Making Some Changes

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven

— Eccl 3:1 *NRSV)

BACKGROUND

You’ve probably noticed, we’re making some changes here at the Catholic Roads website. Our friends and followers will all be seeing it soon. We wanted to take a few minutes to explain what we’re doing, where we’re going, and why.

THE FOCUS

Features! Feature writing! That’s the new “buzzword” here at Catholic Roads.

We’ll be telling stories about wonderful people all around us in the Catholic Church. Many stories will be about priests, deacons, seminarians, and religious people. The priests, especially, have been badly treated in the mainstream media, largely because of the child abuse scandals in recent decades. The truth is, we have been blessed with some amazing men who serve the Church today as priests. And there are some awesome guys going through seminary right now!!!

We want to highlight a few of them as a way of encouraging the faithful to remain behind these wonderful, holy men and to pray for them daily.

But it’s not all about priests and religious people. Other stories we’ll be sharing will be about lay people doing things that are making an impact — especially lay people in media and entertainment.

We hope to do lots of caricatures along the way — mostly related to the stories we write. And we’d really like to be able to tell some of those stories with comic book or comic strip style art too (we’ll see how that works).

Stick with us as we experiment a little please.

CULTURE AND TRENDS

Sadly, there has been a big trend here in America among some Catholics to use social media as a vehicle for criticizing the Church and bashing many of our leaders. While it is true that some of our leaders have done very questionable things, our position is that the Church remains good and holy and blessed and protected by Jesus Christ (Mt 16:18).

Jesus has been building and protecting His Church for 2000 years, and He can still be trusted to do that. If you have a problem with some of the things going on, we’re encouraging you to tell it to Jesus in prayer!

We’ll see more results if we pray when we’re tempted to “blurt out” our concerns on social media!

COUNTER CULTURE

We understand that you grow an audience faster these days if you make controversial statements and focus on things that make people angry, but we’ve made a decision to promote the good people around us in the Catholic Church.

In other words, we’re going “counter culture” (a play on words — we have a feature over at Bible Study Cartoons entitled “Counter Culture.”)

So if you share our belief that the Church is the Bride of Christ, that she is good and beautiful, and that there are still many wonderful people at work all around us for the glory of God and the good of His people, then support us here at Catholic Roads. We’ll tell you how to do that at the end of this article.

FINDING OUR OLD CONTENT

We’re leaving some of our old posts here on the Catholic Roads website — for nostalgia, perhaps. But we do plan to move many of those old posts and cartoons to Bible Study Cartoons (biblestudycartoons.com).

We’ll be using that site to focus on evangelization and catechesis.

Please visit the Bible Study Cartoons website too and be sure to like it if you want to see more cartoons about the Bible and the Catechism.

You know the deal — it helps with those quirky, ever-changing algorithms (or something like that).

NEXT STEPS

Okay! It’s time to explain how you can help us out with this rather unique ministry effort.

You can start by liking this post — the one you’re reading right now (… algorithms again). Maybe even leave a short comment.

Also follow this website and the Bible Study Cartoons website too.

Don’t forget to follow us on social media too please. They direct traffic to posts and tweets that cause people to react (thus, the mean and negative accounts often get the most traffic — it’s all part of that “algorithm way of life”).

Oh yeah! Tell your Catholic friends about what we’re doing here on Catholic Roads and Bible Study Cartoons!

And ask them to intensify their prayers for priests, deacons, seminarians, religious — and each other too.

Vivat Jesus!