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Chapter 3

The Undaunted Fruit-Farmer

He changed the desert into pools of water,

arid land into springs of water,

And settled the hungry there;

they built a city to live in.

They sowed fields and planted vineyards,

brought in an abundant harvest.

Psalm 107:35-37

Years ago, I moved from Seattle — locals call it “Rain City” — to Colorado Springs, 6,700 feet high in the Rockies and semi-arid. I bought a “fixer-upper” home filled with tons of potential and not much else. My first clue about how bad things had been was when total strangers thanked me the first time I mowed the dead stubble that passed for a lawn, saying, “Nobody has done that in years!” I watered for a year, but nothing grew except three-foot-high Canadian thistles.

Finally, I brought in a very savvy landscape designer. She took one look and summed up my yard with brisk precision: “There’s nothing here to save.” She was not saying “Abandon all hope, you can’t have a garden in Colorado.” She meant, “You are going to have to start from scratch. You can’t garden in Colorado the way you gardened in Seattle where rain regularly falls from the sky.” When I asked her how long it would take for a new garden to reach maturity, she calculated for a moment. “Eight years.”

So, I double-dug flower beds, hauled in good soil, planted, fertilized, and watered. I pruned and mulched, and replanted when things failed. I bribed male relatives, friends, and seminarians to tackle some of the toughest tasks and hired skilled help when I needed it. I beat off marauding deer and rabbits. Together, the garden and I survived blizzards and hail bombs. I would stalk around the garden on cool summer mornings, trowel in hand, rejoicing in the color and light. Eight years, fourteen water-wise trees, sixty-five hardy shrubs, and hundreds of tough-as-nails perennials later, I found out that my landscape designer was right. A lush, green, and undaunted garden with a view of Pikes Peak now completely fills what was once the neighborhood eyesore.

I have often used the story of my garden to illustrate the dramatic cultural shifts we have lived through over the past fifty years. Our “spiritual climate” has also changed dramatically, and so has the life of the Church. Our culture is now an arid spiritual place, a far more hostile and difficult place to make disciples and foster apostles. But that does not mean we cannot evangelize and bear abundant fruit in the twenty-first century. It just means we cannot do it the way we once did when the culture generally supported our faith and values.

Baptized Unbelievers

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI demonstrated his awareness of our quickly changing situation when he significantly rewrote the conclusion to an essay on the indissolubility of marriage he first published in 1972 and then republished in 2014. The pope did not mince words:

Today there is another question that imposes itself with great seriousness. Currently there are more and more baptized pagans, meaning persons who have become Christian by means of baptism but do not believe and have never known the faith. This is a paradoxical situation: baptism makes the person Christian, but without faith he remains nonetheless just a baptized pagan…. This brings up questions for which we still do not have answers. And therefore it is even more urgent to explore them.¹

This reality, which the Vatican has also referred to as “baptized unbelievers,” is something all evangelizers must grapple with. Right now, many children who are being baptized have parents who neither believe nor practice the faith and are not attempting to pass the faith on to their children. A recent CARA study found that only 14 percent of millennial Catholics — who are in their peak child-bearing years — attend Mass on a weekly basis,² so it isn’t startling to find that only 11 percent of millennial Catholic parents have enrolled their children in some kind of parish-based religious education.³ Sixty-eight percent of all Catholic parents have not enrolled their children in any type of formal religious education.⁴

We need all hands on deck because we are standing on the edge of a demographic precipice. In Britain, it is even grimmer. There, 65 percent of Catholics are either marginal or non-practicing or on their way out the door. Nearly half of non-practicing British Catholics are functioning agnostics or believers in an impersonal God, and more than half of Catholics who leave were already de facto agnostics or atheists.⁵ The irony is that UK “leavers” have not left the practice of “their” faith. They are practicing their faith when they leave the Church because their actual faith is closer to agnosticism than Catholicism.

No matter where we live in the Western world, it is critical to remember that when we encounter a non-practicing Catholic or a “none,” we are probably not speaking to someone who just likes to sleep in on Sundays. There is a good chance that we are talking to someone whose belief in a personal God is tenuous or nonexistent.

Institute trainers have been working intensely with many parishes and dioceses, helping them begin calling parishioners to intentional, fruit-bearing discipleship, and we have learned a great deal over the past five years. Here are some of our most significant recent “ahas.”

1. Beware of “Imagined” Evangelization

When there is such a gap between the worldview and experience of so many unbelievers and the beliefs and experience of ecclesial insiders, it is fatally easy to underestimate how far we, the evangelizers, will have to travel in order to bring the Gospel to the majority of people. Recently, blogger Colleen Vermeulen remarked on an observation Pope Francis made:

Pope Francis has reminded those who preach Eucharistic homilies to “never respond to questions that nobody asks” when it comes to sharing the Gospel (Evangelii Gaudium, para. 155). Let us follow a similar path, avoiding imagined evangelization, where we lead with answers the unchurched have no interest in; and instead, taking up a people-driven evangelization that brings us alongside those who are not at our Eucharistic Table, yet have a desire for and interest in closeness to God.⁶

That’s why the new Pew Religious Landscape Survey below is so fascinating and important. It shows us a hidden field that is full of unexpected, wild wheat.

2. We Are Everywhere

In 2014, the new Pew Religious Landscape Survey⁷ found that 45 percent of U.S. adults (approximately 110 million) are “connected” in some important way to Catholicism. This means that 110 million Americans feel some important bond with the Catholic Church or the Catholic faith. No other religious tradition in the United States has anything like this reach. It means that nearly one out of every two American adults you meet has some kind of significant tie to the Church.

There are four basic categories of Catholic connections.

First: Twenty percent of U.S. adults have a Catholic identity. Ask them their religion and roughly 49 million American adults will say, “I’m Catholic.” Of these Catholics, 22 percent attend Mass weekly, but the majority seldom or never cross the threshold.⁸ But that still leaves 61 million other people who also feel a significant connection to the faith in some way or other, yet who do not self-identify as Catholic. Who are they?

Second: This is where the real surprise comes in. The second cohort of people with a significant connection to the Church are the 9 percent of American adults (22 million) who say they are not Catholic religiously but who nonetheless feel “culturally” or “partially” Catholic anyway. Half of these “partial” Catholics currently describe themselves as Protestant and half as “nones” (people who do not belong to any particular religious group) or as belonging to some other faith. The majority, 65 percent of this group, were raised Catholic and left both the Church and the identity but still feel connected in significant ways. And 43 percent of these “cultural” or “partial” Catholics stated that they are open to returning!

I was particularly startled to learn that one-third of these cultural Catholics were not raised Catholic and didn’t have Catholic parents but still consider themselves to be Catholic in some meaningful way. We don’t even have a category for the millions of people who have no Catholic background at all but nevertheless identify as at least partly Catholic. They need the intentional accompaniment of Catholic disciples to help them encounter Jesus Christ within the Church.

Third: Another 9 percent of American adults — that is, another 22 million people — call themselves “ex-Catholics.” These are not merely people who drifted away from the faith but are rather people who define themselves as having left the Church. It is a harder stance, often fueled by some kind of wound or anger or disbelief. Yet even among that group, 8 percent (1.7 million) told Pew that they were open to returning. In our Making Disciples seminars, we have a motto, “Never accept a label in place of a story,” because even an “ex-Catholic” might be open to coming back.

Fourth: This final group — which includes 8 percent of American adults (20 million people) — feel “connected” to Catholicism through Catholic family, friends, institutions, practices, or values.

Remember that this is a snapshot in time. All of these numbers might be significantly different in a few years because religious identity in the twenty-first century west is highly fluid. Many people who now define themselves as ex-Catholics may change their minds (with our help), while many who now identify as Catholic may soon identify as ex-Catholic.

We stand at a stunning crossroads: millions are jettisoning their Catholic identity but simultaneously nearly half the adult population of the United States feels some serious connection to the Catholic Church. Every one of those connections is a potential bridge of trust across which we can walk as evangelizers to invite them to begin the journey to intentional discipleship, either by way of return (for former Catholics) or baptism. What an incredible evangelical opportunity if we have the will to take advantage of it!

3. To Be Deep in Catholic History Is to Evangelize

No, Virginia. Evangelization is not Protestant. Few Catholics seem to remember an influential pre-Vatican II evangelization movement that was driven by two things: the rapid secularization of Europe and the experience of missionaries outside “Christendom.” I had never heard of the kerygmatic movement until I read Father Alfonso Nebreda, S.J.’s out-of-print classic, Kerygma in Crisis? Father Nebreda showed that Catholic catechesis had clearly taught the critical importance of personal faith in centuries past:

Early sixteenth-century catechisms routinely emphasized personal faith in the work of Jesus Christ as essential to salvation.… The sixteenth-century catechisms placed faith at the beginning of the baptismal act. We read, for instance, in the catechism of Dietenberger (1537): “Sacramental baptism demands three important things: faith, water, and the divine Word, and none of these may be lacking. Water and the word do not suffice, the word and water are nothing without faith.

… the Contarini catechism says, referring to St. Thomas: “Sacraments are exterior and sensible signs of the invisible grace which is bestowed through them on account of faith in Christ’s death by which our sins are forgiven.”⁹

However, by the late sixteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth century, catechisms shifted their focus almost entirely to the objective efficacy of the sacraments and hardly mentioned the personal act of faith. Why the change?