Catholics Can Come Home Again

A handbook for welcoming inactive Catholics back to membership or participation in a parish community.

With a Foreword by Scott Hahn, bestselling author of The Lamb's Supper God has something extraordinary planned for your life . . . In our fast-paced, highly technological world, this statement might sound a bit lofty, but the lives of millions of souls who have come before us attest to this simple truth: God has a wonderful plan in store for you. With these words, Tom Peterson, founder and president of Catholics Come Home, a nonprofit multimedia organization dedicated to promoting Catholic evangelization, offers inspiration for believers from all walks of life, whether lapsed or practicing, to deepen their faith and draw them closer to Jesus and His Church. In a series of moving stories and personal anecdotes, Tom relates how after rediscovering his faith, he experienced God's unfailing love, and soon found his true purpose in life. You can too! Drawing from scripture, his own struggles and discoveries, and the lives of the saints as well as ordinary individuals, the author offers seven ways to enter into a more deeply personal relationship with Jesus. These are pearls that you can share with others to illuminate the importance of the Catholic faith and open wide the door to a homecoming celebration.

"Returning Home to Your Catholic Faith" addresses with honesty and compassion the fears, hurts, and guilt that many inactive Catholics feel when they first consider returning to the Church. A brief, to-the-point presentation of issues always stress God's mercy; most people who leave and later return do so as part of the process of maturing. Practical tips on how to reconnect with the Church are included. The section on what the Church is like today is a reassuring overview of the opportunities available in a parish. View sample pages. "Paperback"

Religious traditions in the United States are characterized by ongoing tension between assimilation to the broader culture, as typified by mainline Protestant churches, and defiant rejection of cultural incursions, as witnessed by more sectarian movements such as Mormonism and Hassidism. However, legal theorist and Catholic theologian Cathleen Kaveny contends there is a third possibility—a culture of engagement—that accommodates and respects tradition. It also recognizes the need to interact with culture to remain relevant and to offer critiques of social, political, legal, and economic practices. Kaveny suggests that rather than avoid the crisscross of the religious and secular spheres of life, we should use this conflict as an opportunity to come together and to encounter, challenge, contribute to, and correct one another. Focusing on five broad areas of interest—Law as a Teacher, Religious Liberty and Its Limits, Conversations about Culture, Conversations about Belief, and Cases and Controversies—Kaveny demonstrates how thoughtful and purposeful engagement can contribute to rich, constructive, and difficult discussions between moral and cultural traditions. This provocative collection of Kaveny's articles from Commonweal magazine, substantially revised and updated from their initial publication, provides astonishing insight into a range of hot-button issues like abortion, assisted suicide, government-sponsored torture, contraception, the Ashley Treatment, capital punishment, and the role of religious faith in a pluralistic society. At turns masterful and inspirational, A Culture of Engagement is a welcome reminder of what can be gained when a diversity of experiences and beliefs is brought to bear on American public life.

The results of a project in the UK that invited Catholics who no longer regularly practice their faith to share their story. Why they left and what could be done to change this are two of the questions explored.

In A Faith Interrupted, authors Alice Camille and Joel Schorn serve as compassionate mediators in a conversation with disaffected Catholics, providing a place for people to clarify what went wrong and identify options for reconciliation and reunion. This book not only explores some of the reasons why Catholics leave the church and offers guidance for those contemplating a return, but also outlines basic principles of the faith, looks at key elements that make up the Catholic identity, and simplifies issues of theology and Church teaching.

Here the authors offer practical, how-to advice on building parish programs that will attract inactive Catholics and keep them engaged once they've returned. They honor existing programs such as "Landings" and "Coming Home," but also offer ways to adapt and personalize these programs. They also emphasize the importance for parish teams of being authentic shepherds for Christ, gathering up and feeding his sheep. Returnees, they say, will be richer for rekindling their relationship with Christ, and the parish will be richer for sharing their journey.

Behold, I make all things new. Revelation 21:5 It does us all good to refresh, renew, and rediscover what it means to be human, to be a child of God. In Fr. John Henry’s latest book, he desires to lead you “home” through a prayerful revitalization of your faith in God’s plan for you—your story—by recalling its incredible beauty and depth. He reminds you that your identity as a Christian is strengthened through the sacraments—gifts of the Church that accompany and enrich you through life. “…if people are still people, and the world operates according to all the patterns Ecclesiastes says it does, with sunrise and sunset, rivers flowing to the sea, and the birth and death of all living things (cf. Eccl 1, 3), we should look deeper for an inner renewal caused by grace. Change without grace, renovation without interior renewal, is spiritually worthless. The thing remodeled, so to speak, remains what it always was. The most important kind of regeneration isn’t outward or skin-deep but takes places in the hidden depths of the soul.” Allow yourself to be reminded that God is a lover whose very desires for you will lead you directly to fulfillment and everlasting joy. The author hopes for you to live the resounding cry: “My story must flow from him,and return to him.”