Outreach Programs for Inactive Catholics Introduc

The Roman Catholic Church has the largest denomination of Christian followers in the United States, with 45 million people identifying themselves as Catholic. However, 17 million of those people are ôinactiveö Catholics, meaning they attend Church only once or not at all each year, and they do not actively seek to practice the tenets of Catholicism (Saltarelli). In recent years, and for several reasons, the Catholic Church has increased its efforts to reach out to the lapsed Catholics. This paper discusses the fundamental features of Catholicism that make such outreach an integral part of Church activities, and also considers a more practical and political reason why the Church may have increased its outreach to inactive Catholics. The paper also surveys outreach programs across the United States.

Why The Catholic Church Must Reach out to Inactive Members

Catholicism is a universalizing religion, which means that, by its very nature, it seeks to encourage all non-members to join its faith. Thus, two of its primary activities are proselytizing and evangelization. By proselytizing to members of other faiths, Catholics seek to encourage them to convert. But through evangelization, Catholics seek to instill the tenets of Catholicism into their own members so that they may then go out and pass these tenets on to people with whom they come into contact. Recently, the Roman Catholic Church has increased its evangelizi

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t the Church has been disturbed by the voting preferences of inactive Catholics and seeks to change these habits by re-educating them and realigning them with political positions the Church finds more acceptable. A 1998 study by Crisis Magazine of self-identified Catholics questioned them on issues of politics, faith, and morals (Hudson). The results were sorted according to how often the interviewee attended Mass in a standard month. The study revealed that people who attended Mass more often were more likely to respond with answers that aligned with Church teaching. Moreover, these responses tended to be relatively uniform, suggesting that active Catholics adhere somewhat strictly to the faith and moral teachings of the Church and could be categorized as an identifiable, relatively conservative, voting constituency (Hudson). A follow-up survey in 2002 only confirmed these findings (Hudson). Shortly before the follow-up survey was conducted, the Vatican issued its ôDoctrinal Note on Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life,ö in which it denounced political positions that contradicted the teachings of the Church: a well-formed Christian conscience does not permit one to vote for a political
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2916
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)