and writes:
As Catholics, we should be ashamed and aware of this poll.
As a recent convert from the Southern Baptist tradition (Easter Vigil, 2009), I’m hard pressed to square this with my Protestant family and friends. How are we to lead the world to Christ and be His light in said world if He is not our first priority?
You are right of course, that God must be first. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God…” However, there’s a reason that from our very earliest days, it has been necessary for Catholics to be taught “bear with one another” (Ephesians 4:2; Colossians 3:13). Christians didn’t start being a disappointment just recently. We have always been a disappointment. The Church is not the perfect Church, merely Christ’s Church. Baptism is grace, not magic, and God deigns to mediate grace to us in our ordinariness. The average Catholic is average (much like the average Baptist). This offends (and should offend) our zeal for holiness. But our zeal for holiness, while good, is not the measure of all things: love is. So God confronts us with a Church whose members will, on average, never live up to whatever expectations for excellence we privately placed upon them when we became Catholic. Sure, you will find some heroes and saints (and thanks be to God for them). But you will also find a lot of people who are plain schlubs who adhere to all statistical norms. You might even discover that you are one of them. When you do, extend them (and yourself) the mercy that God extends you. Bear with them as God bears with you. It’s how the Church has functioned from the start. The method of the saints generally tends to be to cut everybody else a lot of slack and themselves far less slack. Strive for excellence yourself. Encourage it in others. Rejoice when you find it—and cultivate lots of charity for the many times you will not find it, whether in others or yourself. The Church is to be a home of charity, not a Darwinian struggle for superior excellence, though of course God calls us to excellence. It is this conception of the Church that, among others, marks it off from sectarian conceptions (as I once whimsically tried to point out here)
We are to seek God above all and seek excellence in our lives. We are to encourage it in the Church. But it must be an excellence in humble virtue, not in prideful virtue. One of the best ways to kill the temptation to the latter is to ruthlessly murder every impulse to compare one’s own supposed zeal for God with somebody’s else’s. That can be tough when family members (or somebody else whose opinions you value) are sitting in judgment of you. But it can be done.
Blessings!
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Can understand the predicament of a convert. lot of things move below the surface of seemingly stale/stable waters. Individuals r struggling in their own way. Holiness is still alive in the church & its moving people.
It’s also important to remember that these polls ask people to check a box that says “Catholic” “Baptist” “Jewish” or whatever at the top ... so you’re measuring a population of people who mark “Catholic” rather than “Muslim” on a box, not a population of people who go to Mass every Sunday, Confession once a year, support the Church, keep the days of fasting and abstinence and make sure not to marry their cousin (to complete the precepts of the Church). Some of these people went to Mass every once in a while as kids and that’s it.
Point is, yes, Catholics’ morals disappoint. Good principle to keep in mind. In this case, though, the principle is “the morals of lapsed CAtholics’ sons and daughters disappoint,” which is even less surprising.
The survey itself is skewed since it doesn’t differentiate effects from causes. Why do people put family and social causes first? Is it because they are ends in themselves or are they the fruits of faith? Without this distinction, the survey is meaningless, since you could choose the later in all faithfulness and choose “faith” in the sense of “it’s just me and Jesus and the rest of the world can go to Hell”.
The Catechism, Humanae Vitae, Theology of the Body, and countless other Church teachings highlight that the family is the primary apostulate of the laity. James 2:17-19 and 1 Corinthians 13:13 highlight that the balance between faith and love is more complex than appears at first blush.
——
James 2:17-19, “Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.
But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe—and tremble!”
1 Corinthians 13:13, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
Don’t forget - Barna is an evangelical. I have always found his polls tend to be skewed against Catholicism.
I feel like saying DUH well of course the largest number in the survey are a disappointing lot who miss the higher aspirations of the faith. Have you looked around in the world heck have you checked out what passes for a Catholic Mass some places. If we were capable of being perfected in the faith while on earth Jesus wouldn’t have had to leave us all of the sacraments.
If you look around you in the pews and say boy are they messed up just make sure you pull out the old mirror and take a look too. I don’t know about the rest of my parish but I have got to be one of the worst sinners who have darkened the confessional since St. Augustine or perhaps St. Paul. I keep expecting a divine hand to pop out of a cloud and smack me on the back of the head and to hear God’s booming voice say COME ON ALREADY! The point is we are all works in progress; yes of course we can do better.
One of the great blessings of our church is the number of totally inept people running around in it. I love the old ladies who sing off key and as loud as possible, the ushers who are so busy glad handing their friends the miss part of mass. I even love the people who plan on coming late, leaving early and parking so they can get out of the lot faster.
As someone who left the faith and after a troublesome trail came back home I can tell you it isn’t what type of outreach or mission program a parish has that is powerful it is the type of sacramental life that makes the difference. Go to a church that does serious Eucharistic adoration {at least weekly}, take a look at their lines for confession {especially during the summer} and you can be sure that evangelization is happening with or without a committee meeting.
Ronald, James was speaking to born again christians. All of the new test is for the born again. Jesus promised to blind the eyes of the unsaved to the scriptures. James says that Faith(being born again) is dead without works. The saved do things differently than they did befor being born again. Here is an example. (This always get me in hot water here.) If someone is actually born again, you wouldnt find them on their knees befor a statue(graven image) of for that matter a painting or even a gold funny looking trinket. This is a work. Not bowing befor statues is also a work. Take a guy who in parapelegic in a wheel chair. He gets saved but can only sit there. His works are that he believes and even tells others, feeds sheep. Abraham believed god, and that was imputed as his righousness. Belief was what god wanted.Not that he was going to kill his son, that was just an act of belief. Does this help?
CatholicScouter - I couldn’t have said it better, especially your last sentence. Thanks for that.
Mark, I often wonder, is their a difference between ordinary and average? Our language often uses these terms interchangeably. I consider myself an ordinary Catholic because I believe in God, I believe all that He has revealed to us in Scripture, and I believe in all that Holy Mother Church proposes for my belief. Maybe the great disappointment is that the average is not ordinary.
Mark: This posting (which is really good) led me to your 2001 piece, “Brother Darwin’s Gospel Hour” (which is truly excellent). I hope it will do the same for many others of your readers. Thank you for your work.
As a convert to Catholicism going on 10 years now, right after I came into the Church I just immersed myself in my faith, got involved in the Church by participating where I felt called, and did my best to do as St. Francis of Assissi admonishes us to “Preach the Gospel at all times, if necessary, use words.” Your Protestant family and friends will see you and your faith as one. That is truly the best way: to wear your faith on your sleeve, and let the polls (and the pols) be damned.
gotta feel for this fella. i reverted back to the faith and wondered why so many who claim the title catholic seem to love their faith or there Lord so little. but then again its really impossible to know where someone next to you in the pew is coming from or what they struggle with. i don’t like being sized up but i know i also am a witness and even there can be various degree’s.
Hey Mark. You are dead on. On an important side-note, as someone who has inside knowledge and experience with Barna’s operation and methods, whenever they report on Catholic data you can bet they off target. Why? They allow “Catholics” to self-identify. So, if you ritually participate in seances, practice Buddhism, and work at Planned Parenthood, but were born to a Catholic home, you are just as likely to be identified as a “Catholic” as one who attends daily mass. In contrast, they are very picky about distinctions between, “protestants” and “evangelicals” etc. From a research standpoint this is very sketchy. I love my protestant friends but we should be very careful when they present research on Catholic realities.
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