Posted By Christina M on July 29, 2004

Yesterday I talked about what motivates Catholics to evangelize, and how the different backgrounds of converts and cradle Catholics sometimes lead to differing approaches to the whole subject of evangelization. In that post, I spoke primarily of apologetics. Today, I want to draw attention to other forms of evangelization that are too easy, sometimes, to forget. The Church has many doors… why should we keep all but one of them locked?

Don’t get me wrong; apologetics can be a valuable evangelization tool. Many people have entered the Church because the list of arguments swayed them. Although nobody ever practiced apologetics on me when I was struggling, my own internal struggle with apologetics was what ultimately led me to stay Catholic when my renewed walk with Jesus was still fresh. For me, it was the Gospel of Matthew. As I read it, originally with an eye toward proving Catholicism wrong, I found instead that everything Matthew said supported the very Catholic teachings I wanted to contradict.

Yet it would be wrong to say that apologetics and “right answers” were the entirety of what kept me Catholic. For me, there was a sense of “home” in the liturgy, and I simply could not see myself in a non-liturgical Church. The few times I attended any, I felt like I was at a prayer group meeting rather than a church service.

There was also an instinctive need for the sacraments. Even as I considered leaving, I was already beginning to feel homesick for sacraments. A part of me felt… I don’t know what other word to call it… lonely at the thought of not having confession available. Like it would mean having part of the experience of faith, but not the whole shabang.

Which brings me to the point I am trying to make: apologetics are good, useful, helpful, and necessary; but there are many doors into the Church, and we should not limit our efforts at intruducing the Catholic faith to efforts that only focus on arguments.

I know a woman who became Catholic solely because of the Eucharist. She believed that Jesus meant what He said, and couldn’t see herself in a Church that reinterpreted it. It had nothing to do with whether or not the Church was right about abortion, tradition, confession, or sexual morality. Once she was in, she somtimes had to struggle to conform herself to Church teachings, but because she was so certain of the Eucharist she felt it was a struggle worth making.

I know a man who became Catholic because he felt that most Christian denominations either disobeyed commands of Jesus, or did them with embarrassment. He also longed to give to God something less casual, more formal and ritual.

I have known people who needed the reassurance that authority and doctrines came from above rather than being voted in from below. I have known people who recognized the historical claims of the Church as the one founded by Christ, and people who found in Catholicim a genuine mysticism lacking in many other Christian walks. Some come because they’ve known people of faith who were Catholic, and wanted a share of what they saw.

And I’ve even known people who came to the Catholic Church simply because they were searching for a relationship with Christ and the Catholic Church was where they found it.

Each of these “doors” into the Church is a valid entryway. And there are many more, too. Jesus calls our hearts, and He calls us in different ways because each of us has different issues, different strengths and weaknesses, different longings. But we all have the same need for Jesus, and salvation. When we bear witness to the world, we must remember that we are witnessing to human beings, individuals, and we must listen to the Holy Spirit in determining how to minister to the needs of an individual.

Yes, we should be ready with answers to why we believe what we believe. Often those answers will be apologetic in nature. Often, though, they will not. Perhaps the first step to evangelizing is not talking, but listening. When we love another person enough to hear what they are saying, rather than just spending their “talk time” figuring out what we’re going to say next, the Holy Spirit has the opening to guide us. We cannot very well minister to a person if we have no love for them, and love sees the human being, and not just a gold star to be won.

Let us pray for an increase in love; for it is when we love that we truly bear witness to Christ, opening many hidden doors into His sancturary.

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Posted By Christina M on July 28, 2004

I am a cradle Catholic, and I love my faith. But when I look around, sometimes I feel like I’m in a rather small minority. Most of the “big names” in Catholic evangelization seem to be converts, with the occasional revert mixed in. People like Scott Hahn, Marcus Grodi, and James Akin talk about, educate about, the faith… and people listen. Such people have done a tremendous service for the Church, and more importantly, for Jesus Christ.

But I find myself repeatedly coming back to the question: why are there so few cradle Catholics in that collection of name-brand Catholic evangelists?

Part of it, I think, is that converts have a testimony to give. Their conversion stories inspire, and let’s face it: someone who converted, like me, at the ripe-old age of three weeks doesn’t have much of a conversion testimony to tell.

And then there is the fact that the convert is usually more on fire than the lifelong Catholic. The convert to anything is likely to be more enthusiastic than the lifelong member, because it takes a lot of courage and dedication to make a conscious decision to convert.

Another reason for the preponderance of former Protestant evangelists for Catholicism is the Protestant tradition of giving testimony. Most cradle Catholics tend to be more private in their expression of faith, because giving testimony is not a regular part of our worship experience.

But I think the biggest factor may well be something for which many of us must shoulder our own blame: lethargy. Not a full-fledged, I-don’t-give-a-hoot lethargy about our faith, but a lack of motivation to share it. If you’ve had something as long as you can remember, it can be awfully easy to take it for granted.

It takes courage to overcome the lack of conditioning to give testimony, and it takes effort to overcome the lack of education many of us have to practice apologetics. But the Baltimore Catechism put it well when it says we are put here to know, love, and serve God in this world so that we may be happy with Him in the next. How can we love Someone we do not know? We owe it not just to potential converts, but to our very selves to learn everything we can about our faith. Perhaps the more we know, the more courage we will find to share it with others. I strongly believe that the more we make the effort to learn, the more we will catch fire with the zeal of the Holy Spirit.

I am not a convert. I’m a revert. And if you aren’t excited enough about your faith to share it, maybe it’s time for you to be a revert, too.

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Posted By Christina M on July 26, 2004

I want to ask for prayers for a loving and giving woman named Ann Marie. She was our DRE at my parish, until her thyroid cancer worsened, refusing to respond to the normal treatments. Ann Marie is one of those dynamo women, who keeps giving even when she feels horrid; she knew at the beginning of the RE year that she had cancer and the prognosis is not good, but she still took on the responsibility. She has small children at home.

Please pray for her… she needs a miracle.

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Posted By Christina M on July 22, 2004

In May, a man named David Reimer committed suicide. If the name doesn’t mean anything to you, be assured that it received a great deal of attention at one time, almost 40 years ago. This was when Dr. John Money, a sex-change pioneer at Johns Hopkins, decided to experiment with sex reassignment on the toddler after a botched circumcision. Convinced that gender is only a matter of nature, and not at all of nurture, he used this baby as his test subject to attempt to prove his theory.

No doubt we’ve all heard tales of doctors “playing God” with other people’s lives; but this exceeds even the cold calculations of those who feel better qualified than either patient or God to determine what is best for the patient. What makes it worse is that he didn’t do this sex reassignment to help the child, but to test a theory. The really scary thing is that the medical establishment allowed a child too young to consent to be used as a subject in an experiment not of medicine but of sociology.

We seem, in the past century, to have come to a point of believing that unconscionable actions must be allowed, if they are for the purpose of gaining knowledge. The tragic irony of this story is that David’s sex reassignment came at a time when Americans really wanted to know that Hitler was wrong, and that it was nurture and not biology that made people what they are; yet the coldness of experimenting with a human being’s sexual identity and genitals to prove the point fits rather too well with the attitudes of Nazi Doctors who experimented on Jewish subjects to gain information and test theories.

I won’t go into the details of David Reimer’s painful journey that led to such a sorrowful end, but you can read more about it in the article linked above. All I can add is that I pray God’s mercy on his soul. Truly, this man has suffered enough.

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Posted By Christina M on July 21, 2004

Of course, we all know that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints no longer allows polygamy. There are, however, some fundamentalist offshoot groups that still promote the practice. Some such communities encourage men to take a great many child brides and have lots of children. A word of advice, though: if you can’t remember the names of all your children, you are probably not going to be considered a stellar parent.

But gee, just because he can’t remember his children doesn’t mean he doesn’t pay them enough attention. Those courts are soooo picky.

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Posted By Christina M on July 8, 2004

This is not a porn site. Yes, I repeat, there’s nothing to see here, so please move on. I’m speaking, of course, to the people who keep linking to Confessions of a Hot Carmel Sundae by way of searches for sex confessions.

Smut readers, I have news for you. St. Augustine was using the word “confessions” to refer to a religious biography long before your pervy little internet porn searches existed.

So I have a suggestion: change your priorities and stick around; you might learn something about the God who loves you. Or for those who refuse that, move on. I’m shaking the dust from my feet as we speak. And washing my keyboard and monitor.

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Posted By Christina M on June 29, 2004

I know it’s controversial, and I know it will stir up angry passions… I know that many on the right will call me immoral, or claim that my faith isn’t real, but I must say it. I feel too strongly about this to remain silent anymore. The right of every woman to reapportion a car must be protected by law.

Oh, I’ve heard all the arguments; but the reality is that these arguments only serve to repress a portion of the society by inhibiting their basic civil rights. The constitution guarantees every American a right to privacy, and to interfere with a woman’s right to have a car violates their inherent privacy.

It also violates their sense of self worth. After all, is a woman just a walking machine? Is that the only value a woman has?

It is a sorrowful thing when a woman must resort to auto reapportionment, and no woman does it lightly. But the alternative is worse. A woman who does not have transportational freedom does not bear the most basic equality. We need, as a society, to keep reapportionment safe, legal, and rare. The solution to an overabundance of reapportionments is not to keep them illegal, but to bring about an environment of support for the welfare of women in transportation crisis. When a woman resorts to reapportionment, it is not her fault but the fault of a repressive system that makes her reapportionment necessary. In fact, reapportionment can be a loving act, when it removes an auto from a potentially harmful environment.

Reapportionments happen, and they will continue to happen whether or not they are legal. Even with reapportionment illegal, thousands of reapportionments occur every year. With it legal, we could regulate the procedure, keeping it safe and preventing damage or trauma. There is no need to add to the trauma a woman already undergoes by inflicting legal sanctions, too. Illegalizing reapportionment does not prevent it from happening, it only chases women into back alleys, forcing them to resort to clothes hangers.

We supposedly live in a nation that allows freedom of religion, yet the right would inflict its morality on millions of women who do not share their religious belief that auto reapportionment is wrong. If you don’t believe in reapportionment, don’t have one; but let other women make their own choice. It’s a victimless choice, and necessary to the freedom of our society.

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Tags: pro life

Posted By Christina M on June 11, 2004

Christine, over at Laudem Gloriae, says “I’ve been accused by fellow Catholics of oversimplifying the ‘very complex’ issue of abortion.” She points out that abortion is no more complex than child abuse. I would add that abortion is only complex if you view it as a political issue.

But abortion isn’t a political issue. Not really. Any more than it’s a religious issue. I am not pro life because I’m Catholic, or because I’m a “conservative.” I’m pro-life because I’m human. Something basic in the undamaged human being feels compassion for smaller beings and knows, knows that it’s wrong to hurt and kill a defenseless creature.

And it isn’t a political plank that dies in abortion, it’s a being. A human being. And that is the only level at which we ought to view abortion, if we are fully human. Any amount of politicking on the subject, if it forgets that there are human beings being harmed, is far too removed from reality.

So don’t denounce abortion because your Church or your political party says it’s wrong. Denounce it because you care about small beings who feel pain. To be fully human is to be humane. Have compassion for all the victims of abortion, both the mothers and their children.

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Posted By Christina M on June 9, 2004

When my husband first saw the name of the Accidental Evangelist, he said “That’s also the name of my “fathers’ rights hero.” Well, glancing again, he realized that Anne Mitchell was the self-same champion ofFathers’ Rights.

In a world increasingly filled with feminist ideas, it is easy to forget, in the “fight” for women’s rights, that men have rights, too. Especially in parenting, men’s rights often slip out of sight. Even where men do have rights, sometimes they don’t know it. How many men have never sought time with their kids after divorce because they thought they couldn’t get it? It’s been documented that most women who “disappear” with their kids believe they have an inalienable and unshared right to their kids, as though their children were a posession inherited from Great Aunt Hortense, and not a blessing shared by both parents, even if those parents are estranged from each other.

With Father’s Day approaching, let’s take some time to remind ourselves of the imporance of a healthy relationship between fathers and their children. Fathers, don’t give up on being a part of their lives. Mothers, never ever treat your children like weapons in the war against their dads. Children deserve all the love they can get, from both of you.

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Posted By Christina M on June 4, 2004

It all started with my counter. Sitemeter shows me where people link from, and sometimes they link from search engines. Naturally, my curiosity gets the better of me, and I sometimes check to see what someone was searching when they found me.

Then, sometimes I wish I hadn’t looked.

It seems that a number of people have found me by doing searches for porn. People have found me while searching for “hot pedophile stories” (I did a piece about Michael Jackson once, and “hot” is in my blog title). People have found me while seeking “sex confessions” (again, confessions in the title, and I have done several bits about chastity and the sanctity of sex). It just never occurred to me that search engines would put these isolated words together and they’d show up on sex searches.

What even more didn’t occur to me was that the people doing these searches would see my rather obviously clean cut and fairly religious blurb and still follow the link. It got me to thinking: could I wind up being an accidental evangelist? Could I possibly offer spiritual encouragement to someone who didn’t know he was looking for it?

It was my husband who said I should call it “Accidental Evangelist.” So I did a search to see if the name was already in use. It was.

I haven’t followed this blog long term, as I just discovered it today. I will tell you this much: so far, I haven’t seen faith-related content there. But it’s one of the funniest things I’ve read.

So I came here to swallow my humility and brag about my do-goodism, but instead am here to plug a very funny woman’s blog. Enjoy.

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