I received my most recent Coming Home Network International newsletter yesterday. In it, evangelical convert Keith Moore describes his journey into the Catholic Church. A combination of largely unchurched, Methodist, "nondenominational," and house church in background, he describes his first experience inside a Catholic church. He was visiting Washington state and attended mass at St. Aloysius, near Gonzaga University.

I will never forget walking into that beautiful Cathedral. I had never seen the Stations of the Cross. I had never seen such amazing stained glass windows, not just for their beauty, but for the stories they told of God's work in our lives. The statues were amazing...they suddenly seemed to me very important because of what they pointed to. I was almost trembling by the time we left that day.

St. Aloysius was built in 1911. How many "new" or modern Catholic churches have you seen that contain purposeful, beautiful, and inspiring art? I myself have seen almost none. That's not to say that it cannot be done, but that it usually is not.

What we have already in existence in the Diocese of Camden are churches that already have these things. St. Mary's, though small, has these things. It is not just a building, it is truly a house of God. It is through sacred art and the structure of a traditional Catholic church that we learn about the Faith. In and of itself, by virtue of its presence, it is a means of evangelization.

Beautiful churches draws in those who who know little about Catholicism, often without them even realizing why. In attempting to make our churches, and therefore our Faith palatable to those currently outside it, many have tried to lower the bar and create "spaces" that are less overtly Catholic and consequently less intimidating to those who do not understand the purpose of beautiful art inside a house of God. But in doing this we lose the very thing that makes our Church attractive to those who seek to join It. Our traditional Catholic churches are treasures that not only have historic merit, but serve an important purpose in our continual conversion.

When I am at mass at St. Mary's, I see all around me in the stained glass windows the saints who are interceding for us in Heaven, the angels who are witnesses at each and every holy sacrifice of the mass, and I am reminded of my place in God's order. Churches like St. Mary's should not be so flippantly dispensed with. They are God's silent tools of conversion.

We put up this article last Oct. 27th--we did not write it ourselves. It deserves a reprinting. Take a look and see if it doesn't sound familiar. Even if you don't read the whole article, be sure to scroll down to the "Suppressing (Closing) Parishes" section, which we put in italics for you. You will see that the scandals and the agenda demonstrated by our current bishop are not new in the history of the American Catholic Church, only the latest attack on Holy Mother Church. Apparently, the power hungry nature of the American bishopric is notorious and long standing. We put in bold the most relevant information so you can easily skim. However we highly recommend you read it carefully. This article is so eerily familiar and gives important background to our current situation, despite its being written about 14 years ago. It may also be read here.

ZAP! YOUR CHURCH IS RENOVATED!
SLAM! YOUR PARISH IS CLOSED! Duane Galles

---

[The following article is drawn from legal opinions and pleadings in the files of the St. Joseph Foundation. The primary contributor is Duane Galles. The editing and a small portion of the text is Charles M. Wilson's and he accepts full responsibility for any flaws.]

We know that Christ's Church is not a democracy and we acknowledge that those who exercise the ministry of governance are not accountable to those they govern. We understand also that the faithful are obliged to follow whatever legitimate authorities determine as leaders of the Church, but the above two citations--and lots of others which could be used--tell us quite a lot about the way in which ecclesiastical authority should be exercised. Unfortunately, there have been times during the 2,000 year history of our Church when these principles have been honored more in the breach than the observance. Perhaps the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council had this in mind when they said:

"By the power of the Holy Spirit the Church is the faithful spouse of the Lord and will never fail to be a sign of salvation in the world; but it is by no means unaware that down through the centuries there have been among its members, both clerical and lay, some who were disloyal to the Spirit of God. Today, as well, the Church is not blind to the discrepancy between the message it proclaims and the human weakness of those to whom the Gospel has been entrusted. Whatever is history's judgment on these shortcomings, we cannot ignore them and we must combat them earnestly, lest they hinder the spread of the Gospel" (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, <Gaudium et Spes>, No. 43).

When we think about this, most of us will recall those sad moments in history when priests, bishops and even some popes were guilty of grossly scandalous conduct and showed themselves to be unworthy of their offices.

But we might also consider those times when Church leaders exhibited other less spectacular weaknesses such as capriciousness, arrogance, cruelty, duplicity, intransigence and authoritarianism. When linked to conditions which have frequently permitted the exercise of power with unrestrained discretion on the part of ecclesiastical authorities, we can rightly wonder if these flaws have not over time caused more harm to the Church and the loss of more souls than the excesses of the likes of John XII, Benedict IX and Alexander VI. It is this exercise of discretionary authority by bishops or their bureaucrats which has resulted in recent heated controversies over many issues, prominent among them being--especially in the United States and Canada--the renovation of parish church buildings and the closure of parishes.

Before proceeding to the consideration of these particular issues, it would be worthwhile to take just a glance at how episcopal discretion has been exercised in the United States and those parts of Canada where English is the predominant language. Going back to the end of the eighteenth century, we see that both had very few Catholics and that, coupled with the difficulties in communication, resulted in Rome taking a more or less "out of sight, out of mind" attitude. In sum, the day-to-day governance of the dioceses was, for better or worse, left almost entirely in the hands of the bishops.

Anyone who holds a position of authority, subject only to a distant and not overly concerned higher authority, is tempted to exercise power not in a spirit of service but often arbitrarily and sometimes abusively. We see an example of this in the nineteenth century when the American bishops, at the First Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1829, attempted by decree to overstate the obligation of obedience of diocesan priests to their bishops and, in effect, reduce them to the condition of religious priests with respect to their superiors. Although, thankfully, the Holy See did intervene to suppress that decree, the bishops resourcefully employed other means to achieve the same end.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the American bishops refused to erect canonical parishes and thereby prevented diocesan priests from acquiring the rights and security of tenure conferred on pastors by the universal law of the Church. Unlike priests in the Catholic countries of Europe, their American counterparts were canonically merely rectors of missions with delegated instead of ordinary powers which could be withdrawn at the pleasure of the bishops.

Indeed, then, the power of the American bishop over his clergy was awesome. He could appoint, remove, transfer and discipline them at will. He controlled their compensation and regulated their lifestyle to an extent and in a manner that no European bishop would have dared. The situation was such that even Pope Pius IX could joke about it. When asked one day by a supplicant for a favor, the pontiff reportedly replied: "What you ask is not in my power to grant, but there is an American bishop in town. Go ask him!"

Another contributing element was the fact that not only were the American bishops subject to little restraint by the Holy See, they were not subject to the type of influence which certain civil authorities could employ in Europe. Centuries of intricate relations between state and Church on that continent resulted in many constraints upon ecclesiastical authority that were never implemented in North America. One example was the right of presentation, or the right of civil governments to propose candidates for Church offices. Even the election of popes could be influenced, as happened in this very century when the Emperor of Austria exercised his right of veto and blocked the election of Cardinal Rampolla as pope in 1903.

An important and beneficial change took place with the promulgation of the 1917 Code of Canon Law, which instantly transformed the "missions" in North America into canonical parishes and thereby transformed their "rectors" into pastors, with all the protections of the law. An even more sweeping change flowed from the ecclesiology of Vatican II, which reemphasized the notion of authority as a ministry of service rather than one of power.

We see this reformed ecclesiology made present in the law in several ways. In 1967 Pope Paul VI in his apostolic constitution, <Regimini Ecclesiae Universae,> created the Second Section of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura to enforce the rights of Christ's faithful even against public ecclesiastical authorities. Sixteen years later, the revised Code of Canon Law, in contrast to its predecessor, codified the rights and duties of the faithful. Perhaps the most important of the 1752 canons in the new Code is number 128, which states that "Anyone who unlawfully inflicts damage upon someone by a juridic act, or indeed by any other act placed with malice or culpability, is obliged to compensate for the damage inflicted." This means that the arbitrary and capricious use of discretionary power is no longer acceptable under the 1983 Code.

The Effects Of The Reforms

While the reforms of Vatican II and the 1983 Code look good on paper, the sad fact is that one can see few positive changes on the parish and diocesan level. Aside from the historical reality that change sometimes takes place very slowly in the Church, our conclusion is that there are three reasons for this: (1) Since Vatican II, the concept of "collegiality" has become something of an obsession and the Holy See has been extremely reluctant to interfere-even when there are good reasons to do so-in diocesan affairs. (2) Too many bishops in the United States and Canada have allowed their authority to be undermined by "experts" on their staffs. (3) The canon 221, 3 of the 1983 Code stated that the "Christian faithful can legitimately vindicate and defend the rights which they enjoy in the Church before a competent ecclesiastical court in accord with the norm of law," but the Code says very little as to how this theoretical right can be put into practice.

There are others who have come to similar conclusions, not all of whom may share our theological views. One, for example, was Fr. Joseph A. Komonchak, Associate Professor of Religion and Religious Education at the Catholic University of America, who said;

"More than a few lay people have noted that their rights to participation in the Church have not always been better respected by the addition to the traditional clerical hierarchy of a new and larger body of "professionals" and "experts". It is an occupational hazard of bureaucrats to believe that they know better than the people in the field how things should be done. And if they turn to management theories elaborated for business and government for ideas on how to plan for the Church's future, it is not surprising to hear complaints that the Church appears much more like a giant and impersonal organization than like a living community of brothers and sisters-a complaint, by the way, that by no means is aimed only at episcopal or papal targets" (<Origins>, April 2, 1987, p. 378).

A prominent American canonist has added a legal dimension to Fr. Komonchak's observation and applied it to parishes, which are often the victims of those "professionals" and "experts."

"Parishes and other local congregations are not branch offices or local outlets of a central corporation, like banks or auto agencies or service stations. They are unique communities of Christian people. They are authentic Churches, just like those described in the New Testament (in Jerusalem, in Antioch, in Corinth, in Ephesus), and they must be respected as such. The Church is "built up from below" by these local communities of God's people...

Sometimes the impression is given that the parishes exist for the sake of the diocese, when just the opposite is true. The organization and governance of the Church is most often stated and interpreted by those in diocesan offices. They subtly begin to believe that their functions are primary, and that they represent the first and most important level of the Church's life' since they are more immediately related to the bishop's authority. They gradually come to consider parish communities as derivative and secondary, almost as managerial units. They speak of planning for "clusters of parishes" or "pastoral zones of the diocese" (meaning that they are preparing to suppress or merge parishes) and of reorganizing local communities for reasons of more efficient use of personnel and financial resources. [In a footnote, the author adds, Economy and efficiency are praiseworthy, but the dignity and quality of local communities is even more important. Ed.] They relate to the local churches in the same ways that corporate executives of Safeway and McDonalds relate to their local stores.

No one is baptized in a chancery office. People enter the Church, grow in faith, give praise to God, and lend loving assistance to their neighbors in parishes and other local communities. These local congregations of the faithful have a proper and authentic autonomy which must be respected> ("The Vindication of Parish Rights," by James A. Coriden, <The Jurist> 54 (1994), pp. 23-24).

Much more along these same lines could be said, but we believe Frs. Komonchak and Coriden have adequately and fairly summarized, for the purposes of this discussion, the atmosphere that prevails in the majority of dioceses in North America.

Renovation Of Church Buildings

We must admit that church buildings are places of worship, not museums, and that hardly any, including St. Peter's Basilica, never undergo some changes. Even so, the many "horror stories" in our case files and those we have seen elsewhere confirm that most "renovations" go far beyond--and in some cases are even contrary to--the legal norms. And this is not a problem that has arisen recently. Almost twenty five years ago, the Holy See issued the following sound advice: "<Mindful of the legislation of Vatican Council II and of the directives in the documents of the Holy See, bishops are to exercise unfailing vigilance to ensure that the remodeling of places of worship is carried out with the utmost caution>" (Congregation for Clergy, Circular Letter <Opera artis>, April 11, 1971).

Virtually all renovation projects are grounded in what the parishioners are told are the needs of the reformed Vatican II liturgy. In fact, they are often motivated by erroneous interpretations of liturgical law arising from the Council's Constitution on the Liturgy, <Sacrosanctum concilium> (SC). Three key concepts of SC, it seems, are commonly misinterpreted and misapplied. This, in turn, has motivated the iconoclasm and destruction of so much cultural church property in the United States and Canada.

The first key concept which has been misinterpreted and misapplied is <participatio actuosa> of SC. It has been mistranslated as "active participation" which, in English, can imply that for participation to be genuine it must involve physical activity. For a proper understanding of the phrase, one can paraphrase the original Latin of the 1958 instruction, <De musica sacra>, to say that participation ought to be internal and, certainly, exercised with a spirit of piety and heartfelt affection. Given this understanding of the concept, "actual participation" might be a more accurate translation. In any event, the liturgical "establishment's" understanding has had pernicious consequences, such as the attentive assistance at Mass and participation in the changes in posture or responses being dismissed by some liturgists as inadequate. Thus, communion rails are destroyed, altars thrust forward like theaters-in-the-round, statues are removed and the Blessed Sacrament banished, since their presence would inhibit a maximum of activity, which inevitably deteriorates into mere busyness.

The second concept misinterpreted is that of <nobilis pulchritudo> (noble beauty) of Article 124 of SC, which has often been translated as "noble simplicity." In the name of "simplicity," altars have been smashed, statues trashed, paintings whitewashed, organs silenced and the ignoble--burlap vestments and crude ceramic vessels, for example--introduced into the temple to serve as its ornaments.

The third concept misunderstood is that of the common priesthood of the laity. In advancing this notion beyond its proper scope, some liturgists demand the abolition of any distinctions whatever between the sacred minister and the laity. Thus, any physical barriers between them are taboo. Communion rails are especially hated and any physical reminder of a "holy of holies" must go, so hordes of lay functionaries can swarm in and out of the "sanctuary."

In addition to the physical renovations themselves, the methods by which they are inflicted are of equal or even greater concern. The "process" leading up to the actual arrival of the bulldozers begins with the appearance of the ubiquitous "experts" and "professionals" who tell the people only what they are supposed to hear. Glossy, one-sided hand-outs are distributed at "listening sessions" while the people are assured that "no final decisions have been made." Usually, a renovation committee consisting of carefully selected parishioners emerges' to announce the final plans, while any alternative suggestions or proposals are stifled by whatever methods-gentle or not so gentle-that circumstances require. There are no credible estimates that we know of as to how much money has been wasted over the last thirty years on needless renovations of North American church buildings, but it must be in the hundreds of millions, or perhaps billions, of dollars.

To close this part of the discussion on a hopeful note, there is a rather remote but growing possibility that (if our prayers are answered) most of the renovations may eventually have to be undone. The first signs of a true "reform of the reform" may have appeared and are reported on page two of this issue. Should this come to pass, even more billions will be needed to set things right. But, we suspect, the people will not mind putting up the money.

Suppressing (Closing) Parishes

Just as we admitted that places of worship cannot remain unchanged forever, we must concede that not every parish has a right to perpetual existence. Acknowledging this general rule, though, does not mean that we have to agree with every suppression decreed by every chancery.

There is one very important difference between renovating church buildings and suppressing parishes. Buildings, of course, do not in themselves have rights and the renovation, or even destruction, of a parish church does not alter the legal status of the parish, which has what is called a juridic personality. In other words, a juridic person in canon law is roughly equivalent to a corporation in secular law. And like a corporation, a juridic person has rights and duties under the law. The primary and fundamental right of any person, natural or legal, is to existence. Father Coriden puts it this way:

"Once a stable community of faithful people has taken shape, it has the right to canonical recognition (e.g., first as a mission or quasi-parish, then as a parish; c. 516). Once established as a parish, the community possesses juridic personality and is, nature sue perpetual (cc. 515, #3; 120, #1). In other words, the parish should remain in existence until overwhelming reasons for its alteration or suppression are clearly demonstrated."

After hearing about or becoming directly involved in parish suppression cases throughout the country, we have yet to see a single example of "overwhelming" reasons. Indeed, virtually all suppressions--and absolutely all which are contested by the parishioners--are justified on the basis of a shortage of priests, more efficient use of facilities, even distribution of people, financial considerations or other factors which have little or nothing to do with the vitality of the community.

Sometimes the reasons given for suppression make no sense at all. For example, the city of Clinton, Iowa, in the Diocese of Davenport used to have five parishes. In 1990, all five were suppressed and one "mega parish" was created in their place. The bishop's letter announcing and attempting to support the action said this:

"And yet, I see that the needs of the past, e.g., for ethnic parishes, are not the needs of today. In fact, the need for unity and united action are the paramount needs of today. (*Almost the exact same thing was stated in this week's Star Herald -Julie)

In other words, five parishes competing for people, funds and personnel is not what the Catholic community needs."

In truth, none of the five parishes was "ethnic" and all were vibrant communities of faith. No one in Clinton has ever understood why their city could not have more than one parish when other cities in the diocese (Davenport, Iowa City, Muscatine, etc.) continue to have several. No one in the chancery has ever been able to explain why either.

Although renovations and suppressions are different kinds of actions, the "process" leading up to them is often remarkably similar. The ever-present "professionals" and "expert consultants" arrive to "soften-up" the parishioners with unctuous assurances that "no decisions will be made without everyone having their say." Then, as in the case of renovations, all those who have opinions contrary to the outcome desired by the chancery are marginalized or excluded from the discussions by whatever means necessary. We have even seen instances where elderly parishioners were threatened with denial of Christian burial if they continued to object.

Should the consultation process produce recommendations which the bishop does not like, such as recently happened in the diocese of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he simply rides roughshod over the procedures he himself established and decrees whatever he wishes.

In short, the decisions to suppress are utterly lacking in reasonable motives and the "consultation processes" lack even a scintilla of justice. The ultimate injustice occurs when a parish suffers the "double whammy" of being forced to renovate its church and then, several years later, being suppressed.

In Conclusion

In spite of the discouraging trends, there are reasons for hope. One of these reasons is that many of the courageous faithful who try to save their churches from the renovators or their parishes from the axe simply refuse to give up. Even when they lose, as often happens, their efforts are not wasted. We know of cases where renovations were prevented and parishes slated for suppression were saved because the "professionals" did not want to face another struggle which might even involve an appeal to Rome.

And who knows? With enough prayer and hard work, we may even see in our lifetime a system of appeal which will see cases decided on the law and the facts instead of ecclesiastical politics and influence peddling.

Today at 11:30am mass we were privileged to have a visiting priest named Fr. Marty Smith, OSA. It seems that he may become a regular fixture at St. Mary's and unless I miss my guess, parishioners will not be disappointed. Fr. Smith kindly introduced himself as an Augustinian who currently resides at the Augustinian monastery at Villanova University. He has been ordained a priest for 32 years now. Our area, of course, is accustomed to the Augustinians due to the proximity of St. Augustine's Prep. For example, at my own grandfather's funeral, an Augustinian priest, to our great surprise, showed up to say the mass at Sacred Heart since he so fondly remembered my grandfather. I was so moved by that gesture, I won't ever forget it.

Anyway, Fr. Smith gave an excellent but simple sermon about weathering life's storms and how we should always ask ourselves whether or not we are asking for God's intercession or whether we are depending upon ourselves to make it through. Since it was Father's Day today, Fr. Smith offered a special prayer for the fathers at mass which granted a plenary indulgence! Apparently the privilege of offering this indulgence was granted to Augustinians many years ago when one of them did a "favor" for the pope. I was unfortunately unable to find any further information on this online, so I can't share with you anything other than that.

So, welcome to Fr. Marty Smith. We hope to see you often!

In this month's Seton Home Study Newsletter, there was printed an excerpt by a talk given by Dr. William Marra, now deceased, back in 1993. He was a home schooling father and professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. Although he is talking about home schoolers in particular, what he is talking about when you come right down to it is our obligations as Catholics, hope for our broken society, and true Christian leadership. The "heroes" he speaks of are what we all have to be as soldiers of Christ. Here is an excerpt of the excerpt.

Because there is no Catholic culture, Catholic culture has to become the effect. Thanks to Christ-centered homeschooling, these children, born into this barren culture, will be the future heroes. These heroes will have a dedication to Truth.

These homeschooled heroes will understand who is Christ, what is Truth, what is the Church, what are the enemies of the Church.

Some of these heroes are going to swear a vow to be holy, and they will mean it. These home schooled heroes will reject our secular materialistic world and all its vices. These homeschooled heroes will understand that life on earth is a pilgrimage. Some of these home schooled heroes will be dedicated to a zealous pursuit of the Truth, no matter what it costs them in study, dispute, or controversy.

Because of their dedication and formation in home schooling, these parents will give us the young people who will be the heroes of sanctity in the first place, and the heroes of Catholic culture in the second place.

It is these homeschooled heroes who will make the cultural barren desert bloom once again.

This is our goal, both in the Church and in the world. We need to take seriously the religious education of our children and take full responsibility for it. We need to take seriously our own religious education, be willing to be continually formed by Christ, and never give up! We must have as the center of our lives the Truth, no matter the cost.

The following letter to the editor was published in yesterday's Courier-Post.  I found the letter  amusing because it's the first time I've seen Bishop Galante used as an example when criticizing someone else.  Anyway, here's the text of the letter:

I question the choice of picking Wendell Pritchett to the post of chancellor of Rutgers University-Camden. He is a Philadelphian who has ties to the University of Pennsylvania.

What incentives would he have of creating a bigger, better and more attractive campus at Rutgers? Why couldn't they find someone from Rutgers-New Brunswick, Princeton or some other fine New Jersey university?

You can take a man out of Philadelphia, but you can't take Philadelphia out of the man. Look at the bishop of Camden, another Philadelphian.

Look at how he is tearing down all the hard work the previous bishops have done to build up the Camden Diocese. He is closing half the churches and schools.

Yet in the Philadelphia Diocese, where a good deal of the population has left the city, I haven't heard of any massive closing of churches and schools.

You can take a man out of Philly, but you can't take the love of Philly out of the man.

AL CIRCOLL

Gloucester City

Previously we have quoted a bit from the 2002 Michael Rose book entitled, Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption into the Catholic Church. This excellent book is well researched and sheds a great deal of light on the controversy, unorthodox doctrine, emphasis on "lay ministry," and seminary/priest formation problems encountered in the Catholic Church in the United States today. Perhaps more than anything else, it explains well how the "priest shortage" crisis is contrived and utterly avoidable.

(As a side note, Bishop Galante and those attempting to make changes to the Church ought to pay attention. Unless we  miscalculate, Rose was 33 when he wrote this book. The younger generations, which the bishop is supposedly trying to attract, are often the ones most disenchanted by the lack of adherence to traditional, orthodox Catholicism.)

Seminary & Priest Formation Problems

From Chapter 5, "The Heterodoxy Downer: How False Teaching Demoralizes and Discourages the Aspiring Priest."

Beyond issues of grave sexual immorality, the seminary environment presents a number of other deterrents to the orthodox seminarian. The most obvious and perhaps the most insidious is heterodoxy, open or subtle dissent from the official teachings of th Church. Many faculty members are averse to teaching what the Church teaches, and some find it onerous even to hide their disdain for Catholicism. The seminarian who arrives on campus expecting to find faculty and staff that love the Catholic faith and teach what the Church teaches can be sadly disappointed.

Continued:

Dr. Louise Leidner, who taught students from the Washington Theological Union in Washington DC...during the 1990s claims that students who expressed orthodox Catholic opinions were "publicly mocked by their WTU peers and by WTU faculty and superiors for taking positions consonant with the Church's teaching." In addition, she says that "Several of her students...were actually kicked out of their religious houses because they expressed orthodox opinions that were 'dangerous and harmful to other people"--even though their positions were supported by the Catechism of the Catholic Church--because they would "negatively infect and unduly influence and contaminate" the other students.

Does it get worse? Apparently. In Chapter Four, Rose mentions several well-known nicknames for seminaries, including a seminary (St. Mary's) to which Bishop Galante, here in the Camden Diocese, has decided to send seminarians. Yikes. (Incidentally, last we heard, this is where our married, former evangelical seminarian/diocesan chaplain employee is currently taking classes.)

According to former seminarians and recently ordained priests...institutions have earned nicknames such as Notre Flame (for Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans) and Theological Closet (for Theological College at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC). St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore has earned the nickname, "The Pink Palace."

Meanwhile, St. Charles Borromeo in Philadelphia, a seminary the diocese of Camden has most often sent seminarians to, is "known to be of a much more conservative mentality" (page 165).

The Rise of "Lay Ministries"

Rose also researched a typical "Lay Pastoral Ministries Program" run by the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. (Note that our own bishop is currently implementing one such program here in our diocese, while at the same time, by slow trickle, removing priests by the dozen to forcible retirement, military chaplaincy, removal to other dioceses, and ostensibly to "study" in Rome.) In the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, a man named Glenn Jeviden was interested in serving the Church and was directed to this Lay Ministries program. The screening process began with an interview conducted by what turned out to be a liberal sister who

asked me several times if I understood the Church was changing, and if I thought I was able to be "flexible enough to accept a pluralistic Church."

The interview was friendly enough but Jividen, though conceding that change is a part of life, asked the sister "if she believed that some truths never changed." She did not answer. He was next asked to write an autobiography, in which he discussed his pro-life activities, involvement with Catholics United for the Faith (CUF), and his devotion to the Church, the Holy Father, and the Blessed Mother, etc. He also had to take the Myers-Briggs personality test (a test based on Jungian psychological types) and was seen by a priest psychologist for other "tests."

During a psychologist visit, following the results of the tests, the conversation turned to CUF, and its alleged inflexible attitudes (read: orthodox) and Jividen's explicitly orthodox positions. The psychologist stated that the pope only had to be abided by when he spoke ex cathedra. It went on from there, you get the idea. Finally the priest psychologist suggested that Jividen would

feel uncomfortable with my CUF friends after entering the Lay Pastoral Ministries Program.

Needless to say, Jividen didn't make the cut and was told to "update" his theology. They suggested he develop his "personal spirituality" and that he see one of their spiritual directors, 22 of the 25 of whom were women.

The Agenda, says Rose?

Rose's point in discussing the lay ministries program is that some see the vocations crisis as "presaging a revolution and the demise of the  hierarchical structure of the Church" (quoting Helen Hull Hitchcock, 1999).

This is the contingent that has long been promoting "lay ecclesial ministry," the laicization of the clergy, and the clericalization of the laity. Simply put, they would like to see the laity take over the leadership of the Church at the parish level and beyond, from teaching and preaching to administering the sacraments. This program would effectively entail eliminating the priesthood rather than just "reenvisioning" it.

Indeed in many places, the lack of priestly vocations (or in our case, the forced scarcity thereof) is embraced as a way to promote a new vocation to "lay ecclesial ministry," that is, non-ordained, paid church professionals. Some bishops, priests, and other diocesan and seminary authorities actually seem to rejoice over decreasing priestly vocations as an opportunity for creating a "new model of Church" in which the laity can "take their rightful place" (quoting Roger Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles).

This philosophy, drawn out by many over the last decade of the 20th century, betrays a peculiar attitude--the priesthood as a barrier to the emergence of the laity in their own dignity and mission (pages 209-211).

The word vibrant, is of course dropped--its use is not new--and the priest shortage is described as a self-fulfilling prophecy. "Where lay ministry is overemphasized, the priesthood becomes devalued" since it is reduced to sacramental ministry, viewed as being on par with "music ministry," "hospitality  ministry," "youth ministry," etc. Priests are mistakenly "defined...by what they do rather than what they are--an alter Christus."

The Vicious Circle

Tell us if this doesn't look familiar to you? The "vicious circle" looks like this:

Catholics in key positions of authority...actively discourage vocations to the priesthood in order to promote lay ministry. Yet at the same time, lay ecclesial ministry  is proposed as the answer to the dearth of priestly vocations, as if this were a permanent and perhaps ideal situation. Parishes run by lay ministers are likely to foster little, if any, interest in vocations to the priesthood. The result is that the number of priests will continue to decline further, necessitating more lay ministers to fill their places (211).

Rose goes on to describe church closures and radical "faith communities" formed in some places:

Priestless "faith communities" over time are likely to become simply congregational communities centered on the reading of the Scriptures, the homily, and on sharing bread and wine--devoid of the act of perfect worship, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass--based on the model of Protestant community.

Continued:

The so-called shortage suits them just fine, precisely because they can use the crisis to justify radical change in the local Church...one run by "lay pastors." This "new model of Church" is not really about solving the priest shortage. It is about advancing their agenda of a politically correct Church.

Potential seminarians will, and do, gravitate toward dioceses and orders "that support the ministry of the priest as defined by the Church." The bishops in such diocese are not "issuing pastoral letters introducing parish 'clusters' or worse. Rose suggests that there are all too many in positions of Church leadership who have a "death with for the male, celibate priesthood."

Nothing New

Friends, what we have going on now in the Camden diocese is nothing new. As we have seen, it has been going on for a couple decades now, it has been perpetrated elsewhere, it has ruined other dioceses, it has discouraged vocations to the priesthood, it has wrought havoc and confusion in the Church. Now this downright un-Catholic plan is being recycled here in South Jersey in order to liberalize the Church by depriving us of the priesthood and even our very churches. Our churches are the places that reflect who we are in God's cosmology, they put us in our rightful place! But Galante, Vollmer, and McGrath would like to replace our churches--and Church--with something altogether different. Make no mistake about it. Bishop Galante even brought along one of the leaders from the Los Angeles Archdiocese--a diocese infamously known as one of the greatest messes with one of the most corrupt bishops in the entire country--"Sister" Marilyn Vollmer, to bring a bit of that mess here. (Of course, they called the program "Gathered and Sent" there, now they're calling it "Gathering God's Gifts" here, so at least they switched up the name a tad.)

Currently we are undergoing a screening process in which the "core groups" at each parish--those who are meant to lead the church mergers--are chosen based on their willingness to close or otherwise undermine their parish and positively participate in the bishop's agenda. Those who don't agree with the closure or status of their church and the direction the Diocese of Camden is headed are quickly weeded out.

Don't fall for the nonsense! Keep the faith. It his a hard thing to keep in a time when church leadership, even some bishops and priests, believe things very different than many of us do, a model of church unlike what we have known and what has been promulgated down the centuries. So continue to pray for Bishop Galante. He needs our prayers. And continue to pray for the holy courage and fortitude of the priests of our diocese and seminarians everywhere.

Notice so many spearheading the movement to save our Faith from immanent destruction are under 50, even under 40. Here's an article that explains why.

Here's a snippet (for more read the entire article below). Catholic leaders are saying that:

"Young people are leaving the Church in droves because of its refusal to conform to the times!" As a young person, I tell you this is rubbish.  It is a smokescreen.  I do not dispute that there are many young, "enlightened" Catholics who have left the Church with these reasons on their lips.  But they are using these reasons as excuses to mask the real problem:  They have either lost their faith or they never really had it.  The need in this case is not for accommodation, but for conversion.  These young Catholics have never been taught that Christianity is not about self-fulfillment, it's about self-denial; it's not about worldly power, it's about humility; it's not about control, it's about obedience; and it's not about some misguided, gender feminist idea of equality, it's about Truth.


I Was Robbed!
by Leila Miller     

I was robbed.

I am a "Generation X" Catholic, raised and catechized in the tumultuous aftermath of Vatican II.  I was a victim of "renewal" and experimentation gone awry, and so were my peers.  With great regret and without exaggeration, I contend that the results have been catastrophic for my generation.  It is my firm belief that the overwhelming majority of young Catholics don't have even an elemental understanding of their Faith.  As a direct result of that ignorance, young Catholics are leaving the Church in a steady stream (or, dare I say, tidal wave?).

It's not entirely accurate to say that I left the Catholic Church (though I considered it), but it's clear to me now that for most of my young adulthood, I was not in the Catholic Church.  Let me give you an overview of my upbringing, which will sound familiar to countless young Catholics.  I was born in the late 1960s into a believing and practicing Catholic family, and my sister and I were taught by our parents to love our Faith.  Barring illness, we attended Sunday Mass and holy days of obligation without exception.  We attended public schools, but we were enrolled in weekly CCD classes at our parish every year.

By the time I began religious education, memorizing the Baltimore Catechism was out, and feeling the "experience of Christ" was in.  My parish priest, I believe, could not have known how the new, more "enlightened" philosophy of catechism would affect the moral development of those in his charge; at the time, he was simply caught up in the so-called "spirit of Vatican II," and was being obedient to what were considered Vatican II "mandates."  Meanwhile, my parents, like the other parents, trusted that religious education classes would teach us the Faith.  Sadly, that never happened.

In general, the volunteer CCD teachers were good-hearted parishioners who probably tried their best with the vacuous material they were given.  Looking back, I can see that a couple of them must have been alarmed at the "new and improved" methods, and wanted to teach us the fundamentals of our Faith; for example, one year a teacher made us memorize the Ten Commandments; another year (9th or 10th grade, I believe) I heard the word transubstantiation for the first and last time.  Aside from these rare moments, I assure you that precious little substantive information was imparted to us youngsters; the countless hours I spent in religious education were missed opportunities.

I can tell you in three phrases the content of a decade of catechesis:  God is good, Jesus loves you, and love your neighbor.  (All very good and true, don't get me wrong, but if you read your Bible you'll see that that's only half the Gospel.  And sometimes half of the truth is more treacherous than an outright lie.)  We were shown a lot of cartoon slide shows depicting Jesus and his parables, and I have nice images of multiplying loaves, the Good Samaritan, and Jesus' empty tomb.  I don't remember anything particularly Catholic about the presentations, aside from a foray into the sacraments when it was time for First Communion or Confirmation.  (But if you'd have asked me to explain what a sacrament was, I couldn't have told you.)

We weren't taught any Catholic prayers, although we all knew the Our Father from Mass attendance, and in my case from nightly prayers.  I learned the Hail Mary along the way, but for many years I knew only the first half.  We never discussed the lives of the saints, or even mentioned their names for that matter.  (Sitting at Mass, I could never figure out who this "Paul" fellow was who wrote so many letters!)

I am thankful at least that I was born before the last vestiges of Catholic tradition could be stamped out, and in the 1970s some of the more pious and beautiful hymns were still often included in the Mass.  Songs like The Church's One Foundation, Immaculate Mary, and At That First Eucharist were powerful to a child, and they have stuck with me to this day.  The dramatic, colorful Bible story books I read at home also presented an unshakable image of a just and mighty God and his glorious and majestic Son.  These haunting melodies and images, combined with my parents' faith and the common themes of my religious education did instill some important truths in my heart:  I never wavered in my belief in God Almighty and in the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of His Son.  Just who or what the Holy Spirit was or did was anybody's guess, although I did recognize that the Holy Spirit was one of the Persons of the Trinity -- whatever that meant.  (I believe this particular bit of knowledge came from the repetition of another traditional hymn, which spoke of "God in three Persons, Blessed Trinity."  Since traditional hymns are no longer sung on a regular basis, I can only surmise that young Catholics today are learning less than I did!)

I went through my school years believing I was a strong Catholic -- in fact, as I got older I would often identify myself as "devout" -- and after my high school graduation I chose to attend a Jesuit university, in part to increase my chances of meeting and marrying a nice Catholic man and raising children in a strong Catholic home.  I made many Catholic friends during my years at Boston College, many of whom were products of Catholic elementary and high schools and most of whom were, like me, practicing Catholics. Just touching on this subject brings up many difficult emotions in me, but it is hard to overstate the tragedy occurring at most Catholic universities across the country -- namely, the betrayal of  parents entrusting a child to a college that identifies itself as "Catholic" while it allows and even encourages fiercely anti-Catholic beliefs and practices to permeate the campus and poison impressionable minds.  I do not know one Catholic who grew in his or her Faith at B.C.  Indeed, many who entered Boston College as practicing Catholics graduated indifferent or hostile to Catholicism.  I assure you that Satan is having a good time at B.C. and universities like it.  Though modern sensibilities may scoff at this notion, I don't mean it metaphorically.

Anyway, to give you an idea what all of those years of religious training and formation amounted to, allow me to throw out a short list of terms that, for my first 28 years, had no meaning to me:

Sacred Tradition	Mass Cards	Scapular
Sanctifying Grace	Benediction	Pentecost
Magisterium	Act of Contrition	Four Marks of the Church
Sacramentals	The "Glory Be"	Joyful/Sorrowful/Glorious Mysteries
Corporal Works of Mercy	Apostolic Succession	Four Last Things
Indulgences	Perpetual Adoration	Spiritual Works of Mercy

In my experience, most Catholics of my generation are unable to explain or even recognize the above.  And to follow are some terms that may sound familiar to my post-Vatican II peers, but that they don't understand correctly and/or believe for a second:

Purgatory	Communion of Saints	Papal Infallibility
Transubstantiation	Mortal and Venial Sin	Immaculate Conception

The attitudes of my Catholic peers are no mystery.  Confession?  Sure, great sacrament -- I'll get there one of these years (wink, wink).  No pre-marital sex?  No artificial contraception?  Yeah right, get real!  Evangelize?  Are you kidding?  Why?  After all, Buddhism, Islam, New Age, Christianity -- they're all equal paths to God.  Who are Catholics to say they have the truth?  A mature spirituality requires the understanding that everyone can be right!

In general, Generation X Catholics don't feel any obligation to live as the Church teaches, and I promise you that they do not fear the fires of Hell, nor do they believe in Purgatory.  (But really, how could they?  They've gone to Mass faithfully for decades and never heard such topics discussed, much less defended!)

The culture we live in is merciless when it comes into contact with a poorly catechized Catholic.  American society today is designed to destroy one's faith, as objective truth and moral absolutes are rejected concepts.  When modern, "enlightened"
catechesis echoes the messages of the culture, and when those charged with informing the Catholic conscience and transmitting the Faith take an "experiential" rather than informative approach, what can you expect?  You can expect exactly what was taught.You can expect young Catholics who believe "conscience" means "opinion" and you can expect subjective feelings and personal experience to supplant objective truth.  In fact, the prevailing philosophy of my peers is that there is no one "truth" -- truth is whatever we want it to be.  You have your truth, I have mine.  (Kind of puts the lie to Christ's definitive statement, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life" doesn't it?  It also doesn't sound like anything worth dying for -- those silly martyrs!)

We reap what we sow, and when pop-psychology all but replaces sound catechesis the results should not surprise anyone.  The practices and beliefs of my circle of Catholic friends tell a sad story.  Pre-marital sex?  Yes, with a series of different partners.  Contraception?  Of course -- it's a virtue.  Living together, a.k.a. living in sin?  It's a non-issue.  (One Catholic friend did go so far as to find a "compassionate" priest who consented to give her absolution before she moved in with a man!)  Active homosexuality?  A lifestyle choice.  Abortion?  Sad, and we don't like it, but it's a woman's private decision -- too bad her partner didn't use a condom.

Most of my Catholic friends attend Mass sporadically or not at all.  Some get their spiritual guidance from gender feminism (which is a fiercely anti-Catholic movement) and/or New Age philosophies. Overall, the Catholic call to holiness is an unfamiliar concept to them, and I do not for a moment attempt to exempt myself from this scrutiny.  Confession is a sacrament that was never emphasized (I made my first Confession at nine years of age while sitting on a priest's lap), and after my first couple of confessions during grade school, I never went back; I shudder when I think of how often I received Holy Communion unworthily.

So how is it that a Catholic who went to Mass every Sunday and went through all the proper catechism programs at her church could continue on unconcerned while carrying several serious sins on her soul?  I do not offer this as an excuse for doing wrong, but you must understand my actions in the context of what I was taught.  My generation of Catholics grew up with a keen understanding of God's infinite love for us.  We knew that His mercy could not be exhausted, no matter how badly we behaved.  But at the same time, we heard almost nothing about God's justice.  That while God is perfectly merciful, He is also perfectly just.  Somehow, that part was lost, or suppressed.  I guess no one wanted to hurt our feelings with Church teaching; for example, that by persisting in serious, unrepented sins, we could damn ourselves to an eternity in Hell.

Jesus said, "Enter through the narrow gate.  The gate that leads to damnation is wide, the road is clear, and many choose to travel it.  But how narrow is the gate that leads to life, how rough the road, and how few there are who find it!" (Matt 7:13-14)  Jesus mentions Hell over a dozen times in the Gospels, but our teachers and priests only presented us with the Jesus of the Beatitudes, or the Jesus who continuously forgave sinners.  We were never reminded that Jesus forgave repentant sinners, those with contrite hearts and the intention to sin no more.

The God presented to American Catholics today is the Rodney Dangerfield of gods:  He gets no respect.  Today, God hardly needs to be worshipped, since He's our buddy, our pal, our equal.  No need to fear Him or stand in awe, no difficult obligations on our part -- we need only feel the warm fuzzies He showers upon us, until we die and He takes us instantly to Heaven.

Such was the image that my generation got of God our Father.  But what would we say of any other father who asks no obedience, forgives every sin unconditionally and automatically, with no requirement for an apology or recompense?  We would call him a wimp, a pushover, a sap, a fool.  Good and loving parents don't reward bad behavior and disobedience.  They set down boundaries that a child, for his own good, must not cross.  Should that child choose to persist in disobedience and wrong-doing, good parents don't expand the boundaries to encompass his bad behavior, they hold firm and hope for his repentance precisely because they desire his happiness and success.  They do not cease to love him, even as they let him experience the consequences of his poor choices.  Such it is with God and sinful man.  He loves us infinitely, but He cannot force us to love and obey Him against our free will.  None of this was explained to post-Vatican II Catholics.

Although many of my peers will leave the Church and Christianity altogether, many will do as I did.  That is, I never once considered forsaking Christianity, nor did I question Christ's divinity (I felt strongly that to deny Christ would be blasphemous and a sacrilege).  But I was guilty of presumption.  I thought that because of my "deep faith" I could continue in one or another mortal sin and God would forgive me, or make an exception on my behalf.  I just knew he would respect my "conscience!"

I never did disagree with the Church's stand on controversial issues such as abortion or homosexuality.  I had even heard, almost by accident, some of the Church's arguments against artificial contraception, and they made sense to me.  I thought the Church was probably right on this issue (how magnanimous of me!), but of course I could never be expected to actually go along with this teaching!  I did plan to learn Natural Family Planning one day, sure, but certainly not now, in my young married years.  After all, God understands.

Though I presumed on God's mercy, I still believed in moral absolutes, and I never went the way of moral relativism; in fact, another young mother and I spent a year and a half writing an editorial column for our state's largest newspaper in which we rejected moral relativism and defended the concept of objective truth.  This friend, Kim, had spent six years as a gender feminist and New Ager, but motherhood combined with writing our column eventually led her back to Christianity and into a local Bible church.              (Read Kim's story here)

Kim had been a lapsed Episcopalian and I was a waning Catholic, so we had never really had religious discussions until then; but because of my strong belief in an objective right and wrong, I was attracted to what she was telling me about the Bible church.  These evangelicals stood firm on moral issues and were not afraid of offending anyone with Christian moral truths.  I couldn't say as much for the Catholic parish I was sporadically attending, where moral courage was sadly lacking and politically correct sermons and liturgies were the norm.  A Church that sought to blend in with the culture was not the kind of religious community I wanted.  I was raising children in a scary society, and I needed support from others who believed as I did and who would be a refuge from the "pagan world."  In my disgust with what American Catholicism had become, I flirted with the idea of leaving it for the Bible church.

Let me back up here and fill in some details.  Shortly after I graduated college, I became engaged to Dean Miller, a nice agnostic Jewish boy (so much for my attempts to find a Catholic husband!).  My identity as a Catholic was strong enough that I had come to this relationship with certain non-negotiables:  I would never get married outside the Church, and any children of mine would be baptized and raised Catholic.  Dean (who, ironically, attended a Catholic high school) respectfully and unselfishly agreed to my conditions, and we were married a year later in a Catholic church by my childhood priest.

Over the next four years, I gave birth to three beautiful babies.  As you might imagine, this provided me with any number of excuses for not going to Mass on Sundays, and almost never on holy days.  Of course, when one does not understand what takes place during the Mass, it is easy to become lax about attending.  During those years, I lived in two major cities and had done a bit of "church-hopping," trying to find a parish I liked.  I became disillusioned by the seemingly endless (and lame) attempts to make the Mass "hip" and entertaining.  All of the hand-holding, applauding, trite songs and political correctness was a monumental turn-off for me.  I felt no reverence, no awe; there was nothing in these Masses to snap me to attention, to take me out of myself and focus my mind and heart up to God in His Heaven.  I wasn't "getting anything out of it."  (Like so many others, I did not fully comprehend that one doesn't go to Mass to "get something out of it" -- one goes to worship God.)  When I did get myself to church, I felt as if I were "putting in my time," mechanically fulfilling an obligation.  I often ducked out right after Communion.

Because I was raised to never miss Mass, I felt guilty for skipping it so often (as well I should have, considering the gravity of the sin!).  I half-teasingly blamed Dean for my not getting to church, but he wouldn't let me get away with such scapegoating.  He and I knew I had no one but myself to blame.  Though my actions were inexcusable, allow me once again to explain my state of mind during these years.  I had grown up in a culture that had, with amazing rapidity and nonchalance, thrown all of the old value systems out the window.  Nothing was sure and eternal anymore, and it had gradually become unacceptable to believe in a right and wrong.  The idea of sin was deemed positively medieval, and  "morality" became a dirty word.  "Getting one's needs met" was the focus of each individual's personal growth, with the question being,  "What's best for me, and what makes me comfortable?"

Of course, Christ's message to the world is exactly the opposite.  We Christians must die to self, take up our crosses in suffering and sacrifice, and do the will of our Heavenly Father.  The Catholic Church in America seemed to me to have forgotten this message, and was all too eager to fit right in with the culture.  Instead of the Church going forth in courage to influence and change the world, the world was influencing the Church.  Worshipping and glorifying God seemed to take a back seat to worshipping and glorifying ourselves.  I knew enough about Christ's message to recognize that a serious gulf existed between what the Pope and the Bible were saying and what American Catholics were hearing.  At some point, the American Church and the world became almost indistinguishable in my eyes.

Case in point:  The only moral challenges given to the faithful from the pulpit were (and are) calls to help the poor, or admonitions against racism and sexism.  But it was obvious to me that every good atheist, pagan or non-believer out there was saying the same thing.  So why bother being a Christian?  Why get out of bed on Sunday morning and go to Mass when I could turn on any news program or TV series and get the same message?  Young Americans generally are sensitive to social justice issues, since we've been immersed in a culture that never ceases to speak out on such things.  To this day, when I hear yet another social justice homily, I want to yell out:  "We get it!  We get it!  But what we never hear about is the need for personal morality!  For repentance!  For conversion!  For holiness!  What we don't understand is our Faith!  Teach us!  Challenge us!  Help us get to Heaven!"  Have too many leaders of the Catholic Church in America forgotten that their mission is to save souls?

The abuses and trials one must endure at Mass today are legendary among the faithful, and it was just such instances which helped fuel my estrangement from the Church.  For example, I have been at Masses where I have been driven to distraction as I read the words of Sacred Scripture in a missalette while the lector read a distorted "inclusive language" version of the same text.  My intelligence has been insulted as I've witnessed the disappearance of words like "brothers" and "men" from both liturgy and song -- apparently the political correctness police have decided that I as a woman am either too stupid or too fragile to understand that such words include me, too.  I have sat through an Easter Mass where the priest donned a bunny suit for a homily/skit, and balloons were tied to the pews.  And I have sat with my mouth hanging open as I heard one priest use that morning's gospel reading to condone homosexuality.  After a while, it didn't seem worth it anymore; I could no longer see the point to attending Mass.  Looking back, it is clear that I had lost respect for the Catholic Church.

Which brings me back to my flirting with the idea of leaving for a Bible church.  I had listened to my friend Kim tell me about the powerful and courageous sermons she heard week after week at her non-denominational church.  The pastor spoke out against the immorality that surrounded Christians today.  He spoke of right and wrong, and he used Sacred Scripture to show his flock the proper way a Christian should conduct himself.  The evangelicals at this church did not pretend to blend into the culture, they were fighting against it, in a loving, Christ-centered way.  They kept their eyes on God.  And the faithful were actually instructed in Christianity!  Kim was attending Sunday services, weekly Bible study, a doctrine class and a Christian parenting class.  She loved it because her soul was being fed, and for the first time she understood what it meant to be a Christian!  What a contrast to what I was experiencing in my Catholic parish.  No wonder a good portion of her church's congregation consisted of ex-Catholics -- young ex-Catholics like me, who were raising families.

Maybe this is a good place to debunk a myth that desperately needs debunking.  One of the classic lines from liberal, dissenting Catholics is this:  "The Church needs to change its outdated teachings and must ordain women, replace the patriarchal language in the liturgy, allow divorce and remarriage, sanction birth control, masturbation, homosexuality, abortion [and so on, ad nauseum].  Young people are leaving the Church in droves because of its refusal to conform to the times!"

As a young person, I tell you this is rubbish.  It is a smokescreen.  I do not dispute that there are many young, "enlightened" Catholics who have left the Church with these reasons on their lips.  But they are using these reasons as excuses to mask the real problem:  They have either lost their faith or they never really had it.  The need in this case is not for accommodation, but for conversion.  These young Catholics have never been taught that Christianity is not about self-fulfillment, it's about self-denial; it's not about worldly power, it's about humility; it's not about control, it's about obedience; and it's not about some misguided, gender feminist idea of equality, it's about Truth.

But for all of the young Catholics who leave the Church because it is not politically correct enough for them, there are equal numbers (mainly those who have begun families) who are leaving for opposite reasons; namely, they feel the Church has become too liberal, too morally lax, too reflective of the secular culture.  These Catholics are filling the pews of fundamentalist and evangelical churches, whose leaders hold fast to Christian morality, and where the Ten Commandments are still understood to be commands, not suggestions.  These young adults are searching for an anchor in a world gone mad.  They are searching for Christ and a high standard of Christian morality, and they don't believe they can find either in the Catholic Church.  (Ironically, by leaving the Catholic Church, they are actually walking away from the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and leaving the faith that holds the highest and most difficult moral code of them all!)

I leaned toward a Bible church because of the moral courage I knew I would find there, because of the pride in Christ Jesus that so permeated the place, and because I would receive instruction in my faith, not an apology for it.  Yet if you ask a liberal, dissenting Catholic why Catholics are leaving the Church, they'll tell you it's because we haven't gone far enough in liberalizing the Faith!  It's as if they're saying, "Let's neutralize Christianity completely, ignore our heritage and traditions, throw out the sacraments, deny the existence of Original Sin, disclaim the divinity of Christ, drain the Faith of any truth or meaning, and then the churches will be bursting at the seams!"  It makes you wonder if the people so hell-bent on liberalizing the Catholic Church are acting out of love for the Faith or acting out of a desire to destroy it.

Nevertheless, by February of 1995, I just wanted out.  I was ready to send out a trial balloon to my mom, to see how she would react to my inclination to leave the Church.  I specifically did not approach my dad first, as I knew he would be heartbroken at the thought; but because my mother was raised a Protestant (she came into the Catholic Church when I was three), I thought she would be easier to talk to.  Mom is a very rational and stoic person, and she is known for giving sound advice.  After I popped the question:  "How would you feel if I left the Church for a Bible church?" she gave me the answer that would change not only my life, but the lives of many others as well.  She said, "Before you leave, you should find out what it is that you're leaving."

She then proceeded to give me some of the reasons she had left Protestantism.  For instance, she said it never made sense to her that Protestants place all their belief in the Bible alone.  The question for her became, which Bible?  There were so many different translations, and everyone had a different view on which version was authoritative.  She was also wary of non-denominational churches in general, and she talked about "the cult of the personality," or the tendency in such churches for the congregation to rally around a well-liked, dynamic pastor who usually had a new and "brilliant" interpretation of Scripture.  He would be the reason that they came, and if that particular pastor left, the congregation would leave with him.

Everything she said made sense to me, and that evening my thoughts of leaving Catholicism were at least neutralized.  The big blow came a couple of weeks later when my mom, in her matter-of-fact way, presented me with a book.  It was the kind of book I had never seen before.  The kind of book I never knew existed.  It was a book of Catholic apologetics.  It was Karl Keating's Catholicism and Fundamentalism .

Some people may roll their eyes in disbelief when I say that I never knew such a book existed.  I don't blame them -- even I cannot believe that it never occurred to me that someone out there might find it necessary, useful, even noble to defend the Faith!  It seems so silly to me now.  How could I have been ready to jump ship to a Bible church without even investigating the doctrinal issues involved?  Why did it never even cross my mind that a Church of 2,000 years might be able to present an argument on her behalf?  Maybe it's because in my lifetime as a Catholic, I had never heard anyone defend the Faith.  No one had ever given me any reasons why Catholics were right, why we had the fullest truth.  The only thing approaching an apologetics argument was my parents' statements that ours was the oldest Christian church.  That we Catholics were here first!  During my childhood and adolescence, I remember being quite proud of that fact.  Too bad no one ever elaborated on that point.

But once that glorious book was placed in my hands, it was all over.  I was excited, amazed, impressed that someone had taken the time to spell out the differences between Protestants and Catholics, not mechanically and neutrally, but passionately and full of love for the Catholic Faith!  And Mr. Keating used the Bible itself to illustrate the truth of Catholic doctrine!  It only took reading a few pages of this wonderful book to not only keep me Catholic, but to set me on a path of knowledge that has led my soul to burn for the Faith.  Sound dramatic?  It is!  Thanks to two years of study and the grace of God, I have found treasures that I never dreamed possible in this world, and yet I have come to understand that I have only dipped my little toe into the vast and glorious ocean that is Catholicism.

Over the next several months, my friend Kim and I engaged in a series of friendly, but extremely intense, theological debates. We went back and forth about issues such as Papal authority, the Real Presence, Mary, sanctification of the soul, and the implications of the Inquisition.  We gave special attention to the two doctrines that separate Protestants and Catholics:  sola scriptura (the Reformers' belief that the Bible is a Christian's only authority) and sola fide (the Reformers' belief that we are saved by our faith alone).  At times it was like the blind leading the blind, but I used the best arguments for Catholicism I knew at the time, and Kim got a hold of the best apologetics that Protestantism had to offer.

The phone calls were intense, and they would leave us physically and emotionally drained.  A couple of our conversations lasted seven hours!  After about six months of this mini replay of the Reformation, we hit what we call "the brick wall" and we agreed it was time to stop talking about theology for awhile, as we were frustrated and getting nowhere.

Meanwhile, my husband Dean was being sucked into all this "God talk" whether he wanted to or not (I was so excited about what I was learning that I discussed it with him when he let me).  Together, Kim and I had "discovered" the Old Testament prophesies which so clearly vindicate Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah, and I excitedly pointed out these passages to my dear Jewish husband.  I'll never forget the almost panicked look in Dean's eyes when he reluctantly admitted one night that it appeared Jesus might actually be the Son of God.

In their own journeys to faith, both Dean and Kim had one overriding principle:  They were searching for objective truth.  They didn't make their faith decisions based on their own opinions or what "felt right."  They weren't looking for what was comfortable, they were looking for what was true.  And of course that's what God asks of each of us.  Just as the Savior took up His Cross, we are each expected to take up our own, following in the footsteps of Truth Himself, even if it costs us our comfort, our security, even our very lives.

In Kim's quest for Truth at all costs, she kept praying and studying, even after we hit our "brick wall."  She gave the Catholics one last chance to prove themselves by reading Patrick Madrid's now legendary book, Surprised By Truth , in which eleven converts -- many of them Protestant ministers -- give their reasons for becoming Catholic.  In three nights (she calls them the darkest nights of her life), she was shown the Biblical and historical truth of Catholicism.  Six months later, at great personal cost but with great joy, Kim did what was previously inconceivable to her:  She received the Sacraments of the Church, and is now a devout Catholic.  Within a year, and after an initial reluctance, her husband announced his own intention to convert.  And with great rejoicing and all gratitude to God, I can report my husband Dean's profound conversion as well.  (Yep, I got a Catholic husband after all, and a devout one at that!)

Some other fruits of my "conversion"?  I have returned to confession after more than fifteen years, and I now reap the graces of that wonderful, previously unknown sacrament.  Mass, which I once avoided, is now an other-worldly experience for me.  Contraception?  Gone, with great benefit to my marriage.  I continue to uncover the treasures of Christ's Church, and Kim and I now teach the Faith to others.  I guess you could say that in Catholicism I've found the secret of the universe, and nothing can compare to its majesty.

Which brings me back to a sadness.  How easily I could have lost it all!  How easily my friends and contemporaries have lost or could lose a Faith they never really understood.  Feel-good, inoffensive, nebulous psycho-babble catechesis doesn't provide an even minimal foundation of faith, and a faith built on such a weak and erroneous foundation could not withstand even the smallest challenge.  For proof of this, note that fundamentalist Christians have successfully pulled millions of Catholics out of the Church just by quoting a few Bible verses out of their proper context.  And at the other end of the spectrum, feminists and New Agers lure Generation Xers out of Catholicism simply by loudly and repeatedly applying snide labels to the Church, such as "patriarchal," "oppressive," "reactionary," "judgmental," "irrelevant," etc.  A poorly catechized Catholic is virtually helpless against these tactics.

So, just what did I learn on my own that I never learned in religious ed.?  Almost everything, but here are some of the biggies that shocked me:  I learned that after Christ's ascension into Heaven, He did not leave us floating out here alone on Earth with just a book to try to interpret individually until He comes again (and since the vast majority of humanity was and is illiterate, why would He?).  I learned that the Catholic Church is the one Church explicitly founded by Jesus Christ on the rock of Peter, the first pope, and that the Bible is a product of the Catholic Church (and thus subject to her interpretation).  I learned that as Christ promised, the Holy Spirit has been protecting and guiding the successors to Peter and the Apostles for all these 20 centuries.  I learned that, because of this promised guidance, the teaching authority of the Church cannot err when speaking on issues of faith and morals; the Church does not, has not and will not change such teachings because she cannot!  The deposit of faith has remained pure and intact since public revelation ended with the death of St. John, the last Apostle.  I learned that the Church has always rightly claimed to be the protector of Christ's Truth, with the authority to proclaim, explain and apply that revealed Truth to the world.  I learned that submission to Church teaching is submission to Christ.

I learned that the crown jewel of Christianity, the Eucharist, is clearly evident in the New Testament, and that it was brilliantly prefigured in the Old Testament by many different writers, thousands of years prior to Christ's institution of that sacrament.  It's no wonder, then, that the earliest Christians and all of the Church Fathers were staunch believers in the Real Presence, and were thoroughly Catholic in the rest of their doctrine.  The writings of the Fathers would stun any Protestant, and most Catholics as well!  I learned that the seven sacraments of the Church were explicitly instituted by Christ and are the direct channels of God's grace into our souls, the surest links between Heaven and Earth.  I learned that God did not make it difficult for man to find the Truth, provided that man seek the Truth.

The thing that shocked me most of all?  Everything I mentioned above can be proven biblically, historically, and through an exercise of reason.  Catholicism is not a religion of blind faith.  Kim and I have played devil's advocate for every controversial claim or issue regarding the Church, and the Church has won every time -- in fact, the Church's case gets stronger and more exquisitely beautiful every time it's tested!  Yet young Catholics were never told any of this.

As I said at the beginning:  I was robbed and my peers were robbed.  The loss is incalculable, as how do you count the cost of even a single lost soul?  As for blame, well, there's enough blame to go around, and I am fully aware of my own culpability in all of this.  I could have asked more questions, and I could have sought to do God's will as best I understood it, but in many cases I did not.  I have had long discussions with my parents, and they have willingly accepted their share of the blame as well.  But if I were giving a prize for biggest subverters of the Faith, it would have to go to liberal, dissenting Catholics, especially those in positions of power within the Church, be they theologians, bishops or catechetical directors.  They have witnessed an entire generation raised up in complete ignorance of the Faith as a result of catechetical failure, they see wide-scale rebellion and disdain for Church teaching and authority, and yet they still push to further liberalize the Church, pushing more and more people out of the Light and into darkness.

When I hear of dissident movements such as Call To Action and We Are Church, and when certain bishops, priests and sisters support and even lead these causes, I am indignant.  While these so-called "progressive" Catholics work to undermine the Faith and  fall all over themselves apologizing for the teachings of Holy Mother Church, I just wonder when any of them is going to apologize to me?  Or to my contemporaries?  When will they apologize for putting a  generation of souls in jeopardy?

Maybe they should be reminded of the Second Epistle of St. John, verses 9-11:  "Anyone who is so 'progressive' that he does not remain rooted in the teaching of Christ does not possess God, while anyone who remains rooted in the teaching possesses both the Father and the Son.  If anyone comes to you who does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house; do not even greet him, for whoever greets him shares in the evil he does."

Or how about St. Paul writing to the Galatians (1:8-9):  "For even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel not in accord with the one we delivered to you, let a curse be upon him!  I repeat what I have just said:  If anyone preaches a gospel to you other than the one you received, let a curse be upon him!"

Here are Jesus' words on the subject:  "Whosoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea" (Matt. 18:6)

Catholics -- be they priests, bishops, religious, theologians or laymen -- who do not profess loyalty to the Holy Father and the Magisterium should have the integrity to identify themselves as Protestants, for that is what they are, i.e. they exist in a state of protest against the Roman Catholic Church.  And those influential Catholics who have so obviously lost their faith have no business teaching or influencing the next generation.

I am not so naive or despairing to believe that even wide-scale apostasy among American Catholics at every level will destroy the Church.  We know from Christ Himself  that the gates of Hell shall never prevail against His Bride.  So even though we needn't be concerned with the Church's survival, we should all concern ourselves with the Church's primary mission on earth: the salvation of souls.  Too many souls have been allowed to slip out of the Church due to catechetical neglect, and it's time to stem the tide.

Perhaps the first step in reversing this trend is to throw ourselves at the mercy of God, begging forgiveness for the mess we've made in His Church and His world.  Second, we must pray for the conversion of those within our Church who seek to undermine the very Faith they claim to profess.  Third, each Catholic must take it upon himself to learn the Faith, and then commit himself to a life of proclaiming the Truth to others -- this is the "new evangelization" by the laity advocated by His Holiness Pope John Paul II.

Finally, I humbly propose a Catholics' Bill of Rights, to be handed out to every new Christian along with his baptismal candle.  Maybe it could go something like this:

You have a right to your Catholic heritage.  You have the right to hear the Truth, the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth.  You have the right to have the Faith of the Apostles transmitted to you unfiltered and undefiled.  You have the right to be catechized by an instructor who must first be required to profess his loyalty and obedience to Rome, and who humbly submits to all the teachings of Christ through His Church.  Anything less is not only nonsensical but scandalous, and might lead you away from the truth of the Church.  You have the right to expect Catholic orthodoxy in all Catholic classrooms and institutions, and you have the most blessed and merciful right never to hear radical feminism or pantheism taught as if it had anything remotely to do with Catholicism.  You have the right to remain Catholic.  If you give up that right, it will be your free will choice and not the result of poor or scandalous catechesis.  (In other words, you have the right to know what you're leaving before you leave it.)  And finally, you have the right to be indignant if you look back 28 years from now and realize that most of these rights have been denied you.

Praise God, my joy at having found the Faith is greater than my righteous anger at those who had a hand in keeping it from me for so long.  I know that I cherish my faith so dearly precisely because I almost lost it.  I know that God's ways are not man's ways, and I am forever grateful that He chose this way to lead me back home.  I only pray that He might somehow lead my contemporaries back home as well.


Leila and her husband have five beautiful children.
You may send her email at this address.
Leila@lisaslighthouse.org