I've read several studies that offer suggestions for converting fallen-away or lax Catholics back to the Church. Usually the studies propose questions asking why they left. The answers are tallied up and presented as a kind of "to-do" list: This is how we fix the Catholic Church.
Just plug in this list, provide for all the personal preferences, and...
...it's fixed!
Except it's not, because this approach gets it all backwards.
When I was in the process of instruction during my conversion to the Catholic Church, a couple of people I knew approached me saying things like, "Well, I know a guy who was a priest back in the '70's, and he says (the reasons he left the Church and became a Baptist/Lutheran/atheist)." Or, "I grew up Catholic, and by the time I was 14, I decided that it was all (their adolescent opinion on their parish church)." Or, (my personal favorite), "I grew up Catholic and went to Catholic school and you probably won't live long enough to go to as many Masses as I have, and it never did a thing for me!"
Finally, I told my friends I wasn't interested in hearing or embracing the opinions of someone who hated what I loved or who failed at what I was attempting to become. I summed it up by saying, "If I want to find out what it's like to be in a good marriage, I'm not going to ask someone who is divorced."
The book Prodigal Daughters*, reviewed by Robert Beaurivage in Regina Magazine, has it right: Talk to the people who have come back to the Church.
This might be the only way we see what's been right there under our noses all along.
*Prodigal Daughters: Catholic Women Come Home to the Church, By Donna Steichen (1999) Published by Ignatius Press, San Francisco, CA.
