The Dying Church

Seeing how the Church lives on the Holy Spirit

05/04/2024

Jn 15:9-17 Jesus said to his disciples: "As the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and remain in his love. "I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy might be complete. This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father. It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you. This I command you: love one another."

My friends, is the Church dying? Or, we might ask, is the Church already dead? This past week the priests of our deanery met to talk about our struggling youth programs and why young people don’t come to Mass after Confirmation or graduation. Would many young people in high school and college say that the Church is dying, or at least that it feels irrelevant?

On April 22, 2024 USA Today published an article called “Share of US Catholics backing legal abortion rises as adherents remain at odds with church.” The author observed: “Catholics tend to be older than most Americans, the [Pew Research] survey found: About 6 in 10 Catholic adults are ages 50 or older, compared with 48% of the overall US population.” Catholics are older than the average American.

Then it pointed out important issues where Catholics disagree with Church teaching, saying: “Among all Catholics, 83% say the church should allow the use of contraception, 69% say priests should be allowed to marry, 64% say women should be allowed to become priests, and 54% say the church should recognize same-sex marriage.”

Then the article drew this rather dire conclusion: “That should be a wake-up call for bishops. One of the reasons people leave is because of rigid instruction on sexuality. An all-male celibate hierarchy is making the rules, and there’s this chasm between what Catholics believe in practice and what the church is teaching. They are leaving the people behind.” According to this article, therefore, if the Catholic Church isn’t already dead, it is definitely on life-support.

The article sounded a little like that old joke about the one dollar bill and the fifty dollar bill, both about to be retired from circulation. They meet on the conveyor belt headed to the shredder and starting talking. The one asks the fifty where it has spent its life. He replies proudly: “I’ve been to Las Vegas, on Caribbean cruises, and in the finest restaurants.” The fifty then asks the one: “How about you, little buddy?”

The one answers somewhat sadly: “Church, church, church, church, church.” The fifty asks: “Excuse me, but what is a church?” In other words, if you base your conclusions on statistical and sociological research, then the Catholic Church seems to be dead, or at least with one foot in the grave and the other foot on a banana peel.

But I am convinced those are exactly the wrong criteria to evaluate the health and strength of the Church. Why? Well, because we miss what the Church really is. You see, statics or sociology will never show us how the Church’s true power and engine is the Holy Spirit. Jesus says in the gospel how he freely chooses those who receive the Spirit: “It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain.”

And in the first reading from Acts, St. Peter bears fruit because he is an instrument for the Holy Spirit. We read: “While Peter was still speaking these things, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who were listening to the word.” And later they are all baptized. That is, if the Pew Research Center had conducted sociological or statistical surveys in the first century, it would have said that the Christian enterprise was hopeless. Dead on arrival.

But the Church is far beyond the capacity of such surveys because it is not a human institution but rather divine, the Body of Christ. And just as Jesus (the Head) rose and reigns forever, so too will the Church (the Body) continue to spread and grow until, as St. Paul boldly predicted in Ep 4:13, “Until we all attain to the unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the extent of the full stature of Christ.” The Church will one day stand fully erect, even if we only receive one dollar bills in the collection.

Let me leave you with a lengthy but brilliant quotation from C. S. Lewis’ book “Mere Christianity.” Listen carefully now: “Compared with the development of man on this planet, the diffusion of Christianity over the human race seems to go like a flash of lightning – for two thousand years is almost nothing in the history of the universe. (Never forget we are all still ‘early Christians.’ The present wicked and wasteful divisions between us are, let us hope, a disease of infancy: we are still teething.” I love the image of the Church as a baby who is “still teething.”

Lewis continues: “The outer world, no doubt, thinks just the opposite. It thinks we are dying of old age,” like that USA Today article argued. Lewis goes on: “But it has thought that very often before. Again and again it has thought Christianity was dying: dying by persecutions from without and corruptions from within, by the rise of Mohammedanism, the rise of the physical sciences, the rise of great anti-Christian revolutionary movements.” Here he means Nazism, Communism, etc.

Lewis concludes: “But every time the world has been disappointed. Its first disappointment was over the crucifixion. The Man [Jesus] came to life again. In a sense…that has been happening ever since. They keep on killing the thing that He started [the Church]: and each time, just as they are patting down the earth on its grave, they suddenly hear that it is still alive and has even broken out in some new place” (pp. 221-22).

In other words, changing metaphors, the Author who is writing the story of the Catholic Church is not human – you or I – but Divine, namely, the Holy Spirit. And if you bother to ask the Holy Spirit what he thinks about the vitality and the future of the Catholic Church, he would answer: “The Church is not dead, its story is only getting started. I’ve only written the Introduction of the book.” Or, like the kids say today: the Holy Spirit is just getting the party started.

Praised be Jesus Christ!