cultures, arts, civilizations — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.4
Pope St. John Paul II understood this deeply:
… God with his call reaches the heart of each individual, and the Spirit, who abides deep within each disciple (cf. 1 Jn 3:24), gives himself to each Christian with different charisms and special signs. Each one, therefore, must be helped to embrace the gift entrusted to him as a completely unique person, and to hear the words which the Spirit of God personally addresses to him.5
No wonder the Church insists that “the ministerial priesthood is at the service of the common priesthood. It is directed at the unfolding of the baptismal grace of all Christians” (Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC] 1547, emphasis added).
Where’s the Fruit?
The question “Where’s the fruit?” is one that I’ve been asking for years. A lot of Catholic leaders are asking the same question. For instance, the leadership of a Catholic university brought me in after reading my book Forming Intentional Disciples: The Path to Knowing and Following Jesus. They said, “We have a problem. We thought that if we exposed our students to thick Catholic culture — the very best of Catholic liturgies, music, art, literature, philosophy, and theology — they would naturally become disciples and behave like disciples. But it’s not working. We’re realizing that we actually have to evangelize our students and explicitly call them to discipleship.”
One of the inevitable results of our failure to evangelize and make intentional disciples of our own is that so many of the graces Catholics have objectively received are not bearing their intended fruit. We can learn a lot from the powerful little two-paragraph section of the Catechism entitled “Liturgy as Source of Life”:
1071 … [The liturgy] involves the “conscious, active, and fruitful participation” of everyone. (emphasis added)
1072 “The sacred liturgy does not exhaust the entire activity of the Church”: it must be preceded by evangelization, faith, and conversion. It can then produce its fruits in the lives of the faithful: new life in the Spirit, involvement in the mission of the Church, and service to her unity. (emphasis added)
Where do we stand in terms of fruit-bearing? I will not make you wade through a mass of depressing statistics; a few quick snapshots will do.
In 2014, 6.5 American Catholics left the Church for every non-Catholic who entered, and half of millennials (ages 18-34) raised Catholic have already dropped the identity.6 I asked pastors and catechists in a dozen different dioceses this past fall how many of the children and teens in their confirmation prep programs had stopped attending Mass since they were confirmed. The estimates that I received ranged from 60 to 90 percent. Millions of young adults raised in the Church and then simply vanishing do not qualify as “fruit.”
Fruit-bearing is the canary in our ecclesial coal mine. It is the most critical external evidence we have that we are doing — or not doing — what Jesus commanded us to do: Make disciples of all nations. The truth is that acceptance of little or no fruit as “normal” has profoundly shaped the lives of almost all Catholics as well as our pastoral practice, our vocational discernment, and our mission to the world.
What is the abundant fruit, which God is calling us to bear? What are the consequences of our failure to make disciples, and to help those disciples grow to fruit-bearing maturity? What hangs in the balance?
• The eternal happiness in God — the salvation — of every human being on the planet.
• Lavish, life-changing, and culture-changing fruitfulness, pouring out into the world through the lives of the faithful.
• The emergence of the next generations of Catholic leaders, saints, and apostles: priestly, religious, and secular. And through them …
• The fulfillment of the Church’s mission and the redemptive work of Jesus Christ in history.
The Virtue of Faith and the Act of Faith
Which brings us to the ancient distinction between what the Church calls the virtus fidei and the actus fidei. Virtus fidei is the “virtue of faith,” the power or capacity to believe given to us by God in valid baptism. When you read in the Catechism or magisterial documents that baptism bestows faith, the document is referring to the virtue of faith.
But the actus fidei, the “act of faith,” is different. This is the explicit, personal, free choice of an older child or adult to respond to God’s grace with belief and discipleship, to embark upon what St. Paul called the “obedience of faith” (Romans 1:5). Actus fidei is where the rubber hits the road and we do what we say we believe. Evangelization addresses this question: Have we made a personal “act of faith”? It is the personal act of faith that is the key to bearing fruit.
The Seeker Journey
At the Catherine of Siena Institute, we have long used a very simple schema to help participants in our Making Disciples seminars understand the developmental process that adults typically go through in the twenty-first century West as they move toward intentional discipleship. We call them the Seeker, Disciple, and Apostle stages of spiritual development.
The Seeker stage corresponds to the long pre-discipleship journey from distrust and disbelief to what the Catechism calls a person’s “first and fundamental conversion” (CCC 1427), the point where you drop your nets and begin to follow Jesus consciously as his disciple in the midst of his Church. Depending upon where they start, some people have a long way to travel before they arrive at that crossroads.
The Seeker stage encompasses the five thresholds of conversion that I cover in considerable detail in chapters 5 through 8 of Forming Intentional Disciples.7 The thresholds have to do with our lived relationship with God, not our religious background or lack of it. In brief, the five thresholds are:
1. Initial Trust
2. Spiritual Curiosity
3. Spiritual Openness
4. Spiritual Seeking
5. Intentional Discipleship8
Trust. In the post-modern West, the vast majority of non-practicing or non-believing Christians, as well as people from non-Christian or “nothing” backgrounds, have to start with some positive association with Christianity, with Christ, or with a believing Christian. They need a bridge of trust in place across which they can move closer to Christ and his Church. If there is no bridge of trust in place, then the first task of an evangelizer is to build or become a relational bridge of personal and spiritual trust that can one day bear the weight of truth.
Curiosity. After trust has been established, the next development stage is spiritual curiosity. As disciple-makers, we want to foster curiosity about the person and work of Jesus Christ rather than about a generic “faith” or simply factual questions about Catholic beliefs and practices. If we do not intentionally foster curiosity about Jesus as the center of our faith, people can (and do) easily come away with the impression
