Crysta Rollins Facebook ad: “You are reading the Bible wrong.”

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Pope John Paul II saw it coming before any of us did. While the rest of us were filling the pews and saying our prayers and assuming our children would do the same, he looked out at the Catholic world and saw something that should have terrified us. He saw our children leaving. Not because they hated the Church. Not because they were angry. Not because someone convinced them God wasn't real. Because nobody had ever given them a reason to stay that went deeper than "because this is what we do." He saw it so clearly that he gave it a name. The New Evangelization. Not a mission to convert non-Christians. A mission to re-evangelize Catholics. Our own people. Our own children. The baptized, confirmed, First-Communion-receiving, Mass-attending sons and daughters who were quietly walking away from the faith their parents had given them because the faith had been handed down as practice without understanding. He said it in 1983. He repeated it for the next 22 years of his papacy. He begged us to listen. "Deepen your knowledge of the Word of the Living God by reading and meditating on the Scriptures." We nodded. We agreed. We said yes, Holy Father. And most of us never did it. I didn't. And three years ago, my daughter stopped going to Mass. Her name is Sarah. She is 34 years old. She was baptized at St. Catherine's. She made her First Communion in a white dress I still have in a box in my closet. She was confirmed at 15. She was married in the Church. And three years ago, slowly, without any announcement or argument or dramatic moment, she stopped. First it was a missed Sunday here and there. Then it was every other week. Then just Christmas and Easter. Then just Christmas. Then nothing. I kept waiting for a conversation that never came. I thought she would tell me why. I thought she would say something I could respond to, something I could argue with, something I could fix. Instead there was just silence. An empty space where her faith used to be. And I didn't know how to talk about it because I didn't know what I would say. Then last Thanksgiving it happened. We were at the table. The whole family. My husband, my son and his wife, Sarah, her husband, the grandchildren. Someone said grace. And after dinner, while the kids were in the other room, my son mentioned something about a reading he had heard at Mass. Sarah was quiet. Then she said it. "I just don't see why any of it matters, Mom. I went to Mass for 30 years and I never understood what we were doing there. I don't even know what most of the readings are about. Nobody ever explained any of it to me." The table went quiet. I opened my mouth to respond. And I had nothing. Not because she was wrong. Because she was right. Nobody had ever explained it to her. Not Catholic school. Not CCD. Not me. I had taken her to Mass every Sunday for 18 years. I had enrolled her in CCD. I had made sure she received every sacrament. I did everything I was supposed to do. But I never explained why. Because I didn't know why. Not really. Not in a way that would hold up against a 30 year old woman looking across the dinner table and asking, honestly, what is the point. I could not point to a passage in Scripture and show her why the Mass matters. I could not open my Bible and show her where confession comes from. I could not explain why our Bible has 73 books and her Protestant friend's has 66. I could not tell her what the Book of Wisdom says or who wrote it or why the Church has treasured it for 2,000 years. I had given my daughter the rituals without the roots. And she did exactly what John Paul II warned us our children would do. She left. I drove home that night and I did not say a single word for the entire ride. My husband reached over and took my hand but he didn't say anything either because he knew. He knew that what Sarah said at that table was the thing I had been afraid of hearing for three years. And he knew I couldn't answer it. That night I sat at my kitchen table at 2am and I thought about John Paul II. He died on April 2, 2005. Sarah was 13. She was confirmed two years later. I remember thinking at the time that the Pope who had baptized a generation of Catholics was gone, and now it was up to us to keep the faith alive in our children. I failed. Over a billion people watched him die. His last public appearance was at the window of the Apostolic Palace. He tried to speak. He tried to give the blessing. The most powerful voice in the Catholic world opened his mouth and nothing came out. He had spent 26 years begging us to deepen our understanding of Scripture, to know the faith well enough to pass it on, to take the New Evangelization seriously. He died still asking. And I was sitting at my kitchen table 20 years later having lost my daughter to the exact thing he warned us about. He cannot sit across from Sarah at Thanksgiving dinner and answer the question I couldn't answer. He cannot open a Bible and show her why the Mass is not a ritual but a sacrifice that has been rehearsed for 3,500 years. He cannot explain to her what is in the seven books of her own Catholic Bible that she has never been told about. He cannot do what he spent 26 years begging us to do for ourselves. In the weeks after Thanksgiving I tried to fix what I should have fixed decades ago. I pulled my Bible off the shelf. The one my mother gave me. I opened it to Genesis and started reading. I quit in Leviticus. The same place I've quit every time I've tried for 30 years. I bought a study Bible. It weighed four pounds. The footnotes were written in a font I needed a magnifying glass to read. I made it through three pages before I felt the same overwhelm I've felt my entire life. I tried a podcast. A popular one. It was well produced and the host was engaging. Three months in I realized it only covered 66 books. Protestant. No Wisdom. No Sirach. No Maccabees. Not my Bible. Not Sarah's Bible. Not the Bible the Church has used for 2,000 years. I closed my laptop and sat there thinking about Sarah saying "nobody ever explained any of it to me" and knowing that I still could not explain it. Even now. Even after the wake-up call. I still did not understand my own faith well enough to make the case for it to my own daughter. My daughter-in-law found the Catholic Bible Companion. She is a convert. She came into the Church through RCIA four years ago when she married my son. She has been Catholic for less time than Sarah has been away from the Church. And she understands the faith better than I do. That fact alone should tell you everything about the problem. She ordered it for me without saying much. It arrived on a Tuesday. Leather. Gold foil. Ribbon marker. Solid in my hands. The kind of book that looks like it belongs beside a Bible. I opened it to the page on Exodus. One page. Four minutes. Who wrote it. When. Why. The Passover lamb, selected on the 10th of Nisan, living with the family for four days, slaughtered on the 14th. The blood painted on the doorposts. Death passing over. The meal eaten together. And the connection to Catholic teaching: the Passover was never just a memorial. It was a rehearsal. Fifteen hundred years of practice for a day that had not happened yet. And the Mass continues what the cross fulfilled. I closed the Companion. I opened my Bible to Exodus 12. And I understood, for the first time in my life, what I was reading. The Passover was not a story about ancient Egypt. It was a blueprint for the Mass. The lamb without blemish. The blood on the wood. The meal. The command to do this in remembrance. Every element of the Mass was sitting in Exodus, waiting for someone to show me it was there. I sat at my kitchen table and cried. Not because of what I had just learned. Because of what Sarah never learned. Because I had taken her to Mass every Sunday for 18 years without ever being able to tell her why. Because if someone had given me this one page 20 years ago, I might have had an answer for her at that Thanksgiving table. That was four months ago. Since then I have read more of my Bible than I read in the previous 55 years of being Catholic. Exodus. Romans. Hebrews. Galatians. Wisdom. Maccabees. James. Mark. Philippians. Each time the same process. One page of context, four minutes, then read. Each time the book made sense. Each time words I had heard at Mass my entire life suddenly landed with their full meaning. The Mass changed. Not the Mass itself, what I heard. When the priest said "Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world," I heard the Passover underneath it. When the lector read from Paul's letter to the Corinthians, I knew which church, which crisis, which argument. When the first reading came from Wisdom, I knew who wrote it and why and what prophecy was hidden inside it. For the first time in 55 years, I understood my own faith. And for the first time, I knew what I would say to Sarah. I have not had that conversation yet. I am not going to pretend this story has a perfect ending. My daughter has been away from the Church for three years and a book on my nightstand does not automatically bring her back. But something has changed. Last month Sarah came over for dinner. We were cleaning up afterward and she saw the Companion sitting on the kitchen counter next to my Bible. "What's that?" "It's a companion for the Bible. It gives you one page of context for every book so you actually understand what you're reading before you start." She picked it up. She flipped through a few pages. "All 73 books?" "All 73." She stopped on the page for the Book of Wisdom. "I've never heard of this one." "It has a passage in chapter two that describes the crucifixion. Written about a hundred years before Jesus was born. It has been in our Bible your entire life and nobody ever told either of us about it." She read the page. She didn't say anything. She set the book down and we finished cleaning up and she went home. Two days later she texted me. "Mom, can I borrow that book for a few weeks?" I dropped it off the next morning. I am not going to tell you that my daughter is back at Mass. She is not. I am not going to promise that this book will bring your child back to the Church. That is not something any book can promise. But I will tell you this. For three years I had nothing to say to my daughter about the faith. I had no answers. I had no depth. I had no way to show her that what she walked away from was worth walking back to. Now I do. And for the first time in three years, she asked me a question about it. John Paul II spent 26 years calling Catholics to understand their faith deeply enough to pass it on. He called it the New Evangelization. He said it over and over. He died still saying it. This is your chance to finally answer him. The Catholic Bible Companion. 73 pages. One page for every book of the Catholic Bible, including the seven that most of the Christian world removed and most Catholics have never been told about. One page before you read. Four minutes. Then open your Bible. Not so that you can win an argument with your daughter. Not so that you can prove a point at the dinner table. So that the next time she asks you why any of it matters, you have something to say. Do not spend another year with nothing to say. All 73 books. The whole story. Tap below and get yours. https://selinary.com/pages/list

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You are reading the Bible wrong..

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