The month of  February is customarily designated as Catholic Press Month and so these few remarks are intended to help us think about the role of the Catholic press and its place in our lives as Catholic people. My message is a simple one: The Catholic press is more necessary now to us than at any other time in the life of the Church in the United States.

Older practicing Catholics have a good working knowledge of the teachings of our faith, and I am sure are surprised, as I am constantly, by the ignorance of the simplest truths about the Catholic faith rampant in the larger non-Catholic community. St. Paul says, “So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ” (Rom 10:17). That certainly was true of the Church up to the modern age, but the pressure brought to bear by the spirit of moral relativism has infected society and helped prevent the reporting on or explanation of  Catholic doctrine.

You can see where all of this is leading. It is vital that we, as those who wish to be faithful practicing Catholics, supplement our religious knowledge by the reading of good Catholic literature. I am happy to say that the diocesan publications of all of the six dioceses in Illinois are excellent sources of this information. Our own Observer does yeoman service in this cause and thankfully still comes to our homes more frequent than most.

When choosing a Catholic publication it should reflect these truths: The Church is one, holy, catholic and apostolic. 1) It is the same throughout the world. 2) No matter how virtuous or not the Church’s ministries and representatives are, the Church presents to you and me the infallible means of holiness proposed by Christ for our sanctification. 3) The Church is catholic, that is, universal. There is no point on this globe that is not the responsibility of one of the successors of the Apostles, our bishops. Finally, the Church is apostolic. It is founded on the faith and teaching of all of the Apostles recognized by Our Lord and the Prince of the Apostles, St. Peter, and his successors.

This is a long way around saying that I think you should subscribe to the diocesan paper, and I think you should discernibly, prayerfully and carefully search out among publications that purport to be Catholic, those which meet the criteria I have all too briefly outlined above.

But we should not just pass over Catholic Press Month by saying, “Isn’t that nice” and then let it go. Ours is a difficult religion because it ascends all the way back to the ascension of Christ and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost; that is getting to be a lot of years. So, no Catholic is immune from the obligation of learning more and more about our Catholic faith in order to practice it more and more humbly, more and more faithfully, more and more deeply.