Portuguese Bishop Américo Aguiar, tapped by Pope Francis to become a cardinal, has caused a stir by insisting that the Catholic Church is not trying to convert young people to Jesus Christ.

“We do not want to convert young people to Christ, or to the Catholic Church, or any of that,” said Bishop Aguiar, auxiliary bishop of Lisbon and coordinator of World Youth Day (WYD) Lisbon 2023, in a July 6 interview with Portuguese television.

The bishop made the controversial remark just three days before it was announced that he would be created a cardinal by Pope Francis next September, provoking consternation among many of the faithful.

World Youth Day, an event of great importance for young Catholics, is scheduled to take place in Lisbon, Portugal, from the 1st to the 6th of August.

In the interview, the bishop said that World Youth Day aims to help young people walk together, respecting their differences. According to him, the goal is to allow each young person to say: “I think differently, I feel differently, I organize my life differently, but we are brothers and we are going to build the future together.”

The bishop defended his statement by asserting that this is “the main message that the pope wants to offer young people.”

“What we want is for it to be normal for a young Catholic Christian to say and bear witness to who he is, for young Muslims, Jews or those of another religion also to have no problem saying who they are,” the bishop declared, or for “a young person who does not profess any religion to feel at ease and not feel strange because he it is like that.”

It is important “that we all understand that difference is richness and the world will be objectively better if we are able to put in the heart of all young people this certainty of the fraternity of all brothers and sisters,” he added.

In his interview, Bishop Aguiar also insisted on the importance that World Youth Day bear witness to “Integral Ecology,” noting that the event will not use printed paper and will employ other measures such as differentiated waste that “will oblige environmentally friendly behavior.”

While Pope Francis himself has encouraged ecological conversion, he has urged Catholics not to try to convince others of the truth of Christianity.

Last January, Francis said that trying to convince someone to become a Christian is a “pagan” activity unworthy of followers of Christ.

“To evangelize is not to proselytize,” the pope told crowds gathered in the Vatican. “To proselytize is something pagan, it is neither religious nor evangelical.”

“This is not about proselytism, as I said, so that others become ‘one of us’ – no, this is not Christian,” he reiterated. “It is about loving so that they might be happy children of God.”

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, proselytizing means “to try to persuade someone to change their religious or political beliefs or way of living to your own.”

Proselytism — or the attempt to convert others to one’s faith — is different from evangelization, the pope has proposed, which is the joyful witness of one’s experience of Christ.

In 2019, the pope told a group of Christian high school students that they should respect people of other faiths and not attempt to convert them to Christianity, insisting “we are not living in the times of the crusades.”

Asked by one of the students how a Christian should treat people of other faiths, the pope proposed that “we are all the same, all children of God” and that true disciples of Jesus do not proselytize.

A Christian should never try to convince others of the truth of Christianity but should simply give a testimony of consistency and wait for others to ask about the faith, he suggested.

“You must be consistent with your faith,” he said. “It never occurred to me (and nor should it) to say to a boy or a girl: ‘You are Jewish, you are Muslim: come, be converted!’ You be consistent with your faith and that consistency is what will make you mature. We are not living in the times of the crusades.”

“The last thing I should do is to try to convince an unbeliever. Never,” he said.

“But listen, the gospel is never, ever advanced through proselytism,” he continued. “If someone says he is a disciple of Jesus and comes to you with proselytism, he is not a disciple of Jesus. Proselytism is not the way; the Church does not grow by proselytism.”