Dear Parishioners,
Last month I was at a wedding
and someone described herself to me as a submarine
Catholic. Not quite sure of what she
meant—probably because of the perplexed look on my face—she continued to
explain: “Yeh, I surface at Christmas
and Easter.”
While I had to chuckle at the
remark, I later thought to myself: Is this what our Catholic faith has come down
to?
Pope Saint John Paul II called for a type of new evangelization in his encyclical
Redemptoris Missio. He spoke of those situations in the Church “where
entire groups of the baptized have lost a living sense of the faith, or even no
longer consider themselves members of the Church, and live a life far removed
from Christ and his Gospel. In this case
what is needed is a ‘new evangelization’ or a ‘re-evangelization.’" (#33)
How common it is for baptized
Catholic people today to be only loosely connected to their Church or to be
alienated from it entirely. Mass
attendance here on any given Saturday/Sunday is less than 25% of the registered
Catholics of the parish. During weddings
and funerals, when we often see Catholics re-surface
for the particular occasion, I can usually sense when people haven’t been to
Mass in a while. For example, I frequently
hear the former response “And also with
you” when I greet the people “The Lord be with you.” The response changed a number of years ago when the new translation of the liturgy was
implemented (Advent, 2011).
We continually see Catholic
couples cohabitating before marriage, Catholics not properly married in the
Church (usually without any required dispensation), pro-choice Catholics, Catholics supportive of gay marriage,
Catholics who practice artificial birth control, sparse confessional lines, and
the vast majority of Catholics either unknowingly or shamelessly coming up to receive
Holy Communion—especially at Christmas and Easter. Do we need a "new evangelization?"
In addition, according to the Pew Research Center, the number of
those “unaffiliated” with a church or religion in the U.S. is up to about 23 percent. Catholicism is still the largest denomination
in America, but the second largest group of people, above and beyond any other
Christian or Protestant denomination, is former
or ex-Catholics.
Whenever I offer Mass and I
repeat the words of consecration—the words that Jesus spoke when He gave us His
Body and Blood in the Eucharist—I am reminded of THE BLOOD OF THE NEW AND ETERNAL COVENANT. Jesus sealed this covenant in His own blood. The sacrifice was a total self-giving. Jesus gave everything for us and took our
sins upon Himself. He unquestionably did
His part.
I think He deserves more of a
commitment from us than perhaps surfacing once or twice a year.
Fr. Ed Namiotka
Pastor
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