DETROIT — In town for the annual Life is a Gift conference at Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Boston College professor and popular Catholic author Peter Kreeft, Ph.D., also spoke Jan. 25 to an audience of seminarians and others about the challenges of the new evangelization, the focus of Pope Benedict XVI’s Year of Faith.

It is once again a pagan world, Kreeft said. “Christendom is pretty much dead; we live in a post-Christian world,” he said at the seminary. However, he said, there is cause for hope. “The Church was never stronger than when it was in the catacombs,” Kreeft said.

And not all the news is bad, he said, noting that at about the same time the Church was losing England during the reign of Henry VIII, Mexico was being evangelized through the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe; today there is great growth in the Church in the Global South.

For Catholics in the United States, the New Evangelization means reaching out to those who have left the Church and re-invigorating the faith of those who have become complacent,” he said.

As to just who should be carrying on the work of the new evangelization, Kreeft was emphatic: “All of us.”