On a particularly pleasant autumn afternoon in 2006, a Saturday afternoon as I recall, I found myself at one of my first book signings. I pleasantly greeted folks, visited with old familiar friends, talked shop with the more inquisitive customers and tried my best to sign my name and write out their requested personalized messages in a manner that would not resemble the proverbial “chicken scratch” that my third grade teacher dubbed my penmanship as being.

     At one point during the afternoon an older lady slowly approached the table where I was set up at, picked up a book, gently thumbed through it, and then from behind her sagging reading glasses, gave me a rather abhorred look and inquired with a tone of disdain, “Now is this a book that normal people can read?  All you priests and bishops write these books that the rest of us can’t understand.  And let me tell you, we’re not impressed!  We don’t have degrees in theology!  Most of the things you guys write don’t make a lick of sense to us who sit in the pew. You’re just out to impress and out-do each other with all your fancy words.  When are you going to start writing things for us?”  I was a bit taken back for a moment by her candor, but actually I was glad to hear her brutally honest comment, because that’s exactly how I felt about so much of the catechetical (educational) material that has come out over the years.

     Later that day as I reflected more deeply on her comments, I began to have flashbacks of my own religious education and the frustration I experienced, especially during my days in the seminary………..(imagine dreamy theatrical flashback sounds…)…ah yes, there I was, the first day of Latin I….“Good morning class.  Open your books to page one.  Read please.  ‘Per sapientiam enim Dei manifestantur divinorum abscondita, producuntur creaturarum opera, nec tantum producuntur….(and so on).’ Okay, for your homework, translate that along with everything else in Chapter 1.  See you on Wednesday.  Class dismissed.”  And with that, my jaw dropped and my head began to pound in frustrated disbelief as my seminary theological education had begun.

     “Oh Lord, what have I gotten myself into?” I asked as I sat in my tiny cell-sized room that evening. Gazing in agony at the stacks of books on my desk seemed like standing at the base of Mt. Everest with no idea how to properly climb.  I was utterly overwhelmed. For a guy who disliked school from the first day of kindergarten, the idea of spending the better part of the next decade studying theology and philosophy was too much to fathom, much less bear at the moment. I hesitantly pulled a book off the mountainous stack and pondered its contents. After attempting to make sense of the first few paragraphs, I realized that it might as well have been written in Chinese. It seemed hopeless.

    As the semester rolled on and my grades continued to ride the tide of mediocrity and occasionally plummet from the undertow, I knew there was no easy way out of this one.  
I couldn’t take classes like “Folk Guitar” or “Ultimate Frisbee” to easily boost my pummeled GPA.  There was no escape. There was no hanging out at local college bars to drown my sorrows in cheap watery beer and laugh away my academic demise, hoping to some how once again miraculously pull things together at the last moment, as I often had a knack for doing in the past.  This was serious business.  I was, in a sense, a professional student. It was my job to study. I had to either step up, or step off.

     With my synaptic connections (fueled by pots of coffee) firing rapidly on all cylinders like a well-tuned engine, I kept force feeding my brain the foreign, mysterious information that I was being exposed to day after day. “How can it be this difficult to learn about Christ and the Church?” I kept asking myself.  “How can becoming a priest possibly be so hard? What does any of this stuff have to do with the faith? How will any of this make me a holier man? Isn’t the gospel message supposed to be simple to understand (though challenging to live)?  Shouldn’t a child be able to understand the teachings of Christ and be able to implement them in his or her life?  How in the world is all this stuff going to be of any help to the good hard working folks who sit in the pews on Sunday morning?”  The questions just kept coming as I grew more and more frustrated with the constant intellectual gymnastics.  

     In those first few agonizing semesters, I realized that I was in fact truly learning the Catholic faith for the first time, albeit in an extremely detailed, in-depth manner. I was “cutting my teeth” as they say, to be able to acquire the cognitive tools and mental discipline to explore the deepest recesses of faith and Sacred Tradition.  Often time I would spend the first part of my study sessions just translating the material into layman’s terms. As time went on, I came to the conclusion that up until that point, my Catholic education was on par with a fifth grader.
 
    Although I had taken it upon myself to attempt to relearn the essentials of my faith before entering the seminary, I realized that I didn’t even scratch the surface; I didn’t even know what the surface was comprised of, for that matter. I also realized that the vast majority of the Catholics of my generation, and many in the generation before and after, were probably at about the same level of understanding that I was, even though many of us received a “Catholic education” in both grade school and high school.

   I began to interrogate myself further as to the disappearance of my religious databank: “Did I just not pay attention in school, especially religion class?  Did I just forget everything I learned over the years? Had all that knowledge simply disintegrated from too many of those cheap watery beers in college?”  Then the most poignant question of all hit me: “Did I ever really even learn the basics of my faith?”  As I pondered that final question I began having more flashbacks about the nature of my religious education and that of those around my same era, give or take 10 years.

      Those of us who received a Catholic education during the late ’60s, through the ’70s and into the early ’80s were subjected not only to a time of tumultuous social change, but we also experienced significant changes in our Church that came about from the Second Vatican Council.  There is still great debate today over the positive and negative effects of Vatican II, as well as the challenges that came in implementing its teachings.  Some feel that this council is the greatest thing that ever happened to the Catholic Church, whereas others felt it was the beginning of the end.

     On the parish level, there were those who joyfully embraced the changes in the Mass and the fresh approach to things that Vatican II ushered in, and there were those who defiantly held on to the way things were and did not want to budge an inch.  The result for students of this time is that we were subjected to opposite extremes of religious education. There was a great deal of catechetical ideological clashing that went on.

     While the vast majority of our Catholic teachers (nuns, brothers, priests and laity) were wonderful, heroic, dedicated, truly inspirational souls, there were more than a few yardstick wielding instructors whose approach to teaching the faith was, “Learn about Jesus or die!” Then there was the opposite extreme: attempting to learn the faith from teachers who were ex-hippies (no offense ex-hippies) that had us look for Jesus in butterflies and release helium balloons out in the parking lot while dressed up like the clown from Godspell.  In the malaise of pleasantries and feel-good spirituality, or that of force-fed iron-fisted academics, many of us simply failed to learn the true fundamentals of the faith. Throughout grade school and high school, the approach to catechetical instruction and preparation for the sacraments became a matter of passing tests, going through the motions, getting a good grade, and forgetting what we had learned.

     Anyone who was blessed enough to be able to attend a Catholic college may have seen yet another questionable side of religious education. It was not all that uncommon for one to have professors who obscenely used their position to push heretical agendas and promote things that were contrary to Church teaching. I know of rogue nuns who taught on the university level who used their class as a soap-box to rant and rave about all sorts of crazed personal issues and to pawn off their own brand new-age pseudo-witchcraft as Catholic spirituality.  I know of renegade priests who made it a point to contradict the Church’s Sacred Traditions and condemn many of the Church’s moral and ethical teachings that they personally didn’t like.

    As for anyone who attended a secular university, you can bet that they experienced a different kind of faith-rot. Having attended a secular university myself for a few years, I had countless classes in which the professors would bash the Catholic Church and present an extremely biased, false interpretation of the faith and the history of the Church. In other classes, things like sexual promiscuity, homosexual activity, abortion, masturbation and other soul-destroying filth was presented to us as the acceptable norm that we should be supporting and celebrating.  

     Within just a few weeks of my first year of college I was subjected to an unbelievable amount of immoral conditioning.  All that I knew as being good, decent, right and wrong, was turned upside down and shoved down an intellectual garbage disposal. If I didn’t have at least some conviction and knowledge about my beliefs, I very well might have been swayed by these hijacking hedonists who were supposed to be the ones forming the minds of our nation’s future leaders. Those who didn’t have a grasp on their faith and who didn’t have any spiritual or moral convictions were swept away into an ocean of immoral complacency.

      When one adds all this up, along with all the other problems in the Church these days, it’s really no wonder people are so luke-warm (at best), confused, turned off, disgusted, and just don’t care about their faith. In my opinion, this rampant deterioration of the Catholic faith, and the willful failure to practice it, is rooted in the lack of basic fundamental Church teaching and a severe misunderstanding of it.  Many of the would-be faithful have wandered away, have never been taught, or have been dragged away from the solid, foundational, unchanging teachings and beliefs of our Church: beliefs and teachings that were handed on to the apostles from Jesus Christ himself.

     The bottom line is that, for a multitude of reasons, we don’t know our faith. We can point fingers and suggest culprits, but that still doesn’t help the fact that thousands (even millions?) of Catholics don’t have a clue about what it truly means to be Catholic. This is a reality that we as a Church need to open our eyes to and face head on.  It is rotting away the core of who we are and what we believe.  It is destroying our identity and dignity as a people of God.  It’s the reason why anti-Catholicism is among the last socially acceptable forms of bigotry. It is severing the relationship that Christ desires to have with each of us individually and collectively as a united people.  It is a reality that is ripping the gospel message from our hearts and leaving us spiritually void and vacant, darkened by sin and coerced by the lies of our culture of death.

    With so many Catholics not having the slightest grasp of the absolute basics, it is extremely easy to crumble and succumb to a mentality of minimalism, of just trying to “be a good person” instead of trying to live a heroic life, rooted in virtue and faith as we are all called to do.  How easy it is to be lead astray from the truth of Christ and his Church.  How easy it is to unwittingly sell our souls to the devil and cruise full-throttle down the highway to hell.

    It’s the disregarding of the “meat and potatoes” of our faith that has caused such weakness and atrophy in our Church and in our people.  We’ve become spiritually bulimic.  We binge on the things in our faith tradition that make us feel good, like the “cuteness” of baptisms, first communions, and the grandeur of wedding ceremonies,  while we purge ourselves of the true meaning and the serious, vital commitment that those things entail.  We binge on things like going to Mass on Christmas and Easter and yet never step foot in Church the rest of the year. We binge on things like parish picnics, athletic events, auctions, trivia nights, while we purge ourselves of the true nourishment we need and can get from things like regular Mass attendance, Confession, prayer, adult faith opportunities, retreats, etc.  Many in our Church have eaten dessert first and thrown the main course to the dogs. In a word, we’re alarmingly malnourished.

     As Catholics, we need to go back to the dinner table, pull ourselves up, and dig into a hearty, helping of spiritual meat and potatoes.  We need to nourish ourselves and feed voraciously on the basic fundamentals of our Catholic faith and redefine the way we live our lives. It’s never too late to restore our spiritual health, to take back what we may have lost, or rightfully claim what we may never have received in the first place.  But nobody is going to force feed us. We’re big boys and girls now, and we need to take care of ourselves and start eating right!

    It’s been said again and again that the USA is the greatest mission territory in the world.  Some of the neediest people in the world are baptized Catholics who were spiritually abandoned and neglected as soon as the water on their heads dried. Some of the neediest people in the world live in affluent areas and sit in the pews on Sunday morning.  They are there out of a sense of obligation, but have no idea what’s going on, and thus fail to go home with a spiritually full stomach. Some of the neediest people are parents who send their kids to Catholic schools and yet make no attempt to back up what their children should be learning at home. Some of the neediest are priests and religious who have long since forgotten the reasons for which they were ordained or consecrated.

    While it is true that the idea of learning (or re-learning) everything about one’s faith can be intimidating, having a professional-level education and an all-encompassing knowledge of the Church is not necessary to be a good, informed, practicing Catholic. One simply needs the meat and potatoes of the faith to nourish one’s soul, enlighten the mind, and motivate one to action.  

     As the woman who confronted me at that book signing was essentially pointing out, many have given up on trying to educate themselves because so much of the material available is over their heads. After trying to make it through pages of theological jargon written by lofty intellectuals whose office walls are covered in degrees and awards, many simply throw in the towel. And I don’t blame them. Many “adult catechesis” classes and books and many of the Church’s documents, are beautiful, powerful and immensely rich, but just don’t make sense to the average person.  Not that the average person is dumb, but rather, those in ivory towers and Vatican offices speak a different language.

    Jesus taught in a way that people could understand.  He used images and examples that people were familiar with.  That’s the beauty of the gospel; so simple that a child can understand it, yet so deep that we could study it for the rest of our lives. It’s with a similar clarity and simplicity that I hope to present the material in this book.  In the chapters and volumes to come, I will cover the fundamentals of faith, Sacred Tradition, liturgy, sacraments, Scripture, prayer, and so on.  I will take an honest look at and address some of the more unfortunate realities of our Church during these difficult times.  I will bring to light such dreaded issues as the priest’s sex abuse scandal, gay marriage, abortion, contraception, and stem-cell research.  I will challenge the reader to reclaim their faith and to spiritually “put some meat on your bones!”   Most importantly, I will do so in a manner that is straight forward, thought provoking, educational and even enjoyable.

     This is not, and will not, be like reading a textbook.  That being the case, I wish to note here the sources used in writing this book.  Primarily, the theology presented is right out of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.  The Catechism contains the official Church teaching on virtually everything in our Catholic faith.  It draws from Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, the teaching of Church Councils, Canon Law and other authoritative sources.  The Catechism is the ultimate book of the meat and potatoes of our faith, but many just can’t seem to get through much of it due to its rather complex structure and wording. It’s not exactly an easy read.

    Other sources that I draw from in this work are the official Ritual books that are used for the administration of the sacraments along with the Old Catholic Encyclopedia and, of course, my notes from nine years of philosophy and theology classes.  To top it off, the reader will notice that I refer quite a bit to the writings and preaching of the late great Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.  His work is timeless, thought provoking and truly inspired. He is a man of God who hit the nail on the head like no other in our modern day.  Any other sources that I draw from will be noted as I go along.

    So now, without further delay, grab your fork and knife, fill your plate, and get ready for a helping plate of meat and potatoes Catholicism!