My wife is part of the marketing team for a technical services firm. While most of her firm's technically trained, professionally licensed coworkers are greatly appreciative of the magic she and her teammates weave as they make the bare-bones technical drafts sound interesting and appealing to the average person, there are always hold-outs who insist, “This is how I want it to read, my clients will understand what I’m talking about."
Often the marketing writers, each in their own time, will find themselves in the position of having to practice the gentle art of persuasion to enlighten one of these coworkers to the benefits of understanding their readers’ points of view. Sometimes, the conversation is short. Sometimes, the conversation takes on elements of a tag-team debate, and sometimes, when the writers have reached that point of exhaustion when throwing in the towel seems the only sensible course of action, my wife reminds them, “Part of our job is to save them from themselves.”
To me, it's logical that the first step be the same as approaching any friend or acquaintance who quits a situation, from leaving college, to changing jobs, to breaking off any kind of relationship. First, we must ask a simple question: "Why?"
What happened?
There are innumerable surveys available online, some going back as far as 1969, all asking this same simple question:Why are Catholics leaving the Church?
I've viewed several of these, including the most recent I found published at America Magazine online. Of course, there are many interpetations of these surveys, but an underlying theme in the survey responses seems to be personal dissatisfaction with what ex/lax Catholics seem to think of as "services" they expect to obtain from the Church, as if the Church is a restaurant or a dinner theater.
In all fairness, there is many a parish that presents the Mass in a manner that has more in common with a dinner theater than with the Sacrifice of Calvary, so it's understandable why so many demand to be entertained at Mass. I can also understand why they have this sense of entitlement: it's been this way for nearly fifty years.
As I read through a summary of suggestions and objections from the most recent survey, I can only hope that every faithful Catholic, laity, deacon, and priest, realizes that, when it comes to desires and complaints of ex/lax Catholics and changes that their return to the fold seem to hinge upon, "Our job is to save them from themselves."
The Mass must be re-proposed to this group. They must be afforded access to a clear presentation of the "law of prayer" to know the "law of belief." This can only be done by revitalizing the liturgy by removing distractions, re-directing the orientation away from the community, and by affording the laity a sense of the sacred in Holy Silence and in the manner in which the Sacrifice is offered.
Additionally, much as my wife and her marketing teammates seek to distinguish their firm from their competitors, the Catholic Church must put behind that form of ecumenism which promotes "sameness" and, instead, clearly present that which distinguishes it, namely, the Real Presence and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the Sacrament of Penance, and the priesthood. The Catholic Church must clearly present requirements of the true church, a people united in the "profession of the same faith, the use of the same means of grace, and (in) subordination to the same authority." ( Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, Dr. Ludwig Ott, p. 301).
At the parish level, worship should be offered in a manner which confirms and nurtures faith in the invisible side of the Church: "...the inner sanctification of mankind...the gifts of Salvation, which the Church communicates, truth and grace...the inner life-principle of the Church, the Holy Ghost, and the operation of His grace...." (Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, Dr. Ludwig Ott, p. 302)
All these things can be clearly recognized through the manner of worship. All these things must be made clear to provide this wandering group with the understanding that there's really only one path home: the Catholic Church.
