Renew The Church! – website and Blog

The link I will write below leads to a new article I just published on the Catholic website, Catholic Exchange.  In the article, I try to connect the “three temptations” that Pope Francis recently warned the Bishops of Latin America about, to many of the spiritual weaknesses we can painfully see in the contemporary Church in America.  Please feel invited to read the article, and if you’d like, make a comment on the Exchange.  And/or here.

Here is the link to the article:

Three Temptations to Spiritual Immaturity.

I recently wrote an article for Homiletic and Pastoral Review – an on-line magazine especially written for those concerned with preaching and pastoral needs of the Church.  The readership is, probably, mostly clergy for the obvious reasons, but lay persons do read it, and do also contribute articles for it.  Certainly laity are concerned about preaching in the Church, and certainly we also are concerned about the many pastoral matters in our parishes.

Anyway, this article of mine was just published on HPR.  I want to share it with the readership of the blog also, hence this link to it: What Happens to a Church When the Members Won’t Grow Up?  Click on the link, if you will, and read it.  As always, I invite your comments below (as does the HPR site also).

The problem written about is seen first in the secular culture – a kind of “Peter Pan syndrome” – a clinging to youth and immaturity, to care-free, worry-free, responsibility-free but fruitless days before the drudgery of adulthood came to ruin it all.  In our time many parents want to be “friends” and almost peers with their children, if they have any, and dread being the “grown-up” in the eyes of the young.  Many adults want to talk as, dress as, act as they did in their own teen years.  They may cling to the same music, television, movie and sports interests, dreading becoming “like their parents” in their own eyes.  Maturity is not a good thing, in this culture devoted to youth, and it is postponed as long as possible.  It is fled, as if it were a disease.

In Christ, it ought to be different!  We are exhorted to grow up in all ways into Christ – into maturity in Him – into the fruitfulness of a mature spirituality, and a mature following of our Lord.  But as in so many things, so also in this, the ways of the world creep into the Church.  And we find in the Church a shrinking back from the call to maturity – to grow in Christ – to come to maturity in grace, unto fruitfulness.

Some in the Church, it ought to be said, have been confused with a mishearing of St. Therese and a spirituality of childhood gleaned from her writings and her example of child-like sanctity.   The child-like trust and faith of St. Therese is not the childish flight from discipleship, with its real challenges and responsibilities, that characterizes our failure to grow and develop as we should.  There is a way in which the spiritually mature are “like children” in moral innocence, in ready obedience, in intrinsic humility, and so on.  One must become “as a child” to enter the Kingdom of heaven!  But in the Kingdom, one must grow into the perfection of our Father’s intention: the perfection (the maturity) of disinterested charity, of moral purity, of heroic obedience, of habitual humility, of unwavering trust in our Father.

Adulthood – and parenthood – ain’t for sissies!  Excuse the slang, but it does make the point.  Leadership in the Church also is not for the fainthearted, nor for those lacking the courage to carry the burden.  The Church was sent to make disciples, and to shepherd those disciples into the fullness of our vocation in Christ – to maturity, to fruitfulness in Him.  May the Lord give us all grace to do as He commanded – and to follow Him, with the trust of a child and the mature courage of a man or woman, no matter the cost.

Jesus came as “light” into the world – and Jesus passed on this light to His Church.  He sent His Church to be the light of the world, in Him.  The world needs light!  The world is becoming encompassed by, immersed in, and it seems overwhelmed by darkness.  God made man in His own beautiful image – but man chose, and chooses, an ugly counterfeit of light, all the while telling himself and one another that such darkness is actually light and no counterfeit at all.

As the world seems to fall further and further into crudeness, baseness, disrespect and irreverence – with the corresponding social ills of violence, abuse, injustice and corruption – I see more and more clearly the need for prayer to God for His light and His grace.  By himself, man will only kill himself and one another in the process.  We need the light and the life of God – and the Church needs to bear witness to this need, and to the fount of divine life and light that God has entrusted to His Church.

Men begin to see God, when they see men of God.  Thus we need not merely teachers, as Paul VI said, but witnesses.  The world needs righteous men and women – men and women of God, whose lives are explained and make sense only in His light.  We don’t need salesmen, or advertisers, or corporate officials, or managers – or if we do, we need them only in and after true witness.  We need saints!  And without saints, we are the most impoverished of any charitable NGO or social club.  We need prayer!  

Prayer is communion with God.  The Catechism (#2564) says, “Christian prayer is a covenant relationship between God and man in Christ.”  We need saints in prayer, because only there is the bridge to God, to life, to sanity.  Men and women in relationship with God are crucial and sacred bridges linking man, and men, in darkness to God Who is light and life.  Over this bridge, so to speak, can pass saving grace – living water – to a world of men lost in a dry, barren desert of darkness.  We need men and women of prayer.

Reverence

What is reverence, if not the foundation and enduring attitude of prayer?  What is reverence if not the human response to the presence of God who is ever-present?  What is reverence if not the habit of being in the presence of God, and thus the habit of prayer?  In the transfiguration, the apostles saw Jesus radiating with a light different from any before seen.  They saw Him radiating the beatitude of His communion with the Father and the Spirit.  They saw, I would suggest, in supernatural perfection what is pointed to, and prefigured in a limited and natural way, in authentic reverence.  Reverence radiates holy, personal and intimate communion with God.  Reverence in a righteous man or woman radiates what is glowing within: communion with the ever-present and eternal God.  The righteous man or woman “sees” Him!  The only righteous response is the habit of holy reverence, and the habit of continual prayer with Him.

  The human person, by his nature, needs to find and to enter and to remain in an attitude of reverence.  Only such an attitude – an habitual attitude of reverence – is worthy of a human person and only this allows him to live in appreciation of life, his life, and time, and creation, and other persons, and his very being.  Only reverence can keep a person in prayer, as he walks through his life on this earth.  

Reverence is the foundation of prayer – the first step into prayer – the interior recognition of the presence of the holy, in which we are standing at this moment.  Reverence recognizes the Other in Whom we are immersed, even now.  Whether in silence and solitude, or in a noisy crowd rushing here or there on some street of some city, it really does not matter.  God is present, waiting in His eternal silence, for our awakening and our knowing how near He is, here and now.

So many in the world do not seem to know of this resting place and resting time with Him, in reverence.   They seem to know only the outside of things and moments, only the busyness and the noise, and not the quiet interior center where life is.

Why is it that this place of rest, this reverence – this Sabbath – is not seen, is not found, is not known?  Perhaps people are too afraid to stop and look for it.  It is not hidden, unless it is hidden in plain sight, right before our eyes.  It is not covered, unless by the dust of our own  blind activity.  It is not too far from us, unless we are too far from ourselves and the present moment in which we live and move and have our being.

There is a “great escape” being attempted by man, in our time.  He is in flight from God, he is running.  He fears the very light that would save him.  Jesus sent His Church to be the light that came not to condemn but to save, and the world deserves – in the union of mercy and justice that is in God – His light.  Church, let each and every one of us hear His call to us to be light in this dark world!  Let each and every one of us give to the last breath we breathe, our lives in a living sacrifice to His will, that we might be a bridge of reverence and prayer, for others to the saving light of Christ.

The title of this blog entry is from an article by Father Rutler, whom some may know from EWTN.  After I read his article I wanted to share it because it expressed so well the terrible darkness in the United States today.  Leaders in our government, as well as citizens who may be among our own families and friends, have believed the “father of lies”.  Please read:

Evil, be thou my good

By Father George Rutler

With my parents at a performance of Gounod’s Faust at the opera some years ago, when Marguerite went mad in Act V after killing her baby, my mother let out a gasp that embarrassed me, for we were in a box over stage left and conspicuous. Now I bless my mother because that maternal empathy is the heart of civilization. “A voice was heard in Ramah, Rachel weeping for her children” (Jeremiah 31:15). Stifle the mother, and you stifle the child, and the world dies. Our Lady, being a take-charge kind of woman, as was evident at the wedding in Cana, may have been a midwife often in Nazareth, weeping at the loss of infants as she surely did when the innocents were massacred in Bethlehem.

In the opera, the repentant Marguerite is taken by angels singing “Salvation!” But Faust, who bartered his soul to Mephistopheles before fathering Marguerite’s child, is bound to that Satan who, in the words of Milton, bids “Evil, be thou my good.” Anyone who calls evil good, moves discourse about infanticide to a very dark place.

On April 26, President Obama, the first sitting president to address Planned Parenthood, not only thanked that organization which aborts around 300,000 children a year, but added, “God bless you.” Evil, be thou my good.

On June 13, Nancy Pelosi said that the abortion issue is “sacred ground.” Evil, be thou my good.

On June 20, a New York Times Op-Ed contributor described the aborting of her 23-week-old son, who had a heart defect: “I felt my son’s budding life end as a doctor inserted a needle through my belly into his tiny heart. As horrible as that moment was — it will live with me forever — I am grateful. We made sure our son was not born only to suffer. He died in a warm and loving place, inside me.” Evil, be thou my good.

Our merciful Lord will hear the cry of those who make terrible mistakes, especially those who have not had the grace of being taught right from wrong. To them he offers real angels, and not singers on a stage. But he also predicted that “a time is coming when anyone who kills will think he is offering service to God” (John 16:2). Like Faust, such people ask God to bless destroyers of life, and call the killing fields “sacred ground,” and even describe the womb of a mother who kills her child as a “warm and loving place.”

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta said that no one is safe around a mother who would kill her own child. Anyone who makes a Faustian bargain knows that even Christ is not safe around such a mother: “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40). Satan calls evil good. Christ calls it crucifixion.

Please let us continue to pray for one another, for the Church in our country and all over the world to which we are sent as disciples of Christ.  Let us continue to strive to become the saints God has called us to be that His Light may shine through as as He shone through Mary and all His saints on this earth.  We have been baptized into His Truth and we have been given a work to do:  “Go, make disciples …”  By God’s grace, evil is overcome by good.  Let us expose the lies of satan at every opportunity we are given.  Our Lady is the Mother and Model for all of us.  Blessed John Paul II said that if we neglect His Mother we will not long after neglect her Son.  The evil one would like nothing better than to “stifle the Mother” , as he has succeeded in stifling so many mothers and so many children have died.

The Catholic Church has a great and beautiful tradition of prayerfulness!  The family of saints in the Church who have written and taught both the art and the science of prayer is a treasure for all Catholics.  The very real – substantially real – Presence of Christ, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, reserved in the Tabernacles of so many of our churches, ought to proclaim to all Catholics that the sanctuary of a church is a holy place.  One would think that Catholics would greatly value the sanctuary of a Catholic church as that: a holy place, a sacred space, where God dwells and waits for us, a place of profound reverence.

It used to be this way.  As a child I well remember the sense of reverence that I had – that I was taught – whenever I entered a Catholic church.  We entered quietly, we entered into prayer, we knew we were in God’s House, all was different here.  A whispered “Hello” might be appropriate to a friend or a relative – more likely was simply a nod or a smile in silence.  Even passing a Catholic church outside, in a car or walking, evoked the sense that there inside was the sacred, the holy, the divine.

It is so very different now.  The power of secularism in this country, in western culture, has done immense damage to that precious religious sense that was so common some decades ago.  A far-reaching “dumbing down” has weakened us, infected us, made less of us.  Not only has the religious sense suffered within us, but our very human dignity has become degraded.  We in the West are not only less religious, we are less human as a culture and a people.  We respect and reverence not only God less, but one another and even ourselves less.  People laugh at, ridicule and mock others as common fare in popular entertainment.  Cruelty grows, where respect diminishes.  All this degradation is the simple consequence of secularism’s fundamental faith, that there is no God or if “it” is, “it” is irrelevant.  And when He is irrelevant, all is irrelevant.  Upon such godlessness, man can find nothing relevant to satisfy his incessant hunger, to fill the void left in his heart when God has been excluded from it.

All the coldness and insensitivity of the secular culture has had its effect on the members of the Catholic Church.  Because we in the Church have not been formed in the Faith adequately, many of us lack the solid foundation of faith adequate to resist the advances of the enemy.  We in the Church have failed to evangelize the Faith in the culture, and now the culture is evangelizing us to their ways.  We have failed to broadcast light, and now darkness grows – and it is invading the Church through her members.

So I finally get to my point: we Catholics need to learn how to pray, so as to develop and live in the habit of prayerfulness.  I am ashamed to say – even among those old enough to remember the prayerfulness that used to characterize us at least while in the House of God – so many Catholics have forgotten.  Many younger Catholics have never learned this!  But many of those who did learn as children the attitude and behavior proper to preparation before Mass, have forgotten.  Catholics awaiting Mass to begin can chat away as carelessly as anyone, apparently as neglectful as an unbeliever of the Blessed Sacrament in the Tabernacle a mere few feet away,  apparently as unconcerned as an unbeliever that the Sacrifice of the Mass is about to begin.  And again, I am ashamed to say, apparently as ignorant as an unbeliever that when that Sacrifice occurs in the Holy Mass, we in the congregation are to offer our own personal lives in self-offering with our Lord Jesus Christ.  We are to unite our lives with His, on the Cross.  Ponder that, in preparation for the Holy Mass, that our presence be one with His, and that our offering may be one with His.

With His perfect Self-offering, we are to offer our works, our sufferings, our praises, our lives in union with Him!  That personal self-offering deserves – He deserves from us – our full, conscious and active participation, our presence with Him in holy worship.  In other words, the Mass deserves our preparation, and our preparation requires time in sincere and authentic prayer.  Jesus deserves our prayerful preparation for what we are about to do with Him.  God the Father deserves our rightful disposition for what we are about to receive: God Himself, in Holy Communion.  Before Mass begins, we need to be in prayer – not chatting away about temporal and worldly concerns.

How can we become more prayerful?  That, my friends, is a question worth considering, and worth answering to ourselves.  It is not so complicated: we can become more prayerful, by praying more.  We need more time of silence, not less.  We need more time in solitude, not less.  We need more time with His revealed Truth in Scripture, not less.  And the more time we squander with unimportant things, the less time we have for the necessary one.  “It is not rocket science,” as the saying goes.

It has been said that freedom is the ability to choose among goods.  The Catechism points out that a choice for evil is an abuse of freedom, and leads instead to bondage.

Catechism 1733 The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes. There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just. The choice to disobey and do evil is an abuse of freedom and leads to “the slavery of sin.”<Cf. Rom 6:17>

With this understanding, it is clear that America – for whom freedom is an important and valued word – is loosing freedom with each passing generation.  Evil has replaced good in American life in countless ways, and the examples continue to multiply.  America has earned a shameful subtitle: the culture of death.

Many Catholics in America can no longer recognize true good, and instead are saturated and drowning in the disvalues of the secular carnal culture.  The New Evangelization was advanced first to address the real need for catechesis and formation among us, so that secondly we can “be Church” and work to evangelize the world.  The very identity of the Church is linked essentially to evangelization, as Paul VI said so clearly: she exists to evangelize.  But has she been faithful to this vocation – this mission given her by Christ?

When the Church neglects her mission, and instead becomes self-preoccupied, what has she become?  Pope Francis, a few days ago, spoke of this anomaly succinctly and poignantly.  To the Argentine Bishops he said,

The typical illness of the shut-in Church is self-reference; to look at herself, to be bent over herself like the woman in the Gospel. It is a kind of narcissism that leads us to spiritual worldliness and to sophisticated clericalism, and then it impedes our experiencing ‘the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing’.

In a recent homily at the Vatican’s Santa Marta residence, he said,

When we announce the coming of Jesus and give testimony to him with our lives and words, the Church becomes a mother who nurtures her children.  But when we don’t, the Church becomes a babysitter whose job it is to send children to sleep, rather than a mother.

What piercing analogies: the Church as a narcissist closed upon herself, or as a babysitter sending the children to sleep!  Such analogies seem painfully appropriate to many of our self-absorbed and impoverished parishes, devoted ever to maintenance while blind to mission, desensitized to the essentials of an authentic living faith.

The Church in America needs to be awakened to the goods that in freedom deserve to be chosen!  Many of us have become numb to all the evils that ought to stir us to the mission!  The culture of death no longer horrifies us, yet all the while it continues to permeate and deaden us, old and young.  The communion of prayer escapes us, so busy with trivia have we become.  The grace of the sacraments flows through our fingers, so poorly disposed are we as we approach and receive them.  We have become impoverished, in a poverty that is no beatitude.  Where, then, is our freedom in Christ?  It waits for us in Him, while the prison door of slavery threatens to close behind us.  Where then is “Holy Mother Church”?  Blessed Mother Mary, pray for us!

Is this a nightmare?  If I’m awake, what country and planet am I on?  It seems that here (wherever this is) adults believe that children and teens can decide whichever sexual identity they want.  Teenage boys can decide they are girls and thus free to use the girls locker room and bathrooms – etc.  Such is the “wisdom” of The Massachusetts Department of Education.

BOSTON (AP, 2/15/2013)  The Massachusetts Department of Education on Friday issued directives for handling transgender students, including allowing them to use the bathrooms or play on the sports teams that correspond to the gender with which they identify.

The guidance was issued at the request of state board of education to help schools follow the state’s 2011 anti-discrimination law protecting transgender people.

…….

The document said whether a student identifies as a boy or girl is up to the student or, in the case of younger students, the parents.

In all cases, ‘‘the student may access the restroom, locker room, and changing facility that corresponds to the student’s gender identity,’’ it said.

The guidance said some students may feel uncomfortable sharing those facilities with a transgender student but this ‘‘discomfort is not a reason to deny access to the transgender student.’’ It urges administrators to resolve issues on a case-by-case basis, and recommends sufficient sex-neutral restrooms and changing areas.

The guidance also addresses what to do if other students consistently and intentionally refuse to refer to a transgendered student by the name or sex they identify as: ‘‘It should not be tolerated and can be grounds for student discipline.’’

……

Scott said disciplining students who won’t acknowledge a student’s gender identity is appropriate because it amounts to bullying. He said the directives simply aim to create a safe learning place for a group that’s statistically far more likely to be harassed.

‘‘The reality is that it’s about creating an inclusive environment for all students to learn,’’ he said.

“The reality is,” this is NOT REALITY!  The human body – designed and given by God – determines one’s sexual identity.  This culture is redefining insanity and calling it “normal.”  The Catechism gives the Catholic understanding of this incredibly simple issue:

2333 Everyone, man and woman, should acknowledge and accept his sexual identity. Physical, moral, and spiritual difference and complementarity are oriented toward the goods of marriage and the flourishing of family life. The harmony of the couple and of society depends in part on the way in which the complementarity, needs, and mutual support between the sexes are lived out.

2393 By creating the human being man and woman, God gives personal dignity equally to the one and the other. Each of them, man and woman, should acknowledge and accept his sexual identity.

Church, wake up!  This culture is drunk while driving, and our Church is sleeping in the backseat.  The Church has an identity given by God – and we are called to more than parish suppers and pious platitudes.  “The Church exists to evangelize,” as the Church affirms again and again.  Jesus sent the Church to “make disciples.”  Will we become what we exist to be, will we do what He made us to do – will we become the voice and the witness of truth and life in this dark culture of death?  When?  The example above of cultural insanity is merely one in a cascade of edicts, laws and policies meant to overturn all common sense in favor of this very dangerous progressive ideology.

Pope Benedict XVI wrote recently and again our call to evangelization:

There is no action more beneficial – and therefore more charitable – towards one’s neighbor than to break the bread of the word of God, to share with him the Good News of the Gospel, to introduce him to a relationship with God: evangelization is the highest and the most integral promotion of the human person. As the Servant of God Pope Paul VI wrote in the Encyclical Populorum Progressio, the proclamation of Christ is the first and principal contributor to development (cf. n. 16). It is the primordial truth of the love of God for us, lived and proclaimed, that opens our lives to receive this love and makes possible the integral development of humanity and of every man.

Essentially, everything proceeds from Love and tends towards Love. God’s gratuitous love is made known to us through the proclamation of the Gospel. If we welcome it with faith, we receive the first and indispensable contact with the Divine, capable of making us “fall in love with Love”, and then we dwell within this Love, we grow in it and we joyfully communicate it to others.

Author George Weigel in a recent presentation(1) said this:

The Church of simple devotional piety will not withstand a Christophobic society. It takes a new way of being Catholic.  Institutional maintenance doesn’t cut it anymore.  The Church must understand herself as a platform of missionary culture.  Everyone is baptized into a missionary culture.

Weigel challenged the audience, The Miscellany reported, “to learn all they can about their Catholic faith and to show the courage to be Catholic in the public square.”

We need a deep and authentic renewal in the Church – a return to faith, living faith, dynamic and courageous faith in the holy Truth of God.  Our culture is bent on defining their own truth – convenient truths, accommodating truths, inclusive truths, immoral and untrue “truths.”  The Church must know, believe, live and proclaim the one saving Truth we have been entrusted with by our Lord.  Catholics – be the man or the woman God created and intended you to be!  Pray, ask God what He would have you stop doing, and reject it for the sake of God.  Pray, ask God what He would have you do, and do it with a full and trusting heart.

1.  The Catholic Miscellany, 2/21/2013, p. 15

(Roots  - R. Thomas Richard © 2013)

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