Sadly, unless you want to know where to buy expensive chocolate or how to dress your Priest like a big tit or some role plays to use in place of the Gospel, you probably won't find your questions being answered by the Catholic Youth Services.

If you are a young person over the age of four, you probably already know that you should be nice to people and not waste food. But, assuming you go to a Catholic school in the UK, you've probably never heard anybody talk about the following...

Q: Where does the Bible deal with or talk about the evil of porn?

Q: How do we live holy lives? It is too hard with my friends always trying to talk me into stuff I know is wrong. How do I get the strength to say yes to God and no to my friends?

Q: My mom wants us to pray the rosary every night as a family, but I think it is boring. It is just the same prayers over and over again, and it takes too long.

Q: My little brother has celiac disease, which will keep him from receiving communion when the time comes. Eating wheat would make him violently sick and could even cause him to die. A host is made of wheat. This disease is a real burden on a Catholic who wants to take the Eucharist. Can he take a rice host?

Q: Lately I have had a lot of doubts about everything that I stand for as a Christian. Everything in my life seems to be going lousy. My family is always yelling. I don’t think my mom and I can ever have a peaceful conversation. I don’t understand why all this is going on. A friend of mine said that it isn’t my fault and that my mom is just going through stuff and I should understand. She said all I have to do is have faith. I pray all the time, but it doesn’t work. Everything is just so overwhelming at times and I don’t know what do to.

Q: I have some non-Catholic friends who love to challenge my faith and ridicule and put me down when I cannot answer their questions. What's the best way to deal with them?

Q: Recently I read at a Christian website about how homosexuality is a sin, and those who protect their rights are not people of God and are going to be sent to hell on the day of judgment. This made me extremely angry. I believe in God, but I don’t believe that He will send homosexual supporters or homosexuals to hell for this. Does the Catholic Church agree with me?

For answers to questions, visit No Question Left Behind.

For a patronising repetitive retelling of the relevance of recycling, visit loserville.

You may recall my recent Evangelisation Question, I remain perplexed at the massive disconnect between what the Church (Popes, Councils etc) say about Evangelisation and what the average bod in the pew (myself included) actually thinks/does. But there is another evangelisation question to be asked. I don't know if it's reassuring or worrying that Karl Keating is asking it. The Catholic Answers guy, the man from catholic.com. Isn't he supposed to know these things already?

My wife was at the gym when a woman entered and breathlessly asked no one in particular, "Did you hear the news?"

For a moment my wife feared there had been some calamity--a wildfire threatening the neighborhood, the death of a prominent political figure, the bottom falling out of the stock market--but no. It was bigger than that. The woman revealed that "Paris Hilton is out of jail!"

The next day, I would guess, the woman returned to announce that Paris Hilton was back in jail. I know of her return behind bars only because it was reported on the front page of the "San Diego Union-Tribune," right alongside other important international news.

And I know who Paris Hilton is only because I looked her up on Wikipedia, where I learned that she is an actress who cannot act well, a singer who cannot sing well, and a courtroom bawler who cannot even bawl well. She is an heiress who, at birth, was given the name of a hotel. That may explain things.

He goes on to say some subjective stuff about todays celebrities being crapper than the celebrities of the past, I'm not interested in that, neither is he...

However that may be, my interest is not in Paris Hilton or Orson Bean or the fictitious Norma Desmond but in the woman at the gym who, unfortunately, is not fictitious and who, equally unfortunately, seems to be representative of many Americans.

I mean those many Americans who are unserious. They aren't given to real thinking. They emote. They easily are swayed by appeals to greed and envy. They are interested in bread and circuses.

This makes them difficult targets for evangelization. No matter how well trained you are in Scripture, no matter how clearly you can explain Church teachings, no matter how convincingly you are able to put the case for Christianity, none of it will have the slightest impact on a mind closed to higher things. You cannot walk through a door that is closed and locked. (Our Lord could--and did--but you are not our Lord.)

It's tempting of course, to make rash comments about this being an American problem. That sort of thing doesn't happen in the land of Fisher, More and Chesterton. But it does. Karl's experience is similar to my own...

When I engage in apologetics, I interact with people who are interested in religion. Even atheists are interested in religion, if only to oppose it. Their very opposition shows that they are further advanced than are the readers of the tabloids. At least they know that religion matters.

And the Protestants and Catholics I deal with, even though sloppy in the practice of their faith, know that religion is one of the few things that count. They may misunderstand what Christ taught, and they may follow his injunctions irregularly, but they know that he is talking about the important things and that the "National Enquirer" is not.

There are millions of Americans who already are Catholics, at least in name, and need help in knowing their faith better. There are millions more who are Christians of some other sort and need to understand that their true religious home has its terrestrial headquarters in Rome. And there are millions of other Americans, of other faiths or no particular faith, who are searching for truth, however ineffectively.

But there also are millions who do not even rise to Pilate's level to ask, "What is truth?" To them, truth is whatever is in the entertainment headlines, which is to say their truth is entirely fictitious. Is there any way to make real headway with such people? Do we have to wait for them, one by one, to come to the realization that celebrityism, in the long run, not only is unsatisfying but actually is subversive of true happiness?

What do you think should be done? How can we make headway with such folks? Is there something proactive we can do, or do we just have to hope they someday will tire of wallowing in celebrity worship and will turn toward real religion?

You can read the full e-letter or join the discussion at the Catholic Answers forum. However, Karl has ninety-two comments already so feel free to leave some for me below.

When you take that step, that fateful step, of deciding to take your religion seriously. Seriously enough that you buy books about it and read them, you reach a point (if you happen to be a Catholic in England) where you are a little bewildered.

Imagine if you will, working in a supermarket. One day you decide to take your job seriously and you buy the supermarket guidebook as produced by the board of directors at the head office. You read the book and discover that the supermarket has a special mission - selling things. How do you sort things out in your head then, when you go to work the next day and discover that your colleagues at the supermarket have no idea we are supposed to sell things. Some of them have a vague inkling that we used to sell things once and others have heard of other supermarkets that sell things but we don't want to be like them! To further exasperate you, the boss at the supermarket acknowledges that it should be selling things and the employees should want to sell things but he doesn't want to push it or else they will all leave.

Thus it is in the parishes of England.

A sweeping statement perhaps but where this is not true it is the exception and tends to occur in small bubbles, so the Faith Movement are good as a group but Fr Massie's Parish Council hasn't used the word Evangelization for some time (I'll wager). It's okay though, because they are going to become a fair trade parish which will obviously help the citizens of West Hull develop a relationship with Christ.

The problem is that I am no better. Ella and I tried to get a group together an do Evangelization work in Hull and while we were able to start a group we struggled to achieve anything. Spreading the Gospel is not as easy as St. Paul makes it look.

So, get to the point James, I was interested to see an interview on Sunday's Zenit with the director of CASE. The Catholic Agency for the Support of Evangelization. They are good eggs so I am interested in what they have to say. Maybe they can help me.

When the archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, asked me to help in setting up CASE, he told me that we needed to look at such new ecclesial movements and distil the secrets of their success into the mainstream of parish life, so that evangelization would no longer be a foreign, or even an embarrassing, concept to Catholics, but something they felt happy to engage in.

I've always been a little iffy on the whole new movements front. The whole thing seems to be an exercise in taking the best people from local parishes and shipping them off somewhere. I think a better word might be dissolve. We want to dissolve the secrets of their success in to the mainstream of parish life. Distil implies boiling something off. Unfortunately in this interview we don't get to hear what the secrets are.

Q: What are the biggest obstacles to evangelization in Europe today?

...many people who think they know what Christianity means actually have a distorted and woefully incomplete picture....

...[people are] profoundly disillusioned with all attempts to explain and save the world...

...the very proclamation of the truth is seen as somehow oppressive and destructive of human freedom and happiness...

All familiar points to anyone who has tried their hand at Evangelization. Any more problems?

Q: Why is it often difficult to engage Catholics with the need to support evangelization?

...evangelization is associated with a certain kind of Protestantism, or with related images such as people preaching aggressively on street corners and "televangelists" looking for money...

...By making known a variety of Catholic methods of evangelization, and especially by associating it with the Eucharist and Eucharistic adoration, CASE tries to get across the message that there is a Catholic way of evangelizing...

...There is also the problem that evangelization is seen as the preserve of specialists, but we want Catholics to see that it is fundamentally about living and sharing their faith in everyday life...

This means Catholics need to recover a sense of confidence in their faith, and to see it as something coherent -- nothing less than the splendor which radiates meaning to every corner of the universe. Where there has been poor catechesis, liturgical deformation or a false understanding of ecumenism or interfaith work, Catholics lose the sense that the Gospel is a marvelous treasure that all need to hear.

In my experience these come up in reverse order. First, Catholic's in Parishes suffer the "poor catechesis, liturgical deformation or a false understanding of ecumenism or interfaith work" and if they escape that then they see Evangelization as the preserve of specialists and finally if they escape that, as specialists they are paranoid about not seeming too protestant. Hence we have to say "Evangelization" instead of "Evangelism".

So, lots of problems (sorry 'challenges') and few solutions. I am left still looking. Here's what I have so far...

• Evangelization has to begin at home. Where I have failed to share Christ I am sure it is because I have been busy shutting Him out of various corners of my own life. It is no good to say "you should follow Christ but I haven't really got around to praying outside of mass yet". I'm working on it.
• Jesus is personal and introductions have to be personal. Sticking up posters and making announcements is no substitute for one friend introducing a friend to another. If you want to evangelize you have to meet people and then you have to talk to them about God. This is difficult because people tend to think talking about God is uncool. I have to stop caring about if people think I am uncool.
• Don't underestimate that "Where there has been poor catechesis, liturgical deformation or a false understanding of ecumenism or interfaith work, Catholics lose the sense that the Gospel is a marvelous treasure that all need to hear." It's not rocket science. If you turn personal confession in to near general absolutions (it's rite two honest govner) then people are going to get the message that God is not personal. If you are a priest and you do these things then you are destroying peoples spiritual (eg. more important than physical) lives. Depriving people of personal forgiveness from God is probably worse than depriving unborn children of life because you are killing the life that would live forever.

That's enough to be going on with (I have to go to work now) but remember:

Pope John Paul II wrote: "Those who have come into genuine contact with Christ cannot keep him for themselves, they must proclaim him"

The quest continues.

Given that...

The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services. (Sacrosanctum Concilium 1963)

And more recently...

I desire, in accordance with the request advanced by the Synod Fathers, that Gregorian chant be suitably esteemed and employed as the chant proper to the Roman liturgy (Sacramentum Caritatis 2007)

Who can honestly say that their parish priest gives a toss about actually using Gregorian Chant in the liturgy?

[we can]

It's a bloody scandal that's what it is and if I were half the man I should be I'd be setting fire to people by now.