Consulting the Faithful

Learning from ordained clergy and ordinary Christians

05/09/2019

John 6:44-51 Jesus said to the crowds: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day. It is written in the prophets: They shall all be taught by God. Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my Flesh for the life of the world."

Two weeks ago I went home to Little Rock to visit my parents, and they asked me to drive them to Calvary Cemetery in Little Rock. They wanted to show me their burial plots, and they even showed me the headstones with their names on it and their birthdays. You can imagine the size of the lump in my throat. All three of us stood silently, facing the future, and the final fate of every man, woman and child that has ever been born on this sad earth. Before we left, I decided to walk over to the so-called Priests Circle, where now Monsignor John O’Donnell is buried. I walked slowly around the circle praying the Hail Mary for each priest who had passed to his eternal reward. I felt a deep sense of gratitude to them for their life spent in service to the gospel, teaching and preaching the faith. How many people today walk with a pep in their step thanks to the sermons of those good shepherds?

Then I went on a scavenger hunt to find Fr. George Tribou’s grave. He choose to be buried among the lay people, and he was hard to find because his tombstone was flat on the ground, and not upright. I said a prayer for him and thanked him because I would not be a priest today without his example and exhortations. For example, he taught me that French kissing a girl is like using someone else’s toothbrush. He knew how to inspire a priestly vocation.

Visiting cemeteries is a practice my parents taught me every time we travel back to India. Our first stop is the cemetery to pray our respects and recite our prayers for our deceased loved ones. We buy flowers and candles from vendors seated outside the cemetery gates and lay them on the graves and pray a decade of the rosary for each person. Oddly enough, I also feel a deep sense of gratitude to my grandparents and other relatives for teaching me the faith and encouraging my vocation. For instance, my grandmother sacrificially took care of our family when my grandfather left the family for several years. He was doing battle with his own demons. When he returned, she welcomed him home and now they are both buried together. Her life was one of the most eloquent sermons ever preached by a lay person on the love of Jesus. In other words, we learn our faith not only from ordained priests, but also from ordinary people, the laity. We should be thankful to both.

Our scriptures today touch on this interplay in learning the faith from both the ordinary clergy but also from the ordinary Christian. In Acts of the Apostles 8, Philip, one of the first bishops of the Church, is sent by the Holy Spirit to teach an Ethiopian magistrate. Philip asks him if he understands the text of Isaiah he is reading. The Ethiopian answers: “How can I, unless someone instructs me?” In other words, like I needed Fr. Tribou to teach me in high school, so the Ethiopian needed Philip to instruct him in the faith, the ordained clergy. But in the gospel Jesus declares (quoting Isiah 54): “They shall all be taught by God.” That is, the Holy Spirit can – and does – directly teach all Christians, like he taught my grandmother how to love my grandfather in a heroic way. Blessed John Henry Newman wrote a lovely little essay called “Consulting the Faithful on Matters of Doctrine” and insisted the faithful are a “barometer” of true belief, even sometimes when the clergy can’t be. When it comes to faith formation, therefore, we are indebted not only to ordained priests but also to ordinary people.

May I mention one area where it seems imperative that we learn from consulting the faithful today? That is when it comes to the crisis of clergy sexual abuse of minors. Over the past twenty years or so the clergy has demonstrated a definite deficiency of leadership on this tragic issue. Basically, we priests cannot police ourselves. We need the lay faithful to help hold us accountable. The lay faithful feel a lot of righteous indignation at the loss of credibility and the lack of transparency. That anger and anxiety should be transformed into helpful reform and renewal for the Church. Like my grandmother was a shining example of sacrificial love, so we priests need to learn anew from saintly lay people how to love like Jesus.

Maybe this is one reason Fr. Tribou chose to be buried in the midst of the lay faithful at Calvary Cemetery. In death, as in life, perhaps he felt he still had much to learn from them. Although, I’m sure he insists on using his own toothbrush in heaven.

Praised be Jesus Christ!