Have You Been Innoculated to Christianity?

I had the pleasure of meeting Dan Paris, very briefly, at my parish nearly 3 years ago.  I pledged my financial and prayerful support then and have continued that support, praying dailly for the young man as he carries out the Lord's work at FOCUS.

So I was most pleased to stumble across this piece written by Dan today:

“So,” I started, a bit nervously. This was our first real conversation about the faith. “Are there any particular books of the Bible you’d like to learn more about?”

He hesitated for a brief moment, then – with a pensive look – replied, “Actually, I was hoping you could just tell me all about Christianity. How did it begin? What does it mean today?”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I never got questions like these. We spent the next hour going over all of salvation history, from Adam & Eve to Acts of the Apostles, and finished with a powerful discussion on the Mass. It was awesome, in the true sense of the word.

I had met Ling, an international student from Beijing, at a Newman Center event a few weeks prior. New to the States and having befriended several Christians, Ling had many questions about this strange person named Jesus, of whom he had heard only rumors.

Why do I tell this story? Because there was something different about Ling. He was receptive. He asked sincere, humble, curious questions. He wanted to know more. Though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at first, after meeting with him for several months, it hit me. He had been spared something that the rest of us, those of us who grew up in Post-Christian society, had received in our youth; he hadn’t been inoculated to Christianity.

You know how inoculation works. A weakened version of a disease is injected into your blood. Your immune system, sensing an intruder, goes all crazy and produces antibodies, which then opens up a can on the bad guys, crushing and utterly destroying them.

From then on, any time the real version of the disease tries to enter your body, your immune system is like, “Nah bro, I got this,” and kills it. Thus, inoculations are great at training your body to recognize and fight diseases it has seen before. Obviously, I’m no microbiologist, but you get the point.

Of course, getting a vaccine to prevent diseases like Chickenpox and Hepatitis B is all well and fine. But what happens when we become inoculated to a worldview? To a belief system? What happens when, coming of age in a culture littered with the shattered remnants of a once robust and holistic Christian culture, we find ourselves immune to, and thus unable to receive, the true, authentic, saving message of Jesus Christ?

What happens when Christianity becomes nothing more than a disease I have seen before?

An Inoculation to Truth

Venerable Fulton Sheen was a boss. He was also right about a lot of stuff, including this:

“There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.”

Sheen understood the tragedy of our inoculation. So many of those who hate or leave the Church do so because they have been tricked into believing a false gospel. 

Here are, in my opinion, three of the most insidious “fake versions” of Christianity – lies which, masquerading as truth, eventually lead people to reject Christianity altogether. We must stop them.

He goes on and it's really good stuff.

Read the whole thing and while you're there, prayerfully consider donating to the FOCUS mission.  It's a worthy cause.

Carry on.