Evangelism, à la McBrien

Fr. Richard McBrien is at it again. In the latest issue of the Tidings, Fr. McBrien critiques conversion motivations in the post-Vatican II Church. Evangelism in the Catholic church has suffered:

"With the Second Vatican Council, however, and with the ecumenical movement which the council and the popes had endorsed, it became practically impossible to present the Catholic Church any longer as "the one, true Church" and all other denominations as awash in error and falsehoods."

Of course, you cannot present the Catholic Church as the one, true Church if you don't really believe it. Can you? That's also a large and unspoken variable in the calculus; the scores of clergy and theologians, in the Church, that cannot acknowlege the Church and thus cannot proclaim it. Skeptics make lousy salesmen, and cynics are even worse.

McBrien goes on to examine recent conservative converts to the Church, noting:

"Conservative Protestants and Jews who convert to Catholicism, especially of the Opus Dei kind, rarely shed the religious, social and political biases they had in their pre-Catholic life."

I didn't realise that there is a Opus Dei Catholic Church. Or, is this a backhanded slap at conservatives who come to the Church expecting some orthodoxy? Some converts have no interest in Cafeteria Catholicism, especially of the Most Holy Redeemer (San Francisco) kind, or else they would have joined the Episcopalians.


At least converts to the Church have the good grace and intellectual honesty to leave a church (or 'faith community') that they do not agree with. Right, Fr. McBrien?

h/t to Curt Jester and da Cafeteria.

Trusting Feelings

I had a couple visitors Friday evening: two young men, dressed in crisp, white shirts, and neatly tucked ties.

Yes, they were Mormons.

It was raining fairly hard, so I invited them to wait out the storm on my porch while we went round and round about false prophets, Scripture, and Apostolic Succession. Now, I will admit that I'd no candidate to be a Doctor of the Church, but I'm not your average pew-warmer either.

The last discussion, before I dismissed them, was a bit about prayer and feelings. One of the young men told me of the "burning feeling in my heart" he experienced when he prayed about the truth of Mormonism. He suggested that I pray about it too, and I could have that feeling.

I told the young man that I trust neither sensations of Flesh nor it's emotional states to validate the truth of Jesus or His Church. He replied that God speaks to us through our flesh, and I replied that our fallen nature and concupisance do as well. Every murmur of Will needs to be measured against Scripture and Tradition.

When exhorted to pray further about it, I told him that Muslims pray five times daily, and are very devoted to their faith (sometimes explosively), yet I wouldn't trust their devotion as validation of Muhammad's heresy.

So, here's my question: What makes YOU so sure that your church is The Church?