In its issue for Oct. 23, 2011, Our Sunday Visitor published an article in which were listed 10 things that all Catholics should know, but apparently do not. Among those are:

1. We are all called to holiness;

2. We have all fallen short of that goal;

3. A personal relationship with Jesus is not just a Protestant thing;

4. Reading the Bible is not just a Protestant thing;

5. The Church is not one equally valid choice among many;

6. Hell, sadly, exists;

7. The Church does not think "sex" is a dirty word;

8. Sunday Mass is still mandatory;

9. Sacramental Confession is a must; and

10. All Christians are obliged to do penance.

You could, I suppose, quibble with the order of importance from 1 to 10, although the authors of the article did not in any way indicate they were placed in that kind of order, but what struck me is that most people, even the practicing Catholics (that is those who observe carefully all the precepts of the Church), would say to me, "We know all those things." But that is just the point. Most of us have knowledge of these things as facts, but we do not always have that deeper knowledge that comes from the experience of these facts.

In November we celebrated All Saints' Day and I think most Catholics, even the most laxed and diffident, could find a saint or two that they like, for example, St. Jude for lost causes, St. Anthony for lost things, St. Blaise to ward off strep throat, and so on. But whenever we are told, "You are called to be a saint," we all too often say, "That is for someone else," and yet the truth is we are called.

The purpose of the Church is to give life to the soul; if we use what the Church offers, we grow in grace, we become more like Christ and we take a step upward on the way of the cross following Christ's steps. If we reach the end of that path, we see God face to face.

So too we are all quick to acknowledge that we are sinners. That is all to the good. But too often we take some satisfaction in that: since everybody else is bad, I can excuse my own badness because it is not as bad as someone else's badness. So we wallow in sin. We condemn the Church because it contains sinners and yet that is the reason Christ founded it. We need forgiveness and in the system God has created, forgiveness is given only to those who ask for it.

Because of the influence of the social media, it is easy to become tired of the harangues of people who talk about a personal relationship with Jesus as if it were akin to finding a long lost brother. That is not it. To everyone he met and loved, Jesus said in one way or another, "Follow me." The Apostles, the disciples, the women, the sinners, the outcasts, the tax collectors, the thieves, even those who profess the atheist religion (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and their ilk) could be driven grudgingly to admit that the Christ of the Gospels was a nice person in some ways at least. But Jesus did not come to be the Prince of Niceness. It was he who said, "I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. I have come for division" (see Lk 12:49-51). Jesus says to us, "Wake up! Make a choice! Do something!"

Reading the Bible is useful, but not if we are going to regard it as an encyclopedia of religion or a handbook like the Boy Scouts use. First of all, Catholics use the longer Bible, not the truncated King James version. Secondly, the Bible is not like the best seller you buy from Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble. The very word bible means "books" — note the "s," plural. It is a series of books, each written in a particular time for a particular purpose and those books are not placed in the Bible in exact chronological order.

In Bible reading, men act just like they do when they are trying to find a new town or place, they never ask directions; women are smarter, they always do. If you set yourself down to read the Bible, join a viable study group or read it with a commentary, even a simple one. The Bible is not a complete record of God's interaction with us. It is like the Whitman Sampler; it gives us various examples of the contact between God and man and leads us to find more points of contact with Him.