Dear Mom and Dad, I know you spent a lot of money on my Catholic education, but I want you to know I’m not a Catholic anymore. I’ve decided that I have better things to do. I’m not convinced anymore that God exists. And I am going to be spiritual, of course, but no longer religious and I’m not going to go to church anymore.
How many of us have heard these words from our family, or from our friends?
We are now reading statistics that tell us that there are almost as many people not going to church as those who have a religious affiliation. People want to be spiritual, but they don’t want to be religious or be committed to some kind of a “religion of men” or an “organization.” We find more and more people saying “I’m just going to enjoy life, be nice, I want to accept everyone. Think green, recycle, but I’m going to avoid religious institutions.
So often we hear these words and we aren’t sure what to do. We either have the impulse to fight back, to argue, to try to coerce them back into the faith, or to just turn our back and walk away and leave them. But neither one of those are the right approach.
So, what I want to do, is my own experience. I’ve gone through this. I’ll just tell you one thing, when I became a believer, 17 years old, first of all, I had to get everybody saved and I made a lot of enemies and I pushed my family members away. And, it took a long time before I got them back. Then, when I became Catholic at 39, I hadn’t learned my lessons well enough when I was younger and I right away went to all of my evangelical friends and all my evangelical family and told them they had to become Catholic and I started giving them all the arguments 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and I ended up pushing them all away and we lost both of our families and all of our friends in a matter of two weeks. And then, I had to start all over again to build relationships and build back a trust so that I could again, not only just get along with them, but hopefully to bring them to a knowledge and the fullness of the Faith. So, what I want to share to day [are] 7 Rules that I’ve come up. They’re really just basic common sense. Any one of you could make the same list, but they’re common sense and I call them “rules for relating to, or dealing with, or sharing with those around us who are not Catholic.” Maybe who have left and becomes something else. And there are a lot of different avenues people leave the church. They become atheists, they become Nones, spiritual, whatever they want to do. And we are left in a position “How do we deal with them?”
We have a lot of instruction in Scripture and in the Catholic Church and also just good common sense about how to do this. Jesus said he did not come to bring peace but a sword. And we can expect in our lives and in our relationships that there are going to be conflicts and there are going to be arguments and there’s going to be some stress and discomfort. This is just part of our life because not everyone is going to believe what we believe or follow our way. And yet we want to love them and work with them, and ultimately our goal is to get to heaven and to bring as many people with us as we can.
Jesus said the world’s going to hate us, but that does not mean that we should go around making enemies. We should do everything we can to love people and to share with them in a way that we can eventually bring them to us. There are no silver bullets. When I go a round the world giving conferences, people accost us “What’s the number one argument I can use to get my son back into the church? What’s the number one silver bullet that I can use?” Sorry, there is no silver bullet nor is there one verse that you can use because everyone is different. No two people are alike. God has the great job of looking at all of us with our unique personalities, and situations, and problems and he has to work with us. We have to trust him. And we have to work with people knowing that they’re all different, with different personalities, and that they’ve all been given a free will. And God doesn’t twist their free will and neither should we.
So, what I want to do in the next few segments here [is] go over my 7 Rules for relating to non-Catholics, family and friends or people on the street as we are doing evangelization because the rules are going to apply across-the-board. So, I’m happy to share these rules with you and I hope that they will be as helpful for you as they have been for so many people that I’ve shared them with over the years.