The Portland team was joined by a Catholic evangelist named Rico who was visiting from Jamaica. Rico originally went to Jamaica as a Protestant missionary but had a conversion experience (back) to Catholicism. He became troubled by the disunity and denominations all around him and knew something was wrong.

He said that in Jamaica there almost seemed to be a Protestant church on every street corner. He said this doctrinal disunity had the disastrous result of making all Christian doctrine irrelevant because the doctrines were all reduced to the opinion of each pastor.

Also, he was frequently told that Catholicism is boring and repetitive, but he realized that even in Protestant sects there was ‘ritualistic repetition’ each week (e.g. open with singing, then collect offering, hear some preaching, have an altar call, close with singing). There simply was no getting around ‘rituals’, but without the Eucharistic Sacrifice at the center of their worship, many Protestants were forced to make Sundays about “entertainment” just to keep people coming, and eventually people got bored of even that.

He now spends a lot of his time evangelizing. He talked about how crucial it is to stay close to the Sacraments if you want to be an effective evangelist. When evangelizing others, he said it was important to simply plant seeds, to make friends, and to let the Holy Spirit do the heavy lifting.