If you are reading this, you are probably a Catholic who takes your church and your faith seriously. The Catholic Key is published for you, the involved Catholic who cares about the church because it is your church, in which and through which you embrace and express your faith. If you are a regular reader of The Catholic Key, we know a number of things about you.

Compared to a non-reader or an occasional reader, you are more likely to:

• Attend Mass regularly.
  
• Be active in your church in some sort of service role.
  
• Be generous in your financial support of your parish and your diocese.
  
• Care about the implications of your faith in daily living.
  
• Care about the social and political implications of your faith.

Nevertheless, despite your strong and steady presence, the church is not complete. You are not the whole enchilada. There are crucial ingredients missing. There are people - and you know some - whose connections to the church are tenuous. Some may even attend services regularly to fulfill what they perceive to be a spiritual obligation - to pay their dues, so to speak, to maintain their membership. There are people - and again you know some - who have given up on even the minimal "dues" payment, who show up only occasionally or not at all.

Of the categories described, only you - the involved one, the one who gives the most time, who works to apply faith to daily actions, who votes according to the social and political implications of our faith, who cares about the health of the church - only you are well and fully served by the church.

Make no mistake, this is not a criticism of some mythical "them." The church is us. You, I, we are the ones who both succeed and fail as church.

We do a great job of serving the involved Catholic. Besides the liturgical celebrations there is a rich variety of ministries available to participate in, there are formation programs, Bible study groups, etc. Many possibilities are listed weekly in The Catholic Key.

You, the involved Catholic, have The Catholic Key to keep you informed of what goes on in your diocese outside your own parish. The Key also tells you about the other parts of the church of which you are a member - the pope, the Vatican, other dioceses, parishes, organizations and individuals living out their faith and conducting their apostolates.

The Key also offers you spiritual, scriptural and theological commentary to nurture and deepen your faith. And it provides you with a weekly smile in the "Father Flood" cartoon strip as well as a crossword puzzle as a change of pace. You get all that and more from The Catholic Key. But what about those who are less involved - what do they get?

For too many, the answer has to be "Nothing." A lot of people don't know or don't care about their diocesan newspaper. But that's not the tragedy. The tragedy is that, by implication, they don't know or care about their church beyond their immediate experience of it. For many, being Catholic starts and ends with their attendance at Sunday Mass. The last blessing is nothing but a directive to go home and forget about it till next week. And many others don't even have that much.

It's up to us who do care to do something about that. One thing we can do is to see to it that more people get to read The Catholic Key on a regular basis. How do we do that? Well, first of all, we need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that The Catholic Key is free. True, it doesn't cost you anything to pick it up or have it handed to you in church. But it is paid for. The Catholic Key is paid for by parishes and by the diocese, as well as by individual subscribers and advertisers.

Producing each copy of The Catholic Key at the current level of circulation costs 49 cents. Somebody has to pay. Ultimately, that "somebody" is you, the involved Catholic who supports your parish and your diocese. Even the money that comes from advertisers can be attributed to you because unless you, the regular reader, paid attention to the ads and used the services they offer, our advertisers wouldn't place their ads in the paper.

But in one sense you have been getting a free ride. We are one of only two dioceses in the U.S. that has virtually no method of circulation other than by having people pick up a copy in church. All the other dioceses mail their diocesan newspapers to subscribers' homes. That costs more. But it's more effective. Why? Let me count the ways:

1. You get the paper earlier - on Thursday or Friday instead of on Sunday. The news you get will be fresher. You will be able to get information on coming weekend attractions.

2. You get the paper every week that it's published. As it is now, if you are out of town, or for some reason don't get to church, you probably miss that issue completely. There just might be something in it particularly relevant to you.

3. Those who don't regularly go to church get a newspaper, which might be their only real link to the church. Who knows, the Holy Spirit may strike them through an article they read in the paper about something or someone who inspires them.

4. People who get a publication, whether or not they read it before, tend to become readers. Nobody thought they wanted or needed the funny papers before the New York World started publishing "The Yellow Kid" in the 1890s.

5. Advertisers love home-delivered newspapers, especially those that have a special audience. The Catholic Key gives them that extra. In addition, our ads are easy to find. They are not buried on the 167th page of a seven-pound newspaper. Because of home delivery, advertisers will be more eager to be in the paper, and can expect even more positive results than they are already getting. Eventually, increased ad revenue will more than cover the added cost of home delivery.

6. We can reach people we are not reaching now. We can never say we have enough active, involved Catholics. We need more people like you. We have a job to do, a mission given to us by the head of our church, Christ Jesus. It's called evangelization.

The basic job of a newspaper in the church and in society is to help form community. Catholics at all levels of involvement are the church. To be church, we have to be interested in and care about one another and the world in which we live. As our founder said, how can we say we love God whom we cannot see unless we love our neighbor whom we can see?

That's what we are about, and that's what our Catholic newspaper is about.