In the late 1980s and early 90s, I was serving the Church as a Youth Minister and director of Faith Formation. In those offices, I was responsible for preparing my teens to receive the Sacrament of Confirmation. Even in those days, there was a subtle deterioration taking place in the religious education process.

Having had my own experience of a total disconnect between God’s activity on earth and my life, I was greatly determined not to allow what happened to me in my religious education experience to happen to those now going through the process. After encountering Christ in High School, I wanted to help other kids come to find Christ. I set a course to bolster the waning programs with the intention to lead them to encounter Christ.

Unfortunately, the parents of the next generation of teens, were my contemporaries who experienced the same watered down proclamation of the Catholic Faith that I did. Not only was I having to help the teens come out of their own apathy, but I had to contend with the apathy being modeled by the parents. It wasn’t all bleak, there were a few Faith filled and ardent parents who really wanted their kids to come to know and live for Christ on earth. The majority of families were just going through the motions.

While there are a plethora of reasons for the demise of our current religious education programs, there was one that many did not see because we lacked the spiritual capacity and formation to see it. In those days the devil was not preached on nor taught. The concept of demons and demonic strongholds was no where on the horizon. Therefore, we would do our best and wonder why nothing was working. It was easy to become apathetic. If the parents would go so far as to lie for their teens so that they could avoid doing the “requirements” for getting confirmed, then what can we really do?

I remember having a parent come to my office a week before the Confirmation Retreat, which was required by the Bishop for Confirmation. He informed me that his son cannot attend the retreat because his son has a baseball game. I reminded him that this was a requirement to receive his sacrament. He acknowledged and I enthusiastically said “That’s okay, we can confirm him next year.” He was not happy with my response. He declared that he wanted his son to get confirmed this year. I asked how he can reconcile the lack of the retreat? He then requested that I give him a private retreat.

As you can imagine, that didn’t go well. The easy thing to do would have been to do the retreat, but once his friends heard that he was getting one the entire class of 65 students would want one. So I held my ground and after ten mines of screaming and ranting and threatening to go to the Pastor, he left. In one sense I couldn’t be angry with him because he was the fruit of his religious education program.

Fast forward to the year 2021 and the current religious education programs and we will see much of the same for the past 40 years. They may have changed the name, but the content and antiquated methods are still the same. This apathy has not only affected our parish religious education classes, but our Catholic Schools as well.

As I have begun to travel again I have started to see, with a greater clarity, the demonic stronghold of apathy in our parishes and schools. The requirements were used to get people who didn’t want to be there through the programs, but no work was being done to evangelize to them so that they could understand the WHY of our Faith and actually desire to know Christ. Some simply try to force feed more Catechists to the poor souls whose hearts are not encountering the love of Christ.

My eyes have been focusing on the current leaders and how affected they are by the spirit of Apathy. His grip is very strong and in union with the spirit of oppression, they can easily loose hope and simply begin to do a job and cease to do a ministry.

I believe we must go the Holy Spirit and to Mother Mary and ask them to reveal to us the spiritual strongholds in our parish and get trained to renounce, bind and cast them out of our parishes. I can see how many parish staff, pastors included, are being tempted to settle for less. Covid 19 has only increased that temptation because we can blame it on the rules that are coming down from on high. It is time to rise and retake our parishes from the demons who have been assigned to infiltrate our leadership and the flock and render them ineffective for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Let us rise, Church of Jesus Christ, in the power of the Spirit and in the authority of the Son of God.