Renew The Church! – website and Blog

The Lord said to Francis, “Rebuild my Church, for as you see it is falling into ruin.”

Christ said to Francis of Assisi, “Go, rebuild my Church which, as you see, is falling into ruin.”

2010. A new year has begun, on the world’s calendar. In the Church, our new year began with Advent of 2009. “Advent,” for many Catholics these days, needs explanation. Indeed, “waiting in expectation” needs explanation! Swept up in a 24-7 culture of fast foods, credit-card lifestyles and instant gratification, “waiting” for anything at all is a bizarre concept.

But “waiting” is exactly what we all are doing, in this brief and transient life on this earth. The big question is, and it is a defining question for each man and woman, “What are you doing while you wait?” We were asked for no input about our birth – we were born, and now we are – we have life – we were given life. We have been and will be asked nothing about the fact of our death: we will die, each of us, without question. This time in the “waiting” room, however long it is to be, is pure gift. How are we using the gift? How will we use the minutes, hours, days or months remaining to us here? Are we preparing for the Christ who is to come? Are we living in Advent? Are we living in the Christ who is here?

Yesterday evening, as we waited in church for the Vigil Mass to begin (The Solemnity of Mary the Mother of God), as I often do I was reading and prayerfully pondering Scripture. And also, as often (or usually) happens, I was fighting inside myself to concentrate on the Word against the constant and loud words of worldly conversations going on around me. One would think that a church would be safe! One would think that a church would be quiet, in prayer, focused on God and not on what Alice said to Alfred yesterday or how Melissa feels about that. One would think that “How’s it going?” might be information that could wait for more appropriate times or places. Maybe all these apparently urgent topics could be entrusted to the Lord in prayer while in church, since there He is in the Tabernacle – Body, Blood Soul and Divinity – listening and waiting for our notice and attention.

We need to discover that we are in the presence of the Holy in every moment! We walk on holy ground, we are surrounded by witnesses, and we are entrusted with a mission! There is a purpose that deserves to permeate our lives in this time of waiting.

Another way of saying this is, we need to grow in the life of prayer. We need to develop and mature in that love-relationship, that holy communion with God, that is our life of prayer. Yesterday I put in the mail the manuscript of the revised edition of my book, The Interior Liturgy of the Our Father. Alba House, the publishing division of the Society of St. Paul, published my first book The Ordinary Path to Holiness, and my hope is they will publish this second one also. Please pray with me that God will use my humble offerings, that they might be seeds planted with the water of His grace.

Both of these books are devoted to growing in the life of prayer; I believe the need among Catholics for help in this is crucial, foundational, essential – and urgent. The world needs the witness of life in Christ!

This is the vocation of the Church: to be His sacrament in the world, to be Christ among men! A great darkness is growing, a true and spiritual famine among us, an impoverishment within us, a horror of solitude, a running from silence, a desolation in the soul – and so many are rushing to tranquilize this growing disquiet with noise, and more busyness, the 24-7 culture of fast foods, credit-card lifestyles and instant gratification. And even with nervous and pointless chatter while in the Holy Presence of God. They are hungry! The world is hungry; the Church is entrusted. Let us, this new year, live the life He has given us.

Thomas

Over the past few years, I have had some experience with churches struggling with budget issues. How are we to meet Budget? Yes, somehow the word itself deserves special print – in bold, in italics, somehow it must get special prominence, since so much time and attention is paid to it. “Budget.” Inside I weep, when staff meetings take up this inevitable topic. Anger is not far from the deep sadness in me.

The Church was given a mission, and yet she seems to find a thousand diversions instead. She was given a mission, a destination and a work to do, yet she wanders through other concerns like a tourist on vacation, and not the apostle on his mission that she should be.

Every church I become involved with seems to think it has not enough money. I submit they all have had too much money, and the problem has been the absence of right priorities in using it. Local churches major on the minors, and overlook that which is essential. Much time and money is spent on externals, to the neglect of the necessary interior and spiritual needs of God’s people. The Church has one central mission given her by Christ: make disciples.

What happens when the people are not led to become strong disciples of Jesus? What happens when they are not led to grow in Christ, so as to come to know Him more truly, so as to love Him more fervently, so as to follow Him more faithfully and so as to be Church in the secular world? What happens is, the people become weaker and weaker in Christ, and more and more like the world they are sent to evangelize. The people of God become evangelized by the world, instead of evangelizers for Christ in the world.

And why should worldly people give to an ineffectual church? It does very little for them, so why should they (in the “wisdom” of the world) support it generously?

Suppose, instead, we were talking about churches filled with strong, faithful and zealous Catholic believers whose entire lives were focused on living the Catholic Faith! Do you think the parish would be lacking in means to fund programs that would exist for one reason: to evangelize, to make disciples, to live the mission given by Jesus? I say they would have no problems funding any program that deserved and needed to be funded!

My passion – which I believe I share with the Lord, and which I believe was given me by the Lord – my passion is for adult education and formation in the Catholic Faith.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age. (Mt 28:19-20)

The US Bishops have, on paper, written that adult formation holds a high priority in the work of catechesis in the Church. Here are some portions from their document, “Our Hearts were Burning Within Us,” which focused on the need for solid, on-going and lifelong adult formation in the Faith.

§ 5 §    Adult faith formation, by which people consciously grow in the life of Christ through experience, reflection, prayer, and study, must be “the central task in [this] catechetical enterprise,” becoming “the axis around which revolves the catechesis of childhood and adolescence as well as that of old age.” This can be done specifically through developing in adults a better understanding of and participation in the full sacramental life of the Church.

§ 6 §    To make this vision a reality, we, as the Catholic bishops of the United States, call the Church in our country to a renewed commitment to adult faith formation, positioning it at the heart of our catechetical vision and practice. We pledge to support adult faith formation without weakening our commitment to our other essential educational ministries.

§ 13 §    Such lifelong formation is always needed and must be a priority in the Church’s catechetical ministry; moreover, it must “be considered the chief form of catechesis. All the other forms, which are indeed always necessary, are in some way oriented to it.”

Describing what ought to be the norm for a catechizing parish:

§ 129 §    The pastor establishes parish policies and procedures that give priority to the vision and practice of adult faith formation.
§ 130 §    Other parish staff members promote and support the faith formation of adults, and they encourage parish adults to participate in basic and continuous education in the faith.
§ 131 §    The parish places adult catechesis at the center of its stated mission and goals, and it promotes the importance of adult faith formation at every opportunity.
§ 132 §    The parish gives adult faith formation a priority in the allocation of financial resources, in providing learning space, and in parish scheduling.

How we need parishes to put these fine words into practice! How we need pastors who take seriously the need and the priority of adult faith formation! May the Lord awaken us all to the obligations of the life He has entrusted to us.

I pray that the Lord will rouse and awaken the Church here in America, before paganism (or Islam) totally overruns the last remnants of Christianity here. Christ is the one light that can save us from the darkness that is growing around us.

A quiet tragedy is growing among us: men and women, Christians – Catholics – insensitive to the presence of God so near, deaf to the thunder in His whispered Words, blind to the traces of divine light in signs He has placed for our journey. We have become desensitized, numbed, unresponsive to either the holiness, or the blasphemies around us.

In the Book of Revelations, we read:

Rev 3:15 “‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot!
Rev 3:16 So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.
Rev 3:17 For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing; not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.

What kind of “lukewarmness” produces such spiritual blindness? How can a “believer” have such lack of discernment, to confuse prosperity with abject poverty, awareness with spiritual blindness, rich garments with humiliating nakedness?

Can a believer be so cold-blooded, so internally adapted to the temperature of his surroundings, that he has no rightful passion or authentic heat of his own? C.S. Lewis spoke of “men without chests,” in his work The Abolition of Man. What disease robs men of chests, of heart, and leaves only bloodless ideas? It is ignorance of, or rejection of, those objective values that inflame heat in the lives and actions of men. Modern men, including those who call themselves Christian, have died to the horrors of sin as they have to the glory of holiness. They have no chests; they have only thoughts about thoughts, lukewarm and pointless.

How can persons remain so detached from the horrors of sin, or the glory of holiness, as to speak of one or the other as easily and detached as they might speak of yesterday’s weather? How can men not care that our culture is going mad? How can Christians not care that the Church staggers and slurs like a drunken man while the culture commits suicide?

We do not hate evil enough. We do not treasure enough the holy all around us. We are men with thoughts about sin, and thoughts about God – but where is the fire? Where is the life? How do we not fall prostrate, sobbing for our sins and the sins of the Church, when we enter the Presence of God?

Revelation gives the response of the Lord to this church:

Rev 3:18 Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, that you may be rich, and white garments to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, that you may see.

Gold, holy and spiritual gold! For those who will seek, there is true and eternal value embedded in this creation, like gold deep in the mountains and running dust in streams. There is fire in the heart of Jesus, able to make pure every ounce that we can find, if we will stay close to Him.

And there is another fire, a less welcomed one, a fire of justice that will destroy. As we look around us, one wonders if it can be very far away. Our blasphemies multiply, and gather, and angels must weep. We are called to repent, to turn again, to live the mission Christ has entrusted to us. We are called to be men, full-bodied and full-blooded, and live our mission – a mission from God – with passion while time remains.

Thomas

We have officially entered the Buying Season. The pillars of our economic system, retail businesses, hold their breath and hope that once more, Americans will buy-buy-buy as if there is no tomorrow. There is of course a tomorrow, some tomorrow that will not come. There is a day that will be the last day, a day that should illuminate our days between now and then, a day that ought to put things here and now into perspective. There is an end to this frantic busyness and buyingness, a day when our values and our valuables will be put on the scales of Truth, and evaluated in the light that never ends.

Our economy is based on over-consumption. The more we over-consume, the fatter and the more self-indulgent we are, the better for this dysfunctional economy. There is something very wrong with this picture! There is something very wrong with an economy built upon a foundation that is itself inherently unstable and transient. Self-indulgence is not a “rock” we can rely upon! Over-consumption is not a firm foundation!

Capitalism is not bad, if capital is invested for returns of real value. Regulation is not bad, if the regulation and the regulators are themselves ordered toward living true justice. Neither individual rights nor big government control are intrinsically bad, when the rights affirmed or the controls enforced are directed to true and righteous good. It is when light is darkness to us, and when darkness is light to us, that both freedom and control are destined to failure.

I do not blame our culture, or our government, or television or anything else in the secular world. I blame us in the Church who have failed to be Church. The Church is not a business! The Church is not a social club! The Church is not a weekend wish-time in a long week of hard and dirty reality. The Church is reality, the life of Christ set in this dark and confused world.

Christ sent the Church to be light in this dark and darkening world, until He comes again. But so many in the Church in our time have failed, and continue to fail in being light and in bringing light in the growing darkness. Instead, the witness of the Church grows fainter as we blend more and more into our surroundings. Catholics grow less sensitive to the presence of the Holy, less reverent before the Tabernacle, less full participants in Holy Mass, less educated and formed in the Faith, less able to evangelize, and indeed seeing less of a reason to do so. The secular and godless culture is evangelizing the Church! The Church is seduced, and grows impotent and lazy, as self-indulgent as the rest of the country. Catholics finally “fit right in.” Happy day.

This is a time for Catholics who have not yet fallen completely asleep to rouse themselves and begin to arouse others. The darkness has not yet overtaken us, but it is coming. Like the three whom Jesus made sit and watch as He prayed in His agony in the Garden, we fall off again and again to sleep, but it need not be this way. When the Son of Man comes, He can indeed find faith upon the earth, if the Church will awaken and become Church, her vocation.

What can we do? What must we do? We must rouse ourselves and look for Jesus who is very near. We must look to Him, we must find Him and see Him and see Him seeing us. We must meet Jesus, and listen so as to hear His words of life. And we must live in Him, without compromise. We must become converted, “sold out” to Jesus, finding God who is all in all, in Him. We must live as though we believe Him, and we must believe Him. No more mere reciting prayers – we must pray. No mere attending Mass – we must participate wholeheartedly, offering ourselves a living sacrifice which is our acceptable service of worship, receiving the living Christ and taking Him with us when we leave the assembly. We must live as though we are accountable, for we are accountable. We must live as though God has entrusted this world to us, for He has. We must live as though our days are numbered, for they are, and He is very near, at the door.

Most political discourse today is missing the point. Should we veer toward socialism – or hold fast to free enterprise and deregulation, to less restricted capitalism? More government regulation and control, or more individual rights and freedoms? So much faith today is put in political and economic ideology! The argument sometimes centers on the Constitution: should the Court judge by strict interpretation, or should it “breathe” and adapt to modern issues and problems?

This country is far different from when first grounded on the Constitution, and based on free enterprise and individual rights. Then, America mostly agreed on what was right and what was wrong – most individuals agreed that there was good and evil, and that we do not determine it: we must discover it. It was and is our challenge to find the true and eternal good, and to come into it; to discern the lurking evil and avoid it when possible, and fight it when necessary.

That was then; this is now. Does it matter whether we have free capitalism or regulated socialism, if we have forgotten the difference between good and evil? Is a greedy free capitalist who manipulates your health insurance any better for you than a “regulated” corrupt Washington bureaucrat? Which one will be looking out for your best interests? Who can be trusted to police either one, when God Himself is banned from the system?

The problem is deeper than the system that organizes us. The problem is within us. Before reform, America needs revival.

In receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, Mother Teresa said, “I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing – direct murder by the mother herself.” Thankfully, American support for abortion is eroding: a recent Pew poll reveals 47% support legal abortion in all or most cases, a 7-point drop from last year; 45% want it illegal, an increase of 4%.

The chasm dividing Americans on many major moral issues is deeply troubling: half see it one way, half the opposite. Most troubling, however, is the moral insensitivity if not blindness of so many – and they have the power to vote! We vote into office people who are moral chameleons, able to adapt to “right” or “wrong” as campaign donors or constituent whims dictate. A nation so governed cannot stand. Its house is built upon mud.

We deserve it. A democracy deserves the government it gets, because for good or evil it is self-inflicted. As a people we are more concerned with our own bread-and-butter issues than with the good or the evil of our choices, the right or the wrong of how we live.

“The chickens have come home to roost,” using words of our President’s former religious and spiritual advisor. We elected them; we are reaping their bitter fruit. America is being restructured, redirected, indebted, refinanced and redefined in ways that make peace impossible: no justice, no peace – simple as that. Let us hope it is not too late!

Who would remodel the house, if its foundation were flawed and unstable? Who would rearrange walls and invest in costly renovations, while the foundation was beginning to crumble? If the foundation is not repaired first, the house will fall! The foundation must be strong and true.

An organization is as morally good as its members. Can corrupt and greedy people in Washington run health care with any more justice than corrupt and greedy people in private insurance companies? Are self-servers and self-promoters in the private sector somehow any more or less dangerous than those in the public?

There is a heart-crisis in America deeper than politics can reach. No party, no bureaucracy, no politician can touch the problem at the foundation; the change first comes within. Some decades ago we took a grave turn for the worse, into a very dark and dangerous alley, and we are tasting the bitter consequences.

Yes, there is a deep-down problem that changing parties alone cannot solve. What do we want this election – Democrat problems or Republican problems? Do we prefer liberal or conservative corruption this cycle? We’ve been burned by both sides – where is the center, the core of things? Where are servant-leaders grounded in truth? Wisdom and justice come from places higher and deeper – and we will not see them until we ourselves learn to look higher and deeper.

The Church is sent to evangelize, but so many in the Church are asleep. Lord, awaken us.

I can think of two reasons to read fiction or to watch fictional stories on TV or in movies. First, because sometimes truth and reality are presented and found through fictional stories: Jesus, after all, often taught truth by way of parables. Second, there is a darker reason – a person can seek to escape from truth and from reality, preferring “make-believe” over that true belief that leads us to God, and to eternal life.

There is troubling evidence of the latter in our entertainment culture. So many are obsessed with sports and actor celebrities! So many are mere spectators of shallow caricatures of people in infantile sitcoms or in brutal stories of vengeance. It would be so much better to seek the hidden realities of truth, from authentically human characters, in believable human stories that point us upward. It would be so much more profitable to resonate in heroic accounts of the triumph of justice, truth and love.

Why would a person prefer to patronize his own dehumanization, rather than nurture and tend his rightful human development? Why would a person seek fantasy and avoid truth – why not seek the bread than endures to eternal life, rather than that bread that perishes? Why do so many squander precious life-times in plays and games and make-believe, and not once and for all resolve to find and embrace and live the truth that waits beneath all that is?

God is here! Eternal God is near, among and within, so close! We are surrounded by parables, proclaiming the saving truth of God. The great poet and Catholic priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, wrote (1),

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.
Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Are we not distancing ourselves from Him more and more, choosing to be distracted, preferring to be too busy, seeking the surfaces of things and avoiding the “deep down things” where waits His charged grandeur?

Holy Ghost, waiting in the morning light, warm and waken our poor chilled souls.

Thomas

(1. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918. “7. God’s Grandeur”, http://www.bartleby.com/122/7.html)

For some time now, the accusation of a “dumbing down” has been charged against our education system. Grade inflation in the schools, lowered norms for standardized tests, lowered minimal passing averages, stretched out and simplified curricula and so on have been charged and defended and explained and denied. There are certainly some very bright and competent students making their way through the system! But societal beliefs have taken priority over traditional educational norms, and there are consequences.

I fear that much graver consequences are coming upon us, due to a moral, a religious “dumbing down” that has taken root in our parishes and dioceses. I’m not talking here of the 7th and 8th grade Confirmation candidates who cannot recite the Hail Mary or even the Our Father, and who have not received the Sacrament of Confession since their First Communion, and who are in the Confirmation program because “my parents made me come.” No, my concern is more for their parents, and the parents that these children will grow up to become.

Adult faith formation in this country, America, is either non-existent or pathetically inadequate in many if not most of our parishes and dioceses. In “position papers” from the bishops in America we hear the right things – we hear what the Church as Church believes and teaches. It is the actual practice that is so impoverished.

The General Directory for Catechesis (1997) makes clear the scope of formation needed:

GDC 175. So as to respond to the more profound needs of our time, adult catechesis must systematically propose the Christian faith in its entirety and in its authenticity, in accordance with the Church’s understanding. It must give priority to the proclamation of salvation, drawing attention to the many difficulties, doubts, misunderstandings, prejudices and objections of today. It must introduce adults to a faith-filled reading of Sacred Scripture and the practice of prayer. A fundamental service to adult catechesis is given by the Catechism of the Catholic Church and by those adult catechisms based on it by the particular Churches. ….

What is the proper scope? The universal Church teaches that the “entirety” of the Faith must be “systematically” proposed to our adults! And we have such a presentation to base our adult formation upon, in the “Catechism of the Catholic Church.” In America in particular, the priority that adult formation must hold in the over-all program of education and formation is also made clear in the U.S. Bishop’s document, “Our Hearts Were Burning Within Us” (1999):

§ 5 § Adult faith formation, by which people consciously grow in the life of Christ through experience, reflection, prayer, and study, must be “the central task in [this] catechetical enterprise,” becoming “the axis around which revolves the catechesis of childhood and adolescence as well as that of old age.”

§ 6 § To make this vision a reality, we, as the Catholic bishops of the United States, call the Church in our country to a renewed commitment to adult faith formation, positioning it at the heart of our catechetical vision and practice. We pledge to support adult faith formation without weakening our commitment to our other essential educational ministries.

Instead of adult formation being our “central task” in all formation programs, being “the axis” of all else – instead of being at “the heart of our catechetical vision and practice” – in practice adult formation is the “extra” that is typically first to be dispensed when budget or space or time conflicts arise. Many pastors give only lip service to the need for adult formation – some do not even give this much, but rather see their adults as knowing pretty much all they need to know about the Faith and the moral challenges of our culture. The result is little to no support from the clergy for real adult formation, and of course “if Father doesn’t think it’s important, why should we?”

Adult faith formation is crucially important. In these dangerous times, it is critically important; it is urgent; it is essential. This is a “dumbing down” that is leading not only the Church but the whole culture to disaster. The dimmer the light of Christ becomes in a culture, the more widespread and bloody becomes the brutality of a growing culture of death. Darkness is coming, and the Church in America is sleepy from her self-indulgences. May God arouse us, and soon! Jesus did not go to the Cross to enable moral compromise, religious indifference and social acceptance. Jesus died to enable our sanctity: He calls us to be saints, to be His light, to pass the saving Gospel on to the many who know not their right hand from their left. Lord, give us renewal!