Per Christum

Lifted out of the combox from a post over at The Cafeteria is Closed on the movement in Evangelical circles to have more focus on Lent. A trend that has been touched on here at PC.Cel writes:

…It is frightening to finally realize that what you want is in the Catholic Church but that you will probably loose all your friends, your family, just about everything, to get it. So please, please be kind to those who are just on the outside and looking in the windows but are still unsure of what they see. It is also very hard to admit that you have been wrong for so long.I came from a Church of Christ turned mega-church. We celebrated communion every week but then the CoC has been doing that for a long time. In the last few years they started doing a 40 day prayer vigil coming up to Easter. Kinda like lent but with prayer only rather than fasting. There is a prayer room up at the church building that gets manned 24/7 for this time period. When I started going to the Catholic Church this last year, I was struck by the similarity it had to perpetual adoration. Imagine my surprise when I found out that we had only reinvented a very ancient wheel, and not very well at that.

It will take them a lot of time because these people have a lot of distance to cover intellectually but many of them will see same things that I did. That the Catholic Church is home and just what we have been trying to reinvent. We slowly give ourselves less and less reasons to not be Catholic. But the process of softening up preconceived notions takes time. Most people have to let it simmer for a while before realize it. True, the time is short but being to confrontational too soon will only drive them away. I think it would be best to simple encourage them to keep on doing it and share with them how we do it. Trust me, they will be intrigued and when they are ready they will come around to asking themselves the question: “Why not Catholic?”

In terms of the big picture, I believe that the rise in interest towards Catholic devotions and the increase in Tiber swimmers like myself is a result of American style evangelicalism’s fundamental dependence on existing in a nation that is essentially Christian. Because our nation is fast becoming a post-Christian nation it is causing a shift in the churches based on it and this is causing many believers to question where they are at. The Catholic faith however, is bigger than any one nation and has an almost unique ability to exists in both friendly nations and hostile nations. It has the ability to stay rooted to the truth by being able to depend on the Holy See as its anchor. This will prove to be significant as the industrialized west becomes more secular and more hostile toward religion.

The Catholic Church also has a history of surviving the collapse of nations and empires and in a lot of cases provides an interim structure for people to depend on during crisis. American evangelicalism will not survive without America in any significantly recognizable form. And America will not survive if it continues to support an abortive, contraceptive and unchaste culture.

NOTE: If Blogger does not get it together with the photo-uploading situation SOON, WordPress here I come! My patience is wearing thin on this, and it is making me honkin’ mad!