EDITORIAL

Stick to the basics

By Kenneth Baker, S.J., Editor

It should not be, but it seems to be a fact that most American Catholics do not know the basics of their Catholic faith. Over the years I have heard or read hundreds of times stories about Catholics who should know what the Church teaches on the Sacraments, on the Commandments, on Church law, and so forth, and it turns out that they simply do not know.

What is the reason for the abysmal ignorance of so many Catholics about the basics of their faith? The main culprit seems to be the faulty catechetics that has been dominant now for about 35 years, with its emphasis on feelings and experience rather than on knowledge. Another culprit is the Catholic school system, from top to bottom, which in many cases has failed to teach students the fulness of the Catholic faith. A third culprit is the pulpit at the parish church where, in many cases, there has been a lot of talk about love, justice and peace, the Third World, and so forth, but precious little explanation of the Church’s teaching on sin, sanctifying grace, the Mass as a sacrifice, the holy Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, and so forth.

We can do a better job in the future and we must do a better job or we will lose millions of young Catholics to the Fundamentalists and to the New Agers. Right now I think the most important thing a priest can do in the pulpit is to proclaim and to explain the beautiful truths of the Catholic faith. I think one reason why the Fundamentalists have already taken so many Catholics away from the Church is that they preach basic biblical truths about sin, salvation and damnation and do not concern themselves with sociology, psychology and politics. For there is no salvation in the human sciences; there is salvation only through faith in Jesus Christ and possession of his grace which comes to us through his Church and only through his Church.

About six years ago I went to Central Park in New York City to listen to Billy Graham. On that occasion he preached on the first page of the catechism and dealt with such things as “Who made You?” “Why did God make you?” “How can you save your soul?” There were over 200,000 people there on a sunny afternoon to listen to his basic message — and this right in the heart of New York City.

Readers of HPR who use our homilies will have noted that we follow an organized plan of topics so that over the course of the three-year cycle of homilies we cover all the basics of the faith. We have been doing that now for twenty years — and I see no reason to change. What we have tried to do is to cover the whole Catechism of the Catholic Church every three years. It is not necessary to introduce new topics. The Catholic faith is so beautiful and such a treasure that it can never be exhausted.

What I want to do here is to urge priest readers to preach the basics of our Catholic faith year in and year out. We live in a Protestant environment which has now been secularized to such an extent that it is no longer religious at all. We now live in a pagan society which is at war, either implicitly or explicitly, with everything we hold dear. In this sense, our present situation resembles that of the early Christians in pagan Rome.

The conflict between those who believe in God and his moral law and those who do not has been called a “culture war.” So far it has been, for the most part, verbal, but it can and it might become bloody. The first indications of a bloody culture war are the treatment of pro-life demonstrators and counselors outside of abortion mills. The Roman pagans worshipped idols and killed Christians for not doing the same. Pro-abortion Americans have made a “sacrament” out of abortion — they have made it into something “Sacred.” Thus the pro-lifers who oppose them are considered to be blasphemers. And in the past such “blasphemers” have been put to death.

If the Church is to grow and grow strong we must stick to the basics. Watered down, pick-and-choose Catholicism will never win the culture war that we are in. We should fight with our best weapons — the basics.