{"id":6677,"date":"2006-07-28T12:28:02","date_gmt":"2006-07-28T12:28:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/07\/serendipity.html"},"modified":"2006-07-28T12:28:02","modified_gmt":"2006-07-28T12:28:02","slug":"serendipity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/07\/serendipity.html","title":{"rendered":"Serendipity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Funny that the week I started doing some work on this project for the Archdiocese of Military Services….OSV runs an article on it. It’s not online yet, but <\/a> an abridged version is available at Catholic Online:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Catholic men and women comprise 27 percent of the U.S. military, according to Archbishop Edwin O\u2019Brien, yet only 7 percent of military chaplains are Catholics. While these figures are an extension of a widespread deficit in priestly vocations in the church, they also bear witness to the grave difficulty the archdiocese faces in providing sacraments, education and ministry to Catholic soldiers spread around the globe \u2013 and the vulnerability of many Catholic military men and women to the proselytizing of evangelical chaplains and soldiers.<\/p>\n

Although the military brass has stepped in on several recent occasions to address concerns about proselytism \u2013 including charges raised by a fellow Christian chaplain last year at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. \u2013 the practice continues among many rank-and-file evangelicals who see Catholic soldiers as prime targets. Lacking a solid formation in their faith or an available Catholic priest to visit for counsel, some Catholic soldiers find themselves too poorly equipped to effectively defend church teaching and practices against the evangelicals\u2019 charges. <\/p>\n

They may come away from such encounters confused or disillusioned about the church and be drawn away from the Catholic faith into evangelicalism or fundamentalism. <\/p>\n

The problem is not only one of recruiting more Catholic chaplains, but also of building up the Catholic faith community in the military. So, even as the military archdiocese steps up its efforts to encourage new priestly vocations and temporary \u201cloans\u201d of clergy from other dioceses, Archbishop O\u2019Brien has also launched Catholics Seeking Christ, an ambitious peer-to-peer ministry that educates Catholic soldiers in their faith with the help of well-trained lay military volunteers.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Our friends (and I mean that!) at the Christianity Today Weblog take note of the editorial:<\/a><\/p>\n

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An article in Our Sunday Visitor<\/em> shows a surprising hostility to evangelical Protestants. "Many Catholic military men and women," the Roman Catholic newspaper warns, are vulnerable "to the proselytizing of evangelical chaplains and soldiers." The unsigned article continues:<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As I said, what’s at this website is unsigned, but it’s a part of an article written by Mary DeTurris Poust, longtime OSV writer and author of Parenting a Grieving Child, published by Loyola.<\/a><\/p>\n

So…the question is, when a Catholic person describes the efforts of an evangelical Protestant to convert Catholics to evangelical Protestantism as "proselytizing" and as a negative…that’s "hostile?"<\/p>\n

Hmmm.<\/p>\n

What I would be very interested in seeing in the comments in this post are, as usual, your opinions, but more importantly, your experiences as a member of the military or military family. What’s the situation regarding this issue?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Funny that the week I started doing some work on this project for the Archdiocese of Military Services….OSV runs an article on it. It’s not online yet, but an abridged version is available at Catholic Online: Catholic men and women comprise 27 percent of the U.S. military, according to Archbishop Edwin O\u2019Brien, yet only 7…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nSerendipity - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/07\/serendipity.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Serendipity - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Funny that the week I started doing some work on this project for the Archdiocese of Military Services….OSV runs an article on it. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6677\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}