For over thirty years I have noted a tendency among some bishops, priests, nuns and Catholic teachers to “water down” the Catholic faith in order to make it more acceptable, apparently, to modem man. I have found this tendency in Catholic books, articles, preaching and teaching from kindergarten through college.

Another way to express the situation is to describe it as a “softening” of Catholicism. This is accomplished in at least two ways. The first is to omit entirely truths that are thought to be either outmoded or too difficult for modern man, such as the Church’s teaching on Original Sin, mortal sin deserving of hell, hell itself, purgatory, the existence of devils, the seven Capital Sins, the reality of concupiscence and temptations to evil, the need for and value of penances such as fasting, that each person at death faces a particular judgment by Christ on his good and evil deeds, that there will be a general judgment of all at the end of the world. Such selectivity in Catholic teaching has been correctly called “Cafeteria Catholicism.”

Another way to distort the fulness of Catholic faith is to overstress the pleasing and joyful aspects of Catholicism, such as the primacy of love, the goodness of God, his mercy, his forgiveness, along with the assumed or even stated belief that everyone will go to heaven. The word “supernatural” has disappeared from this vocabulary, and much of it seems to be little more than pure humanitarianism which one could find expressed better in the local Unitarian Church.

I call this tendency “Catholicism Lite.” Its main feature is that it emphasizes the pleasing aspects of Catholicism, and waters down or even completely omits mention of the painful aspects of our faith, that is, sin, the wrath of God, his judgment and punishment of sinners. For example, recently I studied four sample talks for Jubilee 2000 for parish renewal. There was nothing heretical in them, but they sedulously avoided the “hard truths” of Catholicism and emphasized the love and mercy of God almost to the exclusion of his justice.

I would like to list a few more examples of what I am talking about. In the liturgy, there is more emphasis on community and the Mass as a meal than there is on the dogmatic truth that the Mass is a sacrifice before it is a sacrament. The notion of the sacred is downplayed, which is shown by the lack of reverence for the Real Presence of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament by talking and visiting in church before and after Mass. The need for adoration of God as our Almighty Creator and Lord is replaced with saying that he is our Friend and Consoler.

We don’t hear much about the immortality of the human soul or that one’s eternal destiny — heaven or hell — depends on dying in the state of sanctifying grace. On the other hand, we hear a lot about the rights of Catholics, but not much about their duties and obligations.

What many Catholics are being subjected to is “Catholicism Lite” in which some of the basic elements of our faith, coming to us from Christ himself through the Apostles, are being obscured if not entirely forgotten. The end result of this, if it is not corrected, is that the American Church will become just another Protestant sect, while perhaps still calling itself “Catholic.”

The main reason for the “softening” of Catholicism is the invasion of secular humanistic thinking into the Church. In plain words, it is the Modernism condemned by Pope St. Pius X. This means that positivism, subjectivism and relativism have permeated the Church and have led to a “watering down” of the Nicene-Constantinople Creed. As priests, our task is to respond by teaching “Heavy Catholicism,” that is, the whole Catholic truth not the “lite” version.