"I am so enthralled with the Maronite Divine Liturgy that I wonder why catholics are not beating down the doors to get into this tiny parish church."
I would say the same thing about my parish and the Byzantine rite liturgy.
Folks, you'll just have to excuse me, but I just can't work up the energy to get into a heated debate over which Catholic liturgies are more or less preferable (or pious) when I go by hundreds of people each day who have no faith and little hope.
I'm going to speculate for a moment here. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of the folks who are posting on this thread are people who have had some sort of faith throughout their lives. Most if not all were Baptized as children, and had at least some sort of religious education.
I come from a different experience. I grew up with no faith. My religious education, if you can call it such, was courtesy of CBS, NBC, and ABC. The fact that I came into the Catholic church in the first place is something of a miracle. If anyone ever discussed the basic aspects of the Catholic faith with me, I sure don't remember it. And I never, ever had the experience of meeting a Catholic evangelist. I met lots of Mormon evangelists, though.
So I look back, and I have to wonder: so where *were* all those would-be Catholic evangelists that I never had the privilege of meeting? There were plenty of Catholic churches in the area where I grew up.
You think that perhaps they were too busy debating the relative merits of the Novus Ordo or Tridentine Latin Mass to be bothered with evangelizing the hoi poloi such as myself?
LOL. Amen, brother. We are regularly reminded by our Pastor of our duty to evangelize others. I regularly do it at work, when appropriate. For me it was weird at first but it has now become old hat - talking about Jesus and the Liturgy has become almost as easy as speaking about the relative merits of the Raiders recent draft picks.
This is a good point. However, I must tell you I do some sort of evangelizing. Perhaps I am doing it incorrectly, but there is such uniform hostility to the Catholic Church, that I always encounter a rather ugly vehemance, even from fellow Christians. I have often listened patiently to an evangelical, and with reverence, but I have not found, and this is true even amongst Catholics, patience for the ancient faith as it actually is. Lapsed Catholics are impatient with no married priests, no women priests, no divorce, priest scandals (which disturb, rightly, one and all) and protestants of the mainstream order thing Catholics are troglodytes while Evangelicals don't "get" the Eucharist or our relationship with Mary, but, to my experience, are not as patient in kind as Catholics might be to them. And this is borne out even within FR.
Perhaps the church needs to conduct official classes in effective Evangelization. I don't think it is enough to say "just talk about your faith" there has to be an effective strategy to employ. For modern man, marketing savvy has to be employed I suspect. V's wife.