How Not to Engage in the New Evangelization
One of the buzzwords that came out of the Benedict XVI era was the phrase "the New Evangelization." While something of an amorphous concept, the core of the idea was to try to find new ways to encourage adults to come into the Catholic Church, with a marked emphasis on bringing back former or estranged Catholics. This is a laudable goal, and I have seen it bear good fruits, particularly in the form of the excellent Landings program that I was involved with at my former parish in San Francisco. The core insight of the Landings program is that people who have stopped practicing Catholicism want to have someone listen to why they have left, and so the program tries to create safe space for people to tell their stories. In telling their stories in a group format, where the group contains a mix of people who practicing and not practicing, people are given a proper hearing and encouraged to understand that they are not alone in their struggles with the faith, whatever...