Friends
Peace be with you.
Lastly, we heard from Fr. John Riccardo and Dave Durant. Fr. Riccardo emphasized that prayer has to be at the core of who we are as pastors, not just an agenda item that we bypass quickly. I was reminded of stories of priests who struggled to know which direction to go with somI’m sorry I was unable to write a column for last week. As you may have heard, I came back from the Priests for an Apostololic Age Conference with some kind of head cold/flu that knocked me out of commission for a couple of days. That puts me slightly behind where I’m hoping to be but I’ll do my best to make up for it, beginning with a brief but very exciting announcement. On Saturday March 1, (just under a month away), Jonathan Francois will be ordained a deacon in Denver. If you’d like me to deliver a card of congratulations to him, please get it to the parish office or drop it in the parish collection and I’ll bring it with me. Be sure to include your address on the envelope if you want a Thank you or, even better, let him know you understand how busy he is and so no thank you is necessary but you’d appreciate a prayer instead.
Now about the conference. It was, overally, very good but felt a little disjointed. I”m used to other conferences involving a single speaker or two speakers with two separate topics. This involved five different organizations that specialize in different facets of evangelization, some overlapping and other not, presenting what their organization does. We started with Lisa Brenninkneyer who runs an organization called Walking with Purpose, which seeks to empower women to form Bible studies focused on their particular issues and struggles. She had a very powerful personal story that I’d encourage people to read for themselves but what really impressed me was how she concluded her talk by challenging us to consider encouraging our parishioners to become foster parents and adoptive parents. In the United States, there are fifty million Catholics and three hundred seventy thousand kids in foster care. To bring it a little closer to home, there are thirty nine thousand Catholics in Linn County and around 700 kinds in foster care. Perhaps, if some people would consider becoming foster parents, it could mean some kids who would have never had exposure to the Catholic Church or faith in general would have a good experience of faithful people and desire to become one with us. Please consider if this is a direction God is calling you to go.
We also heard from the Evangelical Catholic and Catholic Leadership Institute, two organizations that we will be hearing from extensively in the future. Both had great presentations, EC about the process they go through to evangelize and CLI about what is preventing priests from being evangelizers. EC will be doing a Lenten retreat for us once we determine the best timeframe to do it and CLI is the group that conducted the survey in December for the entire Archdiocese of Dubuque about parish expectations.ething happening in their parish/cluster who asked their pastoral council to pray together, which unified everyone around a common mission. Dave Durand was much more business oriented and encouraged us to focus on our primary mission and not to get bogged down in secondary missions. A primary mission is what we do to be successful in whatever we’re doing while the secondary missions are things that may be important but either could be done by someone else or distract us from the primary mission.
The biggest thing that united all the speakers was that we need to stop putting so much focus on trying to build a Catholic Culture and acknowledge that that has been lost. We are living in a time more in common with the first few centuries of the church, when we were a persecuted minority, than the Catholic Culture the baby boomers experienced with John F. Kennedy and Bishop Sheen. Relying on passive evangelization, where people see nice people walking into a Church and want to join them without being asked, is not realistic. We have to be intentional disciples, equipped to invite people into relationships with Christ and able to answer objections to the best of our ability. That means all of us.