Anglicanorum Coetibus And Evangelizing The Culture

"Evangelizing the culture" was a favorite phrase of Pope St John Paul, which Bp Barron has taken over more recently, explaining that Cardinal George, his mentor, gave him this specific task after St John Paul inspired him with the objective. My own view is that as a theme, it's more than 30 years old, and more recently Catholic figures have suggested a newer priority of preparing the faithful for persecution and martyrdom.

However, "evangelizing the culture" was proposed as an objective for the Pasadena group-in-formation. I suspect it was inserted as something everyone could agree with (and almost certainly something that would ingratiate Fr Bartus with Bp Barron), but it's worth going a little farther to examine what it means.

This takes me back to another question I raised yesterday, why the deeply troubled St James Newport Beach Anglican/Episcopal parish doesn't seem to have considered the OCSP as an option for any significant group of its membership, which appears to have been quite large in earlier times. Remember that both the Pastoral Provision and Anglicanorum coetibus were intended to reach a target audience of disaffected Anglicans and Episcopalians -- if there's a culture to evangelize, this would seem to be the nearest opportunity for the OCSP.

I would say that St James Newport Beach, whose dissidents went to the ACNA, is an example of the Fort Worth dilemma writ small. Bishoip Iker, we've seen, appears to have considered an option of taking the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth into the Catholic Church as a body prior to Anglicanorum coetibus, but he doesn't seem to have taken it seriously for any length of time. The simplest explanation is probably the one Damian Thompson offered last week: you can dress things up, but a certain large contingent will reject anything they perceive as Catholic.

Add to that the number of Episcopalians who left the Catholic Church after a divorce and remarriage, as well as those who feel TEC's views on same-sex attraction are hospitable. Our Lord's remarks about the seeds that fall on rocky ground are probably appropriate, and the history of the Pastoral Provision should be illustrative: a major development within Anglicanism has been the steadily growing overhang of seminary graduates and unemployed priests, and the one successful aspect of Anglican evangelization since 1980 has been the number of these who have been recruited to Catholic diocesan work.

But consider the most specific example of Catholic evangelization I've seen close at hand: Patrick Madrid's morning radio show. He has degrees in philosophy and dogmatic theology that specifically qualify him for apologetics. From what I can gather as a frequent listener, he seems to pay most attention to Mormons, Pentecostals, and other evangelicals. This is probably because

• They pay attention to scripture
• They have strong family values
• They are alienated from secular culture.

I don't see the Blessed John Henry Newman formula, which seems to involve appealing to affluent millennials with lots of alcohol and a sense of belonging to a clique, as a recipe for equivalent success.