When I was a Methodist pastor, a frustrated elderly parishioner, Mrs. Smith, said to me one Sunday, “I’ve visited Sue Jones in the nursing home three times this month and she said that no one from the church has been to see her.” I paused before replying, hoping the irony of her words would be apparent once she heard it out loud. No such luck.

   Now I’d been a pastor long enough to read the code and understand what she meant; she was frustrated that I, the pastor, hadn’t been to see Mrs. Jones. This, by the way, is why folks in pastoral ministry often live with the perpetual feeling that they are letting somebody down.

   It’s interesting that in a United Methodist setting, with no sacrament of Holy Orders, the pastor’s representative role is still irreplaceable. How much more so, then, in Catholicism, in which the priest is an alter Christus by virtue of his ordination?

   And yet, we the laity also serve a crucial role in caring for each other within the Body of Christ. If we forget this, we become consumers who view the Church as a detached institution that exists to provide us goods and services, rather than to see the Church as a living mission to the world in which we are all working members, organically united and necessarily involved. 

    Thus—if you missed the irony—my Methodist parishioner’s complaint was self-refuting. If she had been to see Mrs. Jones three times in the nursing home, the church had visited her!

    Now translate this concept into another area of ministry—evangelization. The root “eu-angelos” is Greek for “good news,” and so the word “evangelization” refers to announcing and embodying the good news of Christ’s victorious, transforming, and inviting love to the world.

    And this task is primarily ours as laity. As Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium puts it:“[T]he laity go forth as powerful proclaimers of a faith in things to be hoped for, when they courageously join to their profession of faith a life springing from faith. This evangelization…takes on a specific quality and a special force in that it is carried out in the ordinary surroundings of the world.”

    Yet we wait for our pastor to initiate a parish evangelization program, as if it is his task alone. In a role reversal, we imagine we’re spectators cheering on our priests in the battlefield for souls, when actually we’re meant for the battlefield, and our pastors are, in a manner of speaking, our sergeants, medics, and chaplains. Don’t take my word for it, check the Catechism: “The ministerial priesthood is at the service of the common priesthood (note: that’s you and me, via our baptism). It is directed at the unfolding of the baptismal grace of all Christians” (¶1547).

    And where is this battlefield? It’s where we live, work, and play, or as the Council says, “the ordinary surroundings of the world.” And our weapons are love, service and prayer. Thus, our success is not judged by our comportment at Mass, where we show our best faces, but in how we embody love and integrity daily in our work, friendships, families, and all those we meet. 

    I’m not sure we get this, since we more often lament the damage to Catholicism by wayward priests than we do our own hypocrisies that obscure the good news of Christ and his Church. 

    In the gospel reading for January 4th, taken from John 1, John the Baptist directs two of his disciples toward Jesus as the “Lamb of God,” who then ask Jesus where he is staying. Jesus’ response of “Come and see” invites them to spend a day with him—to see in Jesus’ordinary moments the confirmation of the Baptist’s claim.  “Come and see” is also St. John’s literary invitation to read the rest of his gospel, to see for ourselves this Word made flesh.     
 
    But the “Come and see” phrase goes further; it asks every person baptized into Christ whether others see Jesus alive in us. For example, when photojournalist Linda Schaefer once accompanied Blessed Mother Teresa in her work, she titled her pictorial essay, Come and See, an indication that seeing the saint in her daily work confirmed the authenticity of her witness.

   What about us? If we understand our role as evangelizers, we will humbly seek God’s grace—and no one needs it more than me--as we ask ourselves, “If I said ‘Come and see?’ to a non-believer, inviting him to see my daily life, unfiltered from waking to bed, would he be more likely or less so to believe our Lord is real?”After all, wherever we go, there the Church will be.

  As we seek to re-engage inactive Catholics, we should heed Pope  Benedict’s recent homily on the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter, in a Mass  concelebrated by 22 new Cardinals: “The Church does not exist for her own sake,  she is not the point of arrival, but she has to point upwards, beyond herself,  to the realms above.”
     
For the new Cardinals, receiving the red biretta would be a heady  experience, not to mention concelebrating with the Pope around Bernini’s Altar  of the Chair. And yet the Holy Father reminded them that their new attire is  about responsibility, not privilege; service rather than power. The red, in  fact, signifies their willingness to love their brothers and sisters unto death. 
      
His words are also a gentle reminder to all Catholics that simply being  Catholic—i.e. just being a card carrying member—is not an end in itself. What do  I mean? 
     
Consider that every faith tradition has its own particular pitfalls. For  many Protestants, who view the church as an exclusively invisible reality, a  nebulous unity of all people who love Jesus, the temptation is to view the  church as expendable. That’s why the video, “Why I Hate Religion but Love Jesus,” has become a Youtube sensation.

Catholics, on the other hand, know that the Church is both visible and  invisible; yet our temptation is to focus on the institution alone and forget  that the Church exists to lead people to Jesus Christ. The visible aspects of  the Church are indispensable, because we are material beings who experience the  divine life of grace through our bodies (and thus, our senses). But the Church  we see, smell, touch, and taste exists to make visible the invisible mystery of  God. 

The Pope points this out, declaring that “The Church herself is like a  window, the place where God draws near to us.” It helps, of course, that above  Bernini’s Altar of the Chair is a stunning alabaster window that irresistibly  attracts the eye with, as the Holy Father describes it, the “light that comes  from above, without which (the world) would be uninhabitable.” 
      
Without the transcendent reality, Bernini’s sculpture is just a piece of  furniture. And let’s be honest, far too many Catholics grow up seeing the  sculpture but never the light behind it. 

They do the right things, the visible actions that we  Catholics do, but they never experience in personal terms the invisible reality  of Christ’s love in their lives. And so they drift, with the majority of  Catholics leaving the Church not in anger but in apathy. 

Some become  disillusioned with Catholicism, but find an evangelical congregation that talks
openly and convincingly about Jesus and the difference he makes in your life.  They have a personal experience of faith, and they believe everything in their  Catholic past was empty ritual.“I went to the Catholic Church my whole life,”  they attest, “But I never knew Jesus or heard the gospel.” We could rightly  quibble that they saw Jesus and heard the gospel in every Mass they attended,  but perception is reality; not objective reality, of course, but subjective.
Others become disillusioned with Christianity in general, and feel the gnawing  emptiness of a life without faith. 

Meanwhile, we who practice the faith might feel a certain indifference to  these inactive Catholics, knowing that we have found the fullness of faith and  losing little sleep over those who used to sit around us. Or if we are concerned  for them, we sometimes are more motivated to simply get them back to the  Catholic Church, as if merely “being a Catholic” is an end in itself.     
      
Yet as the Pope reminds us, occupying a pew is not the goal. Rather, the  Catholic Church is the sacrament of salvation, the most complete expression of  the Christian life and the path most conducive to union with Jesus Christ. The  Church exists not to perpetuate the institution, but so that people in every generation might know Jesus Christ and the abundant life he gives.

So in the task of reaching out to inactive Catholics, we might ask ourselves two questions. First of all, why are we inviting persons back in the first  place—just to be Catholic or to know Jesus Christ? And secondly, when they come  back, what kind of parish will they be finding; one in which Jesus is moving in  the lives of the people, laity and clergy alike, or one with beautiful  furnishings but no compelling vision of the light shining through?