Letter to Jennifer “Jen” E. Russ, enough already…
It’s time I ended this harangue and moved on to
other cultural train wrecks. I apologize for what has become a helpless,
whining meander on my part, but my confusion was summed up nicely by a blues
musician who just returned from touring Outer Mongolia with a Christian rock
band. (I am not making any of that up. He is constantly traveling the world
sharing the Gospel by means of music. I think he is on his way to China in a
month or two.) He said all the meetings and committees are just a recognition
that the Church is dying and no one knows what to do.
I don’t think the Church is dying. He doesn’t
either. He said that where it has been recently persecuted, it is thriving. It
is among most Europeans that it is dying. In the term Europeans I include the
citizens of Europe, especially Western Europe and their colonial descendants,
the Americas, Spanish, Portuguese, French and English-speaking. Christianity
flourishes in South America – the protestant evangelical/Pentecostal variety, not
the Catholic – but among us Europeans the cloud of God’s glory
seems to have moved on.
It’s time to get used to it. We have rejected the
culture of our forebears. This means that to be culturally Catholic or
Christian is completely impossible because the culture is dying. One can no
longer be Catholic because one is Italian, or Spanish or Belgian. One can only
be Catholic or Christian for that matter because it is true. It is time to drop
the fantasy that because one has a baptismal certificate one is a Catholic.
When I was boy, in another century, one was
excommunicated – that is booted from the church – if one
failed to receive Holy Communion during the Easter season. One could only
receive communion if one was in a state of grace, which meant assisting at Mass
on a weekly basis and, if married or sexually active, living in a faithful and
sacramental marriage. That meant for most of us one could only be Catholic if
one went to confession at least once a year. To fail to receive the sacraments
of penance and Holy Communion annually meant, in effect, to no longer be a
Catholic.
I have no idea which of those assumptions is
still true. We redefine things constantly in hopes of keeping the body count
up, but we are fooling ourselves. In an urban area of 8 million we count two
million plus as Catholics. We claim that 20% of Catholics go to Mass every
Sunday. It is probably more like 15 percent if one includes tourists,
occasional participants and pastoral padding of the statistics. Let’s see, 15%
or 20% of an area population of 8 million. I think that comes to about 2.5
percent or less. We are already a Church that has faded to insignificance in
this part of the world. Face it.
Why has this happened? There are a lot of
reasons. If I could pick one, it would have to be the sins of the clergy. The
clergy have always sinned, but there are times when the sins of the clergy
become so offensive to God and to the people that reaction is inevitable.
In the Middle Ages there were a lot of holy
priests. Still there were enough who thought the faith was their private
plaything that the reformation and the centuries of religious war ensued.
Similar things happened with the decadence of the 6th century that a
religion roared out of the east and swept away most of the Christian world. The
Cathars were such a contrast to the decadent clergy of the twelfth century that,
had it not been for the poor and holy followers of saints Dominic and Francis,
the Church would have perished. And now we in the 21st century are
paying for the sins of 20th. I am not referring to the sins that are so
popularly reported by the vultures of the press. The scandals of the late 20th
century were only symptoms of the rot. The rot had already festered for a
century and more. We slowly lost the vision of piety that inspired the first
missionaries to this land and we cannot recoup until we recover that piety.
The faith is not about breaking the whole world
into small discussion groups. It is about holiness, and that holiness has to
begin with the clergy. About the early
disciples, the Romans were wont to say, “…these men have been with Jesus.”
Until once again that be said about me and my fellow clergy, the decline will
continue inexorably. I have two reasons to hope: St John Paul the Great and
Mother Teresa of Calcutta. In the horror of the 20th century the Lord gave his
orphaned children both a father and a mother. Of them it could be said, “These
had been with Jesus.”
Evangelism is to bring people into a saving
knowledge of Jesus, the Messiah, not a theological, a social, a political or
historical knowledge, but a SAVING knowledge, a knowledge of Him that causes us
to be ashamed of our sins and to long for the change that only grace can
achieve. It is not a knowledge that conforms His image to current perversions,
but a knowledge of Him that delivers us from the perversity, violence and
ugliness of these times. “Be not conformed to this present age but be
transformed by a renewal of your mind.” (Rom 12:2)
To evangelize is not complicated. It is simply to
learn how to pray with people. If we talk about Christ, we are wasting our
time, but if we can get those who are lost to talk to Christ, they will be saved from this dying culture of death. To
evangelize is to move a person from saying “Him” about Christ, to saying “you”
to Christ.
It is that simple. All the committees in the
world won’t help an iota, but one mother Teresa and one Karol Wotyla who could
invite people to trust Christ by their very presence and make all the
difference. If we don’t learn to be holy and to invite people to meet the One
whom they see that we truly love, the Catholic Church in America will become an
arcane club, interesting only to historian and medievalists. If we the clergy
do not repent and return to the Gospel, the thing is up. I have one more cause
for hope. I believe the Lord will give us a second chance.
It seems the Church flourishes in persecution. I
believe that He may just bless us with real suffering, it seems to have already
begun in Canada and Europe and America, where an increasing number of laws
threatened those who would be faithful to the faith that we have received from
Christ and the apostles. I suspect that being a Christian in the post European
world will become very uncomfortable. Perhaps sooner than we think we will
have, as Pope Benedict suspected, a smaller but holier and, I would add, more
real Church.
It’s a hard
rain’s a-gonna fall.
The sky is darkening and it has already started
to drizzle. I suggest we get out the umbrellas.
Enough,
The Rev. Know-it-all
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment