A fascinating article in The Atlantic. . .the subtitle of the article reads: "When a Christian foundation interviewed college nonbelievers about how
and why they left religion, surprising themes emerged."
Here's one theme that should Shock and Awe Catholic pastors, DRE's, CYO chaplains, campus ministers, and RCIA teachers:
The mission and message of their churches was vague
These students heard plenty of messages encouraging "social
justice," community involvement, and "being good," but they seldom saw
the relationship between
that message, Jesus Christ, and the Bible. Listen to Stephanie, a
student at Northwestern: "The connection between Jesus and a person's
life was not
clear." This is an incisive critique. She seems to have intuitively
understood that the church does not exist simply to address social ills,
but to
proclaim the teachings of its founder, Jesus Christ, and their
relevance to the world. Since Stephanie did not see that connection, she
saw little
incentive to stay. We would hear this again.
As our Holy Father, Francis recently preached: No Jesus, no Church. You can't have the Church w/o Christ, or Christ w/o the Church.
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It starts with the liturgy. "Save the liturgy, save the world." Then it moves to our outward expressions of faith i.e. our charitable works.
ReplyDeleteWe need to focus our attention completely on Christ. May God help our Holy Father.
DeleteIt starts with Jesus Christ, and him crucified.
DeleteOne of Jesus’ most psychologically acute sayings was The Children In the Marketplace: “There’s no pleasing you.” People will complain that the Church is too dogmatic or that it’s too wishy wash. My bias, though, is that people can smell anxiety, desperation and loss of confidence in the compulsion to accommodate. (It's a disease that infects all of Western culture now.) And if the Church just tries to be a spiritualized version of the Democrats, why bother?
ReplyDeleteI am, believe me, no friend at all to Islam, --unlike so many foolish and uninformed Christians--but those people exude self-confidence and they never apologize. That makes their message attractive. In the days when Catholics thought of their religion as the true Church, so was Catholicism.
I left the Episcopal Church in 1996 b/c the faith was constantly up for a vote. Every three yrs. a General Convention came along and everything was up for grabs. Nothing was sacred, nothing off-limits. All you needed was a big enough pressure group and a really good spin-doctor to spin your niche complaints and. . .POOF. . .another piece of the faith was abandoned or rewritten. There was no continuity or consistency btw the church I joined in 1982 and the one I left in 1996. . .except that you knew the next GC would change something.
DeleteBlockbuster quotes from Pope Francis! A new wind is blowing!
ReplyDeletehttp://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com/2013/06/francis-unplugged-report-claims.html
Read it twice. . .I see nothing new here. Well, the comments on the Gay Mafia in the Curia are new. NB. the comments are new, not the G.M.
Delete[Shrug]
Hey Ludi, that wind you're dancing in has petered out. . .
Deletehttp://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/latin-american-religious-backtrack-on-pope-and-gay-lobby/