A fallen-away Catholic wants to go to Mass with me

[elts1956]

I completely agree with what Holly is saying here. However, I would like to add one thing.

After telling him what the Church teaches about Communion, and letting him know when and where confessions are heard…be done with it.

You have done your job teaching our faith and the Church.

In my opinion it is either sinful or at least in very poor taste to ask someone if they have went to confession, or if they have confessed this-or-that. If taken to it’s logical extreme, you would have to get into if proper matter and form was present and that would lead to us judging if it was a proper confession. Not good.

I have committed embarassing sins and would not like to even acknowledge going to confession sometimes, much less telling what I have confessed.

There will be no obligation for you during Mass then to tell him whether or not to go to Communion. And I don’t think you should give much thought then because we almost never know the state of someone’s soul (except some very rare cases: i.e. St. Pio).

I agree 100%

 

[foolishmortal]

Thanks! Recently, he told me he thought there must be many deities as so many different religions are praying to so many different ones. I told him they’re likely demons or just their imagination, but he wasn’t listening or his English was too weak.

We had a falling away. He almost left me lost with no bus money as I could not find the subway exit where we’d meet I was going to let that slide. He kept bugging me about condensing my picture files he wanted me to send him and kept bugging me during the long downloading period of all the pics and I let that slide. When I did not meet up with him at a planned time, he threatened he would not hang out with me again if that happened again, though he would have called it off if it were raining that day. He did not even call at the time I was thinking we might have planned to meet to ask where I was and later said he forgot, but still shouted at me via text messages. I don’t not forgive him, but he makes me a bit nervous to be around. I don’t know. Being scrupulous, I might feel too responsible for his soul, though without the right wisdom and without knowing which priest I can trust to give him the good correct answers in a pastorally-correct way.

In East Asia, esp. South Korea, they have this Confucian thing about relationships over objective truth. I could tell him how some things like abortion damages relationships, but what do you say about religious pluralism? Here, family members can have different religions and some Christians might pray to their ancestors in not the way we pray to ours to pray to God but as if they were gods. Well, maybe I’ll send him to this one priest and put him in God’s hands, though I still will not be sure I am responsible for finding a Korean priest who would listen to God’s teachings best. For all I know, maybe the priest I went to for confession, who knows much English, has the relationship-first mentality. They used to put more marriage partnerships into the more objective hands of parents to pick the one who’d be right for their loved one and maybe I’m thinking like I have that responsibility toward my friend. God is involved, but I’d never take a friend to a liberation theologist or a sedevacantist and expect God to turn that priest into a prophet of the Magisterium’s authority as deciding what God wants us to believe about Bible passages.
What do you think? Thanks!