Cardinals Discuss Pentecostal Threats

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MrS said:
Back in 2004 and 2005, groups of Pentacostals were coming out of Lansing Michigan and “visiting” the parking lots on Sundays of two Catholic parishes, and also encouraging Catholics in those communities to consider becoming True Believers.

This effort at “sheep stealing” obviously bothered the two pastors. Thankfully it bothered them to the point where they invited the heads of the pentacostals to a meeting to discuss boundaries on what is fair and what is not, and also to answer some of the concerns the pentacostals had for our salvation.

The pastors, untrained in apologetics as most priests are today, recognized their own shortcomings… and also invited a couple of Catholics to join the meeting… Steve Ray and Gary Michuta. Ouch.

Needless to say, the Pentacostals were dumbfounded that there were good, solid, reasonable answers to their accusations.

So. The Pastors followed that meeting with plans for Apologetic Conferences. In early 2006 the first conference was held with Ray, Michuta, Shea, Bennett, and Shoemann and the pastor as the speakers.

All the conferences were free. A free will collection more than paid the bill. People gave in gratitude !!

Are Catholics willing to learn? Yes!

Are some priests willing to attain that goal? Yes!

Concerned about the pentacostal threat… do something. If your parish won’t sponsor an event, find one that will and support it. There are speakers - priests and laity - all over. I am amazed how many people I meet (Catholic, duh) who really DO know their faith. Some of them are also willing to share it.

We gotta get busy. It will be so easy, you will be in awe. Granted, we can’t all have a Hahn or Staples to speak… but this forum alone could provide names and numbers everywhere of capable people.

maybe a thread idea… “Who In Your Area Can Speak on Apologetics…”
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:amen:

We have “missions” every two years in our parish run by trained speakers. They are usually five night in a row with mass and fellowship afterwards. Last Sunday we had Hector Molina talk to the parish. He is ON FIRE for Jesus. And our Associate priest is a professor of Theology at the local Jesuit University. How much better does that get?
hectormolina.net/

It does!

We have excellent Music Director with his doctorate in Organ! Our choir is the best. We sing Halleluia Chorus, and all the beautiful Latin classics, Panis Angelicus, etc.

Our Adult Faith Group makes CD’s by Scott Hahn, Tim Staples, Rosalind Moss, and others available in the back of church. And we have an excellent parish library.

We are one small parish - 1,200 families.

How much better does it get? We have Archbishop Raymond Burke, a man unafraid of speaking out for Orthodoxy.

I have never met a priest who was not good apologist. They all have their master’s in Theology. I have met priests who are poor speakers.🙂
 
I believe that after Vatican II the Church got those weakness:
1.The changes in the mass were confusing, the mass became dry and emotionless. Vs the vibrant pentecostal services. Charistmatic Renewal and bringing back the TLM would help in that way.
2. The Church concetrated in Social Justice and feel good easybelieveism universalism, the same mistake of liberal mainstream protestants. No cathecism, no Bible studies, no outreach to their own belivers. Read a Catholic newspaper in Latinamerica and is all easygoing politics, not religious studies.
3. The Church neglegected apologetics, and trying to convert other christians in a time when the fund/evangelicals were setting their sights on nominal and practicing but not cathequised catholics. For example, in Latinamerica, were the pentecostals advance have been the greatest you go to a Catholic Library and there is no a single book on Apologetics. Not one.

Of course there are somethings of Pentecostals I also dislike.
  1. The influence of World of Faith teachings.
  2. The fact that the high emotionalism wears out during the years.
  3. The fact that most of them are YEC, making science classes a faith destroying experience for many of them.
  4. The fact that is shallow, dummed down christianity (see 3).
 
One should note that the problem did not arise with VII. The Church has been in South and Central America for over 500 years; yet much of it is still mission territory.

We see the results here where we have to recruit Asian priests to say the Spanish masses. The ratio of Hispanic priests to Hispanic population is very poor, while the ratio for Asians is comparatively high [compared to Anglos].
 
I believe the Spanish had a policy of keeping the Church deliverately dependent on Spanish clergy. And that policy continued after the independence. For example secular third orders are rare in Latinamerica. I have learn a lot on them in the US forum. The Latin CC is very passive.
One of the good thing on the pentecostal challenge is that has forced the Church to react. But very slowly in most places.
 
Joe_Kelley said:
One should note that the problem did not arise with VII. The Church has been in South and Central America for over 500 years; yet much of it is still mission territory.

We see the results here where we have to recruit Asian priests to say the Spanish masses. The ratio of Hispanic priests to Hispanic population is very poor, while the ratio for Asians is comparatively high [compared to Anglos].
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**Celibacy is frowned upon in Latin American countries which is why there aren’t that many candidates to the priesthood. **
 
Thats it. And they are starting to try to bring their nonsense taking clues of their US bethren to the public arena. That would generate a backlash. Since I doubt they will water down or eliminate evolution from school curriculums outside the US.
As a firm evolutionist I stand vigilant.
 
Lovemyfaith said:
VATICAN CITY - The Roman Catholic Church must figure out what it is doing wrong in the battle for souls, because so many Catholics are leaving the church to join Pentecostal and other evangelical movements, a top Vatican cardinal said Friday.

philly.com/philly/wires/ap/news/nation_world/11756257.html
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Putting matters very broadly:​

1. It catechises people - but it doesn’t evangelise them. It preaches the Church, & encourages a personal relationship with the Saints - but it does not give Christ the primacy & Lordship over both. He is important for His theological function, but not as the Risen & Glorified & Living Saviour Who meets His People in the here & now; the Evangelical Christ is a Living Saviour, whom anyone can come to know, in a living way, here & now.

2. Evangelicals are inclined to make the opposite mistake: they can be so centred on Him, that they fail to discern His Body & His Presence in His Saints in Heaven & His Sacraments on earth.

If He is just some dead guy from 2000 years ago, how does that make us Christians ? Knowing about Him as a dead guy from the past =//= knowing Him as Our Lord & Saviour now & here: head-knowledge is not heart-knowledge - let alone the saving faith that He alone can give. No ideology, & no organisation, however sacred or large, can give us Him or faith in Him or love of Him - He alone can do so.

Just MO
 
I agree with other posters in that one of the major problems is poor catechesis of Cathollic youth. I am one that fell away from the Church into secularism for many years in part because of this. For instance, I didn’t even know what genuflection was until I decided to come back to the church and started studying my faith. I genuflected when I went into a church and I had heard the term, but I never associated the two. This is one example of many. The Church gave a lot of rules and practices to follow but none of my catachesis instructors ever explained them. Not even the simplest of issues such as genuflection, let alone more contentious issues such as abstinence and contraception. Along with these issues, I agree that it is time to get more substance to our sermons. I am tired of sermons that are generic and watered down so as not to offend anyone. I can probably count on one hand the number of interesting homilies I’ve heard in a Catholic Church until I happened across some recordings of Archbishop Fulton Sheen on EWTN. It would be nice to have more priests tell it like it is with his loving care for his flock.

Part of the solution to help bring up new generations of strong Catholics is to find ways to lower the cost of Catholic education and bring in instructors that truly know and live the Catholic faith. Perhaps funding this would be possible if the diocese would cut back on funding to political causes, organizations and other social justice causes. With stronger Catholic education I believe improvements in social justice work among parishioners will follow.

Also, as far as countering pentecostals and evangelicals at a time of fewer vocations. Perhaps it is time for the Church to start educating the laity to do missionary work in non-christian countries as these protestant denominations do. Some of these denominations require or at least strongly encourage missionary work among their young adults. It is the responsibility of all to evangelize and maybe it is time to start molding the laity to engage this function and give them the tools to do so without necessarily taking up a vocation. It might give a needed boost to involvement in spreading the Church to allow lay people to do this kind of work without committing to a life of celibacy.

As other posters have stated, it is time to take some lessons from these churches that are drawing so many souls and find ways to adapt their methods into tools that are in keeping with the Church’s teachings and traditions. Lay missionaries could be an important step in this direction. At the very least it is something to consider.
 
Gottle_of_Geer said:

Putting matters very broadly:​

1. It catechises people - but it doesn’t evangelise them. It preaches the Church, & encourages a personal relationship with the Saints - but it does not give Christ the primacy & Lordship over both. He is important for His theological function, but not as the Risen & Glorified & Living Saviour Who meets His People in the here & now; the Evangelical Christ is a Living Saviour, whom anyone can come to know, in a living way, here & now.

**That is the most absurd comment I have read on here lately. If the Catholic Church has been lax about anything, it’s CATECHESIS, NOT evangelization. To say that it preaches “the Church and encourages a personal relationship with the Saints but does not give Christ the primacy and Lordship over both” is both wrong and reveals your lack of understanding in the Church’s mission. When you walk into ANY Catholic Church ANYWHERE in the world, one is struck with the reality that it is CHRIST WHO IS WORSHIPPED AND GLORIFIED FIRST AND FOREMOST, and NOT the saints, who, by the way, have lived lives in the grace of Christ and can be held up as examples to follow.

The great catechetical error in the Church is pushing the notion of ecumenism so far into the heads of its membership the past two generations that they have been led to believe that one Christian sect is the same as any other, and it doesn’t matter which one you belong to.**

Just MO
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i think what Geer was getting at is that yes it teaches Christ, but evanglicals claim to KNOW Christ. I would have never come to the church without first coming to know Christ personally, and finally understanding why Catholicism is the greatest 😃

If you don’t love Christ, the church will just be a big book of rules…and soon enough those other denominations look a lot easier to swallow. If you’re not doing it for Christ then you’re doing it for all the wrong reasons.

One of the nuns from my RCIA class who missioned in S.Africa for 25 years or so put it this way:

“The first 5-10 years we just made things better. Hospitals, food, schools. Then we started talking about Jesus and the Gospels for a few years, and finally the people were so hungry for faith that we cathechised them.”

You have to love Christ first, and I think a lot of people miss that. If you are a truly obsessed follower of J.C then nothing can shake you.
 
revelations said:
i think what Geer was getting at is that yes it teaches Christ, but evanglicals claim to KNOW Christ. I would have never come to the church without first coming to know Christ personally, and finally understanding why Catholicism is the greatest 😃

If you don’t love Christ, the church will just be a big book of rules…and soon enough those other denominations look a lot easier to swallow. If you’re not doing it for Christ then you’re doing it for all the wrong reasons.

One of the nuns from my RCIA class who missioned in S.Africa for 25 years or so put it this way:

“The first 5-10 years we just made things better. Hospitals, food, schools. Then we started talking about Jesus and the Gospels for a few years, and finally the people were so hungry for faith that we cathechised them.”

You have to love Christ first, and I think a lot of people miss that. If you are a truly obsessed follower of J.C then nothing can shake you.
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As I recall, Jesus taught first and fed them as it got late. He didn’t use loaves and fishes to draw them in.
 
Well we aren’t Jesus, and thankfully none of us claim to be. To go further into detail, it makes no sense to preach a savior to people who get no meals a day, have no medical facilities, and no schools.

Anyways, my whole point was you have to come to love Jesus first. The church makes no sense without a thorough love and reverence of our Lord. 8 weeks ago catholicism made no sense to me at all, and I figured the pope was the most irrelevant figure head in all of history.

Amazing what Mary does for us isn’t it?

👍
 
I can only think that anyone leaving the Church for whatever other church can never claim to have really been a practicing Catholic in the first place. If anyone believed that the Eucharist was the real presence of our Lord, which is the central pillar of our faith, how could they ever walk away from that to some other religion that doesn’t?

They could only do that if they never really believed it in their heart of hearts so in reality while having perhaps been baptized Cartholic they never really practiced the Faith or believed what It teaches.

The Bible talks about the seed that falls on hard ground and doesn’t take root. Maybe the Church isn’t about numbers and that apostasy is happening as foretold. Faith isn’t about emotional experience its about what you know and profess to be truth.
 
Why do Catholics become Pentecostals? I became a Catholic when I was 18 as it felt like home spiritually. But I wasn’t really formed or catechised in the faith at that time. Then I fell in secularism, married, got divorced, got an annulment (strange that one stuck!), got married in the Church. Then 25 years later we came back to the Church via an Anglican (Episcopal) Church run by a Pentecostal preacher! There were ex-Catholics in the Church. Anti Catholicism became evident after a while. Also the ex-Catholics I spoke to seemed to have been given ‘evidence’ of the paganism of the Catholic Church. I was offered a book to read called ‘Babylon Mystery’. I didn’t read it. At one prayer service the pastor’s wife asked me to come and ‘pray the Catholic out of another Catholic woman’, I didn’t, I was horrified and upset that they would do this and bolted for the nearest Catholic Church. My husband has now become Catholic. We love the Church, Benedict and have taught ourselves the faith. Having said that we are very unhappyin our Catholic parish and love the more orthodox ones, so the journey continues. Incidentally I went back to the pastor’s wife and ‘discussed’ the incident and the book ‘Babylon Myster’ (which the author has retracted). Regardless she hung on to her views of paganism, tracking back through Church history she decided that even the apostles must have got it wrong! Yes the experiential was probably in step with our cultural heads, but in the end the hunger of faith needs to go deeper. The couple of Pentecostals I talk to admit they don’t pray that much privately, that is listening and spending time etc. Interesting.
 
Polycarp1 said:
I can only think that anyone leaving the Church for whatever other church can never claim to have really been a practicing Catholic in the first place. If anyone believed that the Eucharist was the real presence of our Lord, which is the central pillar of our faith, how could they ever walk away from that to some other religion that doesn’t?

They could only do that if they never really believed it in their heart of hearts so in reality while having perhaps been baptized Cartholic they never really practiced the Faith or believed what It teaches.

The Bible talks about the seed that falls on hard ground and doesn’t take root. Maybe the Church isn’t about numbers and that apostasy is happening as foretold. Faith isn’t about emotional experience its about what you know and profess to be truth.
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As a former Catholic, all I can say is BRAVO! I think you hit the nail squarely on the head. One doesn’t believe then suddenly not believe. I think it would be fair to say I never believed what the Church teaches.

I would also say that I didn’t truly understand that the Eucharist was the “central pillar” of the faith until I was in my late 30’s. I came to that realization after a life time of God loves you, be nice to each other, let’s color a rainbow, Kum bah yah, checklist catechisim. All my brothers and sisters have since left the Church too.

Nohome
 
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