Well, there's more to it than that, but those are the parts that jump out at me.I mean, some Cursillistas work in the prisons, others help the homeless and some work with the mentally ill, but really, it's all about going to the pub. Oh, and we pray and read and try live more Christian lives, too. Whatever.
In any case, there are times where we offer up things for which we'd like the group to pray. Invariably, someone will ask us to pray for our children who have left the faith. Up until now, it didn't occur to me that this was anything unusual. It happens to a lot of us. The modern, secular world is a jealous god and will do its best to take believers of other faiths for its own.
I pride myself at having some amount of understanding of sales and marketing, but I never applied it to this problem.
How in the world could an organization manage to lose customers when:
- They enter as willing buyers of your product,
- They have coaches at their houses urging them to buy your product,
- You have multiple, winning sales pitches for your product and
- There are plenty of testimonials and recommendations for your product in their community?
In other words, our kids spend 8, 12 and sometimes 16 years in Catholic education and come out the other end as ... agnostics, atheists or fallen-away Catholics. Just how terrible at your job would you have to be to produce that given all of those advantages?
Not to worry, though. The US Council of Catholic Bishops is on the job. Don't question them, either. They're bishops, don't you know.
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| Here's our idiot, Bishop McElroy, giving a secular, political speech for open borders while the laity of his diocese mourn their children leaving the Church after 8-16 years of almost daily instruction in the bishop's schools. That's some serious incompetence right there. |
Based on our limited investigation of Catholic schools-- I'm going to be home anyways with the other babies, may as well teach the older ones-- a lot of it has to do with dragging public school lessons in and booting Catholic lessons out.
ReplyDeleteGoing off of my memory, though, the issue is that nobody ever bothered to have even a half-hearted sales talk.
ReplyDeleteMuch less any kind of explanation of value. I basically had to trip over Jimmy Akin and EWTN to find out what I'd inherited as a Catholic.
The whole Catechism thing? Had to discover on my own. YEs, /sad, and /zomga really.
YES! But why do you learn the Catechsim? Because Church Fathers like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, with pitiless logic, showed that it was superior! That's what we've lost. The conviction that Catholicism is superior.
ReplyDeleteI learned the catechism because it was a concise, factual argument for Catholic teachings.
ReplyDeleteAlso because it was the only way to LEARN the factual argument.
I agree with your assessment of why people are leaving the church. It is mainly the fact that the church doesn't actually understand why they are leaving in the first place.
ReplyDeleteYou mention that "The modern, secular world is a jealous god and will do its best to take believers of other faiths for its own", which is what the church wants people to think is the reason their kids are leaving. This is convenient for the church leaders, because it mostly gets them off the hook. They can say, "Oh, we tried to show them the importance of the Church, but the outside world is too tempting, and your kids were too weak to resist the attraction".
The thing is, it's not true. I wasn't seduced out of the church by the modern secular world, and neither were the other people I know who left the church. As far as I know, pretty much none of us are doing things that we would have been ashamed of doing as Catholics. The reason I left the church is, quite bluntly, that they were demanding my time and money, and not offering me anything that I actually needed in return. While incidentally making it pretty clear that they didn't even *care* what I might need from them.
(Noting that not everybody wants or needs the same things. You may well be getting what you need from the Church, but I wasn't).
Tim: BINGO.
ReplyDeleteHere's a twist on what you said. What if they know what you want? I would argue that they know full well what you're looking for, but the modern prelate culture can't bring itself to make comparison sales pitches.
Can you imagine a salesman at a Toyota dealership saying, "Well, you know, all of the brands are pretty much the same. I don't think we should judge cars and say that one is better than another." That's what Catholics hear from the pulpit every freaking week.
Here's my ultimate terror: What if the prelates no longer believe that Catholicism is the Truth? What if they're sincere when they tell us not to differentiate our faith from everything else?