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!
Close the schools and have your faithful with families move to Ontario Canada. We don't pay for Catholic school. It's funded through the government. We could start our own faithful Catholic province since we have lots of land and a low population! Yes we've had to close and cluster due to Satans successful advancement on our sheep too but the churches we do have are overall in good condition. With no tuition costs we have available funds to donate to our church. Jesus says love your neighbor...you're all welcome to our neighborhood :)
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