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U p F r o n t
By Karl Keating
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IN recent years Holy Saturday has signaled not just the end of Lent and the dawn of the Easter season, but also the entrance of new Catholics into the Church through the RCIA. Not every parish has an RCIA program, and not every RCIA program is well constructed, but those considerations are overshadowed by our joy in welcoming new souls into the Body of Christ.
Parishes rightly publish statistics about their RCIA programs, and many of them can boast more catechumens this year than last. I have seen parish bulletins crowing that the number of catechumens has reached double digits, and some dioceses, combining tallies for all their parishes, have busted their statistical buttons in showing off totals that creep past the 1,000 mark. As encouraging as those numbers are, they need to be put into perspective.
Fifty years ago, when America's Catholic population was only 25 million (compared to today's 60 million), a poor New York parish serving an ethnic group with a historically tiny percentage of Catholics was able to produce more converts than most dioceses produce today.
In 1946 alone, St. Aloysius parish in Harlem counted a remarkable 450 converts-yet its achievement was not unique.
St. Charles parish, also in Harlem, grew from 318 parishioners to 6,500 in fourteen years. That's 442 converts a year.
In a single year St. Francis Xavier parish in Baltimore brought in 206 converts, St. Charles Borromeo in Philadelphia 227, Sacred Heart of Jesus in Detroit 180, and St. Anthony of Padua in the Bronx 140.
A single priest in Lansing, Michigan, averaged 50 converts a year for 25 years, and in Chicago a priest made 1,300 converts in 21 years-that's 62 a year by one man!
At a time when there were only forty percent as many Catholics in the U.S. as there are today, when parishes were much poorer, when there was no easy access to mass communication, how did we reap such harvests?
That story is told in Winning Converts, the first book to be issued by Catholic Answers. Originally appearing in 1948 and edited by Fr. John A. O'Brien, who was famous for collections of conversion stories, Winning Converts shows us what worked then- and what can work again.
But in half a century the dynamics have changed. In the 1940s most conversions were made by priests. Today the majority are made by laymen. Priests in post-War America worried that too few laymen were interested in seeking converts. Today many laymen are worried that too few priests think convert-making is respectable.
This change is highlighted in the essay by Fr. John T. McGinn, head of the Paulist League and editor of Techniques for Convert-Makers. He opens with this: "The writer takes the view that the American clergy are vividly aware of the necessity of a more systematic and energetic apostolate to the non-Catholics of our country."
You have to smile. However accurate that may have been of the clergy as a whole in 1948, I think it is not uncharitable to say that it is not accurate today, even though there are many priests who take a keen interest in conversions. While Fr. McGinn's remark may seem out of date, it inspires us because it shows what the Church in this country once did and what it can do again.
Winning Converts is a book we're proud to see as the first in what we expect to be a long line of useful titles published by Catholic Answers. Our next offering will be a two-volume set, The Fathers Know Best, which we plan to have out by early autumn.
Other titles in the works include the pre-conversion diary of a Congregationalist minister, a handbook of prison apologetics, and an explanation of where we got the Bible.
But starting a book division takes lots of capital. To raise some of it we're offering Winning Converts on a prepublication basis. If you order your copy now, you save 20% off the retail price, and you allow us to pay for the first printing run in advance. This saves us money. You win and we win.
The more copies you order (and we hope you'll order several for your friends-think ahead to Christmas!), the larger the print run we can afford. That trims our costs and allows us to move quickly on subsequent titles.
Our ambitious goal is to work up to issuing one new title a month: some reprints of classic works, many entirely new titles.
By the way, I should mention that all of these books will be especially well bound and handsome. One thing that has bothered me for years is that most Catholic books are unattractive, and many are bound so cheaply that a little wear makes the pages fall out. Our books will be different. We won't cut corners in the design of the covers or in the quality of the binding.
Please examine pages 28 and 29 of this issue and commit yourself to multiple copies of Winning Converts. We expect to ship around August 1. If you can throw in an extra donation to help get our publishing arm off the ground, we'd appreciate it.
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