By Chris Valley

It was a crisp, sunny Saturday, perfect for an outing or for a friendly neighborhood game of touch football. They came from rural Blue Ridge and inner-city Atlanta, from Athens and from Sandy Springs. But they didn’t gather to roast marshmallows or to play football.

Over 200 Catholics from across the Archdiocese of Atlanta met at Holy Family Church in Marietta on Saturday, October 29, for the 1983 Archdiocesan Evangelization Conference. Organized by the Archdiocesan Committee on Evangelization, the conference was the seventh in a series of archdiocesan sponsored opportunities to share ideas about parish efforts at evangelization.

The day began with song and prayer. “Bless the Lord, all that is within me; Bless His holy name…” sang the choir from Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Atlanta.

Addressing the theme, “Who Needs Evangelization?”, conference keynote speaker Rev. Alvin A. Illig, C.S.P., challenged those attending to become ever more aware of the vocation of every individual Catholic to be an evangelizer.

“Four out of five people who begin their journey toward the Catholic Church come because of personal contact with someone,” Father Illig maintains.

Director of the Paulist Fathers’ National Catholic Evangelization Association, Father Illig is a respected national authority. His special concern is for the inactive Catholic and for people with no religious affiliation. With Scripture, statistics and practical examples, Father Illig demonstrated that evangelization is at the heart of what it means to follow Christ.

“Evangelization is sharing Christ with others. It is doing as Mary did, accepting Jesus Christ into your life, allowing Him to live in you, and then sharing Him wherever you happen to be,” stresses Father Illig.

Drawing from Pope Paul VI’s Apostolic Exhortation, “Evangelization in the Modern World,” Father Illig listed five major groups of people in need of evangelization: active Catholics themselves, who number approximately 52 million in the United States; inactive Catholics, an additional 15 million; members of other Christian denominations, 75 million Americans; those who are religious but non-Christian, about 12 million people; and the “unchurched,” 70 million who have no religious affiliation. “Everybody needs evangelization,” Father Illig maintains.

“You have to be hope-filled, future-oriented, Resurrection People,” says Father Illig. “In the first 200 years of United States history, the Catholic Church was primarily concerned about the preservation of the faith of immigrant peoples in a hostile country… The time has come to reach out and share the faith.”

Father Illig reported that one in four baptized Catholics over 18 years old is an “inactive” Catholic. Formerly these people were called “lapsed” or “fallen away” Catholics. “During the 1970s the number of disaffiliated Catholics in the United States tripled. The average American parish has about 800 inactive Catholics within its boundaries,” according to Father Illig. “Hundreds of thousands are waiting for an invitation to come home.”

Regarding members of other Christian churches, “We do not come to pirate the members of other Christian churches … We try to work together, pray together and engage in social ministry so that under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we may become one someday,” Father Illig says.

Quoting Pope Paul VI, Father Illig explained that the Catholic Church respects and esteems non-Christian religions. This respect, however, should not inhibit Catholics from proclaiming Jesus as Lord.

But the greatest concern of Father Illig is for those with no religious affiliation, the unchurched. “There are more unchurched in Georgia than all the Baptists, Methodists and Catholics put together,” Father Illig reports. According to Glenmary Father Bernard Quinn, director of the Glenmary Research Center in Atlanta, there are 1.2 million Georgians who belong to no organized religion.

“There are 19,000 Catholic parishes in the United States. There are 7,500 McDonald’s in the United States. Everybody knows McDonald’s, why don’t they know the Catholic Church?

“Why are so many unchurched? How much time and money is spent on outreach to the unchurched? Do they feel perhaps unwanted by the Catholic Church?” Father Illig asks.

Father Illig feels that today’s Catholics are uniquely qualified to reach out to hurting people and to those who do not know Christ. “You are a people who have been tried by fire. In the last twenty years, we priests have given you confusion, scandals, debates, arguments, every reason to leave the Church. With the Apostles, you have been able to say, ‘Lord to whom shall we go? You alone have the words of eternal life.’ You have made a reaffirmation and a recommitment to Christ and His Church … George Gallup refers to the American Catholic Church as the ‘Sleeping Giant.’”

Following Father Illig’s lecture, workshops were led by national and local leaders and addressed the concerns of inactive Catholics, Hispanics, those with no church affiliation, divorced or separated Catholics, Blacks, young adults, the aged, and “angry Catholics.”

Part lectures, part discussion groups, part reunion of active Catholic evangelizers, the Archdiocesan Evangelization Conference was a celebration of Christ’s call to His followers to become “fishers” of men and women.