By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
I write this week’s column from Lourdes, France, where I have joined a pilgrimage of 200 wounded warriors, volunteers, family members, military veterans, and chaplains from the United States. Most of us are here through the gift of the Knights of Columbus which has underwritten this magnificent opportunity for prayer, evangelization, fellowship, and renewal of Catholic faith.
Our experiences here of Marian spirituality connected with the apparitions of Our Lady to St. Bernadette, it is hoped, will bring needed healing and help to all of us, whether our wounds are spiritual or physical.
Our group joins the International Military Pilgrimage to Lourdes, also taking place during our stay at this famous Grotto which is second only to Paris in numbers of visitors arriving in France yearly. Ten thousand military personnel from 35 countries are expected to swell the ranks of the many seeking spiritual sustenance or a physical cure during their stay.
I have begun to visit and speak with the various pilgrims, gathering their stories and thoughts in the hope of serving them and others in more effective ways as a priest and chaplain and, more fundamentally, as a Christian accompanying fellow Christians. Among their number are quite a few revert or convert Catholics. Some also confess to being among the largest religious group in existence: fallen-away Catholics, or “Catholics on leave.”
In these days of our voyage to France new studies are being released that again confirm the loss of more Catholics to the regular practice of the faith, in particular regarding attendance at weekly Catholic Mass. Though there are numerically more Catholics now than was the case in the 1970s, a lower percentage takes part in the life of the Church.
The Pew Research Study addresses the group that has come to be identified as the “nones,” those who answer “no religious affiliation” when asked to describe their faith preference. The study says this group is exponentially adding to its numbers as older millennials also fall into this category.
“Overall, 35 percent of adult millennials (Americans born between 1981 and 1996) are religiously unaffiliated. Far more millennials say they have no religious affiliation compared with those who identify as evangelical Protestants (21 percent), Catholics (16 percent), or mainline Protestants (11 percent),” writes Michael Lipka in a May 12 article on the “Factank” website.
Statistics can help us in some ways to serve the Church, but numbers never tell the whole story when it comes to the lives of individuals. Each human being is a soul to be saved and each must be approached not as a statistic to be manipulated but as a fellow believer to be served in love. Those who know the Catholics who have left our active ranks are the only ones who can challenge or accompany them. Why, in so many cases, are they unwilling to speak out?
In “The Shame that Breeds Helplessness Is Destroying Our Parishes” on Patheos website, Jennifer Fitz refers to the statistics reported by Michael Lipka and says in response that we have to overcome our fear of confrontation if we are to build up the community through evangelization. She thinks first of calling parishioners to survey families about children ages 18-30 who no longer attend Mass. Then, after further reflection she decides against it. “I knew parents would be embarrassed,” she writes to explain her inaction, and this is the case, she says, because “this is a taboo topic.”
Fitz writes: “We Catholics have a taboo about discussing specific families, or even our specific parish program, because we don’t want people to feel bad. All parents know that you can do everything right and still end up with children who use their free will all wrong. It’s hard enough being a parent (or parish staff member) already, we don’t need more guilt piled on the fire.
“The trouble with the taboo, though, is that statistics don’t have eternal souls. Statistics don’t leave the Church. It’s not a percentage that fails to know, love, and serve Jesus Christ, it’s a person. A person with a name, a person known by God and by us, a person with a story. A person with reasons.”
The apostolate of evangelization is a demanding one. Each person must be approached as a person, “a person with reasons.” Whether a phone call or a visit, whether invitation to an event or an adult faith formation course, the means of finding an opening to each person are as varied as the reasons why each person has withdrawn from active life as a Catholic.
Rules without relationships foster rebellion. The breakdown in family life has affected the transmission of the faith. Parents within broken families who do not witness to the faith or are largely absent from daily presence in the lives of their children are hampered from handing down pretty much any wisdom, to include the faith. Authentic relationships within a parish community by default must often serve as the basis for evangelization, as the story of one woman in our Lourdes pilgrimage group demonstrates.
Sometimes the approach needed to effectively challenge a fellow inactive or superficial Catholic takes the form of a rebuke, as seen in the story of our French-language translator on the military pilgrimage to Lourdes, a retired Army lieutenant colonel. She is a bright, energetic, and engaging woman who tells her story without varnish.
She was living and working in France for years and attending Mass, as some French still do. But it took a bracing verbal correction from another Catholic to shake her out of an empty attachment to Catholic culture that has no power to save. She responded to the jolt not by bolting from the fold, but instead by reverting to an authentic and correct practice of the sacraments for the purpose of living in a state of grace. She is now passionately attached to the Traditional Latin Mass, even going so far as to take a Space A military flight to the West Coast in order to participate in the entire Traditional rites Triduum from coast to coast. Here in Lourdes she attends the Masses offered by the FSSP priests in a church outside the Grotto.
This woman’s story challenges us to overcome our fear that someone might walk away from any attachment to the Church’s life if we offer a fraternal correction. Let us not forget that the truth in Christ is always a sharing in His love. However imperfectly we always offer that truth to another soul is never a reason for silencing the saving and divine voice of Christ who infinitely loves every soul. Perhaps this is the very thing we need to share in the first place with those for whom we have prayed with the intention of helping them come back to the life of the Church.
Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever.
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(Follow me on Facebook at Reverendo Padre-Kevin Michael Cusick and on Twitter @MCITLFrAphorism. I blog occasionally at APriestLife.blogspot.com and mcitl.blogspot.com. You can email me at mcitl.blogspot.com.)
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