Evangelization: Hope for the Hopeless, by Phil Lawler

By Phil Lawler, Catholic Culture, July 25, 2024

Phil Lawler has been a Catholic journalist for more than 30 years. He has edited several Catholic magazines and written eight books. Founder of Catholic World News, he is the news director and lead analyst at CatholicCulture.org

Today’s CWN headlines include three different reports about the powerful surge of spiritual energy generated by the National Eucharistic Congress. Will the fervent faith that was at work in Indianapolis prove contagious? Will it spread beyond the thousands of people who participated in that unique event?

That crucial question— How do we communicate the faith that we feel?—was on my mind this morning, as I picked up Christendom, a massive study by Peter Heather on the spread of Christianity during the first millennium after Christ. The book is an exhaustive project (the bibliography alone covers 50 pages), by a historian who provides a staggering amount of information about a period of Church history with which few of us are familiar: the years when, starting with Constantine, the Christian faith grew from a tiny religious minority, a foreign import on a pagan continent, to become the dominant institution in Europe. …

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