How Catholics can, and why they should, evangelize their fellow Catholics

By Walt Schaefer

His experiences with the Men’s Fellowship Movement and the Cincinnati Men’s Conferences led retired investment officer and philanthropist Declan O’Sullivan to write a book and blog inspired by the growth of the lay-led movement.

“The conference was a means to empower men to get together and share their lives with each other,” he said. The men’s fellowship meetings that created the conferences “were not taking away from anything in the parishes. They were empowering men to go out and help in the ministries of the parish. It really became an important activity.

“My interest is in figuring out how to spread the Gospel through the way an individual lives,” he continued. “There’s little or no evangelization going on. You look at the church as kind of an enormous fortress — a great treasury and a bulwark of how to live, but it’s getting smaller and the influence seems to be less than it was at any time in my lifetime. There is no outward movement. The clergy can’t do that. They’re in a different category, kind of our coaches. They are the people who prepare us, but we’re the people who have to go out on the field and play the game — guys talking about religion and concepts and doctrine and about all the things that happened in their lives.”

“The Evangelizing Catholic: How a Crisis Becomes a Gift” is out of print, but available at Amazon.com and other used booksellers.

    Read the blog (which includes sections of the book) at: TheEvangelizingCatholic@wordpress.com, or follow it on Facebook (search: The Evangelizing Catholic).

For more on the Cincinnati Catholic Men’s Conference, see “Bas Rutten to headline Men’s Conference” and “Declan O’Sullivan Looks Back.”