Baptisms, Weddings, and Funerals-- any priest will tell you that this is when most unchurched young adults and young families come to church.
The audience is different from a typical Sunday Mass. So if you're a Sunday regular, you have be patient with my using this secular movie to explain the mysteries of salvation history to a church packed with young adult Catholics that have not been properly evangelized and catechized in the Faith.
Even godparents, to whom much responsibility is given for handing on the Faith, do NOT know many of the Church's teachings. We are in a great catechetical crisis.
It's always a bit riskee, but the method is one that moves the hearers from where they are at in the culture to the higher mysteries that are proclaimed in the Word of God. It's a type of pre-evangelization before delivering the goods with evangelization proper.
Today, St. Catherine's (which has a seating capacity of about 700-800) in Vallejo, was pretty much full this morning. I was privileged to baptize 10 babies today, bringing the total number of souls I have baptized since ordination to 50. I journeyed with these young families at their baptism class.
Homily was preached without a prepared text. My intent was to elicit conversion in the hearers.
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