By Sam M. Lucero
Catholic Herald

Easter is time to extend welcome to strangers

But are church doors wide open for inactive Catholics who see the inside of a church once or twice a year? Or do parish communities treat them as a strangers?

Easter is an opportune time to welcome back Catholics who have wandered away from regular church practice, say church officials. Making them feel welcome rather than guilty will influence their decision to return to church more frequently.

According to Dean Hoge, professor of sociology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., an estimated two-thirds of U.S. Catholics who receive the Sacrament of Confirmation drop out of regular church participation for some period in their lives. Over half of these people will be back to church by age 35, he added.

Sketch of inactive Catholics

But the rest stay away for various reasons. In a resource directory for reaching out to inactive Catholics, "A Time to Listen ... A Time to Heal," Fr. Frank DeSiano, CSP, offers a sketch of inactive Catholics. They may be:

-- cradle Catholics who drift away from church practice as part of "growing up."

-- divorced Catholics who "feel excluded from the table of Christ."

-- disenchanted Catholics raised in the church, but who felt left out when some change occurred or felt ignored when they had issues to raise.

-- people who joined another church seeking to grow spiritually or renew their faith.

-- alienated Catholics who were offended in some way, whether intended or not, by a representative of the church.

With some 17 million inactive Catholics in the United States, church leaders stress a need for reconciliation. Addressing this topic in their 1992 document "Go and Make Disciples: A National Plan and Strategy for Catholic Evangelization in the United States," the U.S. bishops state:

"We want to help (inactive Catholics) to see that, however they feel about the church, we want to talk with them, share with them, and accept them as brothers and sisters."

Outreach to young families

Hoge, an expert on trends in American religion and author of numerous studies on religious activism, said parishes need to offer programs and events of interest to young families such as parenting classes, children's programs and spiritual life discussions.

"The spiritual needs and family needs are very strong and if parishes can help these people they will come," he said. "The church has to make itself approachable and not critical of the way people live their lives."

The bottom line, Hoge added, is that parishes should "point out that we're all in this (journey) together. We all have spiritual needs and we have to help each other figure out how to live."

One man's journey

David Lester's experience mirrors the situation of many inactive Catholics. Lester, 38, stopped attending church while he was in high school. But circumstances in his life -- a divorce and a decision to stop drinking alcohol -- recently pointed him back to church.

"I had been on a plateau for a long time," said Lester, who moved to Hudson in 1995. Feeling he was in a rut, Lester said he began asking himself questions about his life's direction. "Church kind of popped into the hat," he said.

His father, who lives in Webster and attends St. John Parish, told him to contact Fr. James Dabruzzi, who is retired and lives in Hudson. Lester met the priest last fall and Dabruzzi put him in touch with Sr. Bernadette Kalscheur, who directs the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults program at St. Patrick Parish.

The warm reception he received from Dabruzzi and Kalscheur was enough to make Lester enroll in the RCIA. He will be welcomed back into the church at the Easter Vigil this Saturday.

Lester believes the church needs to meet people where they are and not form judgments because they don't attend church regularly.

"I think I was ready to get back into church," he said. "Everybody goes through changes ... Maybe there's circumstances they're dealing with that they don't feel they're good enough to go to church, that their sins are something that God won't accept them back."

Lester added that an inquiry class offered through the RCIA is essential to help inactive Catholics brush up on church teachings and practices. "If I just started going back to church, I think I'd stumble a little bit. The RCIA was nice because there's other people going through it, so you feel a bit more at ease."

Outreach programs

Sr. Eileen Lang, FSPA, director of the diocesan Office of Evangelization, explained that the RCIA is intended for non-Catholics, and that many outreach programs for inactive Catholics are available to parishes.

One such program, Landings, was introduced to parish leaders in the diocese in 1993. Landings is a national ministry to returning Catholics founded by the Paulist Fathers.

Another Landings workshop was held in Hudson nearly two years ago, said Lang, but she does not know if any parishes are utilizing the program today.

A common thread in programs like Landings is that they call on active members who are willing to share their faith story with inactive members in small group settings.

Lang cautioned that successful outreach to inactive Catholics takes commitment from the entire parish. "You can't just say, 'Here it is. Come.' You need to prepare the entire parish -- and a leadership team."

Using the Internet

In some cases, inactive Catholics aren't prepared to walk into a church office and talk to a priest or parish leader. But with the advent of the Internet, church leaders have found a new and effective way to answer questions and point inactive Catholics back to church.

One example is a new Web site that began operation last month. John Feister is one of the creators of http://www.oncecatholic.org, which is a national outreach project initiated by the Franciscan friars of Cincinnati, publishers of St. Anthony Messenger magazine.

"We used the model of a house (for the Web site's design) because we are inviting people to come home to the Catholic faith," said Feister. "In the home there are different rooms where you can share your story and find resources to come and get back to a local parish."

Feister said evangelization is a difficult concept for many Catholics to digest. "At a lot of parishes, if you walk in as a stranger, you're a stranger when you leave," he said. "A lot of evangelical churches have figured out how to make people feel very welcome. What the bishops discovered, and what a lot of us know, is that we Roman Catholics have a long ways to go in that area."

According to Feister, the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin was fond of using the example of the church as a Good Shepherd. "We have to go out to find people where they are and bring them back in," he said, paraphrasing Bernardin. "That's what is driving OnceCatholic.org -- it's the ministry of the Good Shepherd."

The same holds true for parishes, he said.

"We as church have to go out to the people where they are to engage them in conversation and to try to witness to the Gospel in the marketplace," added Feister.

Ideas for parishes

In her book, "When Only One Converts," (Our Sunday Visitor, March 2001), Lynn Nordhagen, describes her leaving the church after marrying a Protestant and twice returning to Catholicism.

"What helped me was the fellowship of people in that parish who maybe had similar experiences," she said. "I think it's important for people to feel welcome and to be included in activities in more than just coffee and donuts."

Nordhagen said Catholics have to commit themselves to being a welcoming community. At Easter and Christmas Masses she said that parishes should offer schedules for Masses, parish activities and names and phone numbers of activity directors.

"There could be a special card in the pews saying, 'Welcome back, would you like to be contacted,' or even an announcement of a special inquiry class meeting in the future for those who have been away and have questions about the church," said Nordhagen. "They could go to this meeting, no strings attached."

Careful making judgments

One priest who is familiar with the stories of inactive Catholics is Fr. John Dietzen, a retired priest of the Diocese of Peoria, Ill., and columnist for Catholic News Service. His column, "Question Corner," has appeared in Catholic newspapers throughout the country for over 25 years.

"I think we need to be careful in our judgments ... of people who do go to Mass infrequently," he said. Their mere presence at Easter and Christmas services "points to an awareness of essentials of what our faith is -- the coming of Christ and the resurrection. Somehow their Catholic instincts, unpracticed as they might be, say this is what we're all about. I do think that this awareness is what brings some people back to the practice of the faith."

In response, he said, parishes should offer a welcoming environment.

"A lot of parishes offer what we call a homecoming after Easter," said Dietzen. While he was a pastor at St. Mark Parish in Peoria and Holy Trinity Parish in Bloomington, Dietzen said the parishes would hold such homecomings.

"We would do this beginning two or three weeks after Easter, like four consecutive Tuesdays," he said. "The point is, if people have been away, they've been away for a reason. There's often some other thing, some event that took place that they became angry at God.

"There's a need to take people where they are and move them gradually and not be judgmental, but accepting them."

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© Superior Catholic Herald, 2001