when I was in California, many years ago, I used to do youth ministry. With the teen club we would do mock trials pretending we were in Roman times during the persecutions. The judge would ask, is there enough evidence to convict this person of being a Christian? The prosecutor and the defense attorney would go back and forth shifting the evidence. What I found interesting is that they seldom checked in on the accused’s attendance at church or knowledge of the catechism. Rather, they looked for evidence of his or her charity, compassion, generosity, forgiveness. Perhaps these young people instinctively understood the message in St. John’s epistle: “Children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth.”
