Evangomercials

The Archdiocese of Cincinnati is supposedly engaged in an outreach to lapsed Catholics. It’s being called the ACE program for Advent, Christmas, and Easter – specifically targeted at those nominal Catholics who only show up twice a year. Earlier this year, we were solicited to contribute money to fund the broadcasting of commercials from the Catholics Come Home project. They call these things evangomercials, because they aren’t exactly selling anything in the commercial sense.

We are now less than a week before Christmas, and I have yet to see a single Catholic evangomercial on any of our local broadcast stations out of Dayton, which is pretty squarely in the center of the AoC. Maybe I’m watching at the wrong time, or maybe they’re waiting for cheaper advertising rates after Christmas, or maybe they’re concentrating their efforts way down south in Cincinnati.

I have, however, seen an evangomercial for the Salvation Army, and I was impressed. I liked it.

Below are a couple of Salvation Army evangomercials, as well as couple of the Catholics Come Home evangomercials that I hope to see soon.

Perseverance

From Fr. John Trigilio’s homily for Monday:

It’s so easy to be overwhelmed by the situation, to say, “Oh, well, we made a good try.” But no! Don’t quit. Don’t give up. As Blessed Teresa of Calcutta often told us, we’re not here to be successful; we’re here to be faithful. Faithfulness doesn’t mean perfection. Faithfulness doesn’t mean that you never fall. It means you never quit. You never give up.

This is especially true in the spiritual life, because how many times you and I are making a little progress, we’re doing well, we’ve just gone on retreat or we’re in Advent or Lent or whatever, but all of a sudden we fall. We give in to temptation. The devil is laughing, “Ha, I’ve got them now.” And it’s easy to stay down! And to hear the count, “One, two, three,” like you’ve been knocked out in the boxing ring. Well you’ve got to get up! Stand up again. So what if you fall down another time, and another time, and another time? The point is to keep getting up, to keep fighting the good fight, as St. Paul says.

The spiritual warfare is real, but we need to never quit, to never give up, to persevere. And remember, the important thing is the spiritual health. Not that our physical health isn’t important, but we need to pray for spiritual health more than ever, especially in this Year of Faith.