www.lapsedCatholic

People say you can do anything on the Internet, and this ‘cybermonk’ priest proves it by using his Web site for on-line evangelization of ‘fallen away’ Catholics

By Robert R. Holton

Father McKee reaches out to lapsed Catholics through his Web site (william@jcn1.com or www.jcn1.com/ william) that he set up as his home office about three months ago.

"In that short space of time, I have been absolutely thrilled about the successes I’ve been having," he told Our Sunday Visitor. "Every day since I launched the project, I got a couple hundred contacts from people telling me their tales of woe and how they feel they were wronged by the Church."

All those who answer Father McKee’s messages remain anonymous — unless a person volunteers his or her name beyond the on-line ID, the priest pointed out.

"That means it’s a no-holds-barred situation in which people who have a complaint about the Church can freely vent," he said.

Despite that, out of the hundreds of messages he has received, he said fewer than a half dozen were "real hard-core crank calls." Mostly callers just politely list the things they feel drove them from the Church, and some ask how they can resolve these issues.

God’s chat room

Father McKee, a second-generation Irishman, admitted he knows precious little about the workings of such "highfalutin things" as cyberspace and e-mail.

His on-line apologetics ministry is really just the logical "upgrade" of his work for the past 14 years as an itinerant preacher reaching out to fallen-away Catholics.

"This new method of contacting people has its benefits," he said. "There is no limit to the area you can cover and the number of people you can reach in cyberspace. After running all over the country and staying in strange rectories for 14 years, it’s nice to sit down at the computer in my own room and chat with people."

Some time ago, Father McKee compiled all he had learned during those 14 years into a 40-page program called "How to Reach Out to Inactive Catholics," and today many dioceses throughout the country and abroad use that program.

Several dioceses, in fact, are preparing to follow Father McKee’s lead and take their programs into the new frontiers of cyberspace as well.

Statistics gathered during his 14 years of on-the-road evangelization show that 80 percent of lapsed Catholics who are invited to rejoin the fold do so within five years.

When it comes to on-line evangelization, however, acquiring such statistics is much trickier, Father McKee explained, especially so early in the game.

Yet he expressed confidence that a goodly portion of those who make the effort to contact his Web site eventually return to the Church, but never inform him.

Since progress is more difficult to gauge, Father McKee sees his objective on the Internet as engaging lapsed Catholics in an initial dialogue, giving them an opportunity to vent their grievances, inviting them to come back to the faith and then urging them to go tête-à-tête with a local priest about the specifics.

"I am always asking myself — and them — why they hate the Church so much," he said. "And 99 percent of the time I find their problems are more psychological than theological."

But some people use the opportunity to denounce what he stands for. "[They] send me messages telling we what is wrong with me, with the Church and all priests, the hierarchy and even the Pope," he said. "Remember, they are anonymous, so they’re getting things off their chest."

People’s legitimate grievances mostly have to do with disagreement with Church teaching, real or imagined abuses by Church people in authority, changes brought about by the Second Vatican Council, divorce and re-marriage matters, and conflict over female and married clergy.

Father McKee uses humor whenever he can to relax his audience — no matter how serious the situation might be. He repeatedly stressed the vital importance of using humor as much as possible in his dealings with those separated from the Church.

"Humor is more important than anything — more important than absolutely anything," he said. "I never start a sermon without a joke or two. You have to be funny, but you also have to use self-deprecation."

Even with those lapsed Catholics who take the initiative and call up Father McKee’s Web site to see what he could do for them about their estrangement from the Church, Father McKee assiduously avoids heavy-handed advice, taking instead a more subtle approach.

"Usually, they just drop it then and there," he said, "and that ends it on my end — except that I give them enough information on how to follow up on their own."

Though such certainty is rare, he knows for a fact that some actually have followed up with a local priest and have since returned to the Church.

He reflected on some of the thank-you messages he has received from such people: "These messages are heartwarming and beautiful. When I read them — over and over again — I can just imagine Jesus sitting down and teaching the people, only in this case they all are on the Internet."

"The biggest thing I learned from this adventure in cyberspace is that what people need more than anything when they are away from their Church is an invitation to come back," he said.

"It is absolutely unbelievable how many people out there are just waiting for that invitation to return, and that is why today I am into this cyberspace thing."

"The so-called theological problems people complain about are not really theological. The basic, overriding problem that most of these people have is simply that life has not turned out the way that they had hoped it would. They get disappointed with life, with themselves, and then they get disappointed with God and the Church — in that order."

Cybersinners all

Father McKee said the fallen away "are people with the same faults, failings, sins as any cross section of practicing Catholics — except that they don’t go to Mass and the sacraments. Yet, they have not [completely] lost the faith, except in rare cases."

"In general, inactive Catholics are good people," he pointed out. "They are law-abiding, tax-paying, child-loving, decent citizens."

In the messages he gets from them, he detects "a pattern of deep pain and hurt; they hate being separated from their Church. It pains them deeply, and the biggest loss to them is their being unable to receive the sacraments regularly due to such problems as divorce, remarriage, abortion, use of birth control. . . . "

In the final analysis, during his nearly 50 years of priesthood (which included mission work in Brazil and editorial work with Liguori Publications), Father McKee has found that "people are more sinned against than sinning."

"It’s a tough life out there," he said, "and people do have a lot of problems, because human beings are very complex — and we are getting more complex by the day. So people today need the Lord more than they ever did before."

Holton is a senior correspondent for Our Sunday Visitor

Copyright Our Sunday Visitor, 1997; from the 10-26-97 edition

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