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Chapter 1

The Weight of My Neighbor’s Glory

All of us, gazing with unveiled face on the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as from the Lord who is the Spirit.

2 Corinthians 3:18

There is a story that I love to tell at every Called & Gifted workshop that I teach: the extraordinary life of Margaret Haughery, the bread saint of New Orleans.

Margaret was born in Ireland but lived most of her life in New Orleans. By the time she was twenty-three, Margaret’s parents, husband, and infant daughter had all died. She was penniless, uneducated, and alone. Although she originally supported herself as a laundress, Margaret quickly began to start businesses. She first founded a dairy and peddled the milk door-to-door. She used the money she made to buy a bankrupt bakery and turned it around, becoming enormously successful. The penniless orphan made a fortune and gave almost all of it away.

A devout Catholic, she lived a life of great simplicity — she owned only two dresses at a time. She was known as the “mother of orphans” because, for decades, she made and gave away vast sums to feed the poor, while founding and supporting homes for orphans and widows of all backgrounds.

Margaret’s wisdom was proverbial. Seated in the doorway of her famous bakery, she was consulted by people of all ranks. When she died in 1882, she was given a state funeral and all New Orleans mourned. What I find most moving is that the plain but fabulous Irish social entrepreneur that everyone called “our Margaret” did all this without ever learning to read or write.¹

Margaret Haughery is a perfect example of why I love this observation by A. D. Lindsay:

The difference between ordinary people and saints is not that saints fulfill the plain duties that ordinary men neglect. The things saints do have not usually occurred to ordinary people at all…. “Gracious” conduct is like the work of an artist. It needs imagination and spontaneity. It is not the choice between presented alternatives but the creation of something new.²

Which brings me to the point of this book.

The greatest riches of the Church are not found in our gorgeous legacy of art and architecture, our brilliant philosophical and scientific heritage, or even our nearly 700,000 institutions that currently serve the dignity and eternal destiny of human beings on this planet. All of these treasures, wonderful and critical as they are, are fruit borne by human beings who, like the unlikely Margaret Haughery, freely responded to and cooperated with the grace of God in their time and place. Our greatest earthly treasures are our Margarets: the 1.272 billion immortals and potential fruit-bearers who currently bear the surname “Catholic.”³

As C. S. Lewis observed:

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.⁴

Pope St. John Paul II understood this deeply:

… God with his call reaches the heart of each individual, and the Spirit, who abides deep within each disciple (cf. 1 Jn 3:24), gives himself to each Christian with different charisms and special signs. Each one, therefore, must be helped to embrace the gift entrusted to him as a completely unique person, and to hear the words which the Spirit of God personally addresses to him.⁵

No wonder the Church insists that “the ministerial priesthood is at the service of the common priesthood. It is directed at the unfolding of the baptismal grace of all Christians” (Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC] 1547, emphasis added).

Where’s the Fruit?

The question “Where’s the fruit?” is one that I’ve been asking for years. A lot of Catholic leaders are asking the same question. For instance, the leadership of a Catholic university brought me in after reading my book Forming Intentional Disciples: The Path to Knowing and Following Jesus. They said, “We have a problem. We thought that if we exposed our students to thick Catholic culture — the very best of Catholic liturgies, music, art, literature, philosophy, and theology — they would naturally become disciples and behave like disciples. But it’s not working. We’re realizing that we actually have to evangelize our students and explicitly call them to discipleship.”

One of the inevitable results of our failure to evangelize and make intentional disciples of our own is that so many of the graces Catholics have objectively received are not bearing their intended fruit. We can learn a lot from the powerful little two-paragraph section of the Catechism entitled “Liturgy as Source of Life”:

1071 … [The liturgy] involves the “conscious, active, and fruitful participation” of everyone. (emphasis added)

1072 “The sacred liturgy does not exhaust the entire activity of the Church”: it must be preceded by evangelization, faith, and conversion. It can then produce its fruits in the lives of the faithful: new life in the Spirit, involvement in the mission of the Church, and service to her unity. (emphasis added)

Where do we stand in terms of fruit-bearing? I will not make you wade through a mass of depressing statistics; a few quick snapshots will do.

In 2014, 6.5 American Catholics left the Church for every non-Catholic who entered, and half of millennials (ages 18-34) raised Catholic have already dropped the identity.⁶ I asked pastors and catechists in a dozen different dioceses this past fall how many of the children and teens in their confirmation prep programs had stopped attending Mass since they were confirmed. The estimates that I received ranged from 60 to 90 percent. Millions of young adults raised in the Church and then simply vanishing do not qualify as “fruit.”

Fruit-bearing is the canary in our ecclesial coal mine. It is the most critical external evidence we have that we are doing — or not doing — what Jesus commanded us to do: Make disciples of all nations. The truth is that acceptance of little or no fruit as “normal” has profoundly shaped the lives of almost all Catholics as well as our pastoral practice, our vocational discernment, and our mission to the world.

What is the abundant fruit, which God is calling us to bear? What are the consequences of our failure to make disciples, and to help those disciples grow to fruit-bearing maturity? What hangs in the balance?

• The eternal happiness in God — the salvation — of every human being on the planet.

• Lavish, life-changing, and culture-changing fruitfulness, pouring out into the world through the lives of the faithful.

• The emergence of the next generations of Catholic leaders, saints, and apostles: priestly, religious, and secular. And through them …

• The fulfillment of the Church’s mission and the redemptive work of Jesus Christ in history.

The Virtue of Faith and the Act of Faith

Which brings us to the ancient distinction between what the Church calls the virtus fidei and the actus fidei. Virtus fidei is the “virtue of faith,” the power or capacity to believe given to us by God in valid baptism. When you read in the Catechism or magisterial documents that baptism bestows faith, the document is referring to the virtue of faith.

But the actus fidei, the “act of faith,” is different. This is the explicit, personal, free choice of an older child or adult to respond to God’s grace with belief and discipleship, to embark upon what St. Paul called the “obedience of faith” (Romans 1:5). Actus fidei is where the rubber hits the road and we do what we say we believe. Evangelization addresses this question: Have we made a personal “act of faith”? It is the personal act of faith that is the key to bearing fruit.

The Seeker Journey

At the Catherine of Siena Institute, we have long used a very simple schema to help participants in our Making Disciples seminars understand the developmental process that adults typically go through in the twenty-first century West as they move toward intentional discipleship. We call them the Seeker, Disciple, and Apostle stages of spiritual development.

The Seeker stage corresponds to the long pre-discipleship journey from distrust and disbelief to what the Catechism calls a person’s “first and fundamental conversion” (CCC 1427), the point where you drop your nets and begin to follow Jesus consciously as his disciple in the midst of his Church. Depending upon where they start, some people have a long way to travel before they arrive at that crossroads.

The Seeker stage encompasses the five thresholds of conversion that I cover in considerable detail in chapters 5 through 8 of Forming Intentional Disciples.⁷ The thresholds have to do with our lived relationship with God, not our religious background or lack of it. In brief, the five thresholds are:

1. Initial Trust

2. Spiritual Curiosity

3. Spiritual Openness

4. Spiritual Seeking

5. Intentional Discipleship⁸

Trust. In the post-modern West, the vast majority of non-practicing or non-believing Christians, as well as people from non-Christian or “nothing” backgrounds, have to start with some positive association with Christianity, with Christ, or with a believing Christian. They need a bridge of trust in place across which they can move closer to Christ and his Church. If there is no bridge of trust in place, then the first task of an evangelizer is to build or become a relational bridge of personal and spiritual trust that can one day bear the weight of truth.

Curiosity. After trust has been established, the next development stage is spiritual curiosity. As disciple-makers, we want to foster curiosity about the person and work of Jesus Christ rather than about a generic “faith” or simply factual questions about Catholic beliefs and practices. If we do not intentionally foster curiosity about Jesus as the center of our faith, people can (and do) easily come away with the impression that Catholicism is primarily about an institution rather than a relationship to the person of Jesus, Lord of the Church, who came, lived, died, and rose again for us.

Openness. As that curiosity builds, the seeker becomes open to the possibility of personal and spiritual change, which is a big turning point. Openness is not a commitment to change, just the willingness to acknowledge to God and to yourself that you are open to the possibility of change. Since to do so involves giving up the sense of having absolute control over one’s own life and dropping one’s defenses, it can feel scary and even absolutely crazy. People typically need support from others as they move into openness.

Seeking. The next stage is spiritual seeking, where people are now actively grappling with whether or not they will choose to follow Jesus as his disciple in the midst of his Church. Consider this Gospel story:

As he was walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter, and his brother Andrew, casting a net into the sea; they were fishermen. He said to them, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” At once they left their nets and followed him. (Matthew 4:18-20)

The spiritual seeker, like Peter and Andrew, is holding his or her nets — his or her entire life — and is steadily regarding Jesus and thinking about whether to drop those nets and follow him. The spiritual seeker has not yet dropped his or her net to follow Jesus but is grappling with whether to do so. It is a time of intense spiritual reflection that feels, for many, like a quest.

Intentional Disciple. Finally, we come to the moment that people do drop their nets and cross the last threshold to begin the life of an intentional disciple. Some are finally responding with faith to the baptismal graces they had received as an infant; others make this journey consciously as teens or adults before baptism. For instance, Cornelius the Centurion, seeking to know the way of salvation, sends for Peter to hear his message and experiences conversion before baptism (see Acts 10:44-48).

Missionary Disciple: Following Jesus and Being Sent by Jesus

The developmental stage of disciple corresponds to what the Catechism calls the “second conversion” (CCC 1428), a lifelong conversion. A man or woman who is now seeking to follow Jesus as a disciple grows spiritually and is transformed as he or she walks with Christ.

Catechesis really comes into its own as disciples become excited and eagerly want to learn more about the faith. They begin to grow in virtue as they integrate not only Catholic doctrine but also the basic disciplines of discipleship into their work, their relationships and family life, their recreation, and so on. Not only do their personal lives change, but they begin to actively cooperate with and be used by God for others. As disciples mature, they start to feel strong enough to go public with their faith, even in situations where people are indifferent or hostile to Christianity.

In a word, the Disciple stage is where people start to bear fruit because their priorities change from within. They want to worship, so they attend Mass regularly. They pray and ask to be taught how to pray. They are eager to serve. Many disciples become the backbone of their local parishes because they care so much about the well-being of the Church. They become good stewards of their finances out of a passion to see the Gospel advance and change other people’s lives. Evangelizing parishes regularly tell us that they have the highest per capita giving in their diocese.

Disciples will fill every class in your parish and diocese because they long to study and grow in the faith. They clamor to discern how God is calling them. Their charisms — special graces of the Holy Spirit that empower us to be a channel of God’s beauty, mercy, provision, truth, and healing for others — become manifest in their lives. They are eager to pass their faith on to their children and are no longer willing to just drop them off at sacramental prep before spending an hour killing time with their phone and a latte. Now they are serious, active collaborators who passionately embrace their roles as the primary catechists in the lives of their children.

All of this and so much more that we desperately want to see happen in our parishes starts to emerge, not out of guilt, but out of a living, growing relationship with God. It bursts out as naturally as apples on apple trees — and for the same reason: every one of these things is the fruit Jesus promises his disciples will bear: “fruit that will remain” (John 15:16).

The Apostle Stage

In Church teaching, there are important differences between what is called “objective” redemption and “subjective” redemption. By his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus has already reconciled us with the Father: this is objective redemption. Subjective redemption is the application of the saving gifts of Christ to individuals, the manifestation of salvific transformation in each of our lives. Human beings contribute nothing to the work of Christ in objective redemption, but the exercise of our free cooperation with God’s grace is central in the drama of subjective redemption.

As disciples mature, they reach a turning point where they take personal ownership and responsibility for the mission of the Church. They realize that they have also been anointed and sent by Christ on a mission, and that there is no such thing as missional unemployment for the baptized. They have entered the Apostle stage of development. Apostles know that they also are one of the Lord’s “sent ones” or in Pope Francis’ memorable phrase: “missionary disciples.”⁹ They grasp that every one of us has a vocation: a work of love to which we have been called by God, and through which he is going to change us and change the world around us.

The Apostle stage of spiritual development is where people discern their personal vocations and abundant fruit-bearing becomes the norm. This is where lay apostles engage in both challenging the societal structures of sin and helping to create new structures ordered toward redemption and the flourishing of human beings. This is the developmental stage where Catholics become passionate about the active evangelization of those who do not yet know Christ and his Church.

The End for Which We Labor

In the end, all our pastoral and catechetical work is not just for the child being baptized and catechized but for the adult that child is called by God to become. The end for which we labor is the mature Christian who is both (1) an immortal intended for eternal happiness with God and (2) an apostle in his or her particular sphere — an agent of subjective redemption and abundant fruit-bearing through his or her cooperation with grace. We glorify God by facilitating the salvation and eternal happiness of immortals and the continual emergence of new missionary disciples who are actively encouraged to grow into the fullness of their earthly influence and creativity. It is these two ends that we serve when we evangelize and make disciples.

A Famine of Fruit

I have not found any research in this area, but I would like to share a very rough practitioner’s working estimate. Based on our experience to date working with 140,000 Catholics in over 500 parishes in 150 dioceses in 12 countries, I estimate that perhaps 3 percent of all the individual charisms and individual vocations¹⁰ that we have been given by God are being manifested and lived.

Christian vocation is a mystery that emerges from a sustained encounter with Jesus Christ. Because we are not yet calling most of our people to discipleship, their charisms and vocations are not manifesting, being discerned, and lived. Indeed, our failure to evangelize actually suppresses the emergence of vocations because the desire to discern God’s call is one of the normal fruits of discipleship. As a result, both the Church and the world are starved for lack of the abundant fruit that the Body of Christ has been anointed to bear.

How this has complicated the discernment process can be seen in the way ordinary lay Catholics so often assume that the term “vocation” refers only to priestly or religious vocation and is rare rather than universal. We expect a few people will be drawn out of the parish to go to the diocese, the seminary, or religious community because they have a special call. In practice, the rest of the laity remaining in the parish is presumed by nearly everyone to have nothing to discern. Therefore, no serious discernment support is made available for those who are not called to one of the obvious ecclesial vocations.

Recently, I spoke to a national gathering of religious vocation directors. I asked them, “How many of you have inquirers come to you who are not ready to discern?” The response was unanimous, “We all do.” I responded that most Catholics assume that only very exceptional people embark on a personal spiritual quest. So, it is very easy for those who are just beginning to move into a new threshold like curiosity or openness to conclude that their new and apparently rare surge in spiritual interest must mean they are called to a rare vocation: priesthood or religious life.

My friend Janet is a good example. She was raised Catholic and experienced a serious conversion as a child. Growing up, she decided that she must be called to become a sister since religious life was the only place where she knew Catholics talked out loud about God.

Janet entered a women’s community but eventually discerned that she was not called to religious life and left, still seeking God. For a time, she “double-dipped,” dividing her time between attendance at Mass and participation in a small non-denominational evangelical church. Why? Because that little evangelical congregation strongly encouraged its members to lives of conscious discipleship, fostered the discernment of charisms, and surrounded her with love and support as she passionately sought to follow Jesus. Eventually, Jan married. When her husband became a fervent Catholic convert, she returned full-time to her life as a Catholic. Despite years of serious spiritual searching, Jan did not grasp — until she was in her thirties — that she could be a lay disciple in the Catholic Church.

No wonder the Church is struggling. The vast majority of those to whom the power of the Holy Spirit has been given are not yet manifesting that power. This is why what Pope St. John Paul II taught is so important:

Therefore, the Church fulfills her mission when she guides every member of the faithful to discover and live his or her own vocation in freedom and to bring it to fulfillment in charity.¹¹

Missionary Disciple in the Muslim World

My oldest female friend (I’ll call her “Natali”) is an American who has lived for decades in a variety of Muslim countries. I first met Natali the day after I graduated from college and thought of her as a sophisticated “older” woman. After all, she was married and in her thirties with both a house and a profession. Over the next two years, we became good friends — and then she left to live in the Middle East.

Every summer since, we have gotten together when she returns to the States for vacation. Natali downloads her year with me in long, rich conversations, telling amazing stories of God at work in and through her relationships in some of the most complex and difficult places on earth.

Today, Natali would strike a stranger as a quite ordinary, five-foot-nuthin’ wife, mother, and grandmother. And what a mistake that would be. She and her husband spent years equipping themselves to be “tent-making” missionaries — that is, Christians who (like St. Paul the tentmaker in Acts 18:3) work at a secular profession that enables them to live where no overt missionary work is possible so that some living witness to the love of Jesus Christ might be found there. She speaks the language fluently and has a real charism in this area. She frequently goes places where no Western women go and where she has developed many friendships. She is credible and approachable because she is a housewife and mother and so can connect with the other women who are also raising their families. With them, she not only shares goat and spiced coffee but the love of Jesus.

What she does is possible only because she is a layperson. No “official” missionary, no pastor, priest, or nun would be allowed into the country. No man would be allowed to enter the situations and relationships where she has been welcomed as a woman. My friend is supported in her efforts not only by her husband but also by her Protestant congregation back home and an international missionary organization.

When a lay Catholic embarks upon an apostolate outside the standard ecclesial structures in the United States, he or she usually has to carve out an individual, and often, quite lonely path. Lay Catholics serious about their secular mission usually have to be remarkably independent and persistent.

A few years ago, I taught a three-hour graduate class on the development of the Church’s understanding of the laity from 1497 (St. Catherine of Genoa and the Oratory of Divine Love) to 1957, the year of the Second World Congress on the Apostolate of the Laity. I was trying to help my students grasp the experience of the Church regarding the laity over those 460 years, because that experience had shaped the bishops attending the Second Vatican Council and, therefore, the debate over the vocation, mission, and charisms of the laity that took place in October 1963.

My students were surprised to learn that Pope Pius XII had been a great champion of the term “lay apostle.” In his address to the Second World Congress, Pope Pius XII referred to “lay apostles” twenty-three times. In fact, he observed that, in 1957, “‘lay apostle’ is one of the terms most widely used in discussing the activities of the Church.”¹²

Five years earlier, in 1952, Pius XII had spoken of his intense desire for huge numbers of both priestly and lay apostles:

We would love to have vast phalanxes of apostles rise up, like those that the Church knew at her origins … and next to the priests, let the laity speak, who have learned to penetrate the minds and hearts of their listeners with their word and love. Yes, bearers of life, penetrate, in every place — in factories, workshops, fields — wherever Christ has the right to enter. Offer yourselves, see yourselves among your own kind, in diverse centers of work, in the same houses, closely and tightly united, in one thought and desire only. And then open wide your arms to welcome all who come to you, anxious for a helpful and reassuring word in this atmosphere of darkness and discomfort.¹³

The Pope was calling the laity to be magnanimous. The virtue of magnanimity is the aspiration to do great things, to bear great fruit for God and his Kingdom. Pope Pius XII knew that St. Thomas Aquinas called magnanimity the “ornament of all the virtues.”¹⁴ The magnanimous person has the courage to seek out what is truly great and become worthy of it.

When I first encountered the idea that aspiring to this sort of holy greatness was considered to be a virtue by the Church, I had difficulty taking it in. Saints do great things for God. But aren’t ordinary lay Catholics supposed to be humble and not presumptuous, to minimize our abilities and significance, and avoid big expectations?

As we have observed hundreds of times in the Called & Gifted discernment process, even the idea of having charisms and being anointed for a mission unnerves many lay Catholics, especially those who are older. Believing that God might do something genuinely important and supernatural through them seems to lack humility. Over and over in the course of helping laypeople discern their charisms, they have told me of their deep belief in the virtue of living small and expecting little of God. As one particularly charming eighty-four-year-old Scot told me in a lilting brogue, “I couldn’t have charisms! It wouldn’t be humble!”

We must recognize that humility is magnanimity’s necessary partner, the attitude before God that recognizes and fully accepts our creaturehood and the immeasurable distance between the Creator and his creation. But in Catholic thought, humility never stands alone. Without magnanimity, we don’t see the whole of our dignity as human beings. Magnanimity and humility together enable us to keep our balance, to arrive at our proper worth before God, to persist in living our mission, and to persevere in seeking our eternal destiny despite apparent frustration and failure.

C.S. Lewis captures perfectly the significance of the responsibility that all disciples bear for one another’s development in this area:

It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.¹⁵

¹ “Margaret Haughery,” Wikipedia (online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Haughery, as of May 5, 2017).

² A. D. Lindsay, “The Two Moralities,” quoted in Dorothy L. Sayers, The Whimsical Christian (New York: Collier, 1987), p. 131.

³ St. Pacian famously observed in a letter, “Christian is my name, but Catholic my surname”: “Letter 1: On the Catholic Name,” 7, in The Extant Works of St. Pacian, Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church 17 (1842), pp. 317-327 (online at http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/pacian_1_letter1.htm, as of May 5, 2017).

⁴ C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 46.

⁵ Pope St. John Paul II, Pastores Dabo Vobis (“I Will Give You Shepherds”), 40 (online at http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_25031992_pastores-dabo-vobis.html, as of May 5, 2017).

⁶ America’s Changing Religious Landscape, Pew Research Center (May 12, 2015), pp. 35 and 41 (online at http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/, as of May 5, 2017).

⁷ This is a very brief review. To learn more about the thresholds, please see chapters 5-8 of Forming Intentional Disciples: The Path to Knowing and Following Jesus (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2012).

⁸ Adapted from “Five Thresholds of Postmodern Evangelism,” by Doug Schaupp, 1998 (online at http://www.illinoisgcf.org/execplanning/resources/FiveThresholdsPaper.pdf, as of May 5, 2017).

⁹ Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 120 (online at http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html, as of May 5, 2017); cf. Apostolicam Actuositatem (Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity), 3 (online at www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19651118_apostolicam-actuositatem_en.html, as of May 5, 2017).

¹⁰ The Church teaches about three basic kinds of vocation: (1) the universal vocation to holiness; (2) state-of-life vocations (priesthood, religious, marriage, singleness); and (3) individual, personal vocations. In addition to a “state of life” vocation, many are also given individual, personal vocations. So, a married mother of two may also have been given a vocation to serve as a physician or as an artist, etc.

¹¹ Pope St. John Paul II, Pastores Dabo Vobis, 40.

¹² Pope Pius XII, Guiding Principles of the Lay Apostolate, Second World Congress of the Lay Apostolate, October 5, 1957, emphasis added (online at https://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/P12LAYAP.HTM, as of May 5, 2017).

¹³ Pope Pius XII, “Christians, Bearer of the Life of the Risen One,” Homily for Easter Sunday, 1952, Compendium on the New Evangelization (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2015), p. 14.

¹⁴ St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q129, a4, Objection 3 (online at http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3129.htm, as of May 5, 2017).

¹⁵ Lewis, The Weight of Glory, p. 46.