What an amazing privilege: last summer I was asked to travel to El Cajon, California, to write about the Chaldean Catholic community. My trip coincided with the ordination of two men to the priesthood: Fr. David Stephan and Fr. Royal Hannoush.
The Catholic Near East Welfare Association, a papal agency assisting the poor in the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe, published the article here:
http://www.cnewa.org/default.aspx?ID=3811&pagetypeID=4&sitecode=HQ&pageno=1
“Consequently, an evangelizer must never look like someone who has just come back from a funeral!” Evangelii Gaudium #10
That has to be one of my favorite quotes from The Joy of the Gospel, the 2013 Apostolic Exhortation penned by Pope Francis. And it reminds me of Marlin, a radiology tech I’ve come to know over the last 20 years.
I’m not making this up.
The Christmas lights have barely been packed away but the countdown to Lent has begun (Ash Wednesday is an unusually early Feb. 14 this year.) Which can only mean one thing: You’ll need to come up with your Lenten plan stat AND March Madness is right around the corner.
Now, why would The Soulful Catholic give a lick about the National Collegiate Athletic Association annual basketball tournament? And what, pray tell, does this have to do with Lent anyway?
You might not be surprised to learn that church attendance is down here and around the U.S.
Outside of Christmas and Easter, it’s not very often that you have a standing-room only crowd at church on Sunday. There’s a startling graph published by Pew Research that shows a steep decline in church attendance starting in 2007 when 54 percent of Americans said they attended religious services monthly or more.
By 2019, that number dropped to 45 percent. Pew also reported that during most of the Covid 19 pandemic, about 6 in 10 Americans did not take part in religious services in any way, including roughly 7 in 10 adults under age 30. Seventy percent of our young people are not going to church!