Will you take your responsibility as a Catholic seriously and invite family and friends to Mass on Easter Sunday? This week our parish-wide invitation to Easter Masses will be going out to every postal patron in the Wareham, W. Wareham, and E. Wareham zip codes. Be on the lookout for the card in your own mail and give us some feedback. The mailing is made possible by the special generosity of parishioners who donated the $3,200 the mailing will cost. Thank you to those who donated. We were still getting a few donations this past week. Any money left over will be used for future evangelization efforts.
As I have mentioned several times, the postcards just scratch the surface. To really plant the seeds of faith we need to invite lapsed Catholics and un-churched people to come to Mass with us. Even if you have invited a person in the past, invite them again. It takes more than one invitation to get most fallen away Catholics or those without a religious affiliation to summons the courage to accept your invitation. So don’t give up just because you were rejected in the past.
Evangelization doesn’t have to been done in any dramatic fashion. So much evangelization goes on in our everyday life. It is done at work, in our social circles and anywhere you have contact with friends, neighbors and acquaintances. All we have to do is be aware and take the opportunity to show that we love our Catholic faith enough to share it with others. The past several weeks I’ve been passing on some suggestions of how we can evangelize in our every day environments. One of those ways is to be aware of what is happening in the Church. A week or so ago Pope Francis commented in an interview to a German magazine on the subject of priestly celibacy. Of course the wider press took that and ran off in every direction with it. So often the secular media covers Catholic topics in very sensational ways that aren’t always accurate. Often people will come to me very confused about a Catholic issue because of poor reporting in the secular media. As good evangelizers, we should be aware of what is going in the Church, locally, nationally and internationally. We can keep up on Catholic news by subscribing to our Diocesan newspaper “The Anchor”. For national and international news go to our parish website www.stpatrickswareham.org and follow the links to very good Catholic websites like Crux or Catholic News Service. Regularly consulting such sites with accurate news coverage helps us keep abreast of Catholic happenings. We can also be a good evangelizer by reading Catholic books. If you belong to a book club, have you ever suggested reading books by Catholic authors with Catholic themes? That is a good way to get lapsed Catholics and the un-churched to start thinking about their faith. Books by G. K. Chesterton, Walker Percy, J. R. Tolkien and Graham Greene are good candidates. Reading the lives of the saints can also give us inspiration as we consider how they were evangelizers.
Maybe you can also be an evangelizer by sharing what is going on here at St. Patrick’s with the local media. Good Letters to the Editor on Catholic topics are appreciated. One of our parishioners, Jim Grady, often makes a contribution to the local press with an insightful commentary. I’d love to get some help from someone with connections with cable TV to publicize happenings here in the parish. Recently, a parishioner has come forward to be our webmaster. If you’re adept with social media, or have webmaster capabilities you could be of great use to the parish as an evangelizer willing to help us spread the gospel message.