Deadly Indifference: How the Church Lost Her Mission and How We Can Reclaim It

Religious indifference—the belief that all religions are equally valid and able to lead people to salvation—has rapidly gained global ascendency over the last five decades. It’s even infected the Catholic Church, wreaking havoc on her mission to the world. Why is indifference deadly to Catholicism? Because it turns Catholicism into “just another religion,” neuters the Church’s role as our path to salvation and converts the parish into little more than a social gathering place. The result? Former Catholics now constitute the second largest “religion” in America. Seventy percent of Catholics do not believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist—and even higher percentages reject the Church’s moral teachings. Mass attendance is in freefall, and even the most basic habits of Sunday-going Catholics, such as regular Confession, have been lost. Eric Sammons, a former diocesan director of evangelisation and now the editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine, pulls the curtain back on the rise of religious indifference, uncovering a wealth of fascinating particulars about what made the “old” Church work, and what is causing the “new” to collapse. He identifies the most damaging distortions of the Faith, presented as progress, and explains why Church leaders felt compelled to upend traditional Catholic life. In captivating detail, Sammons explores why the New Evangelization was destined to fail and explains how the decision to de-emphasize the Church’s exclusive role in the process of salvation inevitably led to mass abandonment of the sacraments. He identifies how certain teachings were ignored or toned down—leading to their sudden collapse—and how progressives elevated ecumenism over evangelisation and supplanted proclamation of the Gospel with “dialogue.” Deadly Indifference is both a vital examination of the current crisis facing the Church and a blueprint for how to overcome it. Let’s recover what was lost and return the Church to its unique rank as the light in a darkened world.

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