Catholics Come Home

AND  ALSO   from comment 47 found  //www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/05/two-questions-about-marriage-and-the-civil-law/#comment-39660

on evangelizing Catholics:

The question is part of a broader question: how do we help others to attain the mind of Christ? The first step is in-house. Many Catholics do not know their faith, and are not spiritually and intellectually formed by the Catholic philosophical tradition, the Catholic moral tradition, the Catholic social tradition or the Catholic theological tradition. Rather, though they believe and recite the Creed, their philosophical/moral outlook is largely shaped by the values of the secular culture. The mind of Christ is something revealed to the world not primarily in individuals as individuals, but in the Church as a community, as a people. Right now in many places the quality of Catholic catechesis is appalling and shameful. As a result, the mind of Christ is virtually invisible to the world around us, because we are not being the salt of the world. Poorly catechized Catholics think very much like the world, and do not even know that in many ways their thought is contrary to natural law, to the mind of Christ and to the teaching of the Church. They acquire their values not from Scripture and Tradition, but from Hollywood and pop culture. This is a problem that has to be addressed both by the bishops and by the Catholic faithful who do know the teaching of the Church. As a people we cannot give what we do not have; on the other hand, those who have the mind of Christ never need to be compelled to evangelize, because evangelism is at the center of Christ’s heart. The key to evangelism is not techniques or technology, but union with Christ, acquiring His heart and mind. Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. It is true, of course, that we are to be in the world and not of the world. But in order not to be of the world, there are certain respects in which we cannot be in the world. Otherwise, we end up like Lot and his family, unaware of how much we have come to have the mind of the world rather than the mind of Christ. And the sort of separation and “come out from among them” required is greater, the more evil a culture becomes. The communal life of Catholics informed by Scripture and Tradition is a *very* different way of life from that of the world, because its values are very different. That communal life, informed by Catholic values, needs to be recovered. The government (in the US) has begun to treat the Catholic faith as something that is expressed only on Sundays and only within a church building because that’s how many Catholics express their faith, as if they were not members of two communities (see the quotation from Cardinal Burke in the article above), but only one, with one shared way of life and a common set of values. But that has to change, and is slowly changing, as the values of our culture diverge more widely from those of Christ and His Church. Catholics in every parish, under the leadership of their bishops, need to rediscover the communal dimension of the way of life informed by the mind of Christ, distinct from the city of man. Only through the communal expression and embodiment of the mind of Christ is the Catholic faith successfully handed down to future generations, and made a light to the world.