Catholics Come Home
Posted by Fr. Aquinas on 25 Aug 2008 at 12:23 am | Tagged as: Miscellaneous
There was a time in American history when the Church and ecclesiastical figures numbered among the movers and shakers of the electronic media. We all remember Archbishop Fulton Sheen and his weekly show on NBC. Today, however, the American Church’s media efforts are often local, low-budget projects, with the exception of EWTN and The Catholic Channel on Sirius Radio, which reach a national and even global audience.
One new group is hoping to change all of this. Catholics Come Home is an aggressive evangelization program aimed at using the best of the media’s tools to attract and bring home disaffected Catholics. Here is what Catholics Come Home says about itself on its website:
Catholics Come Home is an independent, non-profit charity started and supported by a number of Catholic families and individuals. We are a welcoming ministry for anyone who has left the Catholic Church or anyone interested in becoming Catholic. Whether it was resentment, anger, divorce, isolation, apathy, rebellion, or a lack of understanding of the faith, coming home has never been easier.
Our beloved late Pope, John Paul II, continually exhorted the Church to begin a new evangelization. He described modern media as an indispensable means of achieving it. In Ecclesia in America he wrote, ‘Using the media correctly and competently can lead to a genuine enculturation of the Gospel.” Furthermore, he realized that the old methods from the past needed refreshing, “This vital field of action for the Church requires a radical change of mentality, an authentic new awakening of conscience in everyone. New methods are needed, as are new expressions and new courage.”
The first fruits of their work are impressive. Watch the video below. I’ve not seen anything as clear, concise, and inspiring. Share the video with others, and spread the good word about Catholics Come Home. Other videos can be viewed on the Catholics Come Home Youtube page.
As an aside, the work of Catholics Come Home reminds me of the videos put together by Grassroots Films, a Brooklyn company that has done work for the bishops’ conference. Their vocations video, “Fishers of Men,” is well worth seeing. Projects like this give one hope that a Catholic renaissance in the mass media might be just around the corner.
