Can you explain papal infallibility?

Dear Rev. Know it all,

Can you explain papal inscrutability?

Yours,

Betty Kencownzell 

Dear Betty,

I think you mean papal infallibility, and of course I can explain it. Have you forgotten to whom you are writing?

The Oxford dictionary defines “infallible” as incapable of making mistakes or being wrong. Papal infallibility means that the Pope is never wrong when he speaks a) in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, b) in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, and c) when he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church.

When the pope, successor of St. Peter as Bishop of Rome, speaks “in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians”, he is said to speak “ex cathedra.” A “cathedra” was a straight backed chair, or throne. A cathedral is, thus, where the teaching chair of the bishop is kept. The “cathedra” in question is the teaching chair of St. Peter. There is an ancient chair kept at St. Peter’s in Rome, enshrined in the great bronze throne behind the main altar.  It was thought to be the chair from which St. Peter taught. It was probably a gift from Emperor Charles the Bald to Pope John VIII in 875. Still, it’s a nice thought.

The reason much ado is made about a chair, is that at least at the time of Christ, rabbis taught while sitting in a teaching chair. When Jesus went up the mountain with His disciples to deliver His famous sermon on the mount, He sat down to do it.  “Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and opening his mouth he taught them.” (Matt 5:1) If a rabbi had something important to say, he said it sitting down; hence he spoke “ex cathedra” or “from the chair.”

 There is a swell book, a real page-turner by, a German theologian, Heinrich Denzinger (1819-1893) called the Enchiridion Symbolorum et Definitionum. It contains the chief decrees and definitions of all church councils, along with the oldest forms of the Apostles' Creed and a list of condemned propositions. The first edition has just 128 documents. The latest editions have included the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and recent Popes, so if you want to know what some doctrine means, get what, in seminary, we fondly called “a Denzinger.”  Here is what Denzinger has to say about infallibility.

“What is claimed for the pope is infallibility merely, not impeccability or inspiration”  and that to  speak infallibly “The pontiff must teach in his public and official capacity as pastor and doctor of all Christians, not merely in his private capacity as a theologian, preacher or allocutionist, nor in his capacity as a temporal prince or as a mere ordinary of the Diocese of Rome. It must be clear that he speaks as spiritual head of the Church universal.” 

Denzinger has a lot more to say about infallibility, but why be tedious in a church bulletin? What people don’t understand about the teaching of papal infallibility taught by the first Vatican Council (1869-70) is that it limits the pope’s authority.

There have been some really wild and wacky things popes have said over the years. For instance, according to Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085) “All princes should kiss the feet of the pope alone…” and “that it is lawful for him to depose emperors …” and in 1302 Pope Boniface VIII said in the papal bull Unam Sanctam, “Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff. And how about the unpleasantness with Galileo? Didn’t the church infallibly declare that the earth was the center of the solar system?  No, what Cardinal Bellarmine, a really nice guy, said was that “treating heliocentrism as a real phenomenon would be a very dangerous thing, irritating philosophers and theologians, and harming the Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture as false.”  The Cardinal was thinking about the wars of religion north of the Alps in which Protestants and Catholics were killing each other in the millions and he thought, “We don’t need that down here right now.”  The problem was that Galileo was directly saying that the Bible was wrong, and in so doing he was laying the groundwork for a social upheaval that was dangerous. If Galileo had said it differently, there wouldn’t have been a problem.

In fact Galileo was wrong. His theory didn’t fit the number. The planets don’t travel; around the sun in circles as he claimed — they travel in ellipses. Why get thousands killed over a theory that didn’t work mathematically. Galileo declared himself far more infallible than any pope. The Church is not capable of speaking infallibly about science. Neither are scientists and that was the point!  

As for the statements of Boniface and Gregory, they were political in nature, and thus couldn’t be called infallible. That is why there is not a lot of foot kissing going on in the Vatican these days.  (By the way “papal bull” refers to the Latin word “bulla” or “seal” in English by which the pope applies his personal seal to the letter to guarantee its authenticity. Don’t get any silly ideas.) So you see, the First Vatican Council reminded popes that they were not infallible when they spoke about politics, cosmology, ecology, and most other -ologies. They were infallible only when they spoke about faith and morals, and it has to be clear that they are doing so. Furthermore, the pope has infallibility, not impeccability or inspiration. Lack of impeccability means that he can sin and the lack of inspiration means that he cannot come up with new doctrine. He can only illuminate and declare what the Church has always held and believed. We Catholics are not Mormons.  We have no chief “Prophet, Seer, or Revelator, “as do the Mormons. The “Prophet, Seer, and Revelator” is the title of the supreme Mormon authority. A Mormon revelator “makes known, with the Lord’s help, something before unknown. It may be new or forgotten truth, or a new or forgotten application of known truth to man’s need.”

Before 1978, anyone with African ancestry could not be priest in the Mormon Church, and could not participate in most temple ordinances, including celestial marriage. That meant that they could not go to the highest heaven. But, Glory Be! In 1978, the prophet seer and revelator said that God had changed His mind and now blacks would be allowed into the highest heaven.  A pope could only dream about such infallibility. Our poor pontiff is stuck with what we have held and taught from the beginning, things like marriage being a relationship between a man and a woman since Jesus said that, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh” (Matt. 19.5)

For Catholics, Scripture and Sacred Tradition are the only sources of revelation. The magisterium (teaching authority of the Church) is not a source of revelation. It can only bring forward and restate what we have believed from the first. The last words my boyhood pastor said to me were “Keep that faith handed down to us from the apostles Peter and Paul.”

 Lord knows I’m trying, Monsignor O’Brien, Lord knows I’m trying.

Rev. Know-it-all

What's with the synod? Has teaching changed?

Dear Rev. Know it all,

Is it true that the synod has accepted gay marriage and will allow people to be married more than once?

Yours sincerely,

Mary Talbliss 

Dear Mary,

No. It is not true, despite what the mindless hair-hats of the media are telling you. The extraordinary synod (meeting) just concluded was a preparation for a larger ordinary synod of bishops in October of 2015. There was a mid-meeting “relatio” (report) on the group discussions thus far that was slipped in by the very progressive Archbishop Bruno Forte the read thus.  

“Le nostre comunità sono in grado di esserlo accettando e valutando il loro orientamento sessuale, senza compromettere la dottrina cattolica su famiglia e matrimonio?”

The English translation prepared by the Vatican read thus:

 “Are our communities capable of providing that, accepting and valuing their sexual orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony?”

The word “valutando” was translated into English by the Vatican as “valuing.” Bad translation.                          

 “Valutando” in fact means “evaluating,” “weighing” or “considering.”  This “considering” is, furthermore, part of a question. The English speaking press jumped on this like squirrels on an acorn because they want it to be true. It ain’t true. Bishop Bruno wants it to be true. The press wants it to be true. It still ain’t true.

Cardinal Pell says that three-quarters of the bishops were opposed to the wording of the relatio and insisted that they hadn’t said that. In fact the topic only came up in one of the small group discussions! Let me quote a little of the incomparable Fr. Zuhlsdorf’s translation of Marco Tosatti’s report in la Stampa, an Italian magazine

Cardinal Baldisseri, the General Secretary of the Synod announced the decision NOT to publish the reports of the Circuli Minores (small groups’ discussions) the announcement provoked the protest of Card. Erdo (the president of the synod) and numerous other Synodal Fathers. The Pope, silent and very serious. At last, Fr. Lombardi announced that the reports of the commissions would be made public. Erdo took the floor, implicitly distancing himself from the report that bore his name, and saying that if that “disceptatio” had been made public, then the others of the Circulo Minores ought to be made public. His speech was followed by an avalanche from many others along the same line, underscored by thunderous applause. The Secretary of the Synod, Card. Balidisseri, was watching the Pope, as if in search of advice and lights, and the Pope remained silent and very serious.  

Needless to say, the small group reports are now published.

Some news outlets were using the word “earthquake” to describe the change in the Church’s position. The Church has not changed her position. The real earthquake was the brouhaha on the synod floor. Bishops don’t behave that way. Not since the Middle Ages. The earthquake is the bravery of so many bishops in the face of a few self-important people who want to push a failed liberal agenda. They fail to understand that if the Church has nothing better to offer the world; the Church only becomes useless to the modern, dying world.

The African Church in particular is distressed by the full court press of some German bishops led by Cardinal Kasper to allow Catholics married outside the Church to receive Communion. The bishops of Africa make the point that if Europeans must have more than one wife, how can they tell Africans to end the time honored custom of polygamy? (You see in the West we believe in polygamy, that is having more than one spouse. We have only one wife…at a time, but we still have as many wives, or husbands as we please.)

Cardinal Kasper told the press:

Africa is totally different from the West. Also Asian and Muslim countries, they’re very different, especially about gays. You can’t speak about this with Africans and people of Muslim countries. It’s not possible. It’s a taboo. For us, we say we ought not to discriminate, we don’t want to discriminate in certain respects…..I think in the end there must be a general line in the Church, general criteria, but then the questions of Africa we cannot solve. There must be space also for the local bishops’ conferences to solve their problems but I’d with Africa it’s impossible [for us to solve]. But they should not tell us too much. 

To make matters worse, Kasper denies giving the interview. The interviewer produced the tape in which he says exactly the words quoted. What moral cowardice!  

So, the Africans and the Eastern Christians don’t have much to tell the Church in Europe and the “developed” world? As any regular reader knows, I am proud of my German heritage. There is no place in the world I feel as at home as the little hill in the Central German town from which my family comes. It is the little hill on where lie the graves of my ancestors. I can close my eyes and I am there looking down into the town, the cobbled main street, the castle tower and the church spire. I grieve for the land of my ancestors because the faith of my ancestors is, in all parts, dying and, in most parts, dead. 

Let me tell you about the church in the land of my ancestors. It is one of the richest churches in the world, even though the faith itself died in the aftermath of the holocaust. If the churches are empty how can the hierarchy be rich? Let me explain the Kirchensteuer, the church tax. 

To be a Catholic or a Protestant in Germany is a kind of ethnicity. I have often met people who will say things like, “I am Catholic, but I don’t go to church, or I am Catholic, but I don’t believe in God.”  To be Catholic or Protestant is not a matter of faith for many, but of custom. I come from a Catholic or Protestant town, family, region, etc. If I want to be baptized, married or even buried in a Catholic cemetery at the side of my ancestors, (and this is important to Germans) it is expected that I am a Catholic.  To leave the Church is to leave my heritage. To change religions is to change ethnicity. If however, you consider yourself a Catholic, or a Protestant or the member of any church, you must pay a percent of your income which the government deducts from your salary.  If you are not a member of your church, you must go to the rectory and tell the pastor of the church to take you off the rolls. In effect, it costs most people about $1,000 a year to be Catholic.  So to be a Christian is not necessarily to believe the Lordship of Jesus Christ. It can also and in our time more often mean to have a membership in a club, a kind of burial society. A dead church, I suppose, needs a burial society. 

More and more people are saying, “Why should I pay money to a society that means nothing to me? I am not a believer. My parents and grandparents were not believers. Why should I pay?” 

I suspect that the hierarchy of Germany see power and wealth slipping away and want to tell the faithless in Germany that they needn’t trouble themselves about the less convenient demands of Catholic morality. So, to accommodate the dying church of Germany, they want to tell the African and Assyrian/Chaldean/Arab Christians to just shut up.

SHAME! SHAME! I am embarrassed for the graves of my ancestors. A dying church tells the most vital churches in the world to mind their own business. The Arabs and the Africans have nothing to tell us? Five-year-old children are dying for the faith in Africa, in northern Iraq and in Syria. Their severed heads displayed on pikes by bloodthirsty jihadists, while we in the West insist that our pleasures and preferences should not keep us from partaking in the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross!

If any high school principal in the United States had said or even implied that the opinions of non-Europeans were insignificant things, he would be forced to resign, yet as of this writing Cardinal Kasper remains one of the pope’s closest advisors.

Thus saith the Lord! “Behold, your house is left to you desolate.” (Matt 23:38)

The future of the faith is Africa. Its past is Europe.

Rev. Know-it-all

How's that Religious Ed program working out?

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

A while ago you published something about some hair-brained scheme to change the nature of religious education. How did that ever work out?

Cecilia “Cee Cee” Dee

Dear Cecilia,

I have asked the crackpot clergyman who hatched the scheme to write a report. Here it is:

When I came to this parish, I found a fairly standard religious education program. The records were well kept. The ceremonies for the sacraments were well organized, things ran like clockwork and very few of the children or their parents went to Mass. The religious education schedule followed the public school schedule exactly. The public schools had a three day weekend; we had a three day weekend, and so on. I could always tell when the public schools were not in session on Monday. There were no children in church on Sunday.

I tried to visit the children in the classroom. Everyone reminded me how important that was. “It’s very important for the pastor to visit the children.” They never said why it was so important. The children couldn’t distinguish me from the tooth fairy. They just knew I was some guy who wore black. In the first few months of my tenure here, I attended a meeting of the teachers to share my vision for religious ed. I said that I wanted to include a component that stressed biblical literacy.

All the teachers said, and I quote, “NO!”

One of the teachers, who fancied himself a moral theology professor, for fifth graders said that what he was teaching was just too important to modify.

 Religion classes went from 9 am to 10:30 or 11:00 am about half the Sundays of the year. I had Mass at 8 AM and 10 AM after which I raced from room to room when I had the energy and there weren’t other things I was supposed to be doing.  When I walked in to the classrooms, I found teachers at lecterns lecturing about commandments to be memorized, assignments to be studied and tests to be taken in order to qualify for the three C’s, Confession, Communion and Confirmation.  I found children with heads on desks, hollow sunken eyes and thinly veiled anger.  

It was clear that they had neither eaten nor slept well. They had been in a classroom in the government schools where for five unrelenting days they had been subject to preparation for government tests. In our times good performance on tests guarantees government money for government employees. Test preparation passes for education and government employees masquerade as teachers. Now, these captive children were being subjected to a sixth day of the same unrelenting droning on about facts. They hated all religion and Catholicism in particular.  Thus Religious Education!

The first thing I did was to move back the time that classes would start from 9 am to 10 am. The children were delighted. The adults were peeved and tried to convince me to reconsider. My suspicion was that they had better things to do with their Sundays than spend them in church. One parent was furious with me. I quote, “How dare you decide what’s best for my family.” Her Sunday’s were rigidly scheduled to include shopping and athletic events. It was important to get religion out of the way as early as possible. As she berated me for ruining her domestic life, all I could think was, “Please don’t hit me….”  She didn’t but she, her frightened husband and her unsmiling, well-disciplined brood promptly left the parish.

After this, I waited for at least a year and then announced that I wouldn’t put up with parents dropping their kids off for religious  ed and then leaving.  It was common to see minivans pull up at the school door and a parent, dressed in flip flops and pajamas waved as their children stumbled into class.  It was a great deal, a babysitting service that promised to watch your kids for three precious hours on a Sunday morning. That left time for Starbucks, K-mart and the dry cleaners.

The children were expected to go to an hour and a half class and an hour long Mass.  This often didn’t happen. The kids sat around in the parking lot playing computer games and texting one another while Mass went on inside and their parents went to the K-Mart.

Enough was finally enough. I announced that if kids didn’t go to Mass they wouldn’t be passed on for sacraments. A furious parent called me to say, “How dare you tell me I’m not a good Catholic. I attend Mass faithfully EVERY Christmas and Easter and pray at home. Who are you to tell me what I should do?”  Angry letters were sent to the bishop.

After this debacle and a cooling off period I announced my next move. We would expand the religious education program. It would start around 9: 45 with doughnuts and other sugary snacks. Next there would be a half an hour or more of chasing around like wild savages and some semi-organized games that involved yelling a lot and running. Then the children would go to their classes around 11, finally going together to the noon Mass. I firmly believe that before there is catechesis there has to be Biblical literacy and a personal prayer life. If you don’t know Jesus, if you haven’t met Him in prayer, why learn about Him? The Bible is a story of a family (c.f. Jeff Cavins Great Adventure Bible Study.) It’s the story of MY family into which I am adopted through sacraments.  Why join a family about which you know nothing?

I planned three levels of instruction:

1. First comes Biblical literacy, knowing the essential story of the Bible. This gives our beleaguered Catholic kids a fighting chance when they go to high school or college and meet atheists who say the Bible and the faith are just a bunch of myths, or meet anti-Catholic sects that say the Catholic Church doesn’t teach the Bible. 
2. After the kids know the basic story of salvation they can go on to learn the truths of the faith in a more catechetical style. 
3. The study of the lives of the saints as a vehicle to Church history and Catholic spirituality is the third essential idea of the program. To be Catholic is to be part of something great and something to be proud of as witnessed to by the saints of our history.  

First food, then fun, then instruction. At the end of the class period, they spend a few minutes preparing for Mass and then go up to the noon Mass as a group.  (The noon Mass is our more contemporary Mass. My liturgical tastes run to the Neolithic, but hey, you have to put the hay down where the goats can get it.)  My great hope was that someday a child would have a tantrum because they could NOT go to church this morning. This has actually happened.

I was told, “Father, this will never work where we are because of sports.”

To blazes with sports! Go for quality over quantity. If people prefer sporting events to their religious life and their Sunday obligation, they are committing idolatry and are probably going to hell anyway.
Start with a small fanatical group of Catholics and pretty soon, if what you’re doing is really fun, kids will prefer religion to living out the athletic fantasies of their ageing parents. If you prefer sports or shopping or anything else to the life of grace, you probably should just admit it and not try to get the three C’s (Confirmation, Confession, Communion) for your children. If you don’t believe this stuff why should they?  I suggest watching the movie “Chariots of Fire”, the only movie that has ever made me envy Presbyterians.  

Things are a bit smaller. We have about 120 kids in the program, but I see most of them in church. We just started our second confirmation class of the new system. We only have about 20 thirteen- and fourteen- year-olds in the group, but I actually know every one of the kids in the class from church on Sunday.

Our most radical move so far was to move to a home school model for First Communion preparation. We have classroom preparation for First Confession, so we are pretty much covering the material twice. Parents hated the idea until they did it.  It turned into a refresher course on the faith for the parents. It also gave them a way to share their own faith with their children. I was astonished that our First Communion Mass had almost no pictures taken. Parents were involved in the actual religious meaning of the Mass. I even caught a few parents softly crying because of the beauty of the faith they had shared with their own children.

In short it has almost worked out the way I hoped. There have had to be some concessions to practicality. There is oatmeal, not just sugary snacks for breakfast, things like that, and we still have a few parents dropping off kids and then leaving, but I think there is less of that. The church is packed with kids and the young adults and parents who teach them, so all in all I think it is working out.

I wish I could take the credit, but the real credit goes to the extremely enthused and motivated
teachers who have taken it on themselves to share their faith with the kids. It is a beautiful thing to see.

Fr. Simon

A reflection on priestly life -- part 16 (and last)

the thrilling conclusion...

Letter to Ann T. Klerikuhl

Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t want to close down Catholic schools. I just wish that a way could be found for Catholic schools to serve the children of people who are in fact Catholics. If I had my way, I would give enrollment preference to those who are members of the congregation, and I would offer Catholic education to actual members of the church at very inexpensive rates. Certainly others would be welcome to enroll their children, but they would have to pay what it costs, which hovers somewhere around $15,000 per student at the present time.  

"What? Restrict access, but that is how we are going to evangelize the world! That would ghettoize the church! We would lose our moral influence in the wider society."

Get a life! Can’t you see that it just isn’t working?  

In many places we waste our increasingly meager resources on people who have no interest in living the Catholic life and never will have any interest. Forty plus years of pandering to a world gone mad has not converted the world to Christ and the Catholic faith. We have lost our moral influence, in no small measure because of the immorality of some of the clergy, but more so by baptizing the insanity of the modern world. We dispense sacraments to people who never darken the door of the church, who do not know Christ, and do not understand what a sacrament is. They just know they want it.

 I have heard my fellow clergy say that the very desire for a sacrament indicates a desire for faith. No it doesn’t. There are lots of reasons to want a sacrament for yourself or your child other than a commitment to Christ and His Bride the Church. Sometimes it seems people just want the blessing by which they mean something akin to a rabbit’s foot or a good luck charm. Some people just want the photo op. To continue this way is just foolishness and will continue to shrivel the Church. The only way to evangelize the world is to present Christ, to raise up a people committed to living the Gospel life of sacrificial love that begins with the sacrifice of the Mass and ends with sacrificial generosity to a world in need.  

The early Church flourished because the first Christians presented an alternative to the decadence of the age. They honored marriage and were ready to die for their convictions. They loved one another and came together for worship. They healed the sick and cast out demons because of the holiness of their lives and their openness to the Holy Spirit. In short, they provided an alternative to the sickness of their age. They did not simply acquiesce to the spirit of the world. They didn’t need to pick a quarrel with the world because their very presence was an affront to the world in which they lived. They were killed by the thousands simply for being faithful to the Lord and the Church. In China, Africa, Cuba the Middle-East, and elsewhere people are still dying for the faith and there the faith is vital. But it’s not happening here. 

I started this harangue months ago with a discussion of the medieval Church. In 2014 the medieval church is as dead as King Tut. The only people who don’t understand that are the idiots of the press who salivate over every new Catholic controversy that they can find or invent. They are more clerical than the worst clergyman. They are endlessly fascinated by this controversial cardinal or that renegade theologian. They have a bad case of scarlet fever, constantly cooing about the shades of red that the hierarchy wears.  

We, too, the clergy from deacon on up, still long for the medieval Church, as do the bureaucrats of religion. In the Middle Ages society was contiguous with the Church. To be Irish was to be Catholic. To be Polish or German or Mexican or Spanish was to be Catholic. The Church was the society and the society was the Church. Bishops were quite often the rulers of the local political unit. We still think that way. In the major urban centers of America, north and south. The bishop is considered a major political figure as well as a religious one. He is, more often than not, a figure like Queen Elizabeth, trotted out for a grand event, someone who looks good in the photo right there next to the mayor, all smiles. 

The most medieval of theologies is liberation theology. It is the product of an era and understanding when “el pueblo” (the people) was no different than “el pueblo Catolico.” Now in an increasing number of traditionally Catholic countries, the “pueblo” is not Catholic. The pueblo, Protestant and pagan alike despises the Catholic Church. We pretend that we can influence the political direction of society when we cannot even convince four fifths of those who pretend to be Catholic to go to church on a Sunday.  

If we don’t redirect our resources to building up the Church and to deepening our own conversions, we will never be able to bring renewal to this dying world. If we, like the first Christians, offer something better to this weary world, they will turn to Christ. If we continue business as usual and pretend that the medieval Church is still alive and well and that Christian countries are still Christian, then soon there will be nothing left but the church of the catacombs, persecuted but faithful. 

That might not be the worst thing in the world after all. That persecuted Church managed to change the world.

Rev. Know-it-all

A reflection on priestly life -- part 15

Letter to Ann T. Klerikuhl, the thrilling conclusion in two parts!

Time to wrap this up. Have you ever been asked, “Are you saved?”  or “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” 

Perfectly good questions. When some evangelicals say they are saved, they mean that they have an absolute assurance of heaven (unless of course it is a false assurance about which you can never really be sure and you may be doomed to hell anyway, but they still say that you can have an absolute assurance of eternal salvation, though you may wrong about it. Go figure.)

A Catholic recognizes that we have free will for our whole life and are free to reject God at any time.  As St Paul says, we are “saved in hope,” (Romans 8:24) but we Catholics think it is legitimate to say we are saved because we know, love, trust and serve our Savior.  We also have no problem claiming a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.  

It is personal, not private. It is not just an “I-Thou,” but an “I-we-Thou” sort of thing. You can’t love Jesus without loving his wife, strange as she may be. (I am of course speaking of the Church.)  Another way to phrase the question is “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?” This, to my lights, is the best way to ask the question. 

So what does a “saved” Catholic who has a personal relationship with Jesus as Lord and Savior look like? He goes to the Sacrifice of the Mass and lives a sacrificial life.  This business about Jesus being Lord and Savior is problematic. Everybody is good with the “Savior” part, especially when they see death and disaster looming on the horizon. The “Lord” part is a little less popular. Protestant and Catholic alike want Jesus as Savior. I know a couple dozen people who actually want Jesus to be the Lord of their life because that would mean that they have to do what Jesus tells them to do, like not sleep around, be generous to the poor, accept children lovingly as gifts from God and go to Mass every Sunday. Remember what Jesus said?  “Do THIS in memory of Me.”  (“This” being the sacrifice and communion in His Body and Blood)  (Luke 22:19 and 1Corinthians 11:24) and in the Letter to the Hebrews, (10:25) “Do not forsake the assembling of the brethren.”   

A good friend of mine says that he can pretty much tell where you are as Catholic by two things: first, what you think of Pope Paul the Sixth’s encyclical “Humanae Vitae” in which Paul VI laid out what the Church teaches about marriage, family and the destructive nature of artificial birth control, and second, what a person thinks about Sunday obligation.

Here is what the Church teaches:  Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2370: 

Every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible is intrinsically evil.  

And Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2192:  

Sunday is to be observed as the foremost holy day of obligation in the universal Church. On Sundays and other holy days of obligation the faithful are bound to participate in the Mass. 

I am a pastor and as I have explained, am obliged to serve the faithful. So who are the faithful? They are the baptized who pray, obey the Ten Commandments and precepts of the Church, who do the works of mercy, go to Mass on Sunday and think that sex is about families. In short, a Catholic is someone who tries to live by the teachings of the Church. By these standards the Catholic Church in most places is a pretty small organization.   

Let us look at Argentina, a country of 42 million people. 70% or about 30 million of these are Catholic. However, 20% or 6 million of these go to Mass regularly on Sunday. So the case can be made that there are 6 million faithful Catholics in Argentina, and I bet that half of these are senior citizens on fixed incomes. Fixed incomes? I’ll get to that later. Let us look at Honduras, the home of his Eminence Cardinal Maradiaga, a great visionary of the progressive Church.  47% Catholic 41% Protestant 10% non-religious. If the same statistics apply, in a country of 8 million people, 4 million identify as Catholic, and of these perhaps one million go to Mass on Sunday.  How about Puerto Rico, a beautiful tropical island whose population has been in steady decline since the year 2000 in which year 38% of this Catholic Island identified itself as Catholic . One and a half million Catholics. Two million Protestants and a lot of pagans. Doing the same dreary math, which comes to perhaps 300,000 people at Mass on Sunday from a population of millions that everyone assumes is Catholic. Catholicism is dying in Latin America where unlike the dying European Church; it is being replaced by evangelical Protestantism.

Let us look at that exotic land just south of the Cheddar Curtain.  In the City by the Lake, the City in a Garden, there are 2.2 million Catholics. The congregations are counted every October. In 2012 there were 446,000 people in church on an average Sunday. If the Church-On-Sunday definition of Catholic is accurate, then there are about 450,000 Catholics in Chicago. Perhaps.

It would be interesting to do a July count. In October schools and religious education programs are back in session. I suspect that a July count would be closer to 350,000, taking into account those who only come to church because it is a school requirement and pastoral exaggeration.   Two point two million Catholics are impressive.  Sounds good on paper. It’s really pretty thin on the ground.  The archdiocesan area has a total population of around 6 million which means that active Catholics comprise around 6% or 7% of the local community. We are a small Church by the Church-On- Sunday criterion. 

Those more high minded and inclusive than I will take umbrage at (that means not like) my narrow definition of “Catholic.” Personally I still believe that to miss Sunday Mass without a serious reason is gravely sinful. You can’t live the Catholic life unless you are fed at the table of the Lord. I don’t really see a great difference between a lapsed (fallen) Catholic and a non-Catholic, except that a non-Catholic is not morally to blame for disregarding the Lord’s command to participate in the sacrifice of the Mass. 

But, let us assume, for the sake of argument that I am crazy and all you have to do be a Catholic is to have a pulse and a baptismal certificate.  This is where I talk about senior citizens on limited incomes. Of the 2.2 million imaginary Catholics in the above-mentioned archdiocese, only 446,000 (probably more like 350,000) have a collection basket pass in front of them on a weekly basis. Of these, 400,000 plus or minus, a large portion of them are children and those adults who are throwing in a wadded up one dollar bill.  A very large portion of them are very generous, deeply religious senior citizens who are truly giving sacrificially, but have one foot on a banana peel and the other in the kingdom of heaven.  Over the next ten years a large portion of these older people whose generosity sustains the Church will have both feet in heaven and probably not be able to send in their monthly contributions by mail.  In short we will be in debt up to our eyeballs at the current rate. 

There are collections, second collections pledge drives, second pledge drives, and emergency collections a diminishing number of faithful are expected to tolerate. The brilliant bureaucrats of religion will probably invent the fourth and fifth collection when we are down to 200,000.  We have never taught the young about Sunday obligation or the obligation to support the Church. We have believed that out of the goodness of their naturally Christian hearts they would shell out the shekels and things would roll merrily along. Instead we have raised a generation of people who are about as philanthropic as hermit crabs. 

I know a priest whose parish is a million dollars in debt. It is in constant need of maintenance just to keep the roof on the building. He has a school of a couple hundred kids that takes up much of the parish budget. He also has a thriving congregation of not very wealthy Hispanics. He has a successful religious education program and a church full of young adults, teenagers and children. Of this congregation of thousands, perhaps 50 people from the school, including the teachers go to Mass on Sunday.

It used to be that to close a school was the kiss of death. Now it’s the kiss of life. My friend told me that if he closed the school tomorrow it would have no effect on his congregation. This means that all the parents and children who are getting a private school education at reduced costs never once throw a nickel in the collection basket. They howl when there is a rise in tuition to partially cover the spiraling costs of the private school education provided by the parish in which they refuse to participate.  How long can this go on?   

Next week the thrilling conclusion... Finally!