How to Proselytize

Tip feature by Malia Wollan in The New York Times Magazine.

"'Your appearance matters,' says Mario Dias, who manages the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints training center in São Paulo, Brazil, which each year prepares 3,500 young Mormons from all over the world for one-and-a-half-to-two-year missions in the country.
[...]
"Raised as a Catholic, Dias was baptized as a Mormon at 18, three months after he began meeting with missionaries. During his own two-year mission, he converted 70 people and talked to an estimated 3,100. ..."

Catholic families: strong on prayer, weak on sacraments

Below this headline of a report by Cathy Lynn Grossman at Religion News Service is this lede.

"Most of today’s American Catholic parents don’t go to Mass, provide any Catholic education for their children or stress the basic sacraments beyond baptism."

Given that, what could "strong on prayer" possibly mean?

"And yet a new study of these families finds good news: 'They still have a relationship with God and pray for their family,' said a co-author of the research, Mark Gray at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate."

CARA reports his reseach results in The Catholic Family: 21st Century Challenges in the United States.

"Among the study’s findings — and challenges:

"One in three did not find it very important to them that their children celebrate their First Communion. One in four didn’t consider it very important that they be confirmed. These are red flags for the future, said Gray. 'If you don’t have First Communion and you’re not confirmed, you are more likely to leave the faith as an adult. You can’t take Communion or really practice your faith.'

"68 percent of Catholic parents do not take their children to a Catholic school, parish religious training or even a Catholic youth ministry. This is significantly less than in previous generations, based on CARA surveys of adults reflecting on their religious education, said Gray. [Holy Cross Family Ministries marketing director Susan] Wallace called the finding 'staggering.'"

That report and the interviewees don't stress that none of this is really news. As Bishop Donald J. Hying noted, "We now have at least two full generations of Catholics who do not know the basics of the faith and who have abandoned the practice of it in droves." ('Engage youth during critical years of their faith development', Herald of Hope column, Milwaukee Catholic Herald, September 25, 2014.) The report goes on.

"Less than half (49 percent) pay any attention to Catholic information sources in any form."

Now, to me, the attempts elsewhere in the report to characterize this ongoing disaster as 'good news/bad news' look like complacency. As I've said elsewhere, it sure seems there would have been more reaction sooner to problems on this scale in a secular context where money, rather than souls, was at stake. Compare parish efforts at evangelization to that put into a typical building fund drive.

(via Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Decline in Church-Building Reflects Changed Tastes and Times

Ben Leubsdorf reported at The Wall Street Journal.

"Construction of religious buildings in the U.S. has fallen to the lowest level at any time since private records began in 1967. Religious groups will build an estimated 10.3 million square feet this year, down 6% from 2013 and 80% since construction peaked in 2002 ...
[...]
"Behind the decline is a confluence of trends: a drop in formal religious participation, changing donation habits, a shift away from the construction of massive megachurches and, more broadly, a growing taste for alternatives to the traditional house of worship."

Possible trends include more multisite churches, including using rented facilities for branch locations.

The biggest factor is the drop in participation. In 1972 9.3% of Americans said they never attended religious services, compared to 25.3% in 2012. Over the same period those describing their religious preference as "none" went from 5.1% to 20%.

(via Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Cardinal Burke on Canon Law and the New Evangelization

Bp Jenky: Evangelization without catechesis?

Post by Bishop Daniel Jenky.

Chesterton, New Evangelization, and Cheese

The New Evangelization has been called many things, but cheesy is not one of them, and this is a shame. If the New Evangelization is to accomplish the task of re-evangelizing the cultures and communities of today, then the New Evangelization should be more like good cheese.

“In each inn the cheese was good; and in each inn it was different.”

G.K. Chesterton wrote some interesting things about cheese after a trip giving lectures around England. During his travels he lunched in several roadside inns across England that offered nothing but bread and cheese. He found in these cheeses a quality he describes as “the very soul of song.”

Chesterton saw in the cheeses two things:

1) Each cheese was local and therefore diverse, taking on the flavor of the surrounding culture.

The “noble” cheese of Wensleydale was a different happy expression of cheese than that of the cheese of Cheshire, or the cheese in Yorkshire, or the cheese in any of the inns. Chesterton believes that universal truths are best expressed through customs and civilizations when they are living, varying, and diverse. The cheese becomes exquisite because it communicates truth and beauty in a way that is in touch with reality and its local surroundings. The divine and universal idea of cheese takes on the human nature of the town and the people that labored to lovingly produce the cheese.

“Bad customs are universal and rigid, like modern militarism. Good customs are universal and varied, like native chivalry and self-defence… But a good civilization spreads over us freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilization stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella – artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform.”

continue at Catholic Stand

Photo

HT AS

Cdl. Burke on Catholic education and the new evangelization

Cardinal Raymond Burke, prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura and ecclesiastical advisor to The Cardinal Newman Society, recently spoke about the importance of “all forms of Catholic education” to the new evangelization, according to Zenit.

Cardinal Burke delivered his remarks while speaking at the International Pro-Life Conference in Rome on May 3.

He said:

The degree of secularization to which Pope Paul VI referred with concern in 1975 only continues to increase exponentially, also due to a grave impoverishment or even lack of adequate catechesis in the Church during the past four decades.

Pope John Paul II addressed the increasing gravity of this situation with steadfast vigor. The pontificate of Pope John Paul II, in fact, may be rightly described as a tireless call to recognize the Church’s challenge to be faithful to her divinely given mission in a completely secularized society and to respond to the challenge by means of a new evangelization. A new evangelization consists in teaching the faith through preaching, catechesis and all forms of Catholic education, in celebrating the faith in the Sacraments and in prayer and devotion which are their extension, and in living the faith by the practice of the virtues – all as if for the first time, that is, with the engagement and energy of the first disciples and of the first missionaries to our native place.

- See more at: http://www.cardinalnewmansociety.org/CatholicEducationDaily/DetailsPage/tabid/102/ArticleID/3257/Cardinal-Burke-New-Evangelization-Consists-in-Teaching-the-Faith.aspx#sthash.177dj7yA.dpuf

People love to leave out that whole catechesis part of the new evangelization.  Like teaching Catholics what the Church actually teaches should be avoided when participating in evangelization.  Quite the opposite.

Nun Shocks Judges On Italy's 'The Voice' Singing Competition

I'm out for a few days on paternity leave.

I absolutely loved this!  A magnificent moment, particularly what this young woman says after singing that causes one of the judges to break down in tears.


details at HuffPo

Cdl Burke on the Pope’s radical call to the new evangelization

Originally posted: 2014-02-21 in L’Osservatore Romano

During a recent visit to the United States, I was repeatedly impressed by how deeply Pope Francis has penetrated the national conversation on a whole range of issues. His special gift of expressing direct care for each and all has resonated strongly with many in my homeland.

At the same time, I noted a certain questioning about whether Pope Francis has altered or is about to alter the Church’s teaching on a number of the critical moral issues of our time, for example, the teaching on the inviolable dignity of innocent human life, and the integrity of marriage and the family. Those who questioned me in the matter were surprised to learn that the Holy Father has in fact affirmed the unchanging and unchangeable truths of the Church’s teaching on these very questions. They had developed a quite different impression as a result of the popular presentation of Pope Francis and his views. 

Clearly, the words and actions of the Holy Father require, on our part, a fitting tool of interpretation, if we are to understand correctly what he intends to teach. My friend and colleague at the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, Cardinal Renato Raffaele Martino, put it this way in a recent article in this newspaper: “The Holy Father instructs with his words, but effectively teaches through his actions. This is his uniqueness and his magnetism” (L’Osservatore Romano, English edition, [ore] 13 December 2013, p. 7). In other words, Pope Francis is exercising strongly his gift for drawing near to all people of good will. It is said that when he manifests his care for a single person, as he does so generously whenever the occasion presents itself, all understand that he has the same care for each of them.

With regard to his manner of addressing the critical issues, the Holy Father himself has described his approach, when he stated: “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods…. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the Church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the Church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time” (“The Pope’s Interview”, ore, 25 September 2013, p. 14). In other words, the Holy Father wants, first, to convey his love of all people so that his teaching on the critical moral questions may be received in that context. But his approach cannot change the duty of the Church and her shepherds to teach clearly and insistently about the most fundamental moral questions of our time. I think, for instance, of the Holy Father’s words to the participants in the second annual March for Life in Rome on 12 May of last year, or of his Twitter message to the participants in the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., on 22 January.

continue at News.Va

A must watch: Cardinal Burke on Canon Law and the New Evangelization

VERY good. Wow, a must watch.  "pseudo-pastoral" invoked.  Many cardinals think that canon law is opposed to charity or opposed to a pastoral approach to situations. 


Would love to hear this whole talk, does anyone know it's origin?

UPDATE:

2012 Priests Retreat at Bloomington Indiana with Cardinal Burke