Much has been said about the priest shortage over the years. We have fewer priests covering more and more masses.

But there’s an issue more pressing: the shortage of lay apostles. The Church needs to give lay people practical tools to evangelize.

If we focus on that shortage with as much intensity as the priest shortage, we might find that we fix the priest shortage along the way.

We can actually fix the lay apostle shortage

Last year, a friend of mine became the vocation director for our diocese. I half-joked to him, “Please don’t let me die without the sacraments.” As I slowly age, I notice fewer of my peers becoming priests. For every one or two of my peers who become priests, it seems five or ten priests retire. You can see the writing on the wall: in a couple of decades, the nearest priest might have to drive an hour just to give me the sacraments on my deathbed. So I definitely feel the gravity of the situation.

However, focusing on the priest shortage as a layperson seems a bit too easy.

There’s very little I can do to fix the priest shortage outside of having several kids and offering them to the church, which I will do, but with fear and trepidation. I prefer instead to focus on what I can do to fix the crisis in the church.

So we laypeople need to focus more on fixing the layman shortage, particularly the shortage of lay apostles. This is different from not having enough people in our pews—everyone knows that. What we have even fewer of are apostles.

The unique advantage of lay people

I noticed this shortage in 2019 when I started working on the framework that would eventually become my book, Save Your Parish. I divided the jobs of every parish into four different floors: community building, conversion moments, ongoing catechesis, and teaching people how to evangelize. As I’ve talked to parishes trying to implement this framework, I’ve noticed almost zero parishes have anything remotely close to that final floor—the commission section.

Our churches have little to no instruction on how to evangelize the average layperson.

Maybe a church will put up a sign at the exit with “Go announce the gospel of the Lord,” but we don’t give people concrete advice on how to do it. As we see more people come into our church, we need to take these fervent individuals and give them the necessary tools.

When Christ calls for more laborers for the harvest, He is not simply speaking about more priests. We need lay harvesters, too.

Lay people have a unique ability to fit into the cracks and crevices of society. We go to the places where priests will never go. For example, my friends work in engineering firms that require security clearance to get into. A priest is not going to go in there. A priest can go to bars, parks, and ball games, but at the end of the day, a layperson has more mobility than a priest in today’s society.

It’s easier for a parent to go into a school than it is for a priest or even a youth minister.

Give lay people practical tools

One of my parishes started an evangelization team. An enterprising parishioner named Pam wanted to listen to a Catholic evangelization podcast, Every Knee Shall Bow, and practice its content with other people. We got together and role-played conversations with non-Catholics or fallen-away children. Then, they called every parishioner on the parish registry who hadn’t been to Mass in years. Over the course of six years, that small group of about ten people brought three hundred families back to the church.

Another gift the Church can give its people is permission.

That same parish we started an evangelization fund where the church set aside money every month for reimbursement. People could take a friend out to lunch, coffee, or a beer, and the church would reimburse them as long as they talked about Jesus. Very few people actually turned in receipts, but a lot of people did the evangelizing because the permission made them realize, “I am just going to do it now, I don’t really need the church to pay me back ten or twenty bucks.”

Three hundred families—not just three hundred people, but families.

Find more lay people, find more priests

That is the kind of harvest that is out there for the taking. It is fruit that blesses generations. That fruit is available to your parish if you can take it.

We need to focus on this shortage at least as much as we focus on the priest shortage. The more lay people evangelize, the more lay people we are going to bring in, and naturally, the more priests we will ultimately have.

If we fix the lay apostle shortage, we will fix the priest shortage, too.

I write more about Pam’s parish in my book Save Your Parish.

Read the first chapter here:

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Yesterday, Pope Leo posted on X about immigration.

Since the sentiment was relatively pro-migrant, the right freaked out, continuing the trend of shooting themselves in the foot when engaging the Church.

But Pope Leo’s statement could be entirely consistent with the conservative position on immigration in America right now.

The right must work to understand the Church’s position on immigration, and stop acting like the Church is against them.

The Church has a preferential option for the poor

The Church’s position on immigration can be summed up in the social doctrine of the preferential option for the poor. This is the principle that the Church focuses on the interests of the poor and speaks out on their behalf. Often, the poor are shoved to the margins of society and have few advocates.

The preferential option for the poor is a logical conclusion of the principle of the common good.

“Common” means both “shared” and “ordinary.” We cannot have a “common good” unless the “commoner” is included. People often overlook the commoner in politics, so the Church takes on a responsibility to rectify that.

That said, the Church’s preferential option for the poor is not an exclusive option.

She does not support the poor at the expense of the wealthy, the elite, or wealthier nations. But she recognizes that the powerful, the wealthy, and the developed nations often have enough resources to fight for themselves.

They don’t need the Church fighting on their behalf.

Pope Leo’s position is conservative

Pope Leo said the migrant crisis should prick at the consciences of nations, both origin nations and what he called transit nations.

We can glean two things from his phrasing.

First, he recognizes that the current scale of mass immigration is a crisis, i.e., not a good thing. He rightly points out that people are willing to risk their lives on little boats crossing the Mediterranean rather than stay in their places of origin. This should be a sign to those home countries that something has gone terribly wrong; he is basically admonishing origin countries for being corrupt and treating their citizens poorly.

Second, by talking about “transit nations,” he recognizes that refugee status is supposed to be temporary. An issue we face in America is that many seek asylum as a path to become permanent residents, but Pope Leo refers to Western nations as transit countries, saying this should be a temporary measure, and eventually, people return.

The funny thing is, he is talking about everybody except the right. The global left does not see itself as transit countries; they are purposefully importing migrants to increase the labor pool and expand their election base.

You can hold a completely closed-border, mass-deportation position and still say exactly what Pope Leo is saying.

But whenever he talks like this, conservatives immediately assume he’s admonishing them, which makes them look guilty. Instead, they could respond by saying, “Yes, origin nations should get better, and we should act as transit nations with a plan to return people to their home countries as soon as possible.”

Conservatives should argue from compassion

American conservatives need to reframe their argument against mass migration.

Third-world migration is indeed harming wealthy, first-world nations. However, when you put it like that, it sounds like the rich are being inconvenienced for the sake of the poor. That is not a sympathetic position, and it doesn’t sound like the preferential option for the poor.

The right needs to loudly proclaim that it is on the side of the poor American who bears the brunt of illegal immigration.

These are people tied to their hometowns who can’t leave when refugees arrive en masse to take up jobs and houses. They are the ones dealing with driven-down wages, forced to compete with migrants willing to take less. This shows a preferential option for the poor. The right needs to lean into this if it wants to be taken seriously by the Vatican as a faithful Christian movement, rather than just a nationalist populist movement.

The right is in a populist moment, and the preferential option for the poor is ripe for the picking. Right-wing media pundits refuse to see it, stuck in a 2013 reactionary, persecuted mindset. If you want to argue for closing the border and deporting dangerous migrants, you should do it with the Church, not against it. There is nothing inherently immoral about deportation; it’s often a just act.

The right needs to stop antagonizing the Pope, or we will have another situation where the Pope only hears from conservatives when they criticize him.

That won’t win over the hearts and minds of the Church.

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Every Sunday, before the bread and wine are consecrated, laypeople carry them to the altar.

Most of us watch this happen and think nothing of it. The priest's words are routine, and we've stopped listening. He says, “Pray, brethren, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God the almighty Father.”

Despite this being said at every Mass, many Catholics don’t think of themselves as giving anything to the Church. In fact, many are repelled by the very idea that they ought to give anything at all.

We treat our parish like consumers

We treat our parishes the same way we treat a school or a restaurant: as providers of a service. If we don’t like it, we leave. And some say this explicitly. Back in January, when I released my anti-parish-hopping article, many people compared the reason they parish hop to the same reason they don’t go back to a McDonald’s that gave them poor service. They had a bad experience, so they left.

This is a consumerist mentality that is prevalent in our churches. It needs to end.

A parish is not merely a building or an institution. A parish is a family of families, and a family has a different logic than a restaurant.

Now, a family does have rights and responsibilities that run in both directions. Children have rights. If those rights are being violated badly enough, they need to be removed from the family. That’s true. And if a parish is genuinely toxic or harmful, there are legitimate reasons to leave. I’m not arguing otherwise.

But children also have responsibilities.

As children grow up in the faith — as they become spiritually mature, as they leave home and start families of their own — those responsibilities grow, too. You help with your younger siblings, and you care for your parents as they age. You endure your mother’s less-than-great cooking. You show up to your sibling’s play even when you don’t want to. You do these things not because you owe a strict legal debt but because you love your family.

For some reason, it is very difficult for Catholics to apply this same logic to the parish.

What we actually owe

Priests often frame this as time, treasure, and talent. That’s fine. But I think the offertory gives us a better image.

We owe our parish membership in the body. The lay people of the parish are the ones who bring up the bread and the wine — the things that are going to become the body and blood of Christ. We offer ourselves too, as members of the Body. And that membership is going to look different for everybody.

For some men, it looks like being a priest. For some, it’s working at the parish or serving as a ministry volunteer. But for most of us, it looks almost nothing like that. It might be a devout Catholic in a secular office who evangelizes his coworkers quietly over lunch. It might be someone who reconnects with an estranged family member and gently encourages them back to the Church. These are ways of giving your sacrifice too. They all belong to the same offering.

Another way to phrase what we owe is our contribution to the parish mission.

“To whom much is given, much is required,” and you have been given much. As an adult in the faith, as a well-formed Catholic, you have been given something most people on earth don’t have: a clear-eyed understanding of what is right and what is wrong, the revelation of God and His law, the Eucharist itself.

You’ve been given that gift not to bury it but to reinvest it and make it multiply.

The mission of the Church is totalizing. It encompasses everything we do. And the moment is dire. If the only people doing the work of the Church are the ones wearing clerics or drawing a W-2 from St. Mary’s, there will be wheat left unharvested in the field.

You are not a spiritual infant

I’m not saying you owe heroic sacrifice to a parish that is actively failing you or that you can’t leave a genuinely harmful situation. The duty to your parish is subordinated to your duty to your family and your own spiritual health.

But you are not an infant in the pew. You are a spiritual adult, and spiritual adults owe something back. The question is what it looks like for you, in your life, with your particular gifts.

The offertory happens every single Sunday. We say the words together: May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands. The sacrifice we offer the Church is bread, wine, and ourselves, all of which (in different ways) become the Body of Christ

So what are you bringing?

I wrote a book to help laypeople save their parish (even with no experience).

The first chapter is free here:

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Recently, Pope Leo XIV warned European leaders that the continent has entered a time of “drastic sterility”.

Most modernised nations are facing that problem and trying to address it by implementing family-friendly policies. According to Pope Leo, however, these policies are among the culprits of decline and really “promote discrimination against motherhood”.

The solution to the fertility crisis is not to concoct the right collection of policies to promote motherhood.

The solution is a recovery of the telos of woman…

»»» Read the rest at The Catholic Herald

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Last week, the Trump administration released aliens.gov, a website built around a 1950s sci-fi theme that compares illegal immigrants to alien invaders from outer space.

It’s a silly joke and another chapter in the ongoing story of our politics becoming more about memes than governance.

The bishops predictably condemned it, releasing a statement condemning dehumanizing language and insisting that national security and human dignity are not in conflict.

That’s all fine and true. But it’s also another example of the Bishop’s strategy for dealing with the Trump administration, which hurts their cause more than it helps.

How a father corrects a son

The US bishops seem to be speaking out of both sides of their mouth.

They say national security matters, but then it seems like Trump can never do anything right when it comes to actually securing the border. The bishops oppose more detention centers and higher rates of arrest. They’ve condemned “mass deportation” as a matter of course.

But if the deportation of a dangerous criminal is a good thing, what exactly is wrong with doing it en masse? If there’s been a mass importation—which there has been—the only remedy would be a mass deportation.

A Bishop, like a good father, cannot only give negative condemnation. He must also give positive direction. If I tell my son, “don’t go this way, son’t go don’t go that way,” eventually he gets frustrated and asks which way he’s supposed to go. If I never answer, he will go his own way and stop listening to me.

The same is true of the state under the care of the Church. When the bishops give nothing but condemnation, people—including faithful Catholics—tune them out. It becomes white noise.

Offer a positive vision

So let me offer what positive direction might actually sound like.

The bishops could acknowledge the legitimate good of deporting people who are clearly violating our laws—the traffickers, the fraudsters, the violent. They could insist that detention facilities provide access to the sacraments and decent conditions. They could critique the messaging: this is a serious issue, so treat it seriously and stop wasting time making memes about it.

Then they could deal honestly with Catholic Charities, which receives a sizable share of its funding from the federal government. When you have a twenty-million-dollar payroll and twenty million dollars in government money, losing that money hurts—it hurts your ability to keep the doors open and keep your employees’ mortgages paid. That is a massive vulnerability that has given one political party an outsized influence over the Church. Mixing government money into the Church is a red flag and an open door for partisanship.

The bishops should want to be independent enough to give aid prudently, beholden to neither party.

But their relationship with federal grants seems to cloud their judgment when choosing how to interact with the US government.

The perceived double standard

I’m writing all of this in charity. I know any criticism of the hierarchy gets read as disobedience. I don’t intend it that way.

But notice the double standard.

The bishops were hesitant to criticize Joe Biden directly and to deny him communion because they wanted to maintain a relationship—and they did. But they won’t extend that same grace to Catholic Republicans.

I think the bishops are afraid to work with Republicans out of a fear of being seen as partisan, like what has happened to Bishop Barron. I’m afraid that ship has sailed.

The public perception is that the bishops are willing to work with politicians who champion intrinsic evils like abortion with leniency, but not those who differ with them on prudential matters like immigration.

The bishops are seen as partisan to the left, and they must work to change that.

Synodality, walking together, dialogue, etc., are the bishops’ own stated goals, and you cannot dialogue with half the country from behind a press release. Think of what would happen if a bishop met with the vice president somewhere neutral, or in his own home, talking immigration off the record and as friends.

Politics is a network of friends making decisions together. Public condemnation via press releases serves only to alienate.

How to win back the people

Trump won the popular vote running on deportation.

There are members of their flock, even a majority, who have seen mass immigration policy harm their communities. When the bishops condemn what these people voted for, without ever talking to them, they don’t change their minds. They just see the bishops as out of touch and stop listening.

If the bishops are right that Trump’s policies are immoral—and for this article, I’ll assume they are—then it is more important, not less, to build the relationships with Republicans and be heard. Of the two parties, the Republicans are the ones more willing to listen to orthodox Catholics. Every frontrunner for the Republican primary in 2028 is a Catholic.

They’re not perfect, no Catholic statesman ever is, but the bishops are gambling a decade of the Church’s influence over public life on the assumption that condemnation works. It doesn’t.

So which is it? Do we want to win over the corporate press that hates us already or win over the people who have the potential to move public policy in a Catholic direction?

Because we cannot have both, and time is running out.

A parish secretary runs into the pastor’s office and says, “Father, there’s a bat in the church. We can’t get rid of it.”

The pastor says, “Give me a second.” He grabs his bag off the table and leaves. He comes back a few minutes later and says, “Don’t worry, I’ve taken care of it.”

The parish secretary says, “Oh no, did you kill him?”

And he says, “No, I gave him Confirmation. He’ll never come back.”

A priest told me that joke a few years ago. Teens get confirmed, leave, and never come back. It’s such a common problem, it’s a joke, and it reveals something crucial about how the Church sees the problem. The priest is the hero, and the bat (the teen) is the problem.

But we need to reframe this view. Consider that it may not be the case that every single teenager is so disengaged and disinterested in Catholicism. The common denominator is us.

WE are failing to catechize our children and help them see the mission of the Church they are being brought into.

If we acknowledge we are the problem, then we can start to fix it.

Pope Leo, in an address to confirmation kids around Pentecost, talked about this problem.

He reinforced the importance of remaining in our parishes, since that’s where Catholic life is lived. It’s lived in community, it’s lived in parishes.

Leo recognizes that the source of the problem is perhaps something young people are intuiting. He said, “You are part of the mission of the church.” Perhaps he’s the first person to say that to them — because by and large, the church communicates the opposite: that the mission of the church does not belong to these young people.

Young people are smart. They intuit that we don’t believe the Church's mission is for them, and they respond accordingly.

In my book, Save Your Parish, I talk about a problem I call “New Clericalism.

Clericalism is the idea that the mission of the church belongs only to priests and not to lay people. New clericalism is an expansion of that idea to include priests and “official” lay people like youth ministers, DREs, and parish secretaries.

The mission of the church belongs only to them.

Infected by this mindset, New Clericalists parishes become like sacramental dispensaries where people come, do some paperwork or retreats, and receive the sacraments.

Once that process is over, they leave. Why wouldn’t they? Their part is done.

Families bring their children in for a service as they bring them to school or to travel baseball. We put them through a class or a program, and once they are done with it, they are done. It never occurs to them that the mission of the Church belongs to them, too, because it is either not explicitly said or it is not apparent how. If evangelization is merely running CCD, how are they supposed to do the mission?

The real Catholics are the ones who “get involved” as staff or official volunteers. Most have no desire to do this, so they leave entirely. They can tell they are not needed.

Pope Leo is calling these young people to take on a new, non-clericalist mindset when it comes to the Church. He’s asking them to take on an apostolic mindset.

But for them to do that, our parishes have to become apostolic parishes.

We have a collective responsibility to treat our parishes like they are a place for lay people and clergy alike to come together, empower each other, and live out the mission of the Holy Spirit — the mission of the Church — in the real world outside the walls. Leo is saying the Holy Spirit wants us to walk together and do Christ’s work together.

The Holy Spirit descends on us in Confirmation to make us co-laborers with Christ, to work alongside Him in the world and do His mission with Him.

The kids are leaving because they don’t know that. Even if we say it, we don’t do it. We don’t give them a concrete picture of what evangelization as a normal teenager looks like.

As a youth minister, I tried my best to instill this sense of mission in my teens.

One girl, whom I’ll call Rebecca, took it to heart.

She was a small, mousy, introverted girl more interested in writing and drawing than in street corner preaching or volunteering at Church.

One week during Confirmation prep, I told them Confirmation meant being empowered to evangelize. I taught the teens to practice listening to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.

She took my words to heart, and over the course of my time at that parish, she brought ten friends to church, including two non-Catholics, one of whom converted.

We often talk about how “9 leave for every 1 that joins.” But 1 on-fire disciple can bring in 10 and make up that difference.

If we give teenagers the tools to become apostles, some won’t, but many will. Those who take on the mission will cause unprecedented growth in our Church.

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It’s hard to imagine Dante asking ChatGPT “Help me design a nine-part structure of Hell.”

I’m afraid AI will make us lose our ability to think deeply and keep our culture in a permanent state of decadence.

Most people in the West feel an uncanny sense that our society is in decay. In his 2020 book, The Decadent Society, Ross Douthat gives words to this malaise. He calls our society “decadent” – successful but stuck. Our institutions, politics, economy, and even our entertainment are no longer seeking to go beyond themselves and improve.

Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas warns that artificial intelligence – despite the optimistic prophecies of its architects – may be forcing us into a state of permanent decadence. If we heed his words, we might escape it.

Our society is stuck in a self-referential loop. Every year, the Oscars insist that movies are groundbreaking when they are telling the same stories and reinforcing the same cultural narratives. Our political discourse keeps appealing to the same handful of historical events – civil rights, the Civil War, slavery, World War II – as if nothing else has happened in a century. Our institutions, including universities and even churches, have stopped producing great minds at the volume they once did…

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Last week, Stephen Colbert aired the last episode of his late-night talk show, ending his reign of terror on American comedy.

As with every celebrity who expresses even a hint of Catholicism, he was eulogized by popular Catholic figures as a model of the faith. One writer even called him a prophet for Catholicism.

A prophet indeed, but what kind?

Colbert served as a prophet for a type of Catholicism that excises anything from church teaching that contradicts secular morality.

The False Prophet of Beige Catholicism

One article was written by Father James Martin, S.J., editor of America Magazine. He reflected on his personal relationship with Colbert and his role as the unofficial chaplain of The Late Show. Martin called Colbert “the greatest evangelist of modern times,” and gave several reasons for the term.

His most important reason for our purposes is that Colbert is “normal.”

Another particularly laudatory article from the Religion News Service made a similar point, calling him not only normal but a true “outsider”—one of the comedians who operate outside of our institutions to bring us truth.

Martin insists on the sincerity of Colbert’s Catholic faith. He knows him, and I don’t, so ultimately, I can’t say. But I do have good reason to doubt it. Father Martin claims in his article Colbert was “very well studied on Catholicism,” and yet he holds positions on abortion and same-sex “marriage” that are directly contrary to Catholic Church teaching.

So, forgive me if I’m skeptical.

Instead, I’d like to focus on his Catholic fans calling him a “normal outsider.” Because he clearly isn’t.

Just an average super-famous mega-millionaire

Colbert might be normal if you are used to spending time around the ultra-rich and famous. But to most normal people in America and in the Church, Colbert is anything but normal.

He speaks to a large audience every night (although not large enough for CBS) and lives in a $3 million mansion. During his time on The Late Show, he went from a $6 million starting salary to $15 million per year in 2023. This is unfathomable wealth for most “normal people.”

“Outsider” is an equally ridiculous claim. Colbert is well-connected in entertainment and politics. He hosted a show for one of the three oldest broadcasting stations in the country. His programming during COVID was in lockstep with the NIH’s agenda. Regardless of what you think about those guidelines, you can’t call that an “outsider.”

Since it’s so clear he is neither normal nor an outsider, one wonders what the point is of pretending that he is.

The answer is that very pretension allows Beige Catholicism to thrive.

The Hidden Elitism of Beige Catholics

Beige Catholicism is the attempt to reconcile the teachings of the Church with the dominant secular morality. And that is what Colbert spent his time on television doing.

The most devoted adherents of beige Catholicism tend to be those who are at the upper echelons of the church and society. They espouse beige Catholicism because they derive economic and social value from being in these institutions. In other words, they don’t want to get kicked out of the cocktail parties.

So, they espouse a kind of Catholicism that is bereft of anything that makes it provocative or contradictory to the modern age.

Beige Catholicism perpetuates itself by hiding its elitism.

One motive for hiding it is much like Poe’s Telltale Heart; they shove their elitism away underneath a floorboard so other Catholics can’t detect what they got when they traded away their faith. They need to appear normal

Another motive for appearing “normal” is that beige Catholics need to redefine what the word “normal” means. Catholics who actually care about the doctrines of the church need to feel weird, strange, or crazy so they are more likely to conform to this age—to become beige.

We need a better Catholic elite

Ultimately, we need to be aware of this rhetorical move—this pretension that our elite Catholics are somehow just like us. They are entrenched in the system and part of the machine.

Now, it is not inherently wrong to be elite. There will always be an upper class. But it is wrong that the Catholic members of our upper class feel the need to change the Church to match the upper class and not the other way around.

But it’s time for normal Catholics to insist that our elite Catholics (especially the prelates) start representing Christ in the cocktail parties, in Congress, and on television.

We need to apply that pressure because if we don’t, these beige Catholic elites will continue to scandalize the faithful and be lauded for doing it.

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A recent op-ed in Religion News Service offered a refreshing moment of moral clarity from the Spiritual-But-Not-Religious crowd.

Liz Bucar—a professor of religious ethics at Northeastern University who has written a book on the subject—admits that the “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR) have traded in something essential and are now dealing with the consequences.

According to Bucar, they have lost a sense of community and the obligations that come with it. The things, in other words, that religion actually provides.

She notes that SBNR folks have looked for meaning in meditation and yoga, in run clubs and wine tastings, and Sunday morning brunches that have quietly replaced Sunday morning Mass. But these things don’t fulfill what religion did. Her proposed solution is that the SBNR needs to recover obligations by making intense commitments to one another within these new structures.

I appreciate the honesty of the diagnosis. Her solution, however, is impossible by definition.

You Cannot Manufacture What You Discarded

The problem is that her thinking is classically liberal.

She assumes that the structures of religion—belonging, obligation, mutual duty—can be willed into existence through free association. Find some like-minded people, commit to one another, and presto: community.

The fact is, they lost these things because they lost religion. These are inherent to religion. You cannot have them without it.

You cannot have a sense of obligation without religion or family. You cannot have true belonging without a totalizing worldview that makes claims on every part of your life. A run club doesn’t do that. Yoga doesn’t do that. They all assume you remain the sovereign of your own life, dipping into these activities for personal benefit.

This is why these things naturally exclude what the author is looking for. Her religion—because make no mistake, it is a religion—is liberalism, the conviction that autonomy is the highest good.

What does it mean to be spiritual but not religious? It means that the spiritual experience is yours. It’s something you generate within yourself, on your terms, with the parts of traditional faith you happen to like and none of the parts you don’t. It is a thinly veiled worship of the self. And because that is the case, it will naturally prohibit you from the kind of spiritual communal life enjoyed by religious communities. The isolation is a consequence of the SBNR lifestyle.

Self-Actualization is Self-Defeating

There is something deeper going on here, and I think it gets to the heart of why these communities can’t be manufactured.

The entire SBNR project is built around self-actualization. The only thing that unites people in a yoga studio or a run club is a shared, vague interest in becoming their best selves. Which means by definition that the moment another person stops serving your self-actualization, they can be discarded. The relationship has no foundation beyond mutual use.

This is precisely not what happens in a church or a family. The people in your parish, the people in your family, are given to you by God. They are your duty. You don’t get to leave them because they’ve stopped being interesting.

Here is the paradox of the Gospel that the SBNR worldview cannot grasp: Man only finds himself through the gift of himself.

The spiritual-but-not-religious are seeking to find their lives. And they will lose them. The thing they are looking for—meaning, belonging, peace, integration, the experience of being fully alive—is on the other side of the surrender they refuse to make.

If they took up religion, they would have to give up the self, the thing they care about most. But they would finally find the thing they have been chasing.

Are we ready for them?

What’s encouraging is that spiritual-but-not-religious people are, as this author admits, seeking. They want the things they discarded, and they’re starting to notice the absence.

People like this author—who reject organized religion a priori, without ever really experiencing it—will be hard to convince. But there are plenty of others who left religion behind, who realize now they were wrong, and who are ready to come home.

The question is whether we will be ready for them.

Strengthening our communities is, more than anything else, a matter of mindset. It starts with seeing your parish as your extended family, not as a club you joined and could leave if a better one popped up across town.

I write about this in my book, Save Your Parish, but the core of it is simple: until we view our parishes the way we view our families, we will never build the kind of community that can catch the spiritual-but-not-religious when they finally come home.

The seekers are coming, so let’s make sure there’s somewhere real for them to land.

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This week, a Christian rally was held in Washington, DC, hoping to “rededicate” America as a Christian nation. The first instinct of many in the Catholic world is to turn our nose up at it. It smacks too much of “political Christianity” or worse, “Christian nationalism.”

But the rally was an unequivocal good.

Men like Bishop Barron and Cardinal Dolan need to stand alongside Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth. Whatever brand of “Christian nationalism” these three hold, the Church needs to engage it.

Catholics have historically recognized the grievances and virtues of other modern ideologies like liberalism and socialism.

It’s time we extend the same grace to the nationalists.

One Nation Under God

The first instinct of a lot of Catholics, particularly online, is to turn our noses up at events like this. They assume the politicians are acting in bad faith and Catholic leaders are wrong for engaging. I’m not denying there is a political motive to this rally—these politicians want to win votes—but we should look at the base they are trying to rally.

There is now a populist movement of American Christians, socially conservative and economically left-wing, who feel disaffected by the absence of Christ in public life. This movement is called, both as a term of derision and a term of pride, Christian nationalism.

Like all buzzwords, “Christian nationalism” means what you want it to mean, but at its core, it is the belief that the nation has its own integrity and identity, and a belief that the good of the nation is achieved primarily through being a majority Christian nation.

And Catholics—particularly the apolitical, college-educated, suburban kind—recoil from Christian Nationalism.

Christian Nationalism is poor-coded

The main reason why we recoil is that the Christian Nationalist movement is heavily coded as poor. The political cartoon Christian Nationalist is overweight, wearing a wife-beater and a MAGA hat, and lives in a trailer park.

This characterization of the movement should be the signal to Catholics that we are required to listen. The Church’s preferential option for the poor requires we engage the poor as our equals in society and in our political conversation, even if we find them brash and uncouth.

The poor have real grievances and are seeking genuine goods. The Church ought to listen to them and do what it does best when engaging with modernist ideologies.

All modern ideologies are a reaction to legitimate grievances and are pursuing a genuine good. When dealing with these ideologies, the Church has historically acknowledged both the grievance and the good, but corrected its errors and brought in line with reality.

The Church ought to do the same thing with nationalism.

The Catholic response to modern ideology

There are three dominant ideologies. They stem from the three stated values of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

The dominant modern ideologies emphasize one of these values at the expense of the others:

• Liberty became liberalism; the highest good is individual autonomy.

• Equality became socialism; the highest good is economic/social equality.

• Fraternity became fascism; the highest good is the integrity of the nation.

There are legitimate evils perpetrated in the name of liberalism (abortion) and socialism (Holodomor). Yet, the Church was able to recognize the good sought and the grievances aired.

Fascism and its little brother, nationalism, also have legitimate evils perpetrated in the quest for the integrity of the nation. The Church has no problem denouncing these evils. But we seem to have a hard time recognizing the good being sought by nationalists and, yes, even fascists.

The Catholic Church needs to do three things

1. Acknowledge the legitimate grievances of nationalists

2. Acknowledge the genuine good they are seeking

3. Critique their ideology in good faith

The grievance and the good of nationalism

The grievance of the Christian nationalist is that our country’s identity, once majority Christian, is being eroded, especially through artificial means like the mass importation of foreigners by the government.

The immigration numbers are not organic. Federal immigration programs have changed the cultural makeup of small towns across the country, often through duplicitous and careless means. That is a legitimate grievance.

That town’s identity is changing because integration and assimilation do not happen at that large a scale, especially if those immigrants are not Christian, since Christ is the ultimate point of unity among people of different nations.

In response to this grievance, the nationalist is reaching for a genuine good: national integrity. Their growing nationalism is a desire for their neighborhood, town, parish, and nation to have some sort of continuity that can be passed on to their children and grandchildren.

How to correct nationalism

The correction we owe nationalism is in its friend-enemy distinction. The fascist philosopher Carl Schmitt argued in The Concept of the Political that political power is the ability to determine who is an enemy.

However, Christians do not unite around a common enemy, but a common friendship. Friendship is forged in pursuit of a common good, and greater friendship is found by pursuing more of the same goods together.

Mass immigration makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the immigrants to be brought into the circle of friendship into which they immigrate. If the community is 50% Somali Muslim and 50% American Protestant, the two groups have almost nothing in common and will create two parallel communities with competing interests.

On the other hand, when immigration happens slowly, a point of friendship can be found with the existing community, and assimilation can happen. The more points of similarity—the more common goods sought—the quicker it can happen without violating the integrity of the community

The Catholic correction is that immigration will and should happen, but not at such a scale that it violates the integrity of the local communities they enter.

Christ is the point of unity

At Pentecost, the Spirit descended, and the Apostles preached the Gospel to all nations. They were able to speak so each person heard the Gospel in his own native tongue. For the first time since the scattering of the nations at Babel, the people were united under Christ.

That project of uniting the nations continues today through the Catholic Church.

The global liberal regime we find ourselves under is seeking to be that point of unity—uniting all people as atomized individual citizens of the world. But they will fail. Our humanity is not enough to unite us. Only Christ can.

Only Christ’s Church is capable of uniting the nations, and Pentecost shows that He unites the nations as nations, each with their own identity and integrity.

As our nation seeks to reclaim its national integrity, it is paramount that the Church engage with this project, lest we find ourselves with some other principle of unity—an enemy—that will serve only to fracture us. Christ must stand as the point of unity for our nation, and the Catholic Church must be there to preach Him.

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Drive an hour outside almost any American city right now, and you will find a town that is quietly being remade. Property values are climbing in places they have no business climbing. Old neighbours are selling and moving on. A vast, low building with no windows is erected on what was once a family farm.

These are data centres. They are a driving force in the economy of the future, but we have yet to evaluate the goods they purport to provide.

When the Catholic mind evaluates anything like this, it reaches first for the principle of the common good. The common good is a good that is genuinely shared and benefits the whole society. It is distinct from the greater good, in which individuals are made to sacrifice for benefits they themselves never enjoy.

That distinction is critical when evaluating these centres…

»»» Read the rest at the Catholic Herald.

The lay apostolate is a participation in the salvific mission of the Church itself. Through their baptism and confirmation, all are commissioned to that apostolate by the Lord Himself. Lumen Gentium 31 (Vatican II, 1964)

What I saw in Pittsburgh

On a Saturday evening after Mass, the pews slowly emptied. About 50 dedicated parishioners remained in the church, most over 60 years old. Father put an “all parish meeting” in the bulletin the week before. A handful of other parishioners filed in to hear what he had to say.

Father stepped up to the ambo, still in his vestments. He didn’t make eye contact with anyone. He looked down at the ambo even though he had no notes, pretending to study something. His knuckles were tense and white, gripping the wood.

He looked up, took a deep breath, and said, “This July will be my last month at St. Mary’s Parish. The diocese is undergoing restructuring. The bishop has announced that our parish will be merging with Our Lady of Hope and St. Joseph’s down the street.”

He paused - a mistake. People started talking and whispering to each other, speculating why this was happening, what it meant, what would be lost.

The writing was on the wall a decade earlier, but few people were willing to see it. The average age of the parish was steadily climbing. Funerals outpaced baptisms 3-to-1. This should not have come as a shock to the parish, but it did. “Mergers happened in other parishes…but not ours,” they told themselves. The stages of grief washed through the pews. Most sat silently in denial. The rest of the half-hour meeting was spent fielding questions from the handful of parishioners who had jumped straight to anger.

A meeting like this one happened at every parish in the Diocese of Pittsburgh in 2018. Bishop David Zubik announced that every single parish in the diocese would be merging with at least one other parish. Even the successful ones.

For years, parishes in the diocese had been merging. There was too little money and too few priests to justify the number of churches. Pittsburgh had 338 priests in 2000, down to 112 today to serve 199 parishes. Small neighborhood parishes were being absorbed into bigger suburban ones. Bishop Zubik, perhaps rightly, decided it was better to be proactive - to consolidate all at once rather than wait for the parishes to close one by one.

Lawrence County, at the northern border of the diocese of Pittsburgh, once boasted 27 parishes. By 2019, those had merged down to seven. Then those seven merged into one - a single parish for an entire county.

This is happening all over the country, especially in dioceses with aging populations, declining Mass attendance, and struggling economies. Cincinnati announced in 2021 that it was consolidating its 208 parishes into 57 groupings.

And it makes sense that the buildings are closing because they’re empty. According to Pew Research, for every one person who joins the Catholic Church, 8.4 leave—either for another religion or for nothing at all. In 2014, that number was 6.5 to 1. It’s getting worse. The national church is hemorrhaging people, and we need to learn from the churches that are doing well. The consolidations and closures are symptoms of a deeper crisis: we’re losing our own people faster than we’re bringing anyone in.

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Where are you?

I was a youth minister for those seven parishes in Lawrence County during the consolidations. I came from a vibrant parish in Florida, so it felt strange walking into a half-empty church on a Sunday morning. But for many people there, this was just how the Catholic Church was.

Masses were sparsely attended. People came in late and left early. Before Mass even ended, a third of the parking lot had emptied. People didn’t know their priests because priests had to serve multiple churches, spending most of their time driving from parish to parish. And because of the mergers, everyone was confused. Angry. They felt like they were losing something personal, and it was hard to watch. I felt helpless.

My first day at my job, I got a phone call. An older parishioner heard a new youth minister had been hired and was excited. She said, “The youth used to help make Easter baskets. Can they help this year?”

I told her, “When I find them, I’ll let you know. I don’t know where they are.”

The first word God spoke after the Fall in Genesis - Ayeka in Hebrew - means “Where are you?” That phrase became a mantra for me: Where are you? I wrote it on a piece of paper and stuck it to my desk, where it remained for my 4 years in Pittsburgh.

My job was to serve the youth, but I felt the weight of that phrase for all of God’s people. That’s what God is asking His people now. Many of our churches are empty. Even the devout are hard to find. The church feels like it’s in exile.

It was astounding to visit these parishes. Seven churches with their own traditions, Italian festivals, Polish festivals, devotions, and pilgrimages. People would talk about these fantastic things they used to do, and I’d ask, “Where did they go? Where is everybody?”

The sad reality is they were dying, moving away, or simply leaving the faith. And things were getting worse. Most parishes weren’t baptizing as many babies as we were celebrating funerals.

I’ve spoken to hundreds of youth ministers, DREs, pastors, etc., in parishes just like this all over the country. And what’s interesting is that despite the decline in numbers, the parish staff is very busy. They had so much to do. And yet they weren’t bringing many people in. There were a few conversions, few people coming back to church. The church existed merely to maintain itself, not to grow. They weren’t doing our fundamental activity: winning souls for Christ. As Catholic evangelist Mark Hart likes to say, “Jesus calls us to be Fishers of Men, not keepers of the aquarium.”

It’s like a business where everyone is in accounting, and no one is in sales. Parish staff are busy with sacramental prep, bulletin production, fundraisers, building maintenance, and administrative meetings. All necessary. But no one is doing the actual work of growth. No one is out there inviting people in, following up with the lapsed, or knocking on doors. We aren’t paying anyone to grow the parish. We are like the foolish steward who buried his talents.

Now, you could sit around and complain about this. I certainly have. “I wish the parish would hire someone to evangelize.” “I wish Father would go out to the bars and meet people.” But it’s not happening. And so we, as parishioners, need to take ownership of it ourselves.

It isn’t like that everywhere. In many places, the sun is rising, and the Church is growing. But that is of little comfort to those in parishes like the ones in Pittsburgh. And you probably picked up this book because it’s like that at your church.

Something Has to Change

The downward trend has to change. We’re in an all-hands-on-deck situation. We as a church can no longer afford to leave the work of the parish to the priest and the parish staff. The way we run parishes as a Church is not working. And we all need to take responsibility—lay people and clergy.

Over the next four years, I implemented what you’ll find in this book. It’s a distillation of what I learned during my time in formal ministry, what I learned volunteering at my parish, and what I gleaned from working alongside some of the best evangelists in the American church. This book is a blueprint for you to renovate your parish.

Now, I’m just a guy. When I started youth ministry, I was a 22-year-old kid working at the parish who didn’t know anybody. I didn’t have positional authority or institutional power. But I was able to go into a parish and help things change—not because of who I was, but because of the approach I used.

I didn’t implement a specific program. I didn’t inherit a huge youth ministry I could just run. All I did was pray and act on what God told me to do. If I could do this, you can too. Because, regardless of who you are, you have more resources than I did back then. You can do what I did at your parish as well.

But before we get to the strategy, we need to understand why the usual solutions don’t work.

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The Top-Down Problem

Put Community First

The missing ingredient: programs work when you have community support.

If it’s just you and the pastor trying to push a program, it won’t work. You need the community on board to make a program work. So why not start there? Why not build the community support first, then add programs later?

The organic growth that starts from the bottom and grows up slowly is the way forward - because you need that foundation anyway for programs to succeed. So start there.

When I first started my youth ministry, I tried to recreate what worked at my previous parish. I spent all my time trying to convince kids to come to youth group on Sunday Night, Bible study on Tuesday. I was practically begging kids: “Please, please come to youth night. It’s going to be great.”

I kept getting pushback from parents: “We have family dinners on Sunday nights. It’s the night before school starts, and they have homework. We don’t want to do this.”

I was frustrated: “Well, this is what we did. This is what works. You have to do it.”

About six months in, it hit me: I don’t need to recreate my old youth group at this parish. So I did something completely foreign to me - I moved the youth group to Sunday afternoon. Attendance tripled. The youth group started growing like crazy. 20-30 kids showing up instead of the 5-10 I was used to.

The only thing stopping me from running a successful ministry was my failure to listen to the people I wanted to serve. I was building something against them instead of with them. If I hadn’t talked to the parents, I never would have known Sunday night was family dinner night for these families—a strong tradition I had no business breaking to replace it with a weak youth group program.

Whether you’re a youth minister trying to implement programs or just a person in the pews wanting to save your parish, you can’t make change happen by sheer force of will. Even if you’re right.

Take liturgy, for example. A lot of us are in parishes where the liturgy is cringy - 1970s felt-banner nonsense. You want to make it more reverent, more traditional. So you write letters, talk to the parish council, and organize. And nothing happens.

Why? Because you’re trying a top-down approach without institutional strength or community support. If you don’t have institutional power and you don’t have community backing, you can’t get anything done.

So if you can’t get institutional strength, get the community support. The institutional strength will follow.

Catholic Megachurches

In a wealthy suburb north of Baltimore, you’ll find the Church of the Nativity. If you visited their website without context, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was non-denominational. That’s by design.

Years ago, Father Michael White was pastor of a small, dwindling suburban parish in Timonium, Maryland. He attended a conference led by Rick Warren, the Protestant megachurch pastor who created Saddleback Church and wrote The Purpose Driven Church, a guide for building megachurches. Father White decided to implement Rick Warren’s model at his Catholic parish.

To be fair, he built something impressive. Church of the Nativity is a massive organization with a large staff and volunteer team. But they capitalized on a very specific set of advantages not available to every parish.

Timonium, Maryland, is an affluent suburb of Baltimore—median household income over $130,000, steady population growth, and highly educated commuters. In other words, it’s basically Saddleback Valley, California, where Rick Warren built his church. Warren designed his entire model around a demographic profile he called “Saddleback Sam”—an upwardly mobile, khaki-wearing suburban professional looking for practical life guidance. Timonium is full of Saddleback Sams.

Plus, Father White is a charismatic preacher with a great right-hand man in Tom Corcoran. He had the vision, the communication skills, the wealthy parish with resources, and a community that matched the exact profile the Saddleback model was designed for.

Most parishes don’t have any of that. Not every church is in Timonium or Saddleback Valley. Not every pastor is a charismatic leader with a best-selling co-author. Father White’s principles don’t apply to every church because most churches aren’t sitting on the conditions that made his approach work.

On top of that, despite its obvious success, something is lacking in what they’ve built. If you walk into Church of the Nativity, aside from a crucifix suspended from the ceiling and a small tabernacle behind the altar, you wouldn’t know it was Catholic. There’s a band in front of the altar. Screens. A full light kit with lighting cues during Mass. Camera crews. People hosting the livestream with microphones are like news anchors. It’s hard to imagine any Catholic from a century ago walking into this church on Sunday and recognizing it as Catholic.

Rick Warren’s strategy for building a church is to be “seeker-sensitive.” For Warren, if you design your church for people who don’t go to church (the “unchurched”), your church will grow. In the first paragraph of their “About Us” on their website, Church of the Nativity says, “We aim to be a church that people who don’t like church, like!”

It sounds like an intense evangelization effort. It sounds nice! But it is self-defeating. If your church is 100% designed for people who don’t like church—from the welcome committee to the homily to the website—what about the people who do like church? If everything is designed for outsiders, your church isn’t for your people. It’s for other people.

And that’s a problem, because you have a responsibility to your people—to evangelize them, form them, grow them deeper beyond shallow involvement. It’s also not Catholic. Our Mass, by tradition, is not for outsiders. It’s designed for those who are already part of the Body of Christ. The early Church did this. Augustine noted that after the sermon, the catechumens (those preparing for baptism) were dismissed: “The faithful will remain.” (Augustine, Sermo 237) From the beginning, the Mass was for those already incorporated into the Body.

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Why Programs Fail

There are so many books about ministry and how to do it right. Father White wrote a successful book called Rebuilt, where he describes how to do what he did at his parish. I read it as a new youth minister and felt overwhelmed. If you’ve read that book or books like it, you’ve likely felt the same. Do I really need to turn my small parish into a megachurch?

No, thankfully, you don’t.

Rebuilt comes with a list of what they did at their parish. It clearly worked for them, but it is wrong to assume that since something worked for one church, it will work for yours. Not every parish is the Church of the Nativity.

Often, pastors, church staff, and parish leaders see what’s working elsewhere and think: “That’s what will fix our parish.”

So they fight for it, organize around it, and try to make it happen top-down: “We just need Life Teen,” “We just need Alpha,” etc. Sometimes it’s something ridiculous, like liturgical dancing every Sunday to “show people the beauty of the Mass.”

Some ideas are level-headed and calculated. Others are absurd. But the instinct is the same: find the program, implement it from leadership down, and the parish will be saved.

This “Top-Down Method” of parish ministry is extremely common. Sometimes it works (like in the case of Church of the Nativity), but most of the time it won’t because you are building something for other people, not the community that’s actually there.

Top-down solutions are comfortable. They help parish leadership (clerical and lay) feel in control. When the crisis in the Church feels so overwhelming, when we feel so pressured and out of control, we gravitate toward something we can manage: “I can control a program. I can show up every Tuesday night, bring food, and put an ad in the bulletin. I can control that.”

But that’s not how it works.

You might get lucky - the top-down solution might actually resonate, and your people might love it. Father Michael White implemented Rick Warren’s program and got lucky. But that’s the exception, not the rule. The “seeker-sensitive” movement, inspired by Warren, has been around for decades, and Church of the Nativity appears to be the only Catholic church that has implemented it with success. I haven’t seen any others.

Have you ever walked into Bass Pro Shops and encountered the guy selling timeshares? “Hey, for only your email and $1599, I can get you a vacation April 20th-29th in Nashville!” And you’re thinking, “Please stop. I’m just trying to buy boots and maybe a nice hat.”

When you try to implement a program that’s not for your people, you come across like a salesman pushing a product. “Hey, do you want to come to XYZ? We watch a video and talk about our faith.” “No, thank you.” “Oh, come on, it’s really great!”

When it’s just the pastor or staff trying to push a program without community support, it fails. You become program pushers instead of shepherds.

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The Ground-Up Approach

The Code of Canon Law defines a parish as “a stable community of the people of God […] led by a pastor […] typically tied to a territory.”

“Tied to a territory” is a key point here. Your parish has physical boundaries. A megachurch does not. A megachurch draws people to itself. It builds something flashy and exciting that pulls people from an hour away to come on Sunday.

A Catholic parish works differently. It goes to where people are. It’s an extension of Jesus’ call to the Church to make disciples of all nations. A Catholic parish is the Church drawing a boundary and saying, “Here is how we are going to reach this part of the world.”

When Catholics evangelized a new place, they built on top of what already existed—in some cases, literally. The Pantheon in Rome was once a pagan temple; we turned it into a church. The missionary preached in a way that the people could hear. Families converted. People came into the Church, households at a time. The Church built on relationships that already existed.

That’s how we’ve done it for 2,000 years. That’s how we should do it today.

Building something new from scratch that draws people in might work. It might be exactly what people need. But why guess?

You can build on what’s already existing - on what people need, on existing relationships - and you’ll know it’s going to work. At least over time. It won’t work right away, but if you stick with it, it works.

When I was in high school, I had a fantastic youth ministry. So when I became a youth minister, I tried to do exactly what I’d experienced before. As I mentioned earlier, it didn’t work the same way in Pittsburgh as it had in Florida.

Why? Because I was with different kids.

My youth ministry in high school was a community effort. We took ownership. It felt like our youth ministry. We invited their friends. When I was growing my first youth ministry, the kids did all the work. When it was me standing outside the church asking kids to come, very few showed up. But one girl, Mia, invited every kid she knew. Half the youth group was there because she invited them.

This pattern is true at the parish level, too. If people feel ownership of the parish, the parish grows.

So, as a parishioner, you have an advantage. You can just take ownership. Then find other people who say, “This is my parish.”

This does mean you have to stop church-hopping. Since the parish is yours, that means you go there every Sunday (preferably the same Mass time), and if you’re a staff member, same thing. You have to be a parishioner. A community is like a relationship. The more often you see the person, the stronger the relationship. Same thing with the parish, you need consistency.

Now, you might be thinking: “But Patrick, you were a youth minister who had institutional strength. That’s different.”

There are very few people lower on the institutional totem pole than a youth minister. But for the sake of argument, let me tell you about my friends Katie and Michael.

Katie and Michael are a married couple in my hometown—just a mom and dad with young kids who are very faithful Catholics. Katie used to work at a parish, but does not anymore. They’re not church employees. Neither of them have positions or title. But they saw a need for young adults in their area, and they decided to do something about it.

Today, their ministry is the largest and most successful young adult group in our area—maybe even in our diocese. It started in their living room with a handful of people. Now they run a 150-person retreat every year. The small groups still meet in their house. They built all of this in a relatively small town with no institutional backing, no budget, no official approval.

Katie started a young adult ministry while she was working at her parish. After the shutdown in 2020, she left her position and wanted to continue the ministry, but the parish said no. Through a complicated process that included getting sued by the parish, she moved to a different parish with her family.

They made that parish their home. They said, “They need a young adult ministry at this parish, and we’re going to do it.”

And they did. They started as a small group of just 6 guys and built off of that, later adding a women’s group and our annual retreat. They started as a parish-agnostic group and built a fantastic ministry that became the de facto young adult ministry for the parish—and eventually for the whole region. They did it without a pre-packaged program and without diocesan support. They did it by building on relationships that already existed: people they knew, the families they knew, and invited them to their house.

This pattern repeats across thriving parishes. Every parish that thrives only does so because the people are invested, because the people have taken ownership. It doesn’t matter if they have a name for their program or a well-designed curriculum.

The best way to build up your parish is not from the top down, but from the ground up.

You don’t need institutional power or a big program. There’s already a community there. You find them by going to the same church, over and over again.

Buy Save Your Parish here.

What’s stopping you?

“But my parish IS doing things right - we have lots of programs and activities.”

Some think this because they feel included in their community. And that might be true - your parish might have a lot of programs, a lot of stuff, a lot of things going on.

But every parish has something. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing. Most of the parishes in Pittsburgh felt like they had a great community, even as parishes were consolidating and closing. So I’d encourage you to read this book and find where the gaps are in your parish, so your parish can be even greater and stronger. It’s good that you have things, because that means you have things to build on.

“We don’t have any resources or volunteers.”

In this book, you’ll find many “resource-free” ideas. This book was written for anyone from any parish—from small neighborhood parishes that have a pastor who comes once a month, all the way up to huge parishes with thriving communities. Because, regardless of the size of the parish, the principles are the same. The practice will look different.

There’s a nonprofit in my hometown called Providence Place. They were running out of volunteer opportunities for people. Meanwhile, a food pantry doing basically the same thing 20 minutes south was desperately hurting for volunteers. It wasn’t until they talked to each other and discovered one had a surplus and one had a need that they worked together.

The advantage of the bottom-up method is that you will naturally find people willing to help. Some people are willing to volunteer for some things and not others. When I started youth ministry, people told me I’d be unsuccessful because “the youth don’t want to help anymore.” They didn’t want to help with the pancake breakfast or the nationality festival. But they did want to help with youth ministry. They wanted to grow their community.

Because you’re building on top of relationships and people that already exist—not imposing your will on them—this problem solves itself. You won’t have a problem finding volunteers because you’re building things with them. By the very nature of the approach, you’ve found people who are interested in doing something, then you find out what they want to do, and then you do it. That’s the trick.

“Our diocese/pastor won’t let us do anything without permission.”

No one should actively try to go against their pastor. He has care of souls in your parish according to Canon Law. But still, every single Catholic is called to evangelize by virtue of their baptism. The parish is not the property of the pastor. The parish belongs to the faithful, led by the pastor.

You, the people, are your parish. You have permission from God to evangelize and build up your parish. Besides, the core of the organic growth method is: start small, build momentum. Very few pastors are authoritarian enough to forbid a small Bible study from meeting at someone’s house. In fact, they are usually thrilled when a parishioner takes initiative.

Remember Katie and Michael. They were doing something official at their parish, and it got shut down. But they were meeting in their house, so they just kept meeting. That’s walking the line. They didn’t defy the pastor publicly. They didn’t cause a scene. They just did ministry offsite, among friends, at their own table.

If you meet resistance, continue the ministry without being purposefully antagonistic. Keep up appearances by going to Mass at your parish and maintaining a good line of communication with the pastor when possible. Most importantly, don’t label people as enemies, even if they are obstacles to your ministry. Regardless, remember that you are the Church and by definition, a member of the Apostolate.

If you do find yourself with extremely hostile resistance, your work will be harder. It will be smaller. It will take more time. But it will work. Because the tactics in this book work for small groups. Your bishop can’t stop you from hanging out with your friends.

Now, if you can work with your pastor, do it. That’s better, because he has more authority, more resources, and usually a better picture of what the parish needs. If you have institutional help and bottom-up help, that’s ideal. But if you only have the bottom-up, it’ll still work—because top-down doesn’t work without community help anyway. Eventually, the community involvement is going to be more powerful than the institutional resistance.

Buy Save Your Parish here.

No such thing as a lost cause

Many people ask me if the Church can recover what we lost.

The real question people are asking is: “Can we recover what was lost?” What they mean is: “It’s too hard to get back what we lost. It’s hopeless.”

I understand that feeling. As a Catholic who’s looked back on the traditions and the way parish communities worked—especially in Pittsburgh—it was very sad. I saw a neighborhood with beautiful old homes over 100 years old. The church was right in the center. You could imagine hundreds of families in their Sunday best walking to Mass every week.

That parish is closed down now, turned into an apartment complex.

I would think, “Man, they didn’t know what they had.” But I also don’t know what they had. They had their own problems, their own sin, their own institutional failures. It’s easy to look back on the past with rose-colored glasses.

This is just our flavor. This is the moment God has ordained for us. So why should we shy away from it?

There is a cathedral in Cologne that took 600 years to finish. Construction started in 1248. It was supposed to be the greatest Gothic cathedral in the world—a house for the relics of the Three Kings. Workers laid the foundation, built the choir, raised walls, and arches. Then, in the 1500s, work stopped. The Reformation came, and wars broke out. Money ran dry. Gothic architecture fell out of fashion.

For over 300 years, the cathedral sat unfinished. A massive crane loomed over the half-built south tower, becoming a symbol of the city’s broken faith. The building looked dilapidated, empty, hopeless. Generations were born and died, never seeing it complete.

But they never forgot. In the 1800s, the original medieval plans were rediscovered. A new generation decided to finish what their ancestors had started. And in 1880—632 years after the first stone was laid—Cologne Cathedral was finally completed. When it was finished, it was the tallest building in the world.

Our parishes can feel like that unfinished cathedral. Dilapidated. Abandoned. Hopeless. But the Church has always built in hard times. We’ve always thought in generations, not just years. We only have the church we’re given. This is the church we have. So let’s make the most of it. Let’s leave it better for our children and our grandchildren.

But before we can start building, we need to understand why we stopped. Why do parishes keep reaching for top-down solutions that don’t work? Why do laypeople feel like they need permission to evangelize their own neighbors? There’s something structural at work, something that happened after Vatican II that made things worse, not better.

It’s called Clericalism.

And that’s what we’ll explore next.

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The German Catholic Church, in its ongoing effort to become the most ridiculous clown show in church history, has decided to allow a BDSM group to host a booth at its biannual Catholic Congress.

I wonder if the “congress” pun translates to German.

Anyway.

For those unfamiliar, the Katholikentag is a massive lay gathering of German Catholics, drawing tens of thousands of attendees and serving as an official showcase of where the German church sees itself going.

The organizers insist the group does not promote anything outside of Church teaching and that the point is to create dialogue with people of “alternative lifestyles.”

Let’s set aside the argument as to whether this kind of activity is in line with Catholic sexual ethics. Anyone with an ounce of genuine Christian love for their spouse will know intuitively that this kind of behavior is degrading and evil. I want to make a broader point about the state of the church in certain corners of the world, including our own.

Beige Catholicism, Naked and Afraid

The church is desperate, and has been for some time, to seem relevant and inclusive. I’ve written before about Beige Catholicism, an attempt to reconcile the Church to the ideals of the world. In doing so, it makes itself a bland, unnecessary, pointless parody of itself.

This BDSM booth is a perfect case study.

If the church is just as open to aberrant and disgusting sexual practices as the world is, if it confines itself to a purely consent-based sexual ethic, then why be Catholic? Catholic moral theology has always held that sexual acts must be unitive and procreative, ordered toward the good of the spouses and open to life. Strip that away, and you’re left with the same ethic as the secular culture: “as long as everyone agrees, anything goes.”

The Inverted Areopagus

Many in the Church succumb to the temptation of relevance. They preach “See, we believe what you do.” They look at what the culture values and rush to assure everyone that the church agrees.

This is the precise inversion of what St. Paul does at the Areopagus.

Standing before the Athenian philosophers, Paul doesn’t say, “See, we’re just like the Greeks. You worship an unknown god, and we worship an unknown god too.” He says: You worship an unknown god. I worship the God I do know: Jesus Christ. He points to the genuine good in pagan culture—their religious longing, their philosophical seriousness—and says the fulfillment of what they are searching for is fulfilled in Christ.

Paul elevates the culture to Christ. Beige Catholicism does the opposite.

Beige Catholicism sees the values of the culture and reduces the Church to those of the culture. It takes the secular world’s standard and meets it, rather than calling the secular world up to something higher. The German bishops aren’t “evangelizing the BDSM community.” They’re being evangelized by it.

Beige Catholicism’s Inevitable Absurdity

The Katholikentag was willing to host BDSM Catholics United or whatever as well as a panel discussion on why people seek assisted suicide. They were unwilling to host a panel on why people regret their abortions.

What we see in the German church is a reductio ad absurdum of what happens when you take this approach to its logical end. Eventually, you just become evil and disgusting. You start promoting sexual practices like sodomy and bondage, and downplaying real moral goods like the right to life.

This is what makes the German situation so clarifying. The “Synodal Way” machinery is more than willing to discuss whether you can tie up your wife, and whether you can kill yourself with the help of a physician, but is strangely reluctant to discuss why unborn children have the right to be born.

At first, this kind of compromise might appear to work. It keeps people from leaving, at least for a bit. It plugs the gap for a while, the way it did in much of American Catholicism for decades.

But if you continue to compromise with the world, you become indistinguishable from it. This is what the German bishops have done. They promote the same false gospel as the secular world and make themselves redundant.

They might as well take off their vestments. Their mitres are pointless.

What We in America Need to Avoid

Germany is a case study for what we need to avoid in the American Church. We need to reject and condemn the church leaders—and the parts of ourselves—that want to conform our Church to this world.

It is very tempting. Christianity, and certainly Catholicism, is not the dominant ideology of the day. It is tempting to want to fit in and live a secular lie. To trim the hard edges and make the church palatable to whatever the culture happens to be celebrating this year.

But we can’t do that. We have to resist it.

Otherwise, we will become depraved. We will not know the Lord, nor He us.

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Gay Catholic activists are celebrating the recent Synod on Synodality session on homosexuality, and many orthodox Catholics see it as a loss.

But it’s actually a win.

If the only thing they have to celebrate is a document that merely publishes “testimonies” of gay people…it means their days of gay Catholic activism are numbered.

The “major step forward.”

This week, the Vatican’s Synod Office released the final report of Study Group 9, the working group tasked with handling the Church’s most “controversial” issues, including the pastoral treatment of LGBTQ Catholics.

Fr. James Martin, an outspoken advocate for so-called “gay Catholics,” called it “a major step forward for the Catholic Church.” He also praised the group for changing the term from “controversial issues” and instead using the term “emerging issues.”

The report also includes “testimonies” from two LGBT Catholics, treated as “cases in listening” that aided the group’s theological discernment. One from the United States, one from Portugal. They are presented as moral witnesses who can aid the Church’s theological reasoning.

The report says the Church’s task is “not merely to resolve problems but to build the common good through relational conversion, shared learning and transparency.”

Translation: We are going to feel our way to changing Church teaching on homosexuality.

Beige Rainbow Catholics

About thirty years ago, Bishop Robert Barron coined the term “beige Catholicism” to describe a faith that has been bleached out by its attempt to reconcile itself with secular liberalism.

It is Catholic when it wants status in a Catholic room. And it is liberal when it wants status in a liberal room.

This Study Group report in particular, and “gay Catholic” activism in general, is a textbook case of beige Catholicism. Despite flying rainbow flags and celebrating the “diversity” of human sexuality, they are beige. They are like every other boring, old, tired liberal institution in this country.

When faced with the Beige Rainbow, orthodox Catholics tend to despair and whine. “Oh, how far we’ve fallen!” But to do that in this instance is a mistake. The fact that LGBT activists are celebrating this document is a good sign for orthodox Catholics. This is all they have (and it isn’t very much.)

Their desperation is the tell

Here is what beige Catholics will not say out loud.

For decades, the project was simple. Make Catholicism palatable to secular liberalism. Soften the hard edges so we don’t upset the New York Times. Position the Church as a broadly progressive institution that just happened to have some old-fashioned liturgy and a complicated history.

That project depended on liberalism itself being the dominant, confident, unchallenged ideology. As long as liberalism was in charge, beige Catholicism could position itself as the “reasonable” middle ground; Catholic enough to be Catholic, liberal enough to keep its cocktail party invitations.

But liberalism is no longer in charge. It is collapsing under its own contradictions.

And Beige Catholicism is collapsing with it.

This Study Group report is what desperation looks like. No one is paying attention to the Synod on Synodality anymore. Even the reactionary trad outlets barely mention it. But the Beige Catholics have to celebrate it because they staked their entire reputation on leading the charge to change Church teaching on sodomy.

No one cares

When you see Fr. Martin or anyone else calling Study Group 9 “a major step forward,” don’t panic. The reality is that no one cares.

A small group of loud and connected influencer types is pushing the narrative that the Church is changing its teaching on homosexuality. One of the two “testimonies” was written by the same guy from the controversial “gay blessing” picture featuring Father Martin.

But outside that bubble (and the group of reactionaries who make money off anger), this issue is not top of mind for anyone. Beige Catholics are losing ground in the Church. All of their allies jumped ship long ago.

Young Catholics are not converting because the Church sounds like the New York Times. They are converting because the Church says something the world does not. Beige Catholicism cannot compete with that. It never could. It only ever borrowed plausibility from the wider secular liberal order. Young people can get that anywhere. Why join the Church?

We are looking at the desperation of a project that knows its time is up. These poor people spent their lives trying to make Catholicism look like liberalism, and now have to manufacture significance out of a document nobody outside their circle is reading.

Beige Catholicism is on life support.

Maybe we can put a little pillow over it to help the process.

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Last week, the Archdiocese of Dubuque, Iowa, announced it is combining its 80 parishes into 24 parish groupings. These widespread parish consolidations are happening in dioceses all over the country, like Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

And yet, last month, Hallow released a study surveying dioceses in the US and found that in 80% of dioceses, including our four biggest dioceses, there is an increase in converts from last year to this year.

So how do we reconcile these two competing claims?

Depending on who you ask, the Church is either experiencing a monumental decline or unprecedented growth.

The supposed paradox exists only if we treat growth and decline as if they’re driven by the same thing. They are not.

Our Church is being pruned

We think of growth and decline in the Church as two mutually exclusive realities; something either grows or declines. However, when the Lord speaks about the Church in His parables, He often uses imagery of a fig tree or a vine, things that need to be pruned.

I recently had an arborist come to my house and evaluate my trees. He said that most of the branches on the tree were useless and needed to be cut off. For the tree to remain healthy, it would need to lose most of the branches it has. For a while, it would look much smaller than it does now, but later it would be fuller at the crown.

Every branch takes nutrients and water from the tree. If it isn’t providing fruit or shade, the branch needs to be cut off. That cut allows the rest of the tree to thrive. It allows for decline and growth.

“I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit.” (John 15:1-2)

The same pruning is happening in the Church. Take the famous “8 leave for every one who joins” statistic. The eight had a dead faith and were cut off. The one who joins will bear fruit; the eight did not. We should not celebrate them leaving and hope to God they return, but it is a net benefit to the Church.

Of course, the decline and growth in the Church are happening at the same time. That’s how pruning works.

The trend is going in the right direction

The decline is the tail end of a trend where the faith was preached poorly. Cultural Catholicism, the sins of the 60s and 70s, the lessening of the importance of religion, beige Catholicism—all those things are at an end. We’re reaping the benefits of that poor church management.

The growth is the first fruit of a decades-long missionary activity through nationwide organizations like FOCUS, Life Teen, Catholic Answers, devout Catholic colleges, etc. These organizations were pushing and pushing for missionary activity in the Church to continue, and it’s working.

We need to recognize the good that’s happening. We need to recognize the evil that happened. Ultimately, I reject the idea that things are terrible. Things are getting a lot better. The faith is becoming more and more front and center in our culture.

We need to be able to hold multiple things in tension at the same time. The decline is real, but we are winning.

We cannot slack off

That said, we can’t let this slacken our resolve to evangelize.

Both decline and growth can encourage and discourage people. Some people are motivated by growth and want to work for it to continue, but are demoralized by decline. Some are motivated by decline and work hard when things are bad, but when things are good, they’re not motivated to work.

We need to be sober and look at the whole picture. God is working, but we still have work to do.

In one of Jesus’s parables, a master sees a barren fig tree and orders it to be removed. The servant asks for one more year to care for the tree and see if it will bear fruit. The Lord leaves the ending open. We do not know the master’s reply, let alone if the servant’s plan worked.

In the case of the tree of the Church in America, it seems the master agreed to the servant’s plan. Our barren tree did begin to give fruit. But we do not know how much fruit the master expects. We do not know how much time we have left.

We are bearing fruit. But is our year coming to an end?

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The occasion was the Acacian Schism, a dispute in which the emperor had backed a theological compromise with the Monophysite heretics and expected the Church to fall into line and comply.

Pope Gelasius refused.

In his letter, known by its opening words Duo Sunt, he articulated the foundational Catholic doctrine on the relationship between spiritual and temporal authority...

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But this misunderstands the desire for pornography.

A man who desires pornography does not actually want “sex,” he wants the opposite of sex.

He wants a novel stimulus that his wife, by definition, cannot provide.

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Ready to quit porn? Try Relay.

Pornography does not increase the desire for sex

The desire for pornography is not the same as the desire for sex.

If it were, pornography would at least feed a man’s desire for sex with his wife; he would desire her more often as he engaged in more pornography. But we know that is not the case.

Imagine two men. One watches pornography twice a week. The other has sex with his wife twice a week. Their outcomes will be completely different. The man who has sex with his wife regularly will grow in desire for his spouse. He will desire her, and only her will deepen more and more, over time his sexual desire will be only for her.

The man who watches pornography will desire more intense pornography. Not just more of the same. The old images won’t give him the same hit, and he will need increasingly more intense images. He will probably even withdraw from his wife sexually, because the sexual act does not feed that craving.

The more pornography a man watches, the less he will want to have sex with his wife. This is true even if he says he is only watching pornography because his wife won’t have sex with him.

He craves something his wife can’t give, so he withdraws.

The desire is more like gluttony than lust

Because pornography involves sex, we assume the desire for pornography is a desire for sex.

But it is a lot like a drug. A drug like heroin hijacks the brain’s existing desire for pleasure and well-being and then warps it into a desire for the drug itself. In the same way, pornography hijacks the existing desire for intimacy and sex, and then warps it into something different, something that was not there before: a desire for pornography.

Pornography certainly preys upon the innate desire for sex and intimacy, but it is a different desire.

The sin of pornography consumption is less like lust and more like gluttony. Lust is the desire to possess a person in some way. There are no real persons in pornography. Instead, you are looking for images to stimulate your sense of sight the same way a glutton does with his sense of taste. For a glutton, it’s not about the food. For a porn addict, it’s not about the sex. It’s about the novelty.

Since the craving for pornography is a craving for new images, sex with your spouse—which is definitely not a new image—will not satisfy that craving by itself.

So what do you do?

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Recovery requires rewiring your brain

I have a few friends in the porn coaching industry, men who spend all of their time helping men stop their pornography craving.

None of them recommends “more sex.” All of them recommend better coping mechanisms.

Men want to believe that more sex will solve a pornography addiction.

They want someone else to be able to do something, to pull them out of the addiction. That’s how addicts behave. An alcoholic might say, “If only my kids would behave, I’d stop drinking.” But a change in his children’s behavior is not going to solve the addiction.

An increase in your wife’s libido is not going to solve your addiction.

Pornography is a coping mechanism. It is a way you learned to deal with stress, anger, or failure. No matter how much sex your wife has with you, she will never be able to satisfy that craving in the way pornography can, because pornography is always accessible.

Your wife is not in your pocket 24/7.

Your brain has built a highway from Stimulus → Response; from Stress → Porn Use.

Instead, you need to rewire your brain so that stress stimuli lead you to something healthy. Replacing “I watch pornography when I am angry” with “I do X when I am angry.”

My friend Joe built a tool based on this principle. It’s called Relay.

You can set up guardrails to protect yourself from that Stimulus → Response pattern and have the space to build new ones. You can also join an accountability group of men on the same journey.

Use this link to try it out for a few days, and you’ll see what I mean.

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It was once the only acceptable form of Catholicism.
It is a politically correct Catholicism.
It is polite Catholicism.

It’s the kind of Catholicism that demands nothing of you. The kind that conforms to whatever the world considers popular and moral and right and just at the time.

It’s really no Catholicism at all.

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Beige Catholicism

To call it a heresy is to understate its depravity. It would imply that it somehow derives its principles from Catholicism. This error does not derive any principle from Catholicism whatsoever.

Its first principle is non serviam — I will not serve. Its first principle is the self.

One would think that an evil this great would be scary. You’d think that an error this profound would be offensive, blasphemous. But it’s not. It’s beige. It’s boring. It’s dusty. It’s grandma’s basement with plastic-covered sofas that hasn’t been uncovered since the Nixon administration. It’s two-year-old shortbread cookies and chalky powdered lemonade in the parish hall. It’s felt banners and Gather Us In.

It’s disgusting.

Most of the culturally influential institutions of the Church had been captured by this beige Catholicism long ago. Catholic universities, hospitals, political groups, etc. They all decided decades ago to only preach the parts of Catholicism deemed socially acceptable: care for the poor and a vague love for neighbor.

But it’s starting to lose its foothold

Young people are rediscovering real Catholicism, one that demands conversion and repentance (and care for the poor btw.)

Oh No! Converts!

This kind of Catholicism is embodied perhaps best by men like Father Thomas Reese, SJ, the political commentator and former editor of America magazine.

Reese spends most of his time undermining Church teaching, advocating for women’s ordination, lay election of bishops, and that we surrender the gay marriage fight.

He posted an article over the weekend lamenting the number of converts coming into the Church at Easter. The article says these men and women are coming in for “the wrong reasons.” Namely because they listened to conservative podcasters and “trad wife” influencers who preach “traditionalist Catholicism at odds with Church teaching.”

Oh, how sad!

So many people are coming into the Church because they think it’s “based” or because they think it’s conservative. They watched podcasts posted by Catholics with whom he disagrees. They voted for political candidates that he doesn’t like. That must mean they’re converting for the wrong reasons. That must mean they are ”using the Church as a tool for their political ends!”

Get my book, Save Your Parish.

Using the Church as a Political Tool

Often, an accusation is a confession.

I believe we are in the presence of such a confession right now.

Men like Father Thomas Reese use the Church as a tool for their political ends.

They are not first and foremost Catholics. They are first and foremost liberals — secular humanists, vague, beige Catholics. As we saw above, his writing is in lock-step with left-wing politics. Reese is a lifelong apologist and campaigner for Democrat candidates. In 2009, he defended Barack Obama with a sycophancy Donald Trump could only dream of from his Catholic followers.

To him, Catholicism is secondary to political ends. It’s hollow, a mere vessel for whatever his party wants.

These men are Catholic insofar as it agrees with them. Anyone who disagrees is not allowed in. They would never espouse a Catholicism that demands they change or repent, only their opponents must do that. They would never espouse a Catholicism that demands one love their enemies. Only one that demands their enemies love them.

That is his real problem with the converts, not that they’re converting for the wrong reasons, but that they’re not converting for his reasons.

They are converting because they actually believe it.

And he is terrified.

And he should be.

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The Church is Young and Faithful

Younger Catholics are more committed and more engaged. These Catholics willing to sell out the Church for political influence are getting older. By Reese’s own admission, this wave of converts is more “traditional” (translation: faithful to Church teaching).

Beige Catholicism is dying both literally and figuratively. God has numbered its days. It will be overtaken. It will die with its mostly geriatric disciples. And it will be forgotten.

We remember the names of heretics like Arius and Nestorius because their theological systems were intelligible within the Christian worldview. Their errors were serious enough to wrestle with, coherent enough to name.

Beige Catholicism will not be the same. We will not remember these men. This heresy will not be worth naming in any serious academic way. It will be a hiccup — a bad dream we wake up from, one that in the moment felt terrifying but that we later laugh at for its absurdity. The men who follow it won’t even be worth a footnote in the most obscure history textbook on Christianity.

It will be overtaken by Catholic men and women who actually believe this stuff.

The Church has plenty of room

Don’t mistake my meaning here.

This wave of converts is indeed politically right-wing like me. But my excitement here is not “the triumph of the right over the left.” I am fully aware, and I embrace the fact, that men and women are converting to Catholicism who do not agree with me politically.

They disagree with me on economics, on immigration, on foreign wars, on the death penalty, etc. I think they’re wrong. I’m glad they’re here.

That is the difference between beige Catholicism and real Catholicism.

Real Catholicism has room for Montagues and Capulets, for Guelphs and Ghibellines, for Pharisees and Sadducees. Real Catholicism has room for people who disagree with each other. We may doubt each other’s intelligence but never each other’s faith.

And that is what beige Catholics like Father Thomas Reese will never understand.

The Catholic Church is not a political tool. It is the outpost of the Kingdom of God on earth. It is the Body of Christ that can incorporate and transform every person into Him.

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I get why they’re surprised.

But what’s funny is that many Catholics seem surprised, too.

To them I ask: Where have you been?

We’re three decades into a project to re-evangelize the West. It was bound to work eventually.

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What did you think “New Evangelization” meant? (Essays? Vibes?)

Before the turn of the millennium, John Paul II looked at the Western world and diagnosed the actual problem.

The days of evangelizing people who have never heard of Christ are largely gone. We need to reach the baptized who have lost a living sense of the faith.

He called for a new evangelization to reach those people. And lay people actually listened.

Starting in the 90s, apostolates began doing the unglamorous work. FOCUS on college campuses. Franciscan University’s Steubenville conferences, St. Paul Street Evangelization, standing on actual street corners. Small groups of ordinary Catholics who decided that the mission was real and the harvest was worth the labor.

And the fruit is now noticeable.

The decline in church attendance has stalled. Parishes and college campuses are seeing record numbers of conversions. Catholicism is a real option for people now, rather than just a niche religion for a few.

Three principles from the Bible tell us why.

1) A little yeast leavens the whole loaf

Paul said: “A little yeast leavens the whole loaf.” (Galatians 5:9)

The apostolic effort of a few people works through the whole church to make it grow. We’re living inside that disproportionate result right now.

FOCUS began as a handful of missionaries, and now their SEEK conference can’t fit into a single venue anymore.

I receive a lot of pushback when I suggest individual Catholics work to save their parishes and the Church writ large. Apostolates like FOCUS put those criticisms right where they belong (the trash).

True apostolic work from a faithful few can move a mountain. We’ve seen it.

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2) One sows, another reaps

Father Mike Scanlan built the Steubenville conferences. He’s gone now. He saw some fruit, but he didn’t see all the fruit.

The conferences draw about 3,000 teens per event, with 20 conferences a summer across the US and Canada.

They sparked countless conversions and reversions, including my own and the conversions of my closest friends. Those converts evangelized others and multiplied. That is the fruit from the seeds he planted without knowing exactly what would grow.

The person who sows the seed is not always the person who reaps the harvest.

Which means the work we do right now—in our parishes, in our neighborhoods, in our domestic churches—is not primarily for our own satisfaction or our own timeline. We scatter. Someone else reaps.

Sometimes we are tempted to avoid the work of evangelization because we don’t have a long-term vision.

Accept that the work will take a long time. Then start.

3) I will be with you always

Jesus promised He would be with us always.

Why do we act like He won’t be?

Many Catholics talk about the problems in the Church and problems in this world as if they are insurmountable obstacles. We talk as if God abandoned us.

The Israelites in exile felt the same way.

They felt God had reneged on His promise to establish a permanent king on the throne of David. They refused to listen to the prophets who told them the Messiah was coming.

We are repeating the same mistake.

Christ promised He would be with us until the end of the age. (Matthew 28:20) Modern prophets keep reminding us that things will get better.

Why don’t we listen?

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Stop the despair

The Church is winning because God will not abandon His People.

I see two options.

1. Waste our energy being anxious

2. Start working

It’s a choice between hope and despair

You are welcome to choose despair. The Church will win anyway, and you will enjoy the fruit of others’ labor.

The only difference if you choose despair is that you will needlessly suffer between now and the coming promise.

I choose to work. I choose to hope in the promises of Christ because hope does not disappoint.

I hope you will join me.

I wrote Save Your Parish to help you begin this work at your parish.

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It was most prominent in evangelical circles, but had an expression Catholic circles too. The vast majority of preaching directed at Christian kids aged 13-18 was focused on exhortations not to break sexual ethics.

Most Christians hate it now.

But we swung too far in the other direction.

Now, we have an “Anti-Purity Culture” where we pretend the consequences of sexual sins don't exist.

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From Purity Culture to Anti-Purity Culture

There were excesses in Purity Culture.

Pastors and parents operated out of fear that these young kids would make life-altering mistakes and used scare tactics to prevent it. To name a few:

1. The Toothpaste Analogy — You can’t put it back in!

2. Spitting in the Cup — Who would want to drink out of a cup 10 people spit into?

3. The Mangled Rose — After being touched by everyone, the rose loses its petals.

These were clumsy attempts to illustrate a point: if you use something incorrectly or too many times, it gets damaged

These analogies erred because they imply sexual sins can never be fixed (or worse, never forgiven!) Kids who crossed the line were then tempted to think, “Well, I’m too far gone. Why stop now?”

In that way, those analogies failed.

However, those analogies were right in that sexual sin does follow you. It can even damage you.

So while the excesses and errors of purity culture should be acknowledged, we should not swing to the other extreme. Which many have done.

What we see now is the rise of “Anti-Purity Culture.”

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Avoid the two extremes

In American Christianity, there is a tendency to struggle with equilibrium.

We oscillate between two extremes:

1. Certain sins are unforgivable (the error of purity culture)

2. Sins have no temporal consequences whatsoever. (the error of anti-purity culture

Catholics need to find the balance between the two.

This is at the top of my mind because a Christian pastor recently posted a long thread on X about how his wife used to be promiscuous. He claimed that even now—because she has been born again through Christ—she is “purer than most virgins.”

This made people angry.

The claim seemed to be that since the repentance happened, she is better off than someone who never committed that sin in the first place. This is not how Christians should see sin. Her persistent sin created habits she needs to get rid of; their marriage has obstacles that marriages between virgins do not have to overcome, etc.

Ignoring these challenges ignores the real temporal effects of sin.

This reaction is a direct result of anti-purity culture. We are so afraid of returning to the bad old days of relentless shaming for sexual sin that we are terrified to suggest that someone should face even temporary consequences for their sexual sin.

But this “no consequences” view is not Christian.

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How the saints saw their sin

The Christian understanding is that sin has both eternal and temporal consequences.

Forgiveness removes the eternal consequence (hell) but not the temporal consequences. (That’s why we don’t let murderers out of prison if they go to confession.)

Certain sins are mortal. Sex outside of marriage—especially serial sex outside of marriage—is a mortal sin. It earns you hell. That is just true; that isn’t “purity culture.”

Now, that mortal sin can be forgiven. Your guilt and the stain of sin can be wiped away. And yet, the effects of the sin remain. The temporal punishment (vice, damaged relationships, etc.) earned by your sin remains.

This is the main basis for the Catholic understanding of Purgatory.

For no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any one builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble—each man’s work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire. 1 Corinthians 3:11-15

The saints understood their houses were built with gold (God’s forgiveness) and straw (their sins). That straw will be burned away, whether in this world or the next.

Saints decide to have that straw purged in this world.

For example, Mary Magdalene, who is traditionally understood to be the woman caught in adultery, spends the rest of her life doing penance alone in the woods to undo the sin she committed.

Or Mary of Egypt, who lived a life of promiscuity (among pilgrims to the Holy Land no less!) After converting in the Holy Sepulcher, she lived in the desert as a hermit doing reparations for her past life. She was forgiven, but she did penance for her past.

Even though the sin was forgiven, both felt they owed God something in response to that forgiveness.

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We have forgotten how to atone

Too many Christians act like forgiveness is the last step. They believe you can just go on living as if the sin never happened.

That is false.

When my son throws a book and hits his sister, he says he is sorry. But he still has to do something to atone for that sin.

Similarly, when you sleep with countless men, you need to do something to atone. You cannot demand that the world go on as if you did not do those things. You cannot pretend you don’t have the effects of that sin lingering, or that you don’t owe God anything besides a quick, “My bad.”

Even Catholics tend to treat confession like a vending machine. We feel “icky” that we did a bad thing, so we go to confession—or if you are Protestant, you confess to God alone in your room—and we assume, “I am going to be fine. I am not guilty anymore.”

But we have forgotten that even though the guilt is gone, the effects of sin remain.

The more you sleep around, the more you have the vice of promiscuity ingrained in your soul. You need to atone to get rid of that vice.

More importantly—and this one gets missed a lot—we need to make reparations because our sin makes God sad!

Even though He has forgiven us. He still suffers when He sees us sin, and we ought to desire to console His heart.

Again, think of my son when he hits his sister. If he were truly sorry, he wouldn’t immediately go ask for ice cream. If you were a kid who hit his sister and you were truly penitent, you would not demand a reward. You would say, like the Prodigal Son: “Father, I don’t deserve anything. I have sinned against heaven and against you. Treat me as your hired servant.”

That is atonement.

When we only present the sin and the forgiveness, but we fail to present the atonement, we are presenting an incomplete picture of the Christian life.

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We all owe reparations

I want to make this clear: I am not saying this to be high and mighty. I write this because I think we’ve forgotten what atonement actually is.

We ought to want to console the heart of Jesus and offer reparations for our own sins and the sins of others.

I hope that Christians will rediscover this truth about our sin and commit to fasting and prayer for atonement, especially poignant as we approach Holy Week.

St. Mary Magdalen and St. Mary of Egypt, pray for us.