Not that long ago, when you talked about the death of missionaries, it meant that they had met some sad end in a far-flung corner of the world. More recently, it means that no one much feels the need to “preach the Gospel to all nations” anymore – and that missionary work is essentially disappearing. Our modern Gospel is much simpler: We’re all basically good people already, aren’t we? So why can’t we respect and affirm one another’s lifestyles, and all just try and get along.

That seems to be the default setting now, even for many Christians. It’s difficult for us to conceive that actual adherence to the Church would add anything of value to our lives, more than what we already think, quite independent of any institution. Much flows from this stance. All the talk about sharing Christian joy and love, and promoting the New Evangelization is really empty if you don’t believe there’s a specific reason for joy or that the New Evangelization, like the Old, is a matter of real, life-and-death urgency – and eternal consequences.

So it’s no great surprise that the Pontifical Institute of Foreign Missionaries (PIME) in Italy just announced that it will be suspending publication of Ad Gentes, its magazine on missions “To the Nations.” Subscriptions have fallen off drastically, but even more important, the whole spirit of missionary work is drying up. Long gone are the days when Catholic children fasted during Lent and sent in their mite boxes for the missions – a sign that the adults aren’t that serious about missions either. Fr. Piero Gheddo, the deacon of PIME in Milan explained in a recent article that this is primarily the result of two mistakes within the Church.

First, there’s been a diffusion of missionary responsibility proper. “With the publication of Fidei donum (1957) and then with Vatican II (1962-65), it began to be said that the whole Church is missionary, and that the missionary institutes no longer made sense.” It’s an old but true maxim that what’s everybody’s responsibility is nobody’s. How does “the whole Church” reach out to distant peoples without proper institutions and an attitude that it must? The results, beyond all question, confirm that it can’t.

Second, says the padre, there was a politicization of missionary work. For us, the idea of holiness is hard to agree on – or even just to grasp. But concrete secular projects could be undertaken in common. And many presumed that, in the atmosphere of common action and good feeling, vocations would result. They didn’t:

today, tell me: who shows enthusiasm for the missionary vocation and where did the call for missionary vocation ad gentes end up? Today, our missionaries engage in national campaigns about foreign debt, against arms production, against counterfeited medications, and for public water access: today, one no longer speaks of missions to the nations, but of worldliness and of social or ecological efforts. Can you tell me how many young men or women get enthusiastic or become missionaries after a demonstration protesting arms production? None. In fact, missionary institutes have almost no Italian vocations. Don’t lament the closing of Ad Gentes. Within the framework of everything I have described, it makes logical sense.

Coming from a man like Father Gheddo who has devoted his life to missions, this analysis is worthy of attention, and it’s unfortunate that his whole article has not been translated into several languages and widely distributed. Especially so since, as he also mentions, rapidly growing Catholic communities in the developing world continue to need missionaries as much now as ever.

Subtle spirits are always at work in the world and it isn’t easy to discern what is true from what only seems so. Still, whatever excuses might be made, the Church bears much responsibility for secularizing itself over the past half-century. Whether it was out of an ill-judged desire be more “effective” or a much more serious dereliction is no longer very important. The question is how to fix things – fast.

As in many other areas of life, recognizing the truth is the first requirement. We’re now living in a culture that has doubly shut itself off from religious influence. The secular used to mean a place of authentic pluralism, where all voices – religious and not – could contribute and get a hearing. Now it means that each of us must be insulated from the indignity of having to actually encounter, in public, others of a different belief.

Paradoxically, this situation stemmed from the very desire to protect religious liberty. Religious liberty is not only a good thing; it’s a necessity of human nature. But we have subtly shifted the meaning of religious liberty from no interference in the free conscience of another, to stripping the public square of all religious reference. Each of us is “free” to hold whatever we like, but even to propose it, however gingerly, to others is seeking to “impose our values,” and “offensive.”

Of course, this is a giant shell game. Because under the guise of merely asserting basic human rights, we’re also having a secularist morality imposed on many of us who are thereby offended. A national and international clerisy has emerged that is quite adept at making abortion into “reproductive health,” sodomy into “marriage equality,” euthanasia and suicide into a “right to die.”

Human beings exist in a world unavoidably structured along moral lines. Because it’s in our nature to make judgments about good and bad, whether we acknowledge it or not. And if it isn’t one set of morals, it will be another. Our whole culture is now like an old-time WASP dinner party at which it’s forbidden to speak of the most important things: God, sin, redemption, eternity. And under the guise of diversity, we’re increasingly subject to tyranny.

We’ve lost the missionary stance not just because we’ve become indifferent. We’ve rendered ourselves speechless.