Caitlin O’Rourke on Evangelizing

Guest blogger Caitlin O’Rourke is a member of St Bridget’s, Church, High Dudgeon, New Jersey. Caitlin is ten years old.

These two people came to the door on Saturday when Daddy was putting up some shelves and he looked out the window and hit his thumb with a hammer and said a bad word which I wasn’t supposed to hear and told Mom to answer the door and she did and I came to see who it was and it was two boys in white shirts with ties on and they asked Mom if she was saved and I knew what that was about because I had been to Camp Nausea it is really called Nausalea but Daddy calls it the other name and when I was there they kept asking me at the campfire if I wanted to get saved so I knew that the boys with white shirts and ties were evangelizers so Mom was listening to them but I told them that we were already Christians but Catholics and they should go and convert some Muslim people so they went away and Mom asked me how I knew what to say and it was because after I came back from Camp Nausea Aunt Margaret told me about people like that who are always asking if you had Jesus in your heart and she told me that she always said to them that Jesus had her in his heart and that was good enough for her but she thought it was nice of them to evangelize people and Catholics should do that a bit more but none of them ever do because Aunt Margaret said Catholics know all about rosaries and spatulas but they don’t know their faith well enough and they would get stumped on the Bible verses so they chicken out and so I asked Jimmy Pochowski on the playground what his favorite Bible verse was and he said it was do unto others before they do unto you and threw a lump of dirt at me so me and Flora jumped on him and then I got a detention but it wasn’t my fault so I asked Sister Mary Dominic what evangelizing was and she said it was sharing the faith with intelligence and love because you care about people and when I told Aunt Margaret that night she said it was a better answer than Sister Joan used to give who used to be the sister at school before she retired and Father Florsheim got the Dominicans to come instead and Sister Joan had a crew cut and wore a brown dress that zipped up the front that Aunt Margaret said was designed by Joseph Stalin but I don’t know who he is and anyway Sister Joan always used to say that you should spread the gospel at all times and use words if you have to and Aunt Margaret said that didn’t count because if you didn’t use words how would they know what it was all about so this is why I’m writing because Fr Longenecker asked me to be guest blogger and tell you that he is not afraid to use words to preach the gospel but sometimes he has to ask for donations too because he is so busy and because he is a married priest he has a wife and family to support and I’m not supposed to tell you this but Daddy doesn’t think much of Fr Longenecker because he has a wife and he was arguing with Aunt Margaret about how priests should be celery which means not married and that the celery priests would be jealous of Fr Longenecker and Aunt Margaret said if they took one look at Mrs Longenecker they wouldn’t be jealous for long which was not a very nice thing to say because I know Mrs Longenecker and she is a very nice person and I would like to be like her one day if I could but I know you can’t marry a priest but anyway I am supposed to tell you that if you like Fr Longenecker’s blog called Standing on My Head and all the other writing and stuff that he does which I think is good because I like his homilies then you should donate some money to his campaign this week because if you like something and think it is worth something to you then you should pay for it like the time Sister Mary Dominic caught me stealing a chocolate from Jimmy Pochowski’s lunch box and she made me pay for it.

Caitlin goes to the beach. Caitlin goes to Bible Camp Caitlin on Praying for the Dead