In this article, we are going to be talking about Protestants’ dirty little secret. It’s a secret they do not want Catholics discovering. Many Protestants will brag; “I know so many former Catholics who attend my church.” Or, pastors have said, “Half my church is made up of former Catholics.” It is true that many people leave the Catholic Church, but here is what they will not tell you.
Or, perhaps, they themselves don’t know the secret. Here is the secret: Many Catholics who leave also come back! They return home.
I personally know many Catholics who have left the Church. They attend Protestant assemblies. They feel fed and are happy… for a while. Three to six months later, a year later, they leave their assembly because they don’t “feel fed” Then, after a while, that new church doesn’t feed them anymore either. They church hop and church hop.
This is very common in the Protestant world. All along the way, they are deciding if a pastor is right or wrong, Spirit-filled or not. They choose churches based on how they feel. I mean, seriously; what kind of theological training to any of these people have? The church is supposed to teach and change us. We are not supposed to change churches every time we don’t like something.
Some of them start to dig deeper, to look for answers. They being to study history or read the earliest Christians. As they go deeper, they realize that Jesus started the Catholic Church – the “Original Church.” This comes as a shock to many who have never heard these things before. Then, many of them come back home to the Catholic Church.
Here is another secret that they do not want you to know. Many Protestant pastors are former Catholics who did not know their faith before they left. They did not know it. They did not study it. And they got led away by the first person who said, “Look what the Bible says.” Because they did not know anything, they started studying Protestant theology. Eventually, they became a Protestant pastor.
But here is another secret. Aside from the fact that many former Catholics are Protestant pastors, the majority of ex-Catholics did not know their faith. How do we know this? A Pew Research Center survey revealed that people left gradually. They just kind of fell away from it. It was not like something made them leave, apart from a minority of cases where there were scandals or a priest did something. You know, other kind of emotional reasons that upset them! But the majority of the people just fell away. They were not practicing their faith. They were not living their faith. And they certainly did not know their faith. What the survey reveals is that just about 50% of all Catholics who left, left before they were even 18 years old. Many left before 18, not even at 18, before 18.
They also say that the vast majority of all former Catholics left the church before they were 24 years old. We are talking young people who did not really have time to research, and many of them left right after Confirmation. We also know most people do not learn anything in Confirmation. The vast majority of Catholics, by far and away, leave as kids before they are 18. The rest of the majority leave before they are 24. That’s around the time they graduate from college.
And I knew that. I have been saying that for years. The statistics say about 4 out of 5 kids will leave their faith before college. College is a pool of filth that sucks our children’s faith from them. Same thing with high schools, middle schools and secular institutions.
This is our whole country today, and this is for Protestantism too. I mean, you could look at the Pew Research Center surveys of Protestants leaving their faith. They are just cultural Protestants or Protestants who are unaffiliated. They are not really living their faith either. It is just a mass exodus from people being religious today because we are lazy.
Our parents have failed to pass on their faith. This is the main take away. This is the monumental message going on here is that the majority of our kids leave the faith. Their parents failed to give them their faith, to raise them in the faith, to teach them apologetics, to teach them how to love God, and to teach them how to have that deep relationship with God.
Many parents do not know that. And many parents come and admit that to us. They say, “We failed our kids. What can we do? We are coming back to the faith late in life, but how can we get our kids back now?” And it is an honest and good question. That is why we are here to educate teens, kids, and parents.
We have people of all ages watching our channel, but we are here to teach them their faith. That is why we exist. We exist to be truth in an age of confusion and oxygen in a toxic culture. People that want to suck away our faith say, “God is not real.” Or, “You do not need to go to church.”
All this lukewarm secularism – you know, idealism, scientism, and all of these other “isms” that take us away from God. But, thank God that we exist, and Catholic Answers, and Dynamic Catholic, and many other great organizations that have sprung up from this disaster. We are bringing countless souls back to God, back to the faith, and back to Church. Praise God for the many religious orders that are blooming now! There is a huge revival going on in the Church, and it is great to see. We have a whole video if you are interested called “Hope for the Catholic Church,” and it talks about many of the unknown things that are going on in the Church from the ground up. We cover the whole entire conversion, reversion, changing of the Catholic Church from within, a grassroots revival, and a restoration, in a sense, of the Catholic faith.
That is great, and it will still take many years to accomplish. Even so, the fact remains that it is going on, and you need to know about it. We have another video called “Catholic Crisis,” which you also might want to check out. It covers where these problems came from in the first place. Religious education programs, churches, Catholic schools, bishops, and priests. I mean, we kind of go through all of them, and how they trickle down to us today. We explain why we mass abandoned our Catholic faith in the 1960s and in the 1970s. And we cover the free love revolution, new age movement, anarchy, rebellion, and all of these things that came about at the same time.
These things caused many people to leave their faith. It caused like 50,000 priests and nuns to leave the Church. It is crazy what happened!
But, Jesus is not going to let his Church die. So, I want to praise and give thanks. I want to give my support to all those former Catholics who have come home, who did their research, who studied, who got into the Bible, who got into Church history, and who read the Early Church Fathers.
You cannot go back and read the earliest Christians and say, “Oh! Yes, they were Protestant, or they were Orthodox.” No, they were Catholic. And it is so obvious! And it is amazing! So many people are coming home to the Catholic Church. And I am so happy for that! I mean, every day, practically, we get emails or social media messages saying, “Thank you. I was falling away, and now I am coming back to the Catholic Church because of your ministry.”
Catechesis has not been there, but we also blame the Church for catechesis. It is not the Church’s job to catechize your kids. It is your job, parents, and you are trying to shift responsibility onto the Church. That is like us sending the kids to school for one hour a week and expecting the school to give them everything they need to know.
