I suppose you beat the odds. Or maybe your parish is one if the few that does a good job with mystagogy.
Weekly attendance is actually about the same between Protestants and Catholics, but there are so few Protestants who would ever call themselves Protestants if they didn’t attend church at least occasionally, and the practicing-non practicing distinction breaks down approximately like this for Catholics.
Synod: Poll finds practicing, non-practicing Catholics in America are worlds apart | National Catholic Reporter
According to some kind of head guy with Knights of Columbus.
Did you ever look around at other Protestant churches? Some are better than others, and you tend to have a lot more options available to you as a Protestant than you do as a Catholic.
Our difference of opinion might have something to do with our different assessments of the relative value that the sacraments have in making you a better Christian.
My goodness, I suppose the mystagogy was not so good at your parish. I wouldn’t call it hand-holding, but two-thirds of Tiber swimmers could use some more of it within the first five years. Are you a revert? That can be of assistance- I think straight-out converts are more like complete strangers than reverts are, so they tend to need a little more help putting down roots.
Back to the point about the relative efficacy of the sacraments- on their own, they don’t give converts much of a reason to stick around. They need something else in order to stay committed past a year (half don’t) or five years (two thirds don’t). That something is what you call hand-holding, but I would call it the stuff that is comparatively more important and more effective than the sacraments in helping Christians become better Christians. You’re more likely to downplay that if your focus is strictly sacramental, but I would argue that you’re downplaying something that is very important, and to your own detriment.
Everything that you’ve listed is done for you, to you, or on your behalf. At what point do you contribute something? See, this is the other reason why downplaying the non-sacramental types of things is so bad. It downplays everything that you can do as a layperson, and even if it doesn’t strictly limit you to an entirely passive role, it devalues the things you can do by comparison and makes you less likely to do them.
Well, there’s a reason why the CC is working so hard to try and get the laity more involved in doing things of value. It’s actually a long list of rather complicated reasons whose problematic roots are well outside these United States, and it has as much to do with an inordinately high view of the priestly duties as it does with all the laity-related issues. But the short version is that the CC badly needs to change what’s happening with the laity, and I acknowledge that they’re in the early stages of working really hard on it while also pointing out how far they have to go and how they had soooo very far to go when they first started. And if you ask me, all of this is intimately related to what should be (and sometimes is) the core mission of any Christian church- win non believers for Christ and help Christians become better Christians. Again, the CC in the US is working on this, but they really aren’t particularly good at either of them (at this time) (relatively speaking) and it becomes especially apparent in this type of highly competitive environment.
