The Old Mass and the New Evangelization

Peter Kwasniewski has a good article over at OnePeterFive titled 'The Old Mass and the New Evangelization'. The Title immediately caught my eye. To me sometimes when I hear the word evangelization in the Church, the people saying it tend to lean toward attempting to evangelize outsiders into the Church by making the Church seem more protestant and less Catholic. By attempting to change the image of the Church to one of agreeing with the common social ideas that they perceive as being the reason why people are staying away from the Church. These are the same people within the Church that applaud any hint at the idea of the Church accepting gay marriage, divorce, birth control and abortion. This style of evangelization aims to bring people to a church that has lost her core.

I have often thought the best place to start evangelization is within the walls of the Church. Let's first evangelize Catholics and bring them back to the Catholic faith. The current statistic is something like 70% of Catholics do not believe in the True Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, many Catholics have looked to loose teaching through the years to decide their own definition of what is sin and what is not. For example; how many Catholics know it is a mortal sin to miss Church on Sunday? And, if those Catholics are told that, how many know that you are not supposed to take Holy Communion if you are in a state of mortal sin? And, of those, how many actually care? 

We have a crisis of faith inside of our Catholic Church, one that is going to require strong leaders who are willing to stand up and tell us we are wrong. To lead us like sheep and tell us how we should act, what is pleasing to God. To let us know when we do something that in any way questions our reverence to Christ in the Eucharist. That is the type of evengelization that I believe we need. Evangelization back to what it means to be Catholic. What it means to be moral, and why the Church will always accept the sinner, but can never ever accept the sin. 

That is why this article caught my eye, as the Latin Mass becomes more prevalent, as our Priests start demanding a more reverent approach to regular Sunday mass, people in my opinion will respond by standing up. We all want to please God, but due to a lack of good Catholic teaching over the last fifty years many of us don't know how to properly. We are losing what it is to be Catholic to a more protestant  approach to our faith. It seems that many worry that too strict approach to the "rules" of the church will drive away those Catholics that do still attend mass. If we ignore those "rules" though, what do those remaining Catholics have to hold on to? 

The full article can be read here; 'The Old Mass and the New 

Evangelization'