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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!”

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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.

The US bishops seem to be taking social media seriously, exploring how to evangelize through digital channels. Many have begun using this title to describe people who evangelize or discuss Catholicism online.

But framing “influencers” as “missionaries” is risky.

This term puts us at risk of missing the real goal of social media evangelization: connect the online world to the real world.

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A missionary is not an influencer

Missionary work is a noble cause that comes with leaving your family behind and sacrificing for a foreign people. We should be careful comparing something as simple as posting on social media to something so heroic.

Social media, by its nature, is designed to make you focus on the things of this world: on power (influence), on fame (engagement), and on money.

Admittedly, those temptations are present in a mission field, too.

If you are a missionary to foreign lands, you can absolutely get hung up on the numbers—how many people are going to Mass, how many doors you knock on. You may get focused on how influential you are in the local community. You may even choose a mission field based on how wealthy the residents are.

But those temptations are baked into social media rather than being accidental.

If you succeed at digital content creation, you will have wealth, honor, and power you did not have before.

If you succeed at mission work…you might get martyred.

So we should be cautious treating the former as analogous to the latter.

The Anti-Missionary on the Digital Continent

The other risk with this framing is that it is a different kind of missionary work—if it is missionary work at all.

When the Spanish sent missionaries to the New World, those missionaries were not coming home. Their job was to bring the faith of Jesus Christ to the natives. In a certain sense, yes, that is what digital missionaries are doing.

But there is another important part of mission work which is not present in social media.

When missionaries went to a new place or a new country, they became citizens of that country. They stayed there. Like Saint Patrick, when he went to Ireland, he became Irish. He loved the people, lived there, and died there.

Digital missionaries do the exact opposite.

Digital missionaries go to the “digital continent.” But their goal is not to live here. In fact, you shouldn’t want to live here. The goal of a digital missionary is to get people off the digital continent and into real life. They are “anti-missionary” so to speak.

Pope Leo recently spoke about the danger of online Catholicism. It presents the danger of a “disembodied faith”—a faith that is not lived in the real world.

That is not a problem for real-world missionaries; they live and preach a very embodied faith.

But digital missionaries, if they are not careful, could be preaching a disembodied faith. It becomes an adherence to certain ideas or expressions of the faith, as opposed to the lived experience of a parish itself.

If they want to be truly missionary, digital creators need to connect the online world to the real world.

Build the highway to the parish

Catholic creators need to leave behind the mindset that what we are doing is good in and of itself. We need to recognize that our “missionary work” or “evangelization” is initial and temporary. It has to lead to something else.

That leads me to the big problem that we as a church need to solve.

How do we connect the digital continent to the parish?

I am afraid digital Catholic creators are focused on the wrong things. Most are excited when their numbers are going up, and they are reaching more people. But few consider what to do once those people are reached. All the talk about “bringing the faith to the unreached” means nothing if those people never darken the door of a Catholic parish.

True digital missionaries would make solving this problem their top priority.

There are plenty of people who want to create a YouTube channel, evangelize, and become the next big thing. But there are very few people who are trying to build the highway between the digital world and the parish.

Fortunately, even though that question does not seem to be at the top of everyone's mind, it is a priority for the bishops discussing social media.

What does that highway look like? A landing page, a directory, an in-person event? I have some ideas, but I don’t know.

So, I would like to know: if you converted to Catholicism from the internet, what was your highway? How did you get here?

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But that could not be further from the truth.

Often, the people you fight with the most are those closest to you.

To paraphrase a quote from G.K. Chesterton: Christ called us to love our neighbor and love our enemy because often they are the same person.

We need to be in communities with people we disagree with.

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You might be wrong

A priest friend of mine once told me this belief that “community = people I agree with” is a distinctly lay phenomenon.

If you’re a priest or a religious, you are typically forced to be in community with people you do not get along with. You’ve both made the same vow, and that life is gonna put you in community with people that you didn’t choose.

You’re almost certainly going to live with someone you disagree with. That person might even be your pastor. So you might even have to obey someone you disagree with.

But lay people?

We have freedom of movement—more so than we’ve ever had in the history of humanity. We are able to remove ourselves from the people we don’t like.

But we are supposed to be with the people who disagree with us. Because it’s actually good for us.

Being around people you don’t like is an act of humility. It helps you remember you are not the arbiter of what is true, good, and beautiful. Sometimes the reason why we disagree with someone is that they are right and we are wrong.

You might be right

Even if you are right, dealing with people with whom you disagree (especially people in authority) is good for you.

Imagine a scenario where a traditional, faithful, conservative Catholic is upset a particular song is sung in the liturgy. Let’s say it’s Table of Plenty. A campy song that refuses to go away.

He knows this song is not fit for the liturgy. But the music director keeps playing the song. So what does he do?

1. Complain to the Bishop

2. Complain on Twitter

3. Email the director excerpts from Sacrosanctum Concilium every time it is played.

4. Go to a different parish (give up)

I’ve seen all of these solutions employed. They are all equally useless.

If this conservative Catholic wants to change anything, the actual solution is to become her friend (to love his enemy).

When he does this, he will find she has a different perspective. She knows people have grown up with this song and, for better or worse, have been spiritually enriched by it. She finds it enlivening, and it helps her focus on the Mass.

He will find she is pursuing the same good he is: a spiritually rich liturgy.

She is wrong in her means to that end. The music should change. But now that he is her friend, they can have conversations about their shared desire and disagree, knowing they have that shared goal in mind.

Make enemies into friends

You won’t correct someone by becoming their enemy.

You can only correct someone by showing yourself to be a brother.

A community is held together by communication. It requires at least two people who are able to have a conversation about the Good. Even if the perceived goods are at odds, community demands the presupposition that they both want the Good.

If we see our loved ones or our community members as enemies—as people who are deliberately acting contrary to the good—then we are siloing ourselves off. We’re causing division. We’re breaking the community apart.

You can’t actually have communion with someone that you believe to be an enemy. That’s why Jesus said if you’re going to offer sacrifice and you remember that you have a disagreement with your brother: stop, reconcile, and then offer your sacrifice.

Of course, assuming good intentions is difficult.

It’s frustrating to be the first one to listen because the other person might not be willing to listen in return. But Christian charity does not wait for a guarantee that charity will be returned. Christian charity acts first and willingly accepts any persecution that is returned.

If we want Catholic communities, we need to be willing to embrace the ugliness of conflict.

Community won’t be comfortable, but it will make us better.

Chapter 8 of my book Save Your Parish helps you deal with resistance (even from your pastor.)

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I wrote this poem several years ago and it comes to mind every time John 4 is read during Lent.

I hoped to draw out the symbolism of the woman’s five husbands. In the 8th century BC, the Assyrians conquered Samaria and blended them with five pagan peoples, rendering them unclean to the Jews.

It is also an important symbol that the well belonged to Jacob. Both Jacob met Rachel at a well and Abraham’s servant found Isaac’s wife Rebekah at a well. So for an ancient Jew or Samaritan, meeting at a well has romantic undertones.

This subtext is important for understanding the interaction between her and Christ. That is why you will see parallels between the Gospel story, Song of Songs 2, and Hosea 2.

I hope you enjoy it. Please forgive any lack of sophistication in the poem.

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The briars and thorns my lovers gave,
I clung to for my food.
Through dry and weary land I walked,
to draw water at noon.

At first I did not see him there,
but then his eyes met mine.
His heart aflame with Jacob’s love,
beheld his future bride.

In dry land he spoke tenderly
about a living stream.
His words drew longing from my heart.
Could he give this to me?

He had no jar or vessel stone,
and though the well was deep,
he bore into my heart of stone,
poured water into me.

He knew my past, my people’s too,
whether coerced or free,
we pined after those foreign gods
and for adultery.

For I was wed to wicked men
and in desperate need
of a man like unto Moses
to come liberate me

“I know the Christ is soon to come
set Jacob’s children free.”
He looked at me with bridegroom’s eyes,
”Beloved, I am He.

“Winter is gone, the tulips bloom,
the doves begin to wing.”
I ran to tell my countrymen,
”He told me everything.”

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He answered, “I wouldn’t say sh–t.”

His response to the question challenges the clean, comfortable Catholicism so many of us are used to.

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Shia LaBeouf gave an interview after a bender he went on during Mardi Gras. He got into a fight; he got arrested.

Shia had a very public conversion to Catholicism, so many Catholics had their eyes on him. They looked down on him because he is not behaving like we (rightly) expect a converted Catholic to behave. We have certain expectations of living a life of virtue, of not engaging publicly in sin.

Many Catholics saw this bender as proof of the inauthenticity of Shia's conversion.

They thought he might have converted to Catholicism for expedience or to appear righteous. But he gave an interview that shot down that criticism.

The interviewer asked him, "What would you say if you met Jesus?"

And he said, "I wouldn't say shit. I would just kiss him. I would kiss his feet."

It was an unprepared response. You could hear his deep love for Christ, acknowledgement of his own inadequacies as a man to attain virtue, and reliance on the immense mercy of Christ.

The Spiritual Plateau

This interview reminded me of something the saints figured out that I haven't quite figured out myself.

If you look at the mansions of the spiritual life, Saint Teresa of Avila talks about seven mansions that we go through. In the first few mansions, you have this purgation of sin, this illumination of virtue, and this union with God. In the first three mansions, you are purging yourself of mortal sin.

The problem is that many people make it to the third mansion and they stop.

Saint Teresa describes these people as those who live a stable Christian life. They maybe even teach other people about the Christian life. They live a very outwardly virtuous life.

They (we) are “good Catholics.”

But the big hurdle to get over in the third mansion is this knowledge of self—this realization: "I am not done." There is a great danger for those of us who have reached this stage of the spiritual life. We think that we've finished because we've completed this first set of purgation.

But we need to persist. We need deeper humility.

The Pharisee and the Tax Collector

It also reminded me of was the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector.

The Pharisee sits in the temple and thanks God: "Thank God that you haven't made me like this tax collector. Thank you that I am not like other men." And the tax collector merely lowers his head and says, "Lord, have mercy on me a sinner."

Many of us who turn up our noses at Shia's conversion and look at him as though he is lesser than us—or not as far along as us in the spiritual life—we should take that parable to heart.

Why was the Pharisee wrong? He is more virtuous. He doesn't struggle with these ugly sins.

He is wrong because he stopped.

That is a great sin: the prideful assumption that when you've reached a certain stage of the spiritual life, you are done.

That could be me

St Francis used to say if anyone else was given the graces that he was given, they would be a greater saint than he because of the depths of his own sin.

I want to believe that about myself. Similarly, I believe if I led Shia’s life, I would commit greater sins than he did.

That is true humility, saying that and believing it. I struggle to do that, even as I write these words.

I look at the faith of Shia and I ask myself: Would I have answered the question that way? If I was face to face with Jesus Christ, would I fall on my face and kiss him, or would I have the pride to remain standing?

I think I would have the pride to remain standing and talk to him as a peer, because I view myself as His peer.

How foolish. How stupid. How dare I look at Shia, who is just beginning to walk on the way of virtue, and judge his stumbling when I have been Catholic my whole life and still sin at all?

The Greater Responsibility

More is required of me.

My sin is greater because the expectation is greater. I've been given so much; how dare I turn away even a little bit?

It is always a danger, when talking about the Pharisee and the tax collector, that you start to judge the Pharisee.

I hope you know that is not my intention.

I want to share my reflections on Shia's comments in hopes that they can edify you as well. I offer this reflection to my readers in hopes that they find a similar challenge to the one I did.

There is hope for the Pharisee.

He can kiss Christ’s feet, too.

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Since the bombing of Iran this weekend, Catholics have been debating: Was this an act of “Just War?”

But the nature of war itself—chaotic with confusing motives and propagandistic messaging—makes it hard to tell if an act of violence is just.

To help Catholics discuss this, I put together a 5-minute guide on applying Just War to the Iran strike.

What happened in Iran

Here’s some background for those unfamiliar

In June 2025, Israel launched a 12-day military campaign to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. The United States and Israel had previously warned that strikes would continue if Iran continued its program.

Following those strikes, the Iranian economy spiraled out of control. This sparked nationwide protests, which the Iranian government answered with violent repression.

The U.S. and Iran engaged in negotiations. The demands from the United States were clear: Iran must completely end its nuclear program, missile program, and halt support for foreign terror groups.

Despite reports of a potential breakthrough, the U.S. concluded that Iran was simply buying time.

So, last weekend, the United States and Israel launched a massive, joint military campaign. Their strikes targeted Tehran, missile infrastructure, military capabilities, and leadership compounds, including the residence of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Iran immediately retaliated, firing drones and ballistic missiles at Israel and at U.S. military bases stationed in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE.

Was this strike just?

Naturally, when there is military action anywhere in the world, Catholics debate the idea of “Just War.” Catholic Social Teaching does not assume war is automatically evil and has a set of principles to determine when war is justified. There are a few ways to break down CCC 2309.

1. Just Cause

2. Last Resort

3. Prospect of Success

4. Proportionality of Evils

5. Right Intention

6. Legitimate Authority

Catholics need to be able to look at world events like this with sobriety and discuss them without bias. And I mean discuss them. With people that you know. In real life.

These events lead to a more disembodied life, as Pope Leo has called it. We’re glued to our phones or podcasts listening for updates and looking for the “right opinions,” angrily replying to the people who listen to different news outlets, flabbergasted that they don’t agree with us.

But the Church calls us to something better.

We are called to live life in the real world and, if we really care about these events, discuss them.

Let’s look at the facts on the ground, and then let’s look at how Church Teaching should guide our discussion.

A Catholic Social Teaching Discussion Guide on the Iran Strike

The following guide utilizes the classical Just War tradition (Jus ad Bellum) to frame our conversations. Each section provides the theological principle, followed by pointed questions for reflection.

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American Catholics seem to think Pope Leo is snubbing us.

He refused to join President Trump’s Board of Peace and will not be attending America’s 250th anniversary celebration.

But Pope Leo isn’t snubbing America; he is actively refusing to let the Papacy become a political tool.

If we want to understand Pope Leo, American Catholics—Left, Right, and even Center—have to radically adjust our expectations.

Pope Leo’s Decisions

After Pope Leo’s election to the Papacy, Vice President J.D. Vance visited the new Pontiff and invited him to the America 250 celebration in Washington, DC.

The Pope declined.

Following the ceasefire in Gaza, President Donald Trump established the Board of Peace, an international body focused on rebuilding war-torn Gaza. Given Trump’s leadership and his remarks that it might “replace the United Nations,” many nations are disinclined to join.

The Holy See explicitly said no.

Naturally, American Catholics are doing what we do best: making this entirely about ourselves.

The Right sees them as Pope Leo condemning the American Right. If he refused to attend the celebration, he must be anti-American. By refusing to join the Board of Peace, he must be anti-Trump. The American Left sees it the same way; they’re just happy about it. They see the actions as Pope Leo tacitly approving their position by condemning the American Right.

But really, neither of these actions affirms the Left nor condemns the Right.

A persistent problem in the American Church is that we have always expected the Pope to act like an American political figure—or a political figure in general. Now that he is actually an American, we expect it even more.

But Pope Leo is behaving as he ought to as a Pope dealing with an Empire.

The Church vs. The Empire

Pope Leo is trying to avoid the trap that other popes have fallen into when dealing with the empire.

America is an Empire, there’s no getting around it. The UN and now the Board of Peace are ways for us to exert our influence globally, for better or for worse. If the Vatican joined the Board of Peace, it would essentially be accepting a role as a bureaucratic NGO on the world stage. He would just be another piece of the machine. This fundamentally misunderstands what the Church is supposed to be.

The Holy See currently holds a permanent observer seat at the UN, able to offer moral correction but unable to vote as one nation among many.

To a lesser but still important extent, attending the American 250 would signal the same thing: participation in the Empire rather than moral authority over it.

The Church does not sit at the table as one nation among many. She stands above them.

When Popes try to act as members or as arms of an Empire, they make a critical mistake.

Popes in history have made this mistake before, and the Church paid dearly.

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On the surface, this is yet another installment of the never-ending liturgy wars.

But this latest flare-up reveals that the progressive side of the argument is fueled by ignorance.

To move forward, we should stop trying to inform our opponents and instead persuade the people on the fence.

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The Threefold Ignorance

Many of these “reformers-of-a-certain-age” (I’ve been told “boomer” is offensive) were sold a lie. They view the Church through the lens of building the “Great Society” and believe it will only survive if it is overhauled.

This belief is fueled by a threefold ignorance.

First, they are ignorant of the youth. They truly believe “the youth” want inclusive language. The fallacy is that the “wrong” young people want it. Social progressives want the Church to change, not because they intend to join, but because they want it defeated. The young people actually looking for the Church are seeking a place that is not like the world.

Second, they are ignorant of what Vatican II actually said. They rely on the “para-council”—lied to by priests and malefactors who told them the Council confirmed their biases. These reformers have had sixty years to read Sacrosanctum Concilium faithfully, but they have chosen not to.

Third, they are ignorant of the purpose of the liturgy. They believe we change the liturgy to represent us better, suggesting that the belief of the people—not the priest—consecrates the Eucharist. That is the opposite of the truth. The liturgy exists to conform us to Christ.

I say they are ignorant not to let them off the hook. Many of them are ignorant on purpose, either ignoring teaching that contradicts their opinions or not looking for it at all.

This type of ignorance can’t be fixed with “information.”

Tradition Has Already Won

The good news is that these reformers are “of a certain age,” and their ideas are dying with them. This U.S. Catholic survey only had 89 respondents. For a national magazine, that clearly indicates that nobody cares.

The vast consensus of faithful Catholics is that we need tradition.

This was inevitable for two reasons: First, the reformers did not pass on their ideas; those young people left the Church, so the ideas will die with them. Second, tradition is stronger than any trend. It carries the weight of the “democracy of the dead.”

The movement will win in the end, whether through the force of beauty or simply through time and patience.

How to win: Persuade the audience, not the person

It is a fool’s errand to try to convince these reformers.

Instead, we must engage them to convince the audience. Faithful Catholics ought to engage so that listeners can hear the flimsiness of the “reformer” position.

Let’s look at two examples from the survey: Louise, a 77-year-old from California, and Father Stephen, a 75-year-old from Ohio.

Louise claimed that young people are offended by male references.

I am concerned about our future church becoming irrelevant to our future generations who are offended by old traditions of using male references to God and/or all people. — Louise, 77, California

If Louise shows up at your Parish Council meeting, ask her: “That is an interesting concern, Louise. Which young people in our parish told you they were leaving because of non-inclusive language?”

A follow-up conversation will reveal her concern is likely not the youth at all—she is personally offended by the phrase “mankind.”

Father Stephen lamented living with young priests who care about “little changes” which add “nothing substantial.”

I live with two younger conservative priests who do not respect my liturgical style and insist upon little changes in the liturgy that add nothing substantial to the celebration. Even the addition of one word changed in the prayers sets them off. – Fr. Stephen, 75, Ohio

My question to him would be: “If the changes are so little and add nothing substantial, why do them at all?”

Don’t let him escape. A change can’t be made for no reason; find out what his real reason is.

The Path Forward

The traditionalist movement has been lacking persuasiveness. Many engage in “anti-persuasion”—hammering their position so aggressively that it causes people on the fence to side with their opponent.

Traditional Catholics have been engaging in anti-persuasion for so long that they’ve lost a lot of the normal middle, who see the debate as a waste of time.

I want the Novus Ordo to become more traditional. But the way to do that is not lectures on Tra Le Sollecitudini. The way to persuade is to engage charitably, asking questions that reveal the weaknesses of the progressive position.

Tradition will win.

The only question is how fast we get to the finish line.

I wrote a book to help you get to that finish line faster.

It takes a long time, but good things take time.

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You have half the people complaining the Church is dying and another half going “We’re back, retvrn, based.”

I’m torn myself, but I think both are necessary to really understand the situation the Church is in. For decades, all we’ve had are negative statistics. But it is time to realize the landscape has changed.

Since I was in high school, the attitude was always “It’s getting worse. The Church is dying. The priests are dying. The kids aren’t Catholic. We gotta do something quick!”

Now things are starting to turn around.

The drift is leveling off. You can see growth all over the country—especially at conservative colleges and areas with young people like DC or Manhattan. Some churches are surging. My own parish has had a crazy amount of converts the last few years.

But then you have the “statistics accounts” talking about how the numbers look bad

So how do we reconcile the two?

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The fact is that the Church is going through a pruning.

People (including myself) talk about the “8-to-1” statistic—8 people leave for every one that joins. It is heartbreaking, but its also not necessarily a bad thing. If those eight people had already emotionally checked out and left, their physical leaving is a net positive.

At least they made a decision.

Looking at the other side of that statistic, that convert is not just a number. He is a person. He has relationships and a passion for the faith. If we’re losing eight people who were doing nothing and gaining one person who has a new zeal and wants to help the mission, that’s a win.

We need to avoid the statistical doomerism. If you only focus on the negatives, you’ll get more attention, but you’ll just demoralize your audience into inaction. On the other hand, if you say “We’ve won” and spike the ball, you make people complacent. We have to strike a balance.

The reality is the Church isn’t dying. It can’t die. We’re just impatient.

We want God to fix us now, but pruning a tree takes time.

Things are getting better. There are national movements and organizations like Word on Fire, Ascension Press, Life Teen, Hallow, FOCUS, etc. are effecting real change and causing conversions. These things were niche movements or didn’t even exist 20 or 30 years ago

There are pockets of the Church in America that are booming because they are doing what Catholic parishes are supposed to do: help people find community, meet Jesus in the sacraments, grow in the faith, and share that faith. You can do those things even if your parish hierarchy isn’t willing to.

These pockets look like families getting together and encouraging each other. Finding devout Catholics like them and building.

It will take time, but the work is worth it.

That’s why I wrote my book, Save Your Parish.

It launched at #1 on the Catholicism and Church Growth charts and details how any Catholic can build up their parish community even with no experience or institutional support.

If you want to know how to actually build one of these pockets where you live, go grab a copy.

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But we need to listen to the warnings of a Catholic philosopher from the 1950s.

Marshall McLuhan famously argued that we often think of a medium (like TV, radio, or Instagram) as just a neutral pipe to convey a message.

“The medium is the message.”

Any medium will change the message to fit itself. Like any form of communication, social media has rules of engagement. And if we aren’t careful, we end up changing Catholicism to fit the algorithm, rather than using the algorithm to share Catholicism.

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In the 2010s, we worried about influencers turning the faith into a “lifestyle brand.” You know, the 2010s era of aesthetic coffee cups and perfect families. That criticism is a little outdated. We aren’t living in an era where a handful of influencers dominate our feeds anymore.

We are living in the era of the algorithm.

Social media feeds are now dominated by whatever the algorithm thinks you want to see. That is the medium. And it changes our message.

Our faith is becoming algorithmically optimized. We go online and we find a version of Catholicism that never challenges our priors.

We find the influencers who agree with us on liturgy, on politics, and on culture. We get a “custom-fit” religion. The danger is that our Catholicism becomes less Catholic. Less universal. We only see the sides of the faith that make us comfortable.

We are making our religion in our own image.

The only thing that can break this echo chamber is real life.

The best thing Catholic creators can do to break out of this is to go to places where there is no algorithm. You need to be rooted in the real world. You need to attend a real parish, have friends who are not online, and be around people who practice their Catholicism in the flesh, not just virtually.

I saw a perfect example of this last year.

At the Catholic Creators Conference in Steubenville, there were two influencers who represent totally different corners of the internet. One was a “mass outfit selfie” poster, very “Catholic Inc.” The other was a “red-pilled,” heady intellectual guy.

Online, their audiences tear each other apart.

The “intellectuals” criticize the “selfie girls” for being shallow; the “vibes” crowd calls the guy misogynist, etc. But in person, they got along and took a picture together.

Both of them represent perfectly acceptable expressions of Catholic life, but they rarely see each other outside of the times the algorithm decides they should be beefing.

But being in person shatters the algorithm.

Because real life is never optimized. When we are around people in the flesh, we have to deal with the parts of them we don’t like. And when we do, if we have charity, we realize those differences don’t actually matter that much.

We get over ourselves.

That is why I’m looking forward to the Catholic Creators Conference this May.

If you are a content creator, you need to get offline to become better online. You need to meet the people the algorithm is hiding from you.

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Naturally, politicians and pundits are pointing to the superficial similarities—two religions fasting for a month or so. Even Catholic leaders have made similar connections between the two traditions. They want to make an ecumenical gesture in the name of evangelizing the Muslims

But that is a trap.

The world wants us to see Lent and Ramadan (and Christianity and Islam) as basically the same thing.

They want to replace the Church with the State as the ultimate unifier of mankind.

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The “Cult” in Culture

Most English politicians, sports teams, and even the royal family wished Muslims a happy Ramadan. Many of them left out Ash Wednesday altogether.

Sadiq Khan, the Muslim mayor of London, expressed disappointment in Christians who dared to notice the omission. He was appalled Christians would, in his words, “focus on our differences” rather than what we have in common.

But what do we have in common?

What a group of people has in common is typically called a “culture.” And we tend to think of “culture” as the food we eat, the language we speak, or the holidays we celebrate.

But the word culture comes from the word “cult” meaning “worship.”

At the heart of every culture is what it worships. That is the binding agent that holds people together.

So to Kahn’s point. The religious differences are precisely the differences worth focusing on. Those religious practices should define our culture. But clearly, Kahn and others like him don’t think so.

Their society is united by a different cult: secular liberalism.

Secular liberalism is the water we all swim in. It is the belief that the highest good is a man’s ability to self-determination. Make no mistake: that is a religious claim. That is why men like Kahn want to equate Ramadan and Lent. They see religion as a private hobby, a dietary preference, or a quaint tradition like pierogis or tacos.

If they can convince you that fasting for Lent and fasting for Ramadan are just two versions of the same cultural quirk, they have successfully stripped the meaning out of your tradition.

The State as the New God

Secular liberalism has a problem. If its highest good is individual self-determination, it’s hard to create a society. So, it needs a unifying principle above the individual. If social unity does not come from a shared worship of the Triune God, then the vacuum must be filled by something else.

In the modern West, that “something else” is the State.

If you and I don’t worship the same God, the only thing we have in common is that we are tax-paying citizens of the same country (or increasingly “citizens of the world”). When politicians like Khan scold us for focusing on theological differences, they are really saying: Your loyalty to your specific dogmas is getting in the way of your loyalty to the civic order.

This is why this “Coexist” bumper sticker theology is so insidious.

It pretends to be about peace and unity. But unity to what? Unity to the State above and even against God. It demands that we be members of the Body Politic before the Body of Christ.

Authentic Unity vs. Superficial Niceness

We need to be clear that Christians do not have much in common with religions that deny the Trinity.

There are superficial similarities. As the Catechism says, Muslims claim to worship the God of Abraham. We both fast. We both pray. But if we pretend those similarities make us “the same,” we are insulting them and neutering our traditions.

If you were to tell a devout Muslim, “Hey, your Ramadan is just like my Lent,” You are effectively telling him that his specific theological claims about Allah don’t matter. You are patronizing him. If he takes his faith seriously, he shouldn’t see common ground with a Trinitarian Christian. He should think us heretics.

And we ought to love him enough to disagree with him, not paper over our differences for fake peace.

As Christians in Christian nations, our principle of unity is our Baptism. We are members of the Body of Christ, then members of our nations. That is a tangible reality that cannot be replicated by the State.

This reality should be upheld by lay people and our leaders, not only for political reasons but evangelical ones as well. If we see nothing wrong with the differences, there is no reason to evangelize.

Catholics need to recognize the push for religious pluralism for what it is: an attack on the Body of Christ.

True respect for other religions recognizes our differences and responds by preaching the Gospel.

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We believe the desire to build a massive, profitable enterprise somehow runs contrary to the humility of a saint. We treat business and faith as if the two can’t mix.

But faithful Catholics should build big businesses.

Catholic business owners have a moral obligation to build something great. Wealth will always exist in this world. It might as well be in the hands of virtuous Catholics.

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The wealthy are not evil

We often fall into a simplistic trap where we believe the wealthy are de facto corrupt and the poor are virtuous.

Poverty on its own does not make one virtuous, nor does wealth make one vicious. There are plenty of examples where the stresses of poverty drive people into vice, and saints who use their wealth to pursue sainthood.

While it is true that poverty taken on to imitate Christ is a higher calling than the one to start a business, if you are called to the latter, you are called to do it well. And running a business well means wealth.

Wealth (much like power and fame) is simply a tool that magnifies the virtues or vices that are already there. If you are a greedy person, more money will make you a monster. But if you are a generous person, more money will mean more occasions to be generous.

If you are faithful in small matters, you will be faithful in big ones.

The “Blessing Motive”

Economics textbooks talk about the “profit motive,” the thing that motivates business owners to build. It’s a purely self-interested thing. I want more money, so I will build my business.

A virtuous Catholic business owner instead operates under a “blessing motive.” He wants abundance in his business, not for his own sake but for his children, his employees, his parish, etc.

I have a friend who runs a local business and employs a lot of his friends. From a pure “Wall Street efficiency” standpoint, it’s probably the wrong call. I’m sure it can get messy and personal. It might not be the absolute best business decision if his only goal was to maximize his bottom line.

But it is good for our community.

He runs a business that is able to provide not just for his own family, but for the families of his friends and fellow Catholics. As his wealth grows, so does the wealth of his friends. The community directly benefits from his success.

One-man start-ups turn into small businesses, and turn into enterprises and institutions. When these small and large businesses are controlled by faithful Catholics, that wealth can be used to bless people not only through donations but also by providing people with steady jobs to support their families.

Crucifying Yourself for Your People

Business owners feel the risk more acutely than their employees.

Running a business is stressful. It keeps you up at night. You worry about payroll. You worry about the market crashing. You bear the burden of risk so that your employees don’t have to.

When you hire someone, you are saying, “I will take on the anxiety and the risk of the market so that you can have a steady paycheck.” You are absorbing the chaos so they can have order.

Sometimes that means not cutting yourself a paycheck so you can make payroll.

The entrepreneur’s willingness to take on that anxiety and risk is how he follows Christ’s command to “take up your cross.”

The sweat equity you put into your business can grow and become the kind of thing that blesses 5, 50, or 500 other families. They might not recognize it. They might even resent your success at times. But this is your cross. Bear it well.

The more faithful Catholics willing to take up this cross, the better. Lay Catholics are called to sanctify whatever part of the temporal world we find ourselves in.

We need more Catholics to sanctify the world of business.

This article came out of a conversation with my friend, Dan Fuerst from Briefcase Marketing.

He has an impeccable track record helping businesses with their marketing. He helped a financial institution double its conversion rate (6% → 13%) and helped an e-commerce company achieve a ROAS of 20x.

Catholic businesses can get a free marketing consultation with Dan below.

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The author (or the AI the author used to write the article lol) argues that the rumblings we hear about the advancements of AI are just like those early news reports of a novel virus in Wuhan or a few cases in Italy. He claims we are standing on the precipice of a world-shaking event that will fundamentally alter our lives.

The author may be right, but for the wrong reason.

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We tend to look back at COVID as an economic disaster, but the truth is, we largely recovered from the financial shock. What we did not recover from was the social changes the pandemic brought about.

If you look at the vestiges of the pandemic that stuck around, it isn’t social distancing, masks, or vaccination cards. It’s the ubiquitous Zoom calls, grocery delivery, and virtual Church attendance. The “new normal” the pandemic achieved was increasing the ways we use technology to remove ourselves from human interaction.

And that is what AI is poised to do.

The tech gurus prophesy that AI will take our jobs. Maybe it will. But we have survived economic shifts before and we adapted. What we rarely recover from is the community effects of new technologies. Cars made our communities regional. Planes national. The Internet international.

The real danger is not in AI’s economic utility but its social utility.

It’s in the little pieces of advice or council we ask a chatbot instead of going to a friend. It’s the strange way many refer to ChatGPT as “he or “she” instead of “it.” The average consumer is not using AI at their job but to validate feelings, bounce ideas off of, and to replace the friction of human interaction with a compliant virtual companion.

We are keeping other people at arm’s length. Right where we like them.

In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis described Hell not as a grey town where you can have any house you want. but where everyone quarrels with his neighbor. So, they simply imagine a new house a mile away and then move there. His vision of Hell is an infinitely expanding suburb where we drift further and further apart because we can’t stand to be near one another.

Most of our technological advancements are creating this Hell on earth.

Technology has always greased the wheels of this drift. The telegraph, the phone, the car, the internet—they all promised connection but really made it easier to stay apart. AI is just another accelerant. But the “distance” it creates is when we use it to remove the other person altogether. It allows us to simulate the feeling of a relationship without the “burden” of another person.

This is where the Church must step in.

The Catholic Church is quickly becoming the only institution in the world that must be experienced in person. Many of our jobs can be done remotely. Most of our shopping, too. Even other Christian denominations conceded that “church” could be a livestream. Catholics certainly used livestreams, and the hierarchy bent on dispensing Mass attendance more than we might have liked, but the principle remained: you cannot engage in the Sacramental life remotely.

Worship of God requires physical presence because human community requires physical presence.

As we stare down the barrel of the AI “revolution,” our response as a Church must be a recommitment to the messy, inefficient, in-person reality of parish life.

We need to commit to being with people and loving them. We need to sit in pews next to people we might not even like. We need to serve the poor and know their names.

The world is building tools to help us drift apart. We need to be the people who refuse to move.

Chapter 4 of my new book, Save Your Parish details how the average Catholic can build community in their parish even if they have no institutional support.

Get the #1 New Release in Church Growth here:

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It’s transactional.

But what if Catholics treated the parish as more than an institution?

What if we treated it like a home?

Save Your Parish available now

I go to Mass where I was baptized, where my grandfather was buried, and where my parents got married. There are people (even some on staff) that I disagree with on things like liturgy and evangelization. But they’re my family. They’ve known me since I was a kid.

My parish is my home.

Many young Catholics want to see their parish improve, but they see a better parish across town and are tempted to leave.

It might be God’s will for you to stay.

Your presence at a parish can’t be contingent on the community acting the way you want. That’s how a business works, not a family. Yes, there are situations where you need distance from family. But those situations should be rare. It’s a sign there is a deep problem. Leaving your parish shouldn’t be the norm.

I’ve worked with parishes across the country as an employee, volunteer, guest speaker, etc., and the one thing they had in common was: the parishioners who had been there forever had the most power to change things.

The parish was their home, so they got a say in how it was run.

If young Catholic families commit to a parish and stick with it, over time, we will have the same say in our parishes. If we don’t, we won’t.

I wrote a book called Save Your Parish about how to do exactly that.

It covers:

• What a parish is (a people, not a building)

• The four functions of a parish

• How to identify when they’re missing

• How YOU can fill those gaps (even with no formal training)

Save Your Parish is available on Amazon today. The ebook version is 99¢ for today only.

Plus, if you buy today and email me your receipt, I’ll invite you to a free live Q&A workshop where we’ll talk through these principles and how to put them into practice at your parish.

Are you ready?

Save Your Parish