Human Reality has two components. There is the perpetually outnumbered Roman Catholic Church, The Body of Christ on Earth.
Outside of, and often opposed to, The Church are the teeming masses of lost, loveless souls mired in Conventional Reality. Its scowling hordes sneer at The Church. It is clear that Jesus has divided humanity into two groups: “friends who obey My commands”, and those He describes as “flavorless”.
His most “obedient friends” are Catholics. How many “obedient friends” does He need for His work on earth? Jesus clearly tells His obedient friends in Matthew 5:13: “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt lose its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is good for nothing any more but to be cast out, and to be trodden on by men.”
How much salt does Jesus need? We may combine Jesus’ Words with our own, human knowledge, and provide a formula to evaluate our society and ourselves.
The best chefs recommend 6 grams of salt on a one pound piece of meat that weighs 454 grams. Jesus and good chefs have made it clear: one gram flavors 75 grams of meat. So, one reasonably good, kind, loving, obedient, “salty” Catholic is enough to flavor 75 of the “flavorless”.
The Salt to Meat Ratio of 1 to 75 is a simple calculation that’s well worth exploring, if only because you and I desperately want to know where we stand. The Salt to Meat Ratio is a number that lets us know if we are “Catholics” or “flavorless”.
There are 16 waking hours in a day. In a week, there are 16 hours x 7 days in which we are awake: 112 waking hours/week. 1/75th of that is 1.5 hours, one hour and thirty minutes.
If we spend one hour at Mass each week and a half an hour praying (that’s two Rosaries in a week, or the equivalent in Novenas, Bible reading, etc.) we’re on the right side of The Salt to Meat Ratio. If we spend an hour and a half growing closer to God and The Church He founded by saying to the first Pope, “Thou art Peter, and on this rock I build My Church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”, we’re salt, by the skin of our teeth!
How does our nation stand in The Salt to Meat Ratio? Church statisticians calculate there are 67 million American Catholics. They estimate that 24% attend weekly Mass, about 16 million. How many grains of salt, faithful Catholics, out of three hundred million people, do we need for our nation to attain The Salt to Meat Ratio of 1 : 75? 300,000,000 divided by 75 =4,000,000.
So, depressing though things may appear, Catholics have every reason to keep praying, working, and learning. As Catholics!
