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Third Sunday of Lent
15 March 2009
Dear Friends in Christ,
“I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God.”
These are powerful words. They are words of faith, and they testify to a heart and mind converted by the truth of the Gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe. These are the words spoken each year by hundreds of thousands of men and women who were baptized into the Lord Jesus but outside of the Catholic Church and who later are called into full communion with the Church, often after years of searching for (in Father Longenecker’s fine phrase) “more Christianity.” In five weeks, at the great Vigil of Easter on the night of Holy Saturday, these words will be spoken by a great cloud of witnesses all over the world, including a group of about 30 right here at St. Mary’s, and it is this public declaration of faith which changes a non-Catholic Christian into a Catholic Christian.
I think of these words and the life-changing faith of the men and women who speak them each year because yet another report has been published which tells of accelerating abandonment of the Christ and His Gospel by millions of Catholics in the United States. The American Religious Identification Survey of 2008 (just released by Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut) compares with the same study conducted in 1990, and the findings are startling. In the six states of New England, the Catholic population declined from 50% to 36%, a drop of more than one million persons in 18 years. At the same time, the number of Americans who have no religious beliefs increased from 8% to 15%, and the self-identified Catholic population declined in 29 states. These findings confirm similar results published in the Baylor University Religion Surveys of 2006 and 2008 and the 2008 report of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which found that although one in three Americans were raised in the Catholic Church, only one in four still identify themselves as Catholic—meaning that 10% of all Americans are ex-Catholics.
These are the bitter fruits of the false catholicisms I call casual, cultural, and cafeteria catholicism, and these false forms of religion yield only spiritual mediocrity, doctrinal confusion, uncertain commitments, and a negotiated truce with sin which leads to the death of the soul. The antidote for this deadly disease is the truth of God’s Word which calls us to radical conversion, deep fidelity, joyful discipleship, and courageous evangelism. You probably know a Catholic who no longer goes to Mass, hasn’t been to Confession in decades, and rejects the divinely revealed truth about marriage, human sexuality, or abortion—the usual battlegrounds in our time between the Gospel and our decadent culture. To such persons the greatest gift you can give is the witness of your own faith, and I pray that your faith can truthfully be expressed in the courageous words of the thousands of souls who say: I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God.
Father Newman