Jimmy Akin, over at the National Catholic Register, wonders if Catholics are a bunch of wimps.

He had an encounter with an evangelical acquaintance who was concerned that Catholic Jimmy was not saved.

Excerpt

I hope we can chat again in the future!

I couldn’t help admiring about the gentleman the fact that he was bold enough to go up to a total stranger and start talking about sensitive personal things like whether the stranger has a properly configured relationship with God.

That’s one of the more sensitive and personal topics that can be broached, especially in a one-to-one conversation—as opposed to preaching to a big group of people and asking them individually to consider their relationship with God. The latter is peanuts. Any decent public speaker could do that. Going face-to-face with a single person and making the rectitude of his relationship with God the topic, that requires courage!

I could tell that the gentleman was nervous at the beginning of our conversation, so I did my best to set him at easy and signal that I wasn’t threatened or put off. While I didn’t have a lot of time (I was, after all, getting in my car to go somewhere), I engaged the subject with him happily and enthusiastically, and we had a great (if brief) truck-side conversation.

It brought back pleasant memories of my own time as an Evangelical.

And as I drove away, there was a prominent thought in my head: Catholics almost never do what he just did.

Why?

Why Catholics so seldom work up the courage to approach a total stranger with the message of Jesus.

One might think it’s because Catholics are chicken, that they’re afraid to do so. And of course they are. Evangelicals are, too! You have to screw up your nerve to do this kind of thing. That’s only human!

Yet Evangelicals do it and Catholics—for the most part—don’t.

Why is that? Read the article here.