Finding the Lost

It happened again. A caller said she was raised in the Catholic Church but now she was a "Born Again Christian" and had shed her Catholic faith. I hear that all too often. "I was Catholic but now I'm Christian". I can understand from someone who has never been Catholic and has all the common misconceptions, but it really bothers me to hear those that have left the church in search of something else. Sometimes I blame the individual for not understanding the faith enough to embrace it. I think maybe they did not have a good teacher or maybe the lure of some emotional reaction to a modern worship service distracted them. How are faithful Catholics to deal with our brothers and sisters who now speak against the faith and in some cases ask us to join them in their abandonment?
The Lord tells us that "For the Son of Man came to came to save what was lost. If a man have a hundred sheep, and one of them stray, will he not leave the ninety-nine in the mountains, and go in search of the one that has strayed? And if he happens to find it... he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that did not go astray. Even so, it is not the will of your Father in heaven that a single one of these little ones should perish''(Matthew 18:11-14). The Catechism of the Catholic Church does not address the loss of these Catholics. Perhaps it is because the Church must trust in the apostolic spirit of her sons and daughters to catch them again in our nets before they slip away forever. But just how many "faithful Catholics" are left out there? Out of approximately sixty million nominal Catholics only 25% or so actually practice their faith by attending Sunday Mass regularly and confession yearly. The other 45 million Catholics are simply "sacrament" Catholics at key moments of their existence: baptism, marriage, wake, and funeral. Of course, there are probably millions of former Catholics who are not even on the books . Many millions of others, however, have openly and apparently definitively left the Church. They do not profess or live a prayerful sacramental life. They do not behave according to the teachings of the Church or see these teachings as authoritative or divine. Some pay lip service to the Christian creed by worshipping at mainstream liberal Protestant Churches. Millions of others have joined Evangelical and Fundamentalist denominations, or strange sects and cults, or free-standing mega-churches. They have discovered an emptiness in their lives that is filled by various forms of non-Catholic religious enthusiasms. Many have left, as they say, after "twelve years of Catholic education" and appear to have shed their Catholic beliefs as easily as taking off one's shoes. What is particularly troubling is to think of the sacrifices of those generations of faithful Catholics who both lived and handed down their Faith under difficult circumstances only to see it tossed away.
Why have these people left the Church? Ultimately they are responsible before God for their decisions. The Catechism, however, gives us some clues: "Ignorance of Christ and his Gospel, bad example given by others, enslavement to one's passions, assertion of a mistaken notion of autonomy of conscience, rejection of the Church's authority and her teaching, lack of conversion and of charity: these can be at the source of errors of judgment... in moral conduct" (CCC 1792). It's is these defects that lead to rationalization and self-justification. Over time, this will lead to a loss of the virtues of faith, hope, and charity necessary for eternal life. God does not call us to judge but rather to understand, call, and welcome back the fallen-away. The Church exists ultimately to forgive sins through the application of Christ's merits through the sacraments. There is no such thing as a "good reason" to leave the Church. Those of us who remain in the true Church must listen, while at the same time be uncompromising in defense of the Gospel and the teachings of the Church. There are many roads to travel, we can only pray the lost find the right one back home.