According to a well-known US bishop, dumbing down the Catholic Church by making it more simple and appealing to the mainstream culture has proved disastrous. In his Sunday sermon, Bishop Robert Barron said, “Dumbed down Catholicism has not helped evangelisation. Quite the contrary, we did this to ourselves”. The bishop is a controversial figure on Read more
Pokémon is a Nintendo franchise that launched in the 1990s. In its virtual world, “trainers” travel the world to catch varied monsters called Pokémon — rats, dragons, swordlike creatures, and more — and use these critters to fight each other. The trainer’s goal is to “catch ’em all,” and become a Pokémon master by defeating other trainers. What Read more
Dr. Peter Kreeft is a brilliant theologian, philosopher, and a Evangelical Protestant convert to the Catholic faith. I’ve listened to several of his lectures, read many of his articles, and become a devotee. He’s got a lot of great stuff to say, and he isn’t afraid to say it. His appeal, to me, is that Read more
The Catholic Enquiry Centre is New Zealand’s first Catholic organisation to adopt the new .nz domain name. Until yesterday the Catholic Enquiry Centre’s virtual home was catholicenquiry.org.nz however from around 1:15pm yesterday the New Zealand Catholic Enquiry Centre can be reached at www.catholicenquiry.nz. “It’s a positive way to brand the Centre”, Catholic Enquiry Centre Director, Fr Allan Jones Read more
176. To evangelize is to make the kingdom of God present in our world. Yet “any partial or fragmentary definition which attempts to render the reality of evangelization in all its richness, complexity and dynamism does so only at the risk of impoverishing it and even of distorting it”.[140] I would now like to share Read more
160. The Lord’s missionary mandate includes a call to growth in faith: “Teach them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:20). Hence it is clear that that the first proclamation also calls for ongoing formation and maturation. Evangelization aims at a process of growth which entails taking seriously each person and God’s Read more
The new head of the Catholic bishops’ conference says Church leaders in the Philippines have failed to evangelize the faithful despite there being large numbers of Filipino Catholics. “Many of our people do not even know the fundamentals of our faith,” Archbishop Socrates Villegas of Lingayen-Dagupan said in a pastoral letter on the Year of Read more
A Vatican official has told a gathering of Philippine Church leaders and Catholic social media practitioners in Manila to speak in a language understandable to the digital world to be effective evangelizers. “If we are to share the Good News with our brothers and sisters in the digital continent, we must speak a language they Read more
For years I’ve been immersed in Catholic media and the ongoing conversation within the Church of how to carry on as the Church. And, of course, in the West, at the heart of this conversation is the fact that within the next generation half of the pews will empty. When I travel, I always get Read more
Within the first few weeks of his papacy, Pope Francis won widespread praise for his emphasis on “a poor church” that is “for the poor.” His warm and casual disposition, personal simplicity and tender outreach to “the poorest, the weakest, the least important,” as he expressed it in the homily at his inauguration Mass, may Read more