Faith, Responsibility, and Communion

“Freely you have received; freely give.” — Matthew 10:8

Catholic.Work is a work of faith, prayer, and service. Our goal is to build new roads to Emmaus in the digital city — helping the Church, her ministers, and her people encounter Christ in an age where technology often distracts us from the work of our salvation and sanctification.

Self-supporting

In the spirit of Christian stewardship, we are entirely self-supporting. Like many spiritual communities before us — we do not seek or accept outside donations or institutional sponsorships. We depend solely on our own members and associates: those who share in the work, benefit from it, or feel personally called to help it grow. We think that when people are acting with faith and integrity they will begin to take responsibility for and be stewards of those initiatives they associate themselves with.

Our Tradition of Support

We believe that:

• Contributions are acts of stewardship, not transactions.
• Each member and friend of Catholic.Work contributes as they are able — not from compulsion, but from generosity, responsibility, and gratitude.
• Support is both material and spiritual: We encourage participation in the mission and discernment about how to contribute.
• We are interested in souls, not money. We only have fees for those things where cost is associated beyond what a non-profit constituted like ours would have on hand given our approach to being self-supporting. Most of the support we offer to dioceses and parishes is designed to be free of charge.
• Transparency, simplicity, and accountability are essential to our integrity.

Communion with the Archbishop of the Archdiocese of San Antonio

As we grow, our intention is to be recognized formally as a Catholic apostolate (right now we are an association of Catholics constituted civilly as a non-profit). We are working with the Archdiocese of San Antonio in this process. It is our desire to always be in communion with and at the service of the Archbishop and the people he shepherds in this region. In our constitutions we clearly state that upon dissolution any assets we possess go to the Ordinary of the Archdiocese of San Antonio, who is presently Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller.

In our constitutions we ask that the Archbishop or his delegate would appoint us a priest as spiritual mentor and sacramental minister. We also have written into our constitutions that the Archbishop would approve our choice of president and can with just cause depose him and ask for the board to have another election. While this hasn’t been worked out yet we expressed this desire to his delegates. We pray for a positive outcome because we see this as a way of ensuring communion over time.

We want to be specific and explicit in our support of and communion with the Archbishop and also Pope Leo XIV. We are excited to have an American pope and grateful for the wisdom and pastoral experience he brings to the Church. We are also grateful to have an Ordinary who has an evangelist heart coupled with the capacity to be present to the poor and broken hearted. We aren’t unaware of divisions and factions within the global Catholic Church and even here in our Archdiocese. We experience them in our families and even in our own hearts. We only seek to be agents of communion with Christ as devoted members of the Church. When we take communion we are both receiving Christ and making a statement about our intimate connection with the successor of apostles appointed to our local Church. We note that this isn’t encouraging a naive form of obedience that would reinforce clericalism or shut-down discussion and dialogue, but we believe that authentic renewal always seeks communion with the Church and never isolates.

Without turning to relativism or embracing a New Age syncretism we also are open to and seek to learn about other religions and cultures, this is both for the sake of evangelization and our own growth in authentic philosophical wisdom. We recognize the two sources of truth our Creator gave us: the Book of Nature and the Book of the Word. This is an ancient way of saying that we can learn scientific or philosophical truth from the study of nature and we learn salvific and sanctifying truth from the Word of God in Divine Revelation.

Inter-religious dialogue and Ecumenism

In relationship to our separated brethren in Protestant Ecclesial Communities we seek to grow in understanding of their grievances and concerns in relationship to historical Catholic practice and doctrine. Rather than being satisfied with an argument against Sola Scriptura or not baptizing infants we take it a step further and ask what problem this doctrine was trying to address, and consider what it means for those who subscribe to it. Without glossing over the fact that there have been longstanding differences of opinions over certain things we find great solace in the number of Protestant communities who see the Apostle’s Creed as part of their statement of faith. This is the same creed we teach from in the initiation of catechumens.

We are also encouraged and strengthened by those Protestants willing to stand for unpopular Christian moral truths related to marriage, family, and human sexuality. We think it is possible to both learn from our Protestant brethren and, in communion with Christ, be agents of an evangelization that contributes to unity, deeper communion, and our own salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ. In short, our we are intentionally ecumenical with our Protestant brethren and the Eastern Orthodox Churches, who, with the Church, we recognize as having maintained apostolic succession, and preserving the ancient traditions, liturgies, and sacraments of the Church in their fullness. While we are not an Eastern Catholic association we have great esteem for their traditions, theology, art, culture, and spirituality.

We encourage anyone with questions about this apostolate related to our standing in the Church to call the Chancellor’s office of the Archdiocese of San Antonio. They oversee all the apostolates in the Archdiocese and are the best source for this information.

How You Can Support

If you are interested in our want to contribute to our development — or if this mission has become part of your own — you may support it in one or more of these ways:

1. Associate with us, reach out, build new roads with us.
   In any work that seeks to glorify God, it often opens us up to sharing the gifts we have and to taking responsibility for the works we participate in.
2. Participation, Sharing, and Prayer
   Join in the work. Share our resources, collaborate on projects, or help us connect with others who serve Christ through their work. We are seeking those who would join in our work as contemplatives in prayer and self-offering. Such people may have limitations to their capacity to participate in other ways and/or have a calling to contribute this way. Pease contact us to discuss how you may pray and offer with us for the Church and the World.
3. Voluntary Contributions
   If you are personally associated with Catholic.Work, you may contribute financially to help sustain the work.
   Please see the contact page for contact info until we set-up our giving button. We can provide documentation of our Federal EIN and being formed as a nonprofit in the State of Texas but we are in the process of getting 501c3 approval, which takes some time. So, at this point donations should not be considered tax deductions.

“Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” — 2 Corinthians 9:7