Strategies for Returning to the [Catholic] Church

Our world is a fallen world. The effects of sin seem to be suffocating us. The diabolical is running rampant, unleashed, playing with immortal souls as if puppets on a string. Pride continues to dominate; repentance for anything is deemed archaic, of little use to today’s enlightened thinking.

Certainly this is not the positive language one wants to hear at the outset of a new year, when expectations and resolutions are running high. But all is not really so dire: the diabolical and pervasive sin has not crushed the divine light. “My Immaculate Heart will triumph,” promises the Lady of Fatima. There is a reason the Church opens a new year honoring the Mother of God: obedience to accepting one’s mission in life is the most daunting — and exciting — prospect we face on this earth. We have a guidebook in how to do it through Mary’s fiat.

Perhaps over holiday festivities and the euphoria — and stress — of families coming together, some readers might have encountered resistance from relatives regarding the graces offered in entering the mystery of faith during this holy season. Whether it was avoidance from some in either attending Christmas Mass or praying before a Christmas dinner, such discomforts surely existed. While certainly everyone is different, with their own freedom and right to privacy, perhaps there are some of you readers whose own children—raised in the Catholic faith you so diligently sought to instill in them — want nothing to do with it anymore. It is to this element I wish to address.

In my own experience, generally speaking, I have found degrees of toleration from lapsed or non-Catholics regarding matters of the faith — they know the Catholic Church continues to play an enormous part in global affairs while recalling their own experiences either through schooling or parish life. I have found that while the pervading motif of the millennial generation is a general shunning towards organized religion and regular church attendance, there yet remains a desire for an experience of the transcendent. And that desire is the silver lining.

Unfortunately, committed Catholics are not always quite the fearless galvanized evangelizers that each one is called to be. Marveling that St. Francis de Sales converted 40,000 is usually met with a shrug: “Well, that’s why he’s a saint.” But that’s the precisely the mentality that needs to change.

A Jesuit once posed in a homily, “Listen to conversations. How long does it take before God is ever mentioned?” Out of not wanting to create controversy, God is never mentioned. When he is, or when the Church is mentioned, Catholics are immediately put on the defensive. We can stay silent, letting the Uber driver, for example, have his say about the occultish practice of Catholics (as I experienced recently), or we can defend Holy Mother Church, as we would defend our own mother, and begin a conversation. The faith is not part of the pie of life. It is the pie.

I have come to believe that, in this era, accommodation will not work. Appeasing the culture may seem like a conciliatory gesture, but those on the opposite side most probably will not respect such compromise—even if they do not agree with the position in question. In reading Paul Kengor’s new book, A Pope and a President, on President Reagan and Pope St. John Paul II’s battles against communism, the consistency in the Church’s long running condemnation of communism as far back as Pius IX is impressive. The Church may have apologized for grievous actions throughout its long history, but it has never apologized for being magnificent.

So, how to engage your lapsed love one on returning to the Church? After all, that is our sole duty—to grow into our authentic selves, made in the image of God, and safeguard our immortal souls and those of others towards eternal life. Remembering we can only extend an invitation, a proposal, respecting the freedom of others, here are some strategies:

I: Know Thyself

Be yourself a model of virtue.

Live the Gospel, avoiding hypocrisy, condemnation of others, descent into pettiness. If you consider yourself a Catholic first and desire others to feel that same zeal, your example is the best model. Just like Mary.

Avoid “preaching.”

Respectfully engage in conversation in whatever topic arises. Listen to the other person. Avoid shouting or screaming. Do not let a discussion become an argument or a fight. But know the teachings rather than relying on your own emotions in the heat of the moment.

Pray constantly (1 Thessalonians 5:16).

Read Scripture daily, particularly the Gospels, alone or with family. Have the Catechism handy. Always be reading a spiritual work. Your own edification will inevitably seep into your own worldview. Petition the Trinity for guidance. Ask saints for intercession. Call on the Blessed Mother multiple times a day.

Know your own spiritual story.

What were the integral moments for you in your faith formation? Where did God reveal Himself? Write your own spiritual autobiography in a way that you find creative and inspiring. “Know thyself” is not just an ancient Greek saying. It’s vital to one’s own development.

“Pray the Mass,” as St. Pius X instructs.

Throw your fears and pains onto the altar. Bow your head at the Consecration; respect the Real Presence of Jesus Christ.

II: Extend an Invitation

Know the story of your lapsed child or loved one.

“Communication is simply mutual understanding,” says Stephen R. Covey. You have to care about who they are, where they’ve been, and where they want to go — while you are called to evangelize, you cannot treat them as an agenda, a project. In this way, study Ignatian spirituality for insight on the discernment of spirits. You are always an unofficial spiritual director to someone!

Find common ground.

There are many launching points one can meet due to the richness of the Catholic faith. Unfortunately, many lapsed Catholics have a distorted or misinformed view of the faith, just as many in the Protestant and evangelical world have a Reformation-era concept of the papacy. Much time may be spent on clearing the cobwebs on the reality of the Catholic Church today. Yes, corruption and scandal and atrocities have weakened the moral authority of the Church. But there is a difference between human failings and the Church as founded by Christ handed to Saint Peter (Matthew 16:18). That needs to be made clear. (See Joseph Ratzinger, “Why I Am Still in the Church.”)

Nurture their interests.

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Luke 12:34). Getting to know your loved one authentically and establishing common ground will offer new avenues of appreciation. Are they artists, musicians, poets, writers? Michelangelo, Gaudi, chant, or the great classics of literature offer beautiful immersive experiences in the Catholic worldview.

Pope Francis has been an inspiration for those of any background, through his environment work, Laudato Si, or his call for activism towards migrants, refugees, the disenfranchised.

Connect them with possibly like minded individuals who might continue the conversation, depending on their interests: educators, bioethicists, Father Spitzer’s Magis Institute on science, faith, and reason. Historical subjects on the veracity of Jesus: the Shroud of Turin, for example (see Ian Wilson’s The Shroud, among others).

Give your lapsed child or loved one Matthew Kelly’s Rediscover Catholicism or a similar book that perhaps impacted you. Rediscover appeals to the mainstream, ringing distant bells they would have remembered growing up Catholic. In many ways, that book is an appetizer to what awaits.

Bottom line: communicate the resources provided by so many apostolates—there is something for everyone. Many of those actively engaged in the mission of salvation, the mission of the Church, were once lapsed themselves. Just ask St. Augustine, Dorothy Day, or many great evangelizers in our day and age.

Invite your lapsed child or loved one to Confession.

It’s a challenging invitation. But you’ve at least put it out there. At the same time, do not let the graces of Confession become distorted. While one receives absolution, authentic penance comes when one’s life is turned around. So often the thought is that a few “Hail Marys” and “Our Fathers” is all the Church demands for conciliation. Actually, one must authentically set out determined to begin anew, a new person, transformed. Vinny Flynn’s 7 Secrets of Confession is a powerful little book for guidance.

Extend an invitation to Mass.

Bring an extra copy of Magnificat or a book with daily readings and give your loved one a copy. Sit up close. And then pray the Mass. Together.

**Give your loved one Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth.**

Along with the timelessness of the Scriptures themselves, this trilogy is written for people of our time to rediscover Christ. It is some of the most staggering spiritual reading you will encounter.

III: Going Forward

Three very simple, practical steps:

1.) Offer help in introducing your loved one to parish resources in their diocese, again contingent on their own discernment of spirits, perhaps even establishing a regular meeting with a spiritual director.
2.) In a quiet moment, offer to pray with them, calling specifically on the Holy Family for guidance.
3.) Finally, ask them to pray for you.

Happy New Year!

. . ..... I believe Jesus called Simon Cephas because that is what the Bible says.

I know you are sincere, but I believe you are self-misguided by your own assessment of the extent of the abilities and motives of others who try to improve your outlook. Let me give you one project for your own edification:

Find any verse in the New Testament where Jesus, addressing Simon directly and personally, used the name "Cephas" to get his attention.

(Keep in mind that in John 1:42, Jesus told Simon that he would be called "Cephas." That is a prediction that others might call him "Cephas" or equivalently "Peter," but Jesus did not say that He would address him as "Cephas" in Aramaic or "Peter" when He was speaking in the Greek.)

==========

As I have already tried to explain to you the Bible is of God, don’t you think he knew how to translate it?

God did give the Holy Writings initially in the original languages through he agency of various humans who were guided by the Holy Spirit to produce the inspired, inerrant, complete messages in the particular language that progressively revealed Him and His Will more and more to humankind. The languages used were exclusively Hebrew and the cognate Aramaic tongue for the canon of the Old Testament, and the commonly used Koine Greek of the time of writing of the New Testament.

But God did not even make copies of these original discrete messages, though He guided men to preserve the messages through carefully supervised professional copyists. The Jews were best at this in preserving the books of the Old Testament by hand-copying. Archaeology has confirmed that fact. However, some of the Christianized Gentiles were not so careful nor fearful of God's displeasure of adding to, subtracting from, or altering those copies, so we now have to decide which actual copies of New Testament books got deliberately manipulated or inadvertently mis-copied. The scholars engaged in textual criticism have been laboring on that for a long time, and that effort is worthy of your attention.

But, contrary to your ill-advised opinion, God did not translate the message(s) contained in the language original written documents into any other human language. That has been done solely by error-prone humans, however sincere and dedicated in motivation they have been, some with a view toward the profitability of their copyrights. And no translation is completely free of error in putting the Spirit-inspired words of one language into the common words of another human language, impossible to achieve perfectly.

An even harder task than simply translating has been to try to capture the sense of what was in the mind of the God-guided original Scripture-writer of an ancient time and culture, into the mind of a Twenty-First human whose life experiences and inclinations are quite different. That task of scientific artistry is called interpretation, the terminology being "hermeneutics" (taken from the Greek verb used in John 1:42) as follows: Strong's Number G2059

ἑρμηνεύω
hermēneuō
her-mayn-yoo'-oh

Strong's Definition
From a presumed derivative of G2060 (as the god of language); to translate: - interpret.

Thayer's Definition:
1) to explain in words, expound
2) to interpret
. 2a) to translate what has been spoken or written in a foreign tongue into the vernacular
Part of Speech: verb
=======

It is true that, wih a decent education and grasp of the English written Word, one ought to be able to come to a sufficient knowledge of The Faith of Christ to be saved, and one's feet be placed on the path of learning more and more, but the grasp of the doctrine will not be that of a scholar whose life is consecrated to knowing The Go more intimately so that he can help others along that path where the light of The Spirit grows brighter and brighter.

This is the intent of those here on FR, and of spiritually mature men in local assemblies, who want you to advance. Are you willing to give them a break?

Remembering that no one in this life perfectly understands all of God's Will, but some have a far greater grasp than novices, for you to have the thoughts expressed so far in the comments and replies on this thread indicates that you could profit therewith. Even in the Post #431 demonstrates that in some key areas your assumptions are defective, and that you will be hurting yourself to continue to hold those opinions.

Rendered with respect . . .

According to Aquinas, sin is, “an utterance, a deed, or a desire contrary to the eternal law.”[2] Sin occurs when we disobey divine commands that are rooted in God’s perfectly good, perfectly eternal, and perfectly unchanging nature. God by definition cannot sin because he is perfect goodness itself. It would be a logical contradiction for God to violate his perfectly good and perfectly rational nature.

So if it is impossible for God to sin, then it was impossible for Jesus to sin because Jesus is God. The Council of Chalcedon declared that,

“Following the holy Fathers, we unanimously teach and confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, composed of rational soul and body; consubstantial with the Father as to his divinity and consubstantial with us as to his humanity; “like us in all things but sin.”[3]

As the Blessed Mother was granted the graces by God to be conceived without sin, Jesus as stated above could not sin or inherit sin through His Mother.

Your comment: “If you’d pay more attention to what God told us in his scriptures instead of listening to the propaganda from the Catholic religion you’d know that Jesus had to have at least one parent who was a sinner like the rest of us...’

Just your personal erroneous opinion, perhaps you should listen to the Catholic Church that Jesus founded for your salvation instead of man-made religious doctrines that disagree with the teachings of Jesus and the Bible.

In John 5:43, Jesus declared:

I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me; if another comes in his own name, him you will receive.

But make no mistake about it: What Jesus was saying in John 5:43 is this: He comes “in the name of the Father,” which means he speaks with the final and infallible authority of his Father. He leaves no back door open. No wiggle room. If you reject him, or his teaching, you reject the Father! That is the kind of authority Jesus is revealed to have received from his Father in Scripture.

What I find fascinating in speaking with non-Catholics about this is almost all of them agree with a Catholic understanding here when it comes to the authority of Jesus. But here is what they almost universally miss: Just about every time the New Testament reveals the radical nature of Christ’s authority, you will find in close proximity Christ then giving a similar authority to the Church.

Matt. 28:18-20:

… All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age (the implication is go with my authority).

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/how-can-the-church-teach-angels

May you seek God’s Truth and see through the false promises of man.

You are mistaken . . .

Hahahahahahahahaha, oh! Haaah! nnnnhahahahaheeee! oh, my . . . haha ah hahmmahggggahhmmmmm. Hm. Ah, well, ah, you've been corrected well and truly, for instances by myself in Post #158 and by Mark17 in Post #161:

Mark17: Let me take a little bit of a stab at this. I think Imardmd1 is saying there are two different Greek words Petros and Petra. Peter’s name meant a small stone. The ROCK Jesus talked about building the church in, meant a huge rock, like the Rock of Gibraltar.

. . . such that here and in other exchanges in this thread your assumptions are pretty largely discredited, and not worthy of further processing unless you back up and admit your lack of the communication skills and both scholarship and spiritual training necessary to illuminate critical nuances of the Biblical languages and how they work.

Even setting that aside, apparently you have not done the homework I asked from you to show that in the dialogue, Jesus is only recorded as addressing "Peter" with his proper name "Simon" or "Simon bar Jona" (to distinguish him from other "Simon"s who might be in the vicinity and listening, or for Bible students in later years comparing the gospel records).

Yes, other fellow disciples and Bible writers did denominate this fisher-of-men "Peter" (English transliteration); Paul five times in Galatians only, where he also used the equivalent "Cephas" once in chapter two verse nine after using "Peter" the verse before. Otherwise, Paul only used "Cephas" four times in writing to the Corinthians, where some of the assembly were ex-synagogue constituents, and would understand both the Aramaic word "Cephas" as being "Peter" in the Greek, having the same mental image as we English-speakers of today would think of a worn-down broken-off piece of a weathered outcrop, a "petros" in Greek or a "stone" in descriptive English--not a "rock" in English or "petra" in Greek.

Here's the crux:

"Cephas" written in the English and Latin alphabets, and כּף in the Aramaic alphabet, and transliterated to Κηφᾶς in the Greek alphabet, is interpretively translated as Πέτρος in the Koine Greek language penned by the Holy Spirit in the precisely, infallibly, and inerrantly guided mind and hand of he Beloved Apostle John, and defined in a Greek-English lexicon as "Stone" in English; not סלע written in Hebrew (see Psalms 31:3 and 71:3), (pronounced sela = seh'-lah), from an unused root meaning to be lofty; a craggy rock, literally or figuratively (a fortress), which translated by the Holy Spirit guiding the minds and hands of both Paul (1 Cor. 10:4 TR) and Peter (1 Pet. 2:8 TR) is πετρα, and interpreted in a Greek-English lexicon/dictionary is "rock" having the meaning of a cliff, ledge, outcropping of stone. But even Thayer fails when he refers to πετρα as "metaphorically a man like a rock, by reason of his firmness and strength of soul" thus mixing his metaphors and confusing his readers, for a careful search of the Scriptures only reveals this as symbolically a quality of The God Alone, not of men or mankind (excepting the Lord Jesus Christ).

So your impression that:

". . . often Jesus called Simons rock, . . ."

is not correct. The Holy Spirit Himself teaches us that Jesus assigned the nickname "Peter," meaning in English "stone," not "rock" lest we get confused by assigning the same level of faith and action to Peter, which only belong to The Christ, the Son of the Living God. In other words, I feel that in the Matthew 16 passage, Jesus was strongly announcing the sense that "Peter, you are (a) stone, but I, yes I, am The Rock," thus confirming Old Testament prophecies of Him in Moses and all the prophets, speaking to fools and slow of heart to believe.

When you say:

But I think you will understand more as you get older, a kid gets through high school and thinks he knows it all but just hang in there.

I can barely keep myself from rolling in laughter at your naivety. But thanks for your confidence in me < /sarc >. My opinion is that you have tripped on these Biblical terms which are to you a

". . . stone^{λιθος (lithos)} of stumbling, and a rock^{πετρα (petra)} of offence, even to them which stumble at the word, being disobedient: whereunto also they were appointed" (1 Pet. 2:9 AV)

"A Mighty Fortress^πετρα is our God, a bulwark never failing"

Πέτρος failed many times; Πέτρa never.

May you seek God’s Truth and see through the false promises of man.

And then you quote who??? A man...

So if it is impossible for God to sin, then it was impossible for Jesus to sin because Jesus is God. The Council of Chalcedon declared that,

Again, you're following flawed men and not God...

So it may seem illogical to your group but God doesn't concern himself with the logic of sinful men...

Jas 1:13 Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man:

Clear enough...Don't need a Catholic interpretation to muddle that one up...But Aquinas and your councils seemed to have missed a very important fact...While Jesus is God, he also was a man...

Jas 1:14 But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.
Jas 1:15 Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.

Did Jesus ever lust after anything??? Obviously so...Otherwise he couldn't have been tempted...if Jesus didn't take a second look at a pretty, voluptuous Jewish girl, or his mouth didn't water when he saw someone eating a grilled, medium rare rib steak, then he was never tempted...But what does ~~Aquinas, or any other Catholic priest~~ Jesus himself say about it???

Heb_4:15 For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.

God can't be tempted yet Jesus was tempted in all points, and capable of sin as we are...If Jesus wasn't capable of sin, he then wasn't tempted...

Again, it was impossible for God to be tempted, but Jesus was tempted constantly...So how does that fit into your Catholic narrative...

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Strategies for Returning to the Church