"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge . . ."

One of the principal challenges facing us in the Church today is the problem of ignorance and confusion. It is no longer a matter of large numbers of rank-and-file Catholics (lapsed or "practicing") rejecting Church teachings or "dissenting" from them; many of them have not the vaguest knowledge of what those teachings are. And, ironically, the more widespread the ignorance about Catholic teaching, the greater the prejudice against the Catholic Church. The fact that "the truth is out there" somewhere, in encyclicals and historical documents of the Church seems of little avail when one is staring priests and catechists in the face who don't believe in hell or purgatory, and who deny the importance of sacramental confession, observance of holy days of obligation, rubrics of Mass, or importance of knowing the Bible. It may be that writers such as David Palm are wrong about this or that detail in their interpretation this patristic or that encyclical. But my interest is with what animates their concern in the Church today, which I do not think can be easily dismissed as a matter of misreading this Church Father or that encyclical. "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge . . ." (Hosea 4:6)