The Holy Spirit is still perfecting the Church

We all like to think that if we were among the throngs who were confronted with Jesus when he walked on earth, we would have left everything to follow him. His identity would have been crystal clear to us. 

When confronted with new challenges and new realities, we need to radically trust that the Holy Spirit is doing something new and that we, little sheep that we are, cannot see or understand what that new thing might be. The Holy Spirit cannot be contained within the confines of our understanding, just like new wine cannot be put into old wineskins. There will be a big mess if we attempt either. 

Speaking of big messes, Protestant reformer John Calvin, disillusioned with the leadership and the abundant corruption in the Roman Catholic Church, did not simply petition the Church to return to the Bible as the original authority. No, his main thrust hits dangerously close to home. He desired a return to the apostolic origin of the Church fathers. In a 1539 letter to a cardinal in Rome, Calvin wrote: “You know not only that our agreement with antiquity is closer than yours, but that all we have attempted has been to renew the ancient form of the church.”

His desire was not to found a new renegade church. He was a good Catholic, one might say a real Catholic. 

Calvin desired a purer Catholic experience, one untainted by human corruption, and yet he ended up creating a new church. 

The reason Christ speaks about following the good shepherd, abiding in him to bear fruit, and pouring new wine into new wineskins instead of old ones, is because he wants to tell us in as many ways as possible that apart from him, we can do nothing. 

When Jesus told Peter that he was the rock upon which he would build his church and that the gates of hell would not prevail against it, there were no footnotes. There were also no promises of smooth sailing with a long line of saintly Popes.

Even now, the snake slithers at our feet in the gardens of our churches and suggests to us that, “Maybe Jesus didn’t really say that the Church would stand the test of time. Maybe you need to look for something better?” 

When the plan is uncertain and the way forward does not look like any version of Catholicism we recognize, we need to ask Our Lady for her prayers and guidance. She said yes to the Holy Spirit even though she couldn’t understand how being a poor, pregnant, unmarried teenager could somehow be God’s plan.

Dominican priest Father Juan Gonzalez Arintero, OP, wrote extensively on mystical evolution. Father Arintero’s focus on mysticism, holiness, and perfection had a major influence on the Second Vatican Council. 

“The Church still remains and withstand all persecutions because it must progress and be perfected completely and especially in sanctity,” he wrote.

“For that did Jesus Christ establish his Church … it is necessary that the Church finish her course … that the number and perfection of all her members be completed, that all should be transformed in the same divine image from glory to glory; and that all should be sanctified … much is yet lacking for the complete fulfillment of the prophecies concerning the general effusion of the gifts of the Spirit.”

We see in creation that the Lord is not finished. He still allows his creatures to evolve and change and it brings him further glory to see them flourish as it is his glory and prerogative to bring his church and each member of it into the fullness of his life. His plan for us is life in abundance. How sad it would be for us to jump ship before he is finished with us.

“For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”

To use motherspeak, we are now in the transition phase of this labour. When we see things groaning and shifting all around us, instead of frantically grasping for the familiar, may we have the courage to trust that the Holy Spirit is constantly doing something new.

Fiat! Be it done unto me, Lord, according to thy word.

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