Hello there Rosary Lovers! The Catholic Church contains 1.3 billion members, and that number is always growing. But how many of these are dynamic Catholics?
In this post we will ask: What is a dynamic Catholic?
A Dynamic Catholic Takes their Faith Incredibly Seriously
The difference between a nominal Catholic and a dynamic Catholic is that the latter takes their faith very, very seriously.
A dynamic Catholic LOVES their faith, adores Mary, loves the Church and worships and feasts upon Christ in the Eucharist as often as possible.
A dynamic Catholic LOVES the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
A dynamic Catholic believes in the teachings of the holy Catholic Church with all their heart.
The Church teaches the immaculate conception? A dynamic Catholic embraces this doctrine and would never dream about denying it.
The Church teaches it is morally wrong to use artifical contraception? A dynamic Catholic takes this teaching into their heart and soul and does all they can to obey this teaching.
The Church teaches it is gravely sinful to masturbate? A dynamic Catholic turns away from this sin as much as is in their power, simply because the Church says so.
A dynamic Catholic believes and does what the Catholic Church says, simply because the Church says so and because it’s the Church that says it.
No-one can become a saint without being a dynamic Catholic
The kind of stuff the saints were made of was of this sheer quality of Catholicism. No-one can hope to go straight to heaven when they die unless it is this kind of Catholicism that they try to live.
The saints worshipped God in the Church. They venerated the Church as their Mother and would do anything to propogate her and serve her.
Many of the saints were murdered because they loved the Church like this. This is dynamic Catholicism.
There is no better life to live
Ultimately, the saints chose this path because they believed with every aspect of their being that there is no better life one can live other than this.
Dynamic Catholicism IS true Catholicism. It is what every Catholic is called to, and it is what God expects each of us to attain to when we join the Church.
In essence, this is nothing other than Spirit-filled Catholicism.
Catholics who are full of joy and of the Holy Spirit. These kinds of people change their own lives, the lives of their families and friends, and the world.
It took a handful of Spirit-filled Catholics to transform the planet and turn the world upside down. These were the apostles and their followers.
There is an entire book in the Holy Scripture devoted to this theme: it’s the Book of Acts. I encourage you to read it.
How can I become a dynamic Catholic?
Powerful Prayers, Examination of Conscience, Confession and Eucharist
Well, the first step is to be fully reconciled with the Church. To do this, you will perhaps need to ‘start over’ with your faith, as it were.
That’s why God has given us Confession. We all mess up, we all sin, even the saints sinned. But they went to Confession when they did so and ‘started over’.
You need to make a determined decision to live with all your heart for Christ in the Church. That’s the first step. You might begin by praying some very powerful prayers.
The Church holds in her sacred Treasury a whole host of consecration prayers: to the immaculate Heart of Mary, to the sacred Heart of Jesus, to the Trinity, and so on. Try this link here.
Eventually, these prayers will so work on your soul that they will probably drive you back to the holy Sacrament of Confession.
Ask God to reveal to you all that you should bring to Confession. Seek God about your next Confession and spend a little while preparing for it. This is going to be a big occasion and you won’t want to be the same after going. You want your next Confession to change your life.
Then, when you are ready, when God makes the path clear, go to Confession and bring all that God lays on your heart. Don’t worry about forgetting things; God is merciful. Just say what comes to mind.
Don’t hold anything back. Big things or little things; big sins or small sins, come clean with it all. Present God with your entire heart.
No, you won’t make a perfect Confession. But if you come to God with humility and offer him what he lays on your heart to confess, in your own natural way of expressing things, you will make a good confession.
After receiving the forgiveness of ALL of your sins, get to the Holy Eucharist as soon as possible.
Establish a Pattern of Prayer/Devotion
After receiving the Eucharist, you will need to commit daily to a form or pattern of prayer. Most of us go off the rails as Catholics because we do not have a regular pattern of devotion or prayer in our lives.
Try different things and find what works for you. Ask the Holy Spirit to show you what spiritual discipline is best for you as a unique individual and a unique Catholic.
Then stay faithful to it.
It may be:
- Daily Lectio Divina (meditative, repetitive readings of small passages of Scripture)
- Recitation of the Holy Rosary
- Daily visitation to a local Catholic Church to spend a few minutes before the Eucharist
- Saying the Our Father (Lord’s prayer) a few times a day
- Buying a Catholic prayer book and reciting the prayers in that
- Reciting some standard morning and evening Catholic prayers
- Daily attendence at Mass
There are many, many others.
The NUMBER 1 most important of the above, and the one we should all seek to attain to, is daily attendence at Mass. No other devotion can come close to this one.
This is where Heaven and Earth meet. You will always find all you need at Mass before the Eucharist and in feeding on the body and blood of Jesus.
Keeping Trying! And Never Give Up!
The one thing to always remember is what St Mother Theresa said: ‘The one difference between and saint and a sinner is that a saint gets back up again after falling.’
The one thing God always wants you to do, no matter how far you fall away from him, is to keep trying and to keep rising.
What did Jesus do when he fell 3 times bearing his cross willingly for our salvation? He got back up. Each and every time.
He did not let the shame and horrible taunting of the soldiers and the pain of his wounds and his tiredness and hunger and thirst get the better of him.
He got back up, to ascend the Throne of the Cross, to die for us and fulfil the will of God.
Hi Matthew,
I agree with you totally, when it comes to practicing your faith you should be 100% dedicated. It is, something very serious and when making a commitment, it has to be a part of your life or the only way of life for you as an individual. As we saw with the numerous saints that were killed for the sake of the church or for the love of the church. When you spoke about Confession, this is where a lot of us as human beings fail. I believe some of us haven’t learned what truly is confession. What does it really means or how do we seriously ask for forgiveness? I do appreciate how you brought out this vital point on confession. It is only God who can assist you when doing so. Thanks so much for this article. Great encouragement! No matter how many times you fall, just get back up and keep going. God bless.
Hi Tricia
Thank you for your insightful comment.
That’s very interesting that you think some of us haven’t properly understood the nature of Confession. Can you elaborate please? I think it would be useful to us all if you did.
I must admit, Confession is a sacrament that I have only just begun to appreciate properly. It’s so simple and yet so very mysterious. An absolutely wonderful sacrament and gift from God to the Church.
I think in Confession, it’s best to keep things simple. We confess those things that are on our hearts and that we know we have done wrong (especially those things that we know are seriously wrong). And we have to be genuinely sorry for doing them. I don’t think much more is required of us than that.
One of the most useful ways I’ve heard it explained is that Confession is for those things we need to ‘throw up’, that is, things that are genuinely bothering us and troubling us. It is absolutely vital we get to confession and confess these things, or they will eat us up in our lives. God doesn’t want this for anyone.
Guilt is useful, very useful, but only to get us to feel sorry, Confess our sins, and try not to sin again. Guilt is no use if it eats us up.
Obviously, it’s hard to be very, very sorry, and that’s why we have Confession. Most of us aren’t as sorry as we could be, or aren’t sorry for the best reasons (i.e., because we have offended such a good God). Confession deals with all of this imperfection in our repentance, simply by its very nature. Confession is FOR people who DON’T feel sorrow for their sins as they should.
If we could feel perfect sorrow over our sins, we wouldn’t need Confession so much. Sometimes we do feel perfect sorrow over our sins, for the sake of God’s love, but this is relatively rare and is always a gift of God into our hearts. The Church calls this perfect contrition and it always wipes away every sin we’ve ever committed, even really bad ones, and even BEFORE we get to the Confessional and Confess our sins.
But as I said, most of us only have imperfect contrition/sorrow for our sins, and that’s why we need Confession. We go to the Confessional, bring our imperfect sorrow and our imperfect knowledge of ourselves and of God, and simply confess to the things that we think we’ve done wrong. It doesn’t even matter if we genuinely forget to confess some really important things. Through the priest we are forgiven EVERYTHING.
And I think it’s really important for us to be real before God, to confess naturally. Just be yourself.
That’s the glory of Confession I think. In essence, we just bring our humility and our sorrow, even with all our weaknesses, even our weakness in feeling a true sense of sorrow.
You are spot on, it is only by God’s Holy Spirit that we can be prepared for Confession and find grace to confess our sins.
This is why an Examination of Conscience is so important before we confess. But we don’t need to go overboard here. Just a few minutes in prayer asking the Holy Spirit what we’ve done, and using some kind of list of sins, like the Ten Commandments, or Confession apps that are available on our phones.
I’m so glad you benefitted so much from the article! I loved writing it (as I have loved writing most of the posts on this site).
“No matter how many times you fall, just get back up and keep going.” Thank you for that quote. Absolutely 🙂
“The difference between a saint and a sinner is the saint always gets back up after falling.” St Mother Theresa.
“The righteous man falls 6 times, but gets up 7 times.” Book of Proverbs.
God bless you too.
I must admit that I don´t have in-depth knowledge about Catholicism. Sure, I know some things like praying the Rosary and to the Saints. I´ve also heard about confessing your sins to the priests at the confessional.
I agree that God is merciful and that we should take the time to communicate with him daily. It could be through prayer, worship, and praise.
You wrote that it is morally wrong to use artificial contraceptives. Would you mind explaining this further?
Thank you.
Hello there and thank you for your comment!
I would strongly recommend studying Catholicism. Even from a neutral viewpoint, it’s incredibly interesting. It’s also an exceptionally internally consistent belief-system. Everything hangs together within it, and no belief is out of place.
This includes the Church’s rejection of the use of artificial contraceptives.
The Church believes that the nature of sex is two-fold:
1. Open to life (open to reproduction)
2. Union between two people.
The Church believes that both of these aspects are absolutely essential to every, single sex act. They are part of what sex is in its very essence. If either of these is removed from sex, then the Church believes that sex becomes something less than it is intended to be.
As a result, the Church takes the view that each and every sex act needs to be open to life, that is, open to the possibility of reproduction.
This rules out the use of artificial contraceptives as something acceptable to the Church. (It also, incidentally, rules out sex between two people of the same sex.)
Catholic couples can, for good/serious reason/s, decide to space out their children over a few years by the use of natural birth control, which we call Natural Family Planning.
For good reason/s, Catholics can also indefinitely decide to either stop having children, or to not have children (such as if becoming pregnant might be seriously harmful to the woman.)
Catholics do this by abstaining from sex during fertile periods, and engaging in sex during infertile periods. This is permissible by the Church, so long as there is good reason.
Good reasons include a wide range of things, like mental health, finances, physical stuff, and so on. A bad reason would be, ‘We’re only having sex during infertile periods because we want to enjoy our lives and not have kids yet.’
I hope that helps. If you have any further questions about this, I’ll be happy to help.
God bless and take care.
Hey Matthew!
Thank you for sharing about what a Dynamic Catholic is. I have never heard of the term before, but it’s very interesting. I grew up in a Catholic church and went to Religious Education since I was 5, but I do not consider myself a Dynamic Catholic. I do know quite a few close family members and friends who I could call Dynamic Catholics!
Hey there Lorenz
Yes, I only heard of the term recently actually. Surprisingly, it’s very popular and is searched a lot on the net every month. About 11,000 searches a month…!!!
You’re fortunate to have had all that Catholic upbringing behind you. I converted only in 2019 after becoming convinced in 2018 that the Catholic Church is the Church Jesus Christ founded, and that the Pope is Jesus’ visible representative on God’s earth.
I didn’t fall in love with the Church until 2020. I had a bit of a rocky start, struggling to accept everything the Church teaches, such as her teaching regarding contraception.
It’s great you have those who are close to you whom you can immediately reference as dynamic Catholics!
God bless you