We are persisting with the New Evangelism, and for the past eight years, it has achieved almost nothing. Jesus advocated performance management. If a vine does not produce good fruit, cut it down and replace it with a new vine.
Priests have provided practising Catholics with the sacraments and administered parishes well, over the past 50 years. However, overall, pastorally, they and their bishops have performed miserably. Priests are well educated and very capable men, surely their poor performance is not due to a lack of capability, but to the method they are forced to use.
Traditional Evangelism worked well up until the 1960s. Let us switch back to it. Let’s go back to what was successful. It must be very distressing for priests to perform so poorly, pastorally. They see congregations in sharp decline, give sermons with little real meaning and see students graduate from Catholic schools, never to attend Mass again.
Our priests, up until now, have been unable to communicate freely for fear of what it will do to their careers as priests. Now they can discuss key Church issues, using this blog discussion facility, because they can do so anonymously. It is time to speak up, whatever your views.
One Response
The idea of evangelism as I understand it is to spread the gospel and the teachings of Jesus. As a measure of how well we are doing at this, the number of people attending mass nowadays compared to earlier times (eg. Pre-V2) should tell us that we have gone backwards dramatically.
So where have we gone wrong. Perhaps we should look at the evangelism of earlier times when the church was full and compare it with our present-day evangelism. The key places where catholic evangelism occurs are within the church and within the schools, both catholic and public.
Within the church there is limited action other than the message from the pulpit which only reaches that low percentage of the Catholics who attend and this group is aging rapidly. In part this group is evangelised with the Alpha program which was invented by the C of E or some other protestant church and taken on by the local church. You can attend St Matthews Anglican church in Manly and do this course, you don’t need to go to the catholic venue.
Within the school system, there must be something wrong with the method or what is being taught. Surely the parish priests attend these schools and have an insight into the teaching program. Surely, they can offer some suggestion to the catholic community or to their bishops on the problem and possible solutions. Perhaps the diocese bishops need to attend school to see what the problem is.
I believe the current parish priests are only committed to providing the sacraments and are little concerned by other matters. This is only my opinion but I must admit they do a good job at providing these sacraments to us.
“Synod Sceptic”