Outreach Programs for Inactive Catholics
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 evangelizing mission to its own members through papal pronouncements and documents issued by the United States Conference of Bishops.
In his ôDecree on the Mission Activity of the Church,ö announced on December 7, 1965, Pope Paul VI outlined the evangelizing mission of the Catholic Church. He explained that Catholics had been:
Divinely sent to the nations of the world to be unto them ôa universal sacrament of salvation,ö the Church, driven by the inner necessity of he...