad but that has now taken on a much harder, Christophobic edge across the 21st-century Western world. When Frossard saw John Paul II at the Mass marking the beginning of the Pope's public ministry on October 22, 1978, he wired back to his Paris newspaper, "This is not a pope from Poland; this is a pope from Galilee." It was a brilliant metaphor, and it still speaks to us today.

For that is where the Leonine revival that has reached its fulfillment in John Paul II and Benedict XVI, heirs and authentic interpreters of the Second Vatican Council, is inviting us: it is inviting us to Galilee, and then beyond Galilee. We are being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scripture, the sacraments, and prayer, and to make friendship with him the centre of our lives. We are being invited to think of ourselves as evangelists, and to measure the truth of our lives by the way in which we give expression to the human decency and solidarity that flows from friendship with Christ the Lord. We are being invited, through the New Evangelisation, to make our distinctive, Catholic contribution to the renewal, and perhaps the saving, of Western civilisation, which is beset from within by the corrosive forces of the dictatorship of relativism and from without by the passions of jihadist Islam.

Through the witness of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and by the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, we are being invited to have the courage to be Catholic. Whether we accept that invitation or not, God's purposes will be vindicated. But a lot of what happens to the West during this century will depend on whether a critical mass of men and women embrace the Gospel in full, and have the courage to take the Gospel beyond Galilee and out to the nations.