Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization

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The Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization (Latin: Pontificium Consilium de Nova Evangelizatione),^[1] also translated as Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelization,^[2] was a pontifical council of the Roman Curia whose creation was announced by Pope Benedict XVI at vespers on 28 June 2010, eve of the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, to carry out the New Evangelization. On 5 June 2022, the department was merged into the Dicastery for Evangelization.

The Pope said that "the process of secularisation has produced a serious crisis of the sense of the Christian faith and role of the Church", and the new pontifical council would "promote a renewed evangelisation" in countries where the Church has long existed "but which are living a progressive secularisation of society and a sort of 'eclipse of the sense of God'."

On 30 June 2010, Pope Benedict XVI appointed as its first President Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella, until then President of the Pontifical Academy for Life.^[3] On 13 May 2011, Pope Benedict XVI named Archbishop Jose Octavio Ruiz Arenas as the first Secretary of the Pontifical Council. Archbishop Ruiz Arenas had been serving as the Vice President of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America and had served as the Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Villavicencio in Villavicencio, Colombia. The 66-year-old prelate is a native of Colombia. That same day, Monsignor Graham Bell, formerly the Secretary Coordinator of the Pontifical Academy for Life, was named the Undersecretary of the Pontifical Council.

On Friday, 25 January 2013, Pope Benedict XVI, in an Apostolic Letter issued Motu Proprio (on his own initiative), transferred the oversight of catechesis from the Congregation for the Clergy to the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization (catechesis is the use of catechists, clergy, and other individuals to teach and inform those in the Church, those interested in the Church, and catechumens- those joining the Church through Baptism and/or Confirmation- about the faith and its structure and tenets).^[4]