The Grace and Peace of Jesus Christ be with you all!

Forgive my impertinence. I typically lurk a forum for quite some time before starting to post to get a good feel for it. It allows me to pretend I am not a fool when I do open my mouth. I just, however, read Fr. Loya's post about evangelization and I could not resist a post of my own.

I am a Latin Rite Catholic and, thanks to Fr. Loya's visit to my parish (St. John's in Champaign) and his radio program, I'm strongly attracted to Byzantine Catholicism. In fact, after attending Divine Liturgy at Annunciation parish several weeks ago, I briefly entertained the idea of moving Rites. That, of course, is a very Protestant thing to do and reaffirmed that I still have quite a bit of personal conversion to go being a convert/revert to the faith. The right thing to do is to be nourished by the Eastern rites and bring this nourishment to the Latin Church.

Your Problems are Our Problems! The entire Church catholic is facing a new challenge of evangelization. As John Paul the Great rightly said, we need a new evangelization. We vie for the souls of baptized unbelievers and more than ever, the wolves are leading so many of these sheep.

Likewise, the entire Church catholic is facing an identity crisis. After Vatican II, at least here in America, much of the Latin Church became somewhat Protestantized. John Paul and now Pope Benedict will, I pray, will continue healing the ills that have come and nurturing the goods as the Church seeks to finally come and implement the reforms of the council. Much of the Latin Church has lost its sense of Liturgy.

This is where the Eastern Churches come in. If Annunciation parish is any sign, your liturgy is intact and sustained. We Westerners need you. We need you more now than ever. If for that simple reason only, stop all your talk about "dying" and start realizing how important you are. Take hold of your liturgy and traditions. Delve into them and plumb their depths. Our Tradition is just as much a part of God's revelation to us as the Scripture and the Magisterium and sometimes, I think, the least understood of the three. Our worship is God's inspiration in us to give back to Him and both of us, East and West, need to reach back and rebuild. As Fr. Loya said, we need to raze the Church in order to rebuild the Church.

But what does any of this have to have with evangelization? The rampant heresy of our day is dualism. America is a Protestant country. Protestantism is, in many ways, borne from dualism - the idea that the beliefs of the spirit or mind (denomination) can be separated from the Body of Christ and that the two are not intricately linked. However, it seems to me that dualism is not a big problem in the Eastern Churches.

Perhaps I'm ignorant of this as I'm just learning about your Churches, but it really seems as though dualism would be rather hard to maintain. The main reason is the asceticism which is so intricately built into your Liturgy and lives. So many fasts, and not just wussy fasts. Not only this, but there is such a rich history of monasticism and asceticism that it makes it hard to separate the spirit from the body in my opinion.

People are unhappy because they are disordered. They are dualists even if they don't know it. They're minds are set on one thing and their body is somewhere else. Just look at the complacency of our culture concerning sex, in particular attitudes toward masturbation. I speak of what some Christian writers even say about it. If you are fantasizing make sure it's your wife... or you can't fantasize but you still can... or whatever they're going to say. The bottom line is that this attitude is dualistic to the core and needs to be exorcized - first in ourselves, and then in others.

My suggestion, then, is for the Eastern Churches to be who they are and this will evangelize our culture. Who you are, like who all of us should be, are a people who take seriously the fact that we are ensouled bodies and the unity of body and soul is of the utmost important to ourselves and to God. It is how He made us after all.

Be joyful about the faith! Should we not all say, "We have seen the true light, we have received the heavenly Spirit, we have found the true faith, and we adore the undivided Trinity as it has saved us," with fervor and vigor? Being joyful is the one thing that people can really see in Christians. We praise God and we love every second of it! If only Catholics in the West would not go about as though everything were dirge and duty! We all need to be joyful if we are the infect those around us with the true faith.

Here in America, the new evangelization is going to be the exorcism of dualism and and great advance to this is the Theology of the Body, in my opinion. John Paul the Great has reclaimed sex from the culture of death and given us a lofty goal to strive for. The same goal as God has written into our bodies - to be who we are made to be. In my opinion, the Eastern Church is way ahead of the West in really living this out because asceticism is already so intertwined in your worship. The Church in the West has much back-tracking to do and weeding, as it were, to get back to a really good place to be visionary again. In my opinion, your Churches ought to be in the vanguard of living and joyfully proclaiming our true identities and our true humanness.

This has probably become a ramble by now but I really wanted to write something encouraging with all this talk of "dying Churches". Be who you are so that the rest of us can be who we ought to be. This is my suggestion for how to evangelize. I can only ask how simple laity like myself can help you in this task that we are all called to.

Peace be with you all!

By His Blood,
Mike J.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Michael,

Welcome to this board and welcome to Annunciation parish. Please forgive me if we didn't meet during your visit. I try to greet every visitor but sometimes we are overwhelmed with visitors and I don't always catch everyone. If you get an opportunity to visit again please look for the guy with the beard and ever lightening and thinning hair standing near the center of the Church with his young wife.

God has given our congregation a vision well beyond our local congregation. That vision, as you've already observed, includes Champaign-Urbana. Every day brings new excitement and challenge. We have other Churches that have an expansive vision. Sadly, we have others that do not. Keep praying for us. We will pray for you that you will be a reflected light of the "True Light" whether you remain a Roman Catholic or move to the Eastern Church.

Dan Lauffer

Mike - OK but only if our problems are your problems...

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Welcome to the forum.

Michael, I too am a convert to Catholicism. I first entered the Roman Rite in 1996. However I became convinced by reading the Church fathers, and learning about the East on how much I was a byzantine soul.

If one form fit all then we would all be latin rite or some type of other rite, but no Christ is bigger than that and he comes to man in various different ways but not in different teachings.

To me the Divine Liturgy is home, because this is how I have wished to worship God ever since I can remember. I wanted physical, mental, spiritual worship and this is what the Divine Liturgy does.

It isn't a "protestant" thing to switch rites or ways of worship. If it were then we wouldn't have monasticism, because it was the longing to get closer to go that made those Holy Men and Women seek out God in the desert. At one time it was something new and different, it wasn't a protest against what was, it was an embrace of deeper conversation with God.

Now, I need to say this, we can't get past a problem unless we look at it. The numbers show that we are shrinking. Our rite does not enjoy the growth that it should have. Think of it as a garden that has been planted but for some reason the gardeners are neglecting their duty. If we do nothing, then the garden bed will grow up with weeds, the plants will die of thirst, and we will have been negligent.

Right now, we have to look the garden squarely and admit that if we do not step up right now in this time in history, then we stand a fair chance of passing on due to the plain fact of demographics.

So, yes, we must embrace the idea that we are in trouble. What you witnessed at Annunciation is atypical. I wish it weren't so. My wife and I struggled with the fact that If we were to move away would we find a parish that would fill those shoes.

The only way for that to happen is to embrace our mission, the one that was given by our beloved Saviour, Jesus Christ. That mission is to go out and preach the Gospel, and baptize in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

And yes, you are right, we do have to get off our collective butts and realize that we have something that the Church needs. This means that we start fighting for our RITE to Parrrrtttay!!! (in a very byzantine way that is)

This means that we don't give up and go away. However with all things, sometimes people have to be made aware that there is a problem before they will do anything about it. The one good thing about all of this is that we are now starting to look squarely at the issues at hand and how to deal with them.

In an earlier forum, there was discussion by Joe (Jthur) about what I will term a Byzantine Road Show. If we have to then we do this, we get some priests that are not afraid to travel and we find where there are those who need us and we take the liturgy to them. We become the circuit riders of the old west who would go from point to point.

Europe is now a mission country. America is heading that way. There are fertile fields out there that need our love and care and JESUS CHRIST is calling the Eastern Catholic Churches to step up.
We are being called to preach Christ Crucified to a land who needs it more now than ever.

I will tell you that at this time, I have never been more optimistic about where we are headed as a Church. We are small, we are less affluent, we have less, we are in the shoes of our Forefathers. Have we thought about this??!!! The fact is that we really don't have that much to lose and that is a great thing. Where our treasure is that is where our heart is. Let us embrace the Mission of Christ as the Treasure that it is and quit dealing with stupid turf issues and how we will be looked at.

Our liturgy rocks, our chant rocks our worship rocks, and it is built on the Rock. Dudes, Christ is asking us to preach him. He is asking a sinner like myself to embrace him with my whole being and go out and bring others to him. In my book, if that is an offer we can't refuse.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

John,

I love you brother. We dudes must indeed get off our butts. Standing at liturgy is a good start. Now we'll get moving.

Dan L

John, thank you for that. A lot of the cradles need a shot like that. As Seraphim Rose once said: "Cradles have patience but no zeal. Converts have zeal but no patience. Blessed are those who are given the gift of balance." It's funny, the visitors and newcomers at our parish are the standers, often the "cradle Byzantines" are the kneelers. Gradually more are standing, as more new people come. One step at a time.

The first step in any building project is making sure the foundation is solid. In the Latin Rite, I think half the problem of not being great evangelizers is because there are so many that just do not know the faith nor do they live it. There is also a great deal of assumption about what Catholicism is and not a whole lot of actual knowledge and experience of it. This is partially due to the incredibly poor catechesis that has been going on for decades. This is starting to turn around, though and there are a great deal of missions and apostolates to help combat this problem.

Here too, however, I see a great area where the Eastern Churches have some advantage - almost no one knows about you. That may sound like a back-handed compliment but I assure you it is not. When I discuss my faith with friends, most of my work is figuring out what their assumptions of the Catholic faith are and correcting those before I can even talk about new stuff. I think it was Chesterton who said something along the lines that once a person ceases to ardently push against the Catholic Church, they will be pulled into it.

I called it a rather Protestant thing to do because church-hopping seems to be a passtime for them. It's a shopping market of denominations and churches out there and most people go out looking for a religion that suits them, not suiting themselves to a true religion. This may be less common in the mainline denominations but I was an evangelical and there is a lot of focus on style in order to attract and keep people around (this is not altogether bad but it shouldn't be a focus).

Dan - your parish seems to have some vitality to it.

-ray

Ray,

You are correct. I pastored United Methodist Churches for 27 years. I won national awards for evangelization and Church Growth. We left the UMC six 1/2 years ago because of the theological chaos and came home to a Church alive in Christ, sensitive, and outgoing, far beyond what I had found in the UMC.

Come see us sometime if you are ever in the midwest. The Holy spirit is moving and I believe there is great things ahead for the entire Church.

Dan L

So - does it seem true to you that the 'movers' of the Eastern churches all seem to be converts?

-ray

We had a meeting today of some of the movers and shakers. Four were converts. Four were cradle. It does seem that new life inspires further new life but I don't think all of the movers and shakers are converts.

Dan L

The problem with cradle Catholics is that they take everything for granted. The problem with converts is we expect them not to.

I'd agree that it's a pretty even mix of cradle/convert down here in Champaign as well. It's all about the exchange of gifts, I think. We must be careful not to outright dismiss Protestantism because they have a lot of great gifts to offer Catholicism - not the least of which are people.