Daily Breakfast 685 – At Your Service!
Blog World in Las Vegas; CJ is learning about saints; St. Therese; Church Hierarchy; the Biggest Loser and the Church; motivation and the survival of the Catholic Church; The Tolkien Professor podcast.
- The Tolkien Professor (iTunes podcast link)
- Biggest Loser Fan Podcast
- Name the SQPN Kiwi and win a CD by Sarah Bauer: listener feedback number: +1 206 202 4455
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Tolkien Professor is great! Glad you had a chance to listen!
One thing I have noticed is that most Catholics don’t seem very joyful about their faith. We are almost afraid to share it with others, while our protestant neighbors have no problem inviting people to their churches! The evangelical churches here are full of joy for the faith. I don’t see that at most Catholic churches, and I think that is where we lose a lot of people. There are some exceptions: the Catholic Church at the University of Wisconsin is one, and that church is packed every weekend…standing room only.
So what do they have that is different? The priest is a great preacher, the music is wonderful, there are all sorts of small groups/Bible studies to get involved in, and there is babysitting during services. And not only that, they are very good Catholics who are true believers in the faith and don’t water it down. If we could bring that enthusiasm to every parish, I think we would change the church.
I think we also can’t forget Catholic schools, and to promote them to parents as a better alternative than the increasingly secular public schools.
I just noticed the opposite in my home town. As a Protestant I noticed most fellow Protestants weren’t very joyful about their faith and were afraid to share it, whereas it was normal for the Catholic parish in our local cathedral to welcome Protestant visitors on a regular basis…I think this is a very local thing…
The big problem with most evangelical congregations is that, yes they show a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of joy, but they are also ‘prosperity christians’: they preach that if you do things right you will prosper and consequently you are not a good christian / steward if you don’t. I found most evangelical churches I went to superficial. They seemed to know a lot about Scripture, but if you look closely it’s a lot of only PART of Scripture they know a lot about. They happily ignore vast parts of it, claiming we are in another ‘dispensation’ or ‘covenant’ and it doesn’t apply to us. It looks all great from the outside, but there’s spiritual poverty on the inside.
So, please, don’t think the evangelical grass is greener and we should copy a lot of their stuff, because most of what we need to be a positive church we already have, we have centuries of treasures dusting away. Let’s uncover them! My parish is different and I’m sure other parishes will follow.
I agree with you Inge, all I want to copy is the joy!
I think the joy has to come from within, being authentic. It’s not something to be copied, otherwise other people just feel it’s fake. But I’m sure that’s not what you mean.
Well, I have seen that same joy coming through in some Catholic parishes too. It just seems to be more common in the Protestant churches, at least around here in the Midwest. I think sometimes we Catholics are afraid of showing joy, that we feel we have to be “serious”, and that showing joy would somehow trivialize our faith. I don’t think we have to copy the Evangelicals, but we can certainly learn from them. I think it struck me that I could be on fire and joyful about my faith, the same way they are, and still be a Catholic. That wasn’t something I was ever taught, or ever really saw, in my Catholic upbringing. But I hope it will be different for my child.
Wow. A really inspiring podcast, Father. I listened in the car on the way home from work tonight and what you said about St Therese and also hope for the church really struck a chord. Since I started listening to SQPN’s podcasts, my eyes have been opened to the joy and love of life that permeates our faith. We so often get bogged down in the day to day problems of lack of priests, declining congregations and closing parishes that we forget that there is a great deal to be hopeful for in the way that our current Pope is leading our church and in our young people who have discovered an underlying beauty in the Faith that my ’70s generation seemed never to get. It makes me very hopeful for the future. Thank you.