There are many ways that we could allow ourselves to feel betrayed right now as a church.
As a response to this crooked, dirge-singing generation, we can channel our energies into learning about the Church at every opportunity. We can read what the brilliant minds before us have written. We can log off Twitter and pick up Benedict or Cardinal Sarah. We can find a concise history of the Catholic Church and marvel at its tenacity during some very tumultuous ages.
One sweeping glance at our tradition-drenched liturgies, our rigorous and exhaustive theological treatises – and yes, also the many storms that have been navigated before this one – will convince us: what a grand adventure it is to be a Catholic.
In these days when ignorant, click-hungry journalism reduces thousands of years of Church history to a few seconds of slap-dash soundbites, it is so important to recall that the Church is not who the world says she is. She is not the clergy, nor is she their leader. She is something altogether more mystical and much more elusive.
Many regard the Church as buildings and bodies that can be reorganized and restructured to suit the times in which we live. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is akin to thinking we can reorganize our life cycle and instead give birth to the mother who birthed us. We can “change” the Church in the same way we can change the tides or our child’s personality. The Church is made up of Christ’s mystical body, and every soul on earth, in heaven, and in purgatory are enfolded therein. Cardinals and Popes just happen to have the microphone for a short window of time.
“The sources of theology and the Church’s doctrinal and moral teaching remain unchanged and unchangeable,” Cardinal Robert Sarah said in his address during the final week of the Synod of Synodality. “The Church, as the continuation and extension of Christ in the world, is not in crisis. It is we, her sinful children, who are in crisis. She enjoys the promise of eternal life: the gates of hell will never prevail against her.”
The Church does not need to excel at PR and its focus need not be to articulate every movement of the spirit. Its members need not spell out every specific opportunity for a blessing. We need not micromanage the movements of mercy. Priests are – always have been – free to dole out blessings upon any well-intentioned searching child of God.
To focus on same-sex blessings as if they are something other than a priest blessing an individual child of God is altogether confusing and redundant.
Good mother that she is, the Church must respond to any child in spiritual need who seeks grace and blessing. That is a non-negotiable. But as for those who approach the Church to make headlines or to confuse or tear down, to argue or to belittle ... we do not need to dialogue with these people. Christ did not respond to taunts and misrepresentations of his person in his final hours. He did not dignify them with a response or an explanation. But he did promise paradise to the repentant thief beside him on the cross. Each and every sinner will be forgiven if they repent and seek to align their lives with God’s plan for human life in all realms.
“The deposit of faith continues to be a supernatural divine gift,” Cardinal Sarah continued in his address. “But today, the crisis of the Church has entered a new phase: the crisis of the Magisterium. Certainly, the authentic Magisterium, as a supernatural function of the Mystical Body of Christ, exercised and guided invisibly by the Holy Spirit, cannot be in crisis; the voice and action of the Holy Spirit are constant, and the truth towards which it leads us is steadfast and unchanging.”
In these days, words will increasingly fail us in a world that is hostile to everything that Christ desires for the human soul. We cannot explain with words the things that are unnamable. God himself could not speak to this reality in words that we could understand, so he spoke the Word in the person of Jesus Christ.
The world needs more words in the same way that it needs Christ to die a second time. God has spoken once and for all and the world clearly can’t abide in the fullness and completeness of his silence.
“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first,” Jesus said.
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