Catholic and Enjoying It!
Earlier this week, I posted a note from a reader and Sherry Weddell graciously chimed in with the requested reply.
Now the conversation has been picked up on Fr. Longenecker’s blog and on Fr. Z’ blog as well.
But what I find fascinating and so sad at the same time is that almost no one picks up on the main point of my original post:
This goes so far beyond a failure to catechize. We are two generations past that. We are on the edge of a demographic precipice that is going to make the post Vatican II fall-off look like a golden age. We are going to have to (gasp) GO OUT and make disciples.
In our culture, religious identity is not longer inherited, it is chosen. And reconsidering the religious identity of your childhood has become a right of passage for young adults. So we have to evangelize when they are children and we’ll probably have to do it again when they are young adults.
I’ve written about this at enormous length over at Intentional Disciples (www.siena.org) and we cover all this in our seminar Making Disciples. We are still spending our time debating what happened nearly 50 years ago while our future walked right out the door and we didn’t notice.
In the future, people will be fervent Catholics because they are disciples of Jesus Christ first who know that this is his Body on earth which he has provided for them and where he desires them to be.
We’ve worked in 40% of American dioceses now and I can tell you: cultural Catholicism is DEAD, DEAD, DEAD as a retention strategy for the American Catholic church in the 21st century.
In the 21st century west, God has no Grandchildren.
You know the mantra: If we don’t evangelize our own, someone else will: evangelicals, Mormons, or a post-modern culture of vague agnosticism.
If you want Catholics, MAKE DISCIPLES.
If you want Mass attendance, MAKE DISCIPLES.
If you want vocations, MAKE DISCIPLES.
If you want people who will fill our Institutions and pay for them and care for them, MAKE DISCIPLES.
It is what our Lord has commanded us to do in every generation, but we thought that culture and institutions would do it for us. But those days are past.
And yet almost no one, on any of these blogs, seems to want to talk about Making Disciples. The only category they seemed to understand was “Catholic identity” and “Catholic culture”. Which is NOT necessarily the same thing at all….
She has more to say, all of it typically insightful. Go to her blog and read the whole thing.
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