Sacrificing Catholics for Ecumenism

It’s no secret that the Catholic Church is bleeding members. According to Pew Research, those who have left Catholicism outnumber those who have joined the Catholic Church by nearly a four-to-one margin. As such statistics continue to worsen, the emphasis on evangelization grows. Yet, few can state what that ought to look like. So much of the focus has been upon reaching “across the aisle” and attempting to assimilate with Protestants.

A recent case of a Catholic young adult group chat that was admonished by clergy for sharing memes with a jocular approach to Protestant themes serves as an example. Catholics, especially younger Catholics, are urged under the name of charity to be more open to Protestants, which is difficult if not impossible to delineate from simply being less Catholic, even though those who promote this behavior would never admit their stance with such candor.

One of the principal arguments posed against enthusiastic Catholics is that they will be offensive to Protestants and thereby drive them away. Thus, be careful about those memes, kids, lest someone might be repelled by jocularity. But this is a rather new mindset, out of lockstep with human behavior and a long chain of saints who said the truth because it was the truth and because people had a right to hear it. In Decem Rationes, Edmund Campion talked of Protestants in a way that might not be considered ecumenical today:

Throughout the whole course of fifteen centuries these men find neither town, village nor household professing their doctrine, until an unhappy monk by an incestuous marriage had deflowered a virgin vowed to God, or a Swiss gladiator had conspired against his country, or a branded runaway had occupied Geneva.

While sharp-tongued, his points were true, and Decem Rationes was massively influential in both aiding conversions and inspiring demoralized Catholics. (Campion was eventually killed for his faith.) If the modern mindset of conversion-by-tepidity were true, Campion would have merely alienated his readers, but that is not what happened.

Sometimes the truth bites, and humor can relieve its sting. Chesterton was well loved for his wit, with which he contended that “Protestantism was born of men who were sure they were infallible, and it has lived on in men who are not sure that anything is infallible.” It’s impossible to say how many people he converted to Catholicism after his own conversion, but we do know that it was considerable and that he was never shy about speaking the truth.

Masses with tambourines, World Youth Days with Tuppernacles, and attempts to mimic the megachurch all ignore that there was anything to draw people throughout the ages. All of these attempts to convert via dilution might lead us to ask: Why become Catholic at all? If Catholicism is merely one denomination among many acceptable options, then why would one assent to the higher mandate that comes with conversion? Catholicism asks us to change ourselves. If it is not possible to delineate Catholicism as being in some sense better than other denominations, then surely those of other Christian faiths would feel no reason for conversion, let alone the sacrifice that so often comes with it.

For many converts, crossing the Tiber means losing contact with family members and being rejected by old friends. People do not endure these things because Catholics are nice people (even though that’s often the case). They do it when they become convinced that what the Church claims of herself is true and that it is, therefore, the best way to serve Christ. They endure the sacrifices as acts of love. The idea that people will be attracted if we speak less about our differences and only about our similarities is simply false. There is no reason to convert to what you already have.

Then there is the topic of what is owed to the faithful Catholics, lest they be surrendered on the altar of conversion. Must we implicitly assert that they would be better off, or at least on equal footing, if they were elsewhere—deprived of sacraments and the deposit of faith? That is what we do when we cower away from speaking about the Faith boldly. It is offensive to assert that the distinctions of our Faith are so trivial as we revere the saints who died for what we now reduce to nuance.

St. Athanasius, when he was battling the Arian heresy, did not back away from speaking of the differences between Trinitarians and Arians, even though it was true that they shared a great deal in common. Yet it matters that some people are in error about that which is most important. So instead of conversion-by-dilution, he asserted that “Even if Catholics faithful to tradition are reduced to a handful, they are the true Church.”

To be clear, nobody is calling for aggression toward potential converts or even anti-Catholic Protestants. But neither is there room for complicit silence, and the latter is far more common today than the former. For decades, attempts to fill struggling churches have been embarrassing capitulations to either other faiths or to the broken world around us.

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