EVANGELIZATION RESOURCES

These are difficult times for the Catholic Church and the United States of America. There is only one solution to the problems we face... saints! Becoming a saint is a choice, and we must begin choosing the saint within each of us. The biggest crisis of our time is not economic, health care, or vocations, but is an identity crisis. We have forgotten our mission to become saints and forgotten our story as Catholics. We must rediscover that mission and hold each other accountable to accepting responsibility for that mission. Business, as usual, is not going to cut it.

Love of God and neighbor: Jesus says this is the greatest commandment . . . which means that it's also your personal mission -- a mission these pages will help you to fulfill.

Praying through just one of its 60 short, singularly potent chapters each day will usher you through a two-month-long spiritual retreat. It's guaranteed to increase your knowledge of God, to intensify your love for Him, and to cultivate within you the steadfast virtues of a missionary disciple, able and eager to lead others to that same knowledge and love.

Are there greater gifts you can receive? And then pass on to your neighbors?

Masterfully combining Bible passages and Church teachings with practical directions, Fr. John Bartunek, author of the best-selling book The Better Part, here serves as your personal 60-day retreat master. He shows you how to overcome the inevitable spiritual obstacles you'll face, how to nurture your holy desires so that they become stronger and more vibrant, and how to concentrate every element of your soul and personality in service of loving God and neighbor.

Among other things, he also shows you:

What it truly means to be in Christ, and how that sublime state of soul can be yours

How to become conscious of the presence and action of the Holy Spirit in every moment

What you must do now to let God bring full spiritual maturity to your mind, your emotions, and your will

How to properly manage the roller coaster of everyday life

How to regulate your spiritual growth prudently, so as to avoid missteps and burnout even as you work tirelessly to bring others to Christ

And much more to equip you to love God and your neighbor as an inspired and enthusiastic missionary disciple!

As followers of Christ, each of us is called to participate in pro-life activities, whether in an active ministry group or individually. We are called to respect, protect, love, and serve every human life.

Above All, Love will set you on an in-depth personal journey, helping you to cultivate your own pro-life attitude and activities through relatable stories, Scripture verses, and thought-provoking questions. The book culminates with an examination of conscience and prayers focused on pro-life ministry.

Written by a post-abortive mother who has been active for more than a decade in pro-life ministry, Above All, Love offers a first step in healing the fractures that have plagued this ministry, helping all of us to look inward and strive for sanctification. Author and speaker Elizabeth Gillette describes how she felt as a mother facing a crisis pregnancy and how no one "stood in the gap" for her. Her personal testimony and the lessons she has learned will equip all of us to take responsibility for our own pro-life activities and defend life with intention.

We are living through the greatest catastrophe since the fall of the Roman Empire. Western civilization isn't dying: it's already dead. Christendom is no more. What we see around us now isn't Christian. It's not even a civilization. It's a walking corpse.

That's the bad news. The good news is that the West can be reborn someday. We know this because it died once before. Who brought it back? The mystics, the martyrs, and the missionaries. Now they must save the West once again.

In this prescient work, Michael Warren Davis examines just how bad the situation is and how much worse it's going to get. He weaves together examples from history and literature to illustrate how societies fell and how various saints helped them rise again. Throughout, he reflects on the transformative power and benefits of persecution and suffering to show how Christians can survive ― and indeed flourish ― in the new Dark Age that's descending.

These penetrating pages will help you move from a "Culture War" mindset to one of answering the Great Commission. You will learn how to form intentional Christian communities to ward off spiritual isolation and come to understand what St. Augustine, the chief architect of Christendom's first renaissance, taught about why God allows the City of Man to fall in the first place. Additionally, you will discover:

- The only weapon in your arsenal (can you guess?)

- What role laughter played in the early Church's victory

- How to attain xenitia, the first stage of spiritual development

- Methods to grow in union with Christ through meditative prayer

- The fruits of street evangelization and your call to go into the vineyard

- How drawing from Eastern Christianity can help renew our culture again

Above all, you will find out how you can respond to the crisis of the early twenty-first century with the wisdom of the ages -- to testify to your Faith, help restore beauty, and cultivate authentic love in the modern world. For, according to Davis, every Christian has a role to play. All are called to share their faith person-to-person to help rebuild the Church, and once again the tears of mystics, the sweat of missionaries, and the blood of martyrs will become the seed of the Church. Despite the darkness, by imitating their witness, you will find unshakable peace and joy in the face of what is to come.

Not long ago, veteran Youth Minister Everett Fritz counted the number of his former Youth Group members who were still practicing the Faith.

The result? Almost all of them had left the Faith!

Fritz learned that other parishes reported similar staggering losses, pointing to a grim truth: today's Youth Ministries simply do not form young people into lifelong disciples of Jesus Christ.

Not satisfied with these dismal results, Fritz devised a different way of forming young people in the Faith. It's an approach that can truly transform the spiritual lives of young people by applying the same one-to-one personal method that Jesus Himself used to form his twelve original disciples . . . only one of whom was lost!

Fritz has worked with countless parishes, helping them make the shift to a small-group discipleship structure. You'll learn to avoid the many pitfalls and common mistakes parishes make, as well as ways you can easily build the volunteer base needed

Winner of a first-place award in the future church category from the Catholic Media Association.

We can't just talk about Christ's presence in the Eucharist; we have to believe it, celebrate it, and live it both individually and as a community of the faithful. And we must cultivate a culture in our parishes that treats Real Presence not only as an important Catholic doctrine, but also as the most important part of parish identity.

In Becoming Eucharistic People, theologian Timothy P. O'Malley, author of Real Presence, outlines four essential dimensions of a Eucharistic culture in a parish--one that fosters reverence and unity among the faithful, includes every dimension of human life in the mystery of Christ's Body and Blood, and invites people back to parish life or to become Catholic for the first time.

O'Malley--director of education at the McGrath Institute of Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, academic director of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy, and a member of the executive planning team for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops' Eucharistic Revival--shows what it means to foster a parish culture where the Eucharist infuses the worldview, priorities, and practices of its members. O'Malley leads you through discovery and discernment about how to create a parish culture where each person is called to holiness and receives the spiritual, theological, and pastoral help they need to meet Christ fully present in the Eucharist and to become a witness to him in the world.

O'Malley will help you reflect on four essential facets of a Eucharistic parish culture:

liturgies of joyful reverence that celebrate the gifts of diversity;

formation that engages the mind, imagination, understanding, and will;

a rich life of popular piety and the vibrancy of the domestic Church; and

a commitment to solidarity with your neighbor.

O'Malley says that when we reflect Christ's Real Presence to others, our parishes will become sacred spaces in which every person is led to deeper communion with God and with their neighbors.

Online resources, including ideas for parish retreats, teaching resources, and videos based on this book and the US bishops Eucharistic Revival are available from the McGrath Institute for Church Life.

Books in the Engaging Catholicism series from the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame help readers discover the beauty and truth of the Catholic faith through a concise exploration of the Church's most important but often difficult-to-grasp doctrines as well as crucial pastoral and spiritual practices. Perfect for seekers and new Catholics, clergy and catechetical leaders, and everyone in between, the series expands the McGrath Institute's mission to connect the Catholic intellectual life at Notre Dame to the pastoral life of the Church and the spiritual needs of her people.

Are you BORED? Not likely, given the endless opportunities today to see, share, post, watch, and like. So are you bored? No way!

(Except maybe at Mass.)

We want the Mass to entertain, make us laugh, give us foot tapping music and sound-bite theology, and get it done in under an hour. Yet every Sunday many of us tune out.

Author Tim O'Malley, in a series of reflections on every part of the Mass, challenges us to turn the idea of boredom on its head, calling boredom--the "good" boredom that opens us to the quiet interior space where we can encounter God--a "sweet gift."

It is there that full participation in the Mass becomes possible--the potential to be transfixed by a ritual, to contemplate the readings, to savor the Eucharist. To be fruitfully "bored again."

Become a Bored Again Catholic and rediscover the power of the Mass to change your life - and the entire world.

Audiobook Availableon christianaudio.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Timothy P. O'Malley, Ph.D. is director of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy in the McGrath Institute for Church Life. He teaches in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He researches in the areas of liturgy, catechesis, and Christian spirituality. He is the author of Liturgy and the New Evangelization: Practicing the Art of Self-Giving Love (Liturgical Press, 2014). He and his wife Kara live in South Bend and have one son.

Bridging the Great Divide: Musings of a Post-Liberal, Post-Conservative Evangelical Catholic represents a pivotal moment in the life of the Catholic community. Today's faithful are searching for an expression of Catholic Christianity that is vibrant, colorful, provocative, counter-cultural, deeply rooted in the tradition, and full of the promise of the Good News. In this timely and prophetic book, Father Robert Barron-himself a member of the younger generation-has minted a new vernacular and blazed a new way that bridges the great divide and gives voice to the concerns of post-liberal, post-conservative, evangelical believers.

This is the most up-to-date, comprehensive, and thorough defense of the Catholic Church against Protestant objections in print. This book is especially relevant as the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation draws near and discussion of the arguments made against the Church during that time in history receive renewed interest.

The Case for Catholicism answers arguments put forward by early Reformers like Luther and Calvin as well as contemporary defenders of Protestantism like Norm Geisler and R.C. Sproul. It provides a meticulous defense of the biblical and historical nature of Catholic doctrines from Scripture and church history. Finally, in both answering Protestant objections to Catholicism and in providing evidence for the Faith, The Case for Catholicism cites modern Protestant scholars who question Reformation assumptions and show how evidence from Scripture and church history support aspects of Catholic theology.

This book is divided into four sections, with each answering a key question Christians have asked about the nature of their faith. Those key questions are:

What is my authority?

What is the Church?

How am I saved?

Who belongs to the body of Christ?

The Case for Catholicism will become a reliable, resource for any Catholic who desires a well-researched, readable, and persuasive answer to Protestant arguments made against the Catholic faith.

Stephen K. Ray was raised in a devout, loving Baptist family. His father was a deacon and led Bible studies. Steve himself was very involved in the Baptist Church as a teacher of Biblical studies, and he lectured on a wide range of topics. When a best friend, an Evangelical pastor, converted to the Catholic Church, Steve and his wife Janet decided to investigate the claims of the Catholic Church, taking a thrilling journey back in time that would eventually change their lives forever. After hundreds of hours studying the Bible and the writings of the early Church, they were convinced that the Roman Catholic Church was the Church founded by Christ, and they were received into the Church on Pentecost Sunday in 1994. In this book, with no rancor toward his Evangelical roots, Ray shares with the reader their exhilarating discoveries. He traces their initial hostility toward the Catholic Church, their passionate research and the discovery of the historical Church, quietly waiting to be rediscovered. He convincingly lays out the issues that carried them over the "uncrossable chasm" into the Catholic Church. Thoroughly documented with over 400 footnotes, Crossing the Tiber contains an extensive compilation of biblical and patristic quotations and commentary on the issues of Baptism and the Eucharist, as well as a thorough analysis of Sola Scriptura and Tradition. Ray takes you back to the first four centuries of the Church to discover the early Church - was it like today's Protestantism in theology and practice, or was it Catholic? Discover the unbiblical and unhistorical nature of the "Bible-only" argument. Discover the uniform consistency of the Catholic teaching on Baptism and the Eucharistfrom Scriptures and the Church Fathers.

How to keep faith in a culture hostile to Christianity

In an increasingly secular world, Christians are often pulled in two directions. Some urge us to retreat and build insular communities. Others call upon us to wage a culture war, harnessing the government to shore up Christian cultural power.

But there is another way--and it's as old as the church itself. Stephen O. Presley takes us back to the first few centuries AD to show us how the first Christians approached cultural engagement. Amid a pagan culture that regarded their faith with suspicion, early Christians founded a religious movement that transformed the ancient world. Looking to great theologians like Augustine, Origen, and Tertullian, Presley shows how the early church approached politics, family, public life, and more. From these examples, he draws lessons for practicing authentic, pious discernment in how we engage with the wider culture.

The Christians who came before us endured persecution to share a vision of human flourishing that changed the world. Following in their footsteps, we can sanctify our society through social witness. Readers anxious about shifting cultural tides will be left with hope in the already-present kingdom of God and the promised resurrection.

Essential truths about the Word of God that nourishes and enlightens and the Catechism, which presents in a unified, systematic way everything that a Christian must believe in order to live the faith.

To be a Christian is to be an evangelizer. When the Catholic Church calls us to a "New Evangelization," that's simply a reminder us of what has always been true. The good news is: you can do it - you can evangelize - and Scott Hahn shows you how.