3 minutes readWorried About the Church? Papacy? Bishops? Christ is the Point

“In the criticisms uttered by many… there is a failure to see Christ as the whole point.  So much in the daily running of the Church they find depressing – the sermons, they say, take no one deeper into the reality of God or man; this priest or that cares for nothing but money, the sick are neglected, the old are rejected; the hierarchy know nothing of the emotional or intellectual problems which are eating away at their people’s faith, the Curia is simply a bureaucracy, using every trick to hold on to its power; as for the pope…

“It all adds up to ‘the Institutional Church’, with so many wondering if their spiritual integrity will permit them to remain in it.

“But Institutional Israel, the Chosen People, as the Prophets show it, was even worse than the harshest critics think the Catholic Church, yet it never occurred to the holiest of the Jews to leave it.  They knew that however evilly the administration behaved, Israel was still the people of God. So with the Church: an administration is necessary if the Church is to function, but Christ is the whole point of the functioning. We are not baptized into the hierarchy, we do not receive the cardinals sacramentally, we will not spend eternity in the beatific vision of the pope. 

“St. John Fisher could say in a public sermon, ‘If the Pope will not reform the Curia, God will’: a couple of years later he laid his head on Henry VIII’s block for papal supremacy, followed to the same block by St Thomas More, who had spent his youth under the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, lived his early manhood under the Medici pope, Leo X, and died for papal supremacy under Clement VII, as time-serving a pope as Rome had had.

“Christ is the point. I myself admire the present Pope [he was writing of Paul VI]; but even if I criticized as harshly as some do, even if his successor proved to be as bad as some of those who have gone before, even if I sometimes find the Church (as I have to live in it) a pain in the neck, I should still say that nothing a pope could do or say would make me wish to leave the Church, though I might well wish that he would. Israel, through its best periods as through its worst, preserved the truth of God’s Oneness in a world swarming with gods – and the sense of God’s majesty in a world sick with its own pride.  So with the Church. Under the worst administration – say as bad as John XII’s a thousand years ago – we could still learn Christ’s truth, still receive His life in the sacraments, still be in union with Him to the limit of our willingness.” ~ Frank Sheed

A possible idea to help? Instead of tweeting about how bad things are or making another video about how corrupt the vatican is or how bad this or that cleric is, why not do a form of reparation? It’s not going to get you likes, clicks, or popularity to promote and it’s much easier to complain then to do penance by Fr. Mateo gave a solid idea to do for the entire month of October. There is always a price that needs to be paid, whether it is about conversions or helping the Church.

Click on Fr Mateo’s photo for the link on the October Challenge