Crysta Rollins Facebook ad: “Every grandparent needs to read this”

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2879783569055430

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Jewelry & Watches

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CCD is why your grandchildren stopped going to Mass. I know because I taught it for 20 years — and I just found out what happened to my students. I was proud of our CCD program. Really proud. Coloring pages of the saints. Sacrament prep worksheets. Word searches. Fill-in-the-blank Catechism questions. Snacks before dismissal. The kids tolerated it. Parents dropped them off and picked them up. I thought I was building the next generation of Catholics. I was wrong. Last year, I decided to track down my former students. Kids I'd taught from 2004 to 2020. I found 83 of them on social media. What I discovered made me physically sick. More than half of them no longer go to Mass. Most don't call themselves Catholic anymore. Not angry. Not posting manifestos about leaving the Church. Just... gone. "Spiritual but not religious" in their bios. Or nothing about faith at all. Quietly disappeared — the way Catholics always do. One of them — Maria — had posted something that broke me open. "CCD taught me to fill in worksheets about sacraments I never really understood. I could pass the test. But nobody ever gave me a reason to believe any of it was true." I brought it to our parish priest. Father Thomas. I showed him the numbers. I showed him Maria's post. He was quiet for a long time. Then he said something I didn't expect. "I found something a few months ago. A priest friend told me about it. Apologetics for kids. 73 lessons. It teaches them WHY the faith is true — not just what the Catechism says." "Apologetics for kids?" "Real arguments. Evidence for God. Why the Bible is historically reliable. How to defend the Resurrection. The same arguments Aquinas and Augustine made — but at a level children can actually follow. His parish's kids can now explain things most adults can't." I didn't believe him. But I ordered it that night. The next Wednesday, I opened it with my CCD class. "Everything that begins to exist has a cause. Did the universe have a beginning?" A girl named Lily answered. "Scientists say yes. The Big Bang." "Right. And you know who first proposed the Big Bang theory? A Catholic priest — Fr. Georges Lemaître. So if the universe began, what caused it?" A boy named Marcus jumped in. "Something that didn't begin. Something eternal." "And what might that be?" "God?" "You just made a logical argument for God's existence — the same argument St. Thomas Aquinas made 800 years ago. Without quoting a single Bible verse. Without filling in a single worksheet. You reasoned your way there." Their eyes went wide. These were the same kids who used to slouch through CCD waiting for snack time. Week 4, we covered why we can trust the Bible. 5,800 Greek manuscripts. Written within decades of the events. More documentation than any ancient text. Marcus looked up. "So we have more proof for the Bible than for stuff everyone just believes? Like Julius Caesar?" "Way more." "Why didn't anyone ever tell us that?" "Because I didn't know it myself. Until now." Week 7: Evidence for the Resurrection. We covered the minimal facts approach. Five facts even skeptical scholars accept. The students went through every alternative explanation. Each one failed. Lily raised her hand. "So the Resurrection isn't just faith. It's the best explanation of the historical evidence?" "Yes." "Then why does everyone act like being Catholic means you just believe stuff for no reason?" "Because somewhere along the way, we stopped teaching the reasons. Our Church has Aquinas. Augustine. The Scholastic philosophers. 2,000 years of the best arguments ever made for God. And we've been handing kids word searches instead." Week 10, I got a phone call. Lily's grandmother. "Lily spent 45 minutes at Sunday dinner explaining why the Resurrection is historically credible. She used phrases like 'minimal facts' and 'manuscript evidence.' She's 11 years old. My husband — who hasn't been to Mass in years — didn't know what to say. He went with us the next Sunday." Week 14, something unexpected happened. I got a message. From Maria. The same Maria who posted about being "taught to fill in worksheets." "Mrs. Moretti, my mom told me you're teaching CCD differently now. Real arguments. Evidence. The actual reasons. I wish I'd gotten that. Maybe I wouldn't have drifted away." Week 20, Father Thomas made an announcement after Mass. "We're rebuilding our entire religious education program. Our catechist has been using something that's transforming our kids. They're not just memorizing answers for sacrament prep anymore. They're learning why the faith is true — the way our tradition always said we should teach it." Three families enrolled their children in CCD that week who had never signed up before. One grandfather told me after Mass: "I stopped trusting CCD years ago. It felt like babysitting with coloring pages. What Father just described? That's what my grandchildren actually need." I'm 62 years old. I taught CCD for 20 years. And for 20 years, I was part of the problem. Coloring pages and word searches and sacrament prep worksheets aren't enough. They never were. They create kids who can pass the test but can't answer the question. Kids who receive the sacraments but can't explain them. Kids who look Catholic until someone asks "why" — and then they have nothing. More than half of my former students quietly walked away. Not because CCD was too weak on Catechism answers. Because it was too weak on reasons. And here's what haunts me most: the reasons were there all along. Aquinas built them. Augustine built them. The Church preserved them for 2,000 years. I just never put them in front of my students. If your parish's CCD program looks like mine did — worksheets, coloring pages, word searches, and nothing about WHY it's true... Your grandchildren are being set up to quietly disappear. 73 lessons of apologetics that does what 20 years of CCD couldn't — not because the tradition was missing, but because we finally put it in their hands. Don't wait 20 years like I did. The kids in your parish right now are counting on you. Stop handing them coloring pages. Start handing them Aquinas. Before they become another Maria. Before they become another quiet disappearance.

Where the ad sends people

https://selinary.com/pages/apolo

Every grandparent needs to read this 👆