‍Dialogue on Catholic Worldliness

‍How can Catholicism be true when Catholics are so dead?

  Gary Hoge

‍Several people wrote to me to express their skepticism about Catholicism based on their experience with actual Catholics. Rather than produce several repetitive dialogues, I’ve combined them into one. My Protestant dialogue partner here is therefore a composite of several people, whose complaints are quite common. My words are in black, my composite partner’s, which have been edited for continuity, are in blue.

‍Most of the Catholics I know don’t take it seriously. They’re worldly and secular and they don’t seem to care about Jesus or the Gospel at all.

‍G. K. Chesterton once said that the best argument against Christianity is Christians. That is certainly true of Catholicism. Pope John Paul II, putting it politely, acknowledged that “many among her members cause God’s plan to be discernible only with difficulty” (Ut Unum Sint, 11).

‍But is that really an argument against the truth of the Catholic faith? I don’t see how. To argue that Catholicism is false because it doesn’t transform the lives of people who don’t practice it is like arguing that aspirin doesn’t work because it doesn’t relieve the headaches of people who don’t take it.

‍My family claims to be Catholic, but they don’t take it seriously, either.

‍Keep in mind that many people identify as Catholic largely because they were raised Catholic. If you ask what religion they are, they’ll say, “I’m Catholic,” even though they may rarely attend Mass and may know or practice very little of the faith. For some, “Catholic” describes a family or cultural identity more than a deeply held religious commitment.

‍I agree with the basic teachings and traditions of the Catholic Church. But, I am still in the Baptist church. That is because I don’t see enough fruits coming from the Catholic Church. How can the Catholic Church’s claims be true when so many Catholics are so dead?

‍But good fruit is ultimately something produced in the lives of people, not an institution in the abstract. A church can preach the Gospel, administer the sacraments, teach the faith, and call people to holiness, but it cannot force anyone to believe or obey.

‍The Catholic Church does not claim that everyone who calls himself Catholic will be transformed simply by belonging to the Church. A person can attend Mass while rejecting the Church’s teachings and resisting the grace God offers him. Catholicism doesn’t work by osmosis, genetics, or proximity. You actually have to believe the faith and live it.

‍So the existence of nominal or worldly Catholics doesn’t contradict anything Catholicism teaches. In fact, Catholicism itself warns that outward religious observance without interior conversion is worthless. Walking into a Catholic church—even every Sunday—doesn’t magically transform anyone. The Christian life requires repentance, faith, and conversion of heart.

‍So if you want to judge Catholicism by its fruit, look especially at the lives of those who actually practice it. You can’t fairly judge a faith by people who identify with it while largely ignoring what it teaches.

‍I don’t see many truly saved people with transformed lives; instead I see many cultural Catholics that think going to Mass one hour a week will get them into Heaven even though they are living otherwise sinful lives.

‍I’ve known people like that, too, and it’s genuinely sad. But we have to make a fair comparison. We shouldn’t compare committed Evangelicals with nominal Catholics. If you want to know what Catholicism can produce when it is actually lived, look at Catholics who have taken their faith seriously.

‍The history of the Church is filled with people whose lives were radically transformed by Christ—people who gave up wealth, comfort, careers, and sometimes their lives to preach the Gospel, serve the poor, care for the sick, and bring others to Christ. Whatever else we may disagree about, it would be difficult to say that Catholicism has failed to produce transformed lives.

‍How can I move from such a dynamic soul-winning church that I am in now into such a seemingly dead church seemingly full of untransformed people?

‍Before I became Catholic, I asked myself essentially the same question. I had heard plenty of stories about how spiritually dead the Catholic Church was, and I knew Catholics who seemed as worldly as anyone else. So as I became increasingly convinced that Catholicism was true, I kept thinking, “But Lord, they’re all so dead.”

‍Then I remembered Jesus’ words to Peter: “What is that to you? You follow me” (John 21:22).

‍That put the issue in perspective. If Catholicism was true, my responsibility was to follow the truth. Whether the person sitting in the pew next to me was living the faith had no bearing on whether I should.

‍Happily, my fears turned out to be largely unfounded. Since becoming Catholic, I’ve met many Catholics with a deep love for Christ, and I’ve found parishes where the faith is taken seriously, preached clearly, and lived joyfully.

‍A girl that I am friends with, who has little knowledge of the theological issues between Catholics and Protestants said simply, “I am not a Catholic because they don’t emphasize a personal relationship with Jesus.” I am sure that many committed Catholics such as yourself have vastly different experiences, but you must admit, the problem of simply going through the motions with little understanding of the significance seems rampant in the Church. Am I being unfair?

‍I think there’s some truth in what you’re observing, although I wouldn’t draw the conclusion from it that Catholicism itself deemphasizes a personal relationship with Jesus.

‍Catholicism has a highly visible exterior life: Mass, sacraments, feast days, devotions, fasting, gestures, prayers, and other practices. Ideally, those outward practices express and nourish an interior life of faith. But because the outward structure remains even when personal faith grows weak, it is possible for someone to continue going through the motions long after the interior reality has faded.

‍That is a real danger, and Catholics themselves have been warning about it for centuries. External religious observance without conversion of heart is not authentic Catholic Christianity.

‍But the problem isn’t the outward practices themselves. The problem is separating them from the interior reality they are meant to express. At its best, Catholic spirituality joins the two: an intensely personal relationship with Christ expressed and nourished through worship, prayer, Scripture, sacrament, and Christian life.

‍So I wouldn’t deny what your friend has observed. I would only question whether she has correctly diagnosed its cause. Catholics who merely go through the motions are not evidence that Catholicism doesn’t teach a personal relationship with Christ. They are evidence of what happens when Catholics fail to live what their own faith teaches.

‍I spent a summer in Mexico City and a semester in Santiago de Compostela, but with the exception of one little old lady, for all of the students that I met, I can’t say that I met any committed Catholics, and this in Catholic countries where virtually everyone would at least say that they are Catholics.

‍But that’s exactly the problem with judging Catholicism by a “Catholic country.” Where Catholicism has historically been the majority religion, “Catholic” can function as a cultural identity even for people who rarely practice the faith.

‍The same phenomenon occurs elsewhere with other forms of Christianity. Someone may identify as Christian simply because he was raised in a predominantly Christian culture, even though he rarely attends church, reads Scripture, or thinks seriously about his faith.

‍It wouldn’t be fair to judge Protestant Christianity by everyone who checks “Protestant” on a survey. In the same way, it isn’t fair to judge Catholicism by everyone in a historically Catholic country who happens to identify as Catholic.

‍And yet the Evangelicals that I met almost always were “set apart,” meaning they read their Bibles, took their faith seriously, etc.

‍But in a predominantly Catholic culture, wouldn’t you expect Evangelicals to stand out?

‍The people you met who became Evangelicals had generally made a deliberate decision to embrace a minority religious identity rather than simply retain the religion they inherited. That fact alone makes it more likely that they had thought seriously about their faith and were committed to practicing it.

‍Meanwhile, the Catholic population included everyone from deeply committed believers to people who were Catholic only because their parents and grandparents were Catholic. So you weren’t necessarily comparing Evangelicalism with Catholicism. You may have been comparing a largely self-selected group of committed Evangelicals with the entire Catholic population, including its most nominal members.