Keeping Us Connected Newsletter

September 26, 2025

Dear Saint Mary Friends,

Something strange is going on.

You probably have read or heard accounts of an unexpected increase in adults coming into the Church. News accounts highlight this particularly in relation to young men.

St. Mary’s has its own version of this renewal. If not a tsunami, we’ve been having a good sized wave of adults contacting us, who want to return to their Catholic Faith, or to be baptized and join the Church. Sometimes it’s whole families.

Yes, something strange. So now is the time we must embrace the seekers in our lives and propose (not impose) Christ and his Church to them.

Since the 1960’s and 70’s, some Catholics have bought the lie that all religions are basically the same. As a result, there is no need to evangelize, encourage someone to explore the Faith, or speak of Jesus to anyone.

It follows then that everyone is going to heaven. This is even stranger – and spiritually and eternally dangerous!

Pope Paul VI countered this in his 1975 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi (Evangelization in the Modern World). He poses a question:

It would be useful if every Christian…were to pray about the following thought: men can gain salvation also in other ways, by God's mercy…; but as for us, can we gain salvation if through negligence or fear or shame- what St. Paul called "blushing for the Gospel" - or as a result of false ideas we fail to preach it? For that would be to betray the call of God…. (73)

In other words, don’t think you’re necessarily going to heaven if you don’t bring someone with you.

What motivates us to do this? Love of God in Jesus and of the one who does not know him. Again Paul VI:

That model evangelizer, the Apostle Paul, wrote to the Thessalonians a program for us all: "With such yearning love we chose to impart to you not only the gospel of God but our very selves, so dear had you become to us”.

What is this love? …[I]t is the love of a father; and again, it is the love of a mother. It is this love that the Lord expects from every builder of the Church. A sign of love will be the concern to give the truth and a devotion to the proclamation of Jesus Christ, without reservation or turning back. (79)

John Paul II commemorated the 10^th anniversary of Pope Paul’s Exhortation with his Encyclical Redemptoris Missio (Mission of the Redeemer). We need to know the Faith, but need not be great theologians. Mission needs program and buildings, but they only serve the mission. Therefore

It is not enough to update pastoral techniques, organize and coordinate ecclesial resources, or delve more deeply into the biblical and theological foundations of faith. What is needed is the encouragement of a new "ardor for holiness"…throughout the Christian community….

Dear brothers and sisters: let us remember the missionary enthusiasm of the first Christian communities. Despite the limited means of travel and communication in those times, the proclamation of the Gospel quickly reached the ends of the earth. And this was the religion of a man who had died on a cross…! (1 Cor 1:23)

Underlying this missionary dynamism was the holiness of the first Christians and the first communities. (83)

Yes, something strange is happening. May we all seize this moment the Holy Spirit is presenting to us and lower our nets for a catch.

Blessings,