In CERC
My comments today will be simple. I want to focus on just three
points. The first point is where we are as a Church and as individual
Catholics, given the current environment of our country. The second
point is what we need to do about it. And the third point is who we need
to be, or become, to live the kind of witness God wants from us. Before
we get to that, though, I want to offer a few preliminary thoughts.
Language matters. It both expresses and shapes our thinking. Vulgar
language suggests a vulgar soul. Obviously, lots of exceptions exist. A
peasant can have a rough vocabulary and still lead a saintly life. And a
political leader can have a golden tongue and still be a complete
liar. But, in general, words are revealing. They have power because they
have meaning. So we should take care to understand and use them
properly.
The words of the Nicene Creed are the defining statement of Christian
identity. They’re the glue of the Catholic community. Jews are Jews by
virtue of being born of a Jewish mother. But being a Christian has
nothing to do with blood or tribe or ethnicity or national
origin. Christian identity comes from the sacraments, sacred Scripture
and the Creed. What we believe and profess together to be true as
Catholics is the foundation and the cement of our unity.
Every word in the Creed was prayed over, argued over and clarified by
decades of struggle in the early Church. The words are precious and
uncompromising. They direct us toward God and set us apart from the
world. When people sometimes claim that Islam and Christianity have so
much in common, they need to read, or reread, the Creed. Catholics pray
the Creed every Sunday at Mass as the framework and fundamental
profession of our faith. Devout Muslims reject nearly every line of it.
Over a lifetime, a Catholic will recite the Nicene Creed or the
Apostles’ Creed thousands of times. But if we’re honest, we need to
admit that we often mumble the words without even thinking. That has
consequences. The less we understand the words of the Creed and revere
the meaning behind them, the farther away we drift from our Catholic
identity and the more confused we become about who we really are as
Christians. We need to give our hearts to what we hear and what we say
in our public worship. Otherwise, little by little, we become dishonest.
Here’s my purpose in saying all this. The theme we’re here to talk
about today is “Renewing the Church and Her Mission in a Year of
Faith.” Four of those words warrant some attention: renewing, Church, mission and faith.
Let’s start with that first word: renewing. Over time even the
strongest marriage can wear down with hardship or fatigue. Couples
renew their vows to remember and reinforce their love for each
other. The story of the Church is much the same. History has shown
again and again that, over time, the life of the Church can become
routine; then an afterthought; and then stagnant and cynical, or
worse. God sends us saints like Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis of Assisi,
Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena to change that: to scrub the
heart of the Church clean; in other words, to make her young again. They
rekindle the “fire upon the earth” (Luke 12:49) that Jesus intended all
of his disciples to be.
In our own day, we can see the same work of the Holy Spirit in the
Neo-Catechumenal Way, the Christian Life Movement, Walking with Purpose,
ENDOW, the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, and so many
other new apostolic efforts. The new ecclesial movements are a very
important moment of grace for the Church, including the Church in
Philadelphia. We shouldn’t fear them because this is exactly how the
Franciscans and other religious communities once began. We should
welcome the zeal behind these new charisms wholeheartedly, even
as we test them. The Church is always in need of change and reform, but
change and reform that remain faithful to Jesus Christ and the soul of
Catholic teaching. Real renewal is organic, not destructive.
Let’s turn to the second word: Church. The Church is not a
“what,” but a “who;” not an “it,” but a “she.” Nobody can love the
Church as an institution any more than they can love General Motors or
the IRS. The Church has institutional forms because she needs
to work in the legal and material structures of the world. But the
essence of the Church is mother and teacher; guide and comforter; family
and community of faith. That’s how we need to think of her. And the
Church is “his” Church, the bride of Jesus Christ, not “our” Church in
any sense that we own her or have authority to rewrite her teachings.
The great third-century bishop St. Cyprian once said, “You cannot have
God for your Father if you do not have the Church for your mother.” We
should belong to the Church as her sons and daughters. The Church should
live in our hearts like our family does, and we should come together on
Sunday to love and reinforce each other as a family, to praise our
Father and to share the food he gives us in his Son. Our Sunday worship
should be alive and full of faith and celebrated with conviction and
joy. Bricks and mortar are a dead shell without a zeal for God and for
the salvation of each other burning inside the parish walls.
The third word is mission. Our mission, our purpose and task
as Christian disciples, is simple: “Make disciples of all nations”
(Matthew 28:19). Jesus meant exactly what he said, and he meant those
words of the Gospel for all of us, including you and me. We
need to bring Jesus Christ to the whole world and the whole world to
Jesus Christ. Our mission flows straight from the inner life of the
Trinity. God sent his Son. The Son sends his Church. And the Church
sends us.
Obviously, we can’t convert the world on our own. We’re not called to succeed. Success is God’s business. Our business is trying,
working together and supporting each other as believers and always
asking God’s help. God does listen. He’ll handle the rest. But we do
need to try. We need to be more than just maintainers of old
structures. We need to be missionaries.
Fourth and finally, there’s that word faith. Faith is not an
emotion. It’s not a set of doctrines or ideas, though all these things
play an important part in the life of faith. Faith is confidence in
things unseen based on the word of someone we know and love, in this
case God. Faith is a gift of God. He chooses us. We can certainly ask
for the gift of faith, and when it’s offered, we can freely choose to
accept it or not. But the initiative is God’s, and only a living
encounter and a living relationship with Jesus Christ make faith
sustainable.
Faith opens our eyes to God’s real reality. Because we see with new
eyes, we have reason to hope. And hope enables charity by allowing us to
put aside fear and to look beyond ourselves to the suffering and needs
of other people. History is shaped and life is advanced by people who
believe in something more important than themselves. So faith is the
cornerstone of Christian life because it enlarges us; it animates us;
it’s restless. It must be shared or it dies. It takes us outside
ourselves and allows us to risk.
Now let’s go back to the three points I mentioned at the start of this talk. The first point I want to talk about is where we are as a Church and as individual Catholics, given the current environment of our country. We need to know the facts of our pastoral terrain before we can renew or achieve anything.
Some of you here today probably saw the movie from a few years ago called Cinderella Man. It’s
based on a true story: the story of Jimmy Braddock, the Irish Catholic
boxer who came from nowhere to win the 1935 world heavyweight
championship. Out of work, injured and poor in the middle of the Great
Depression, Braddock never betrays his wife. He never gives up on his
duties as a father. He’s honest, humble, grateful, hardworking, faithful
to his friends, and he pays back every dime he receives in unemployment
assistance from the state. Most of all, Braddock accepts the pounding
that life gives him, both in and out of the ring. He endures it without
bitterness. He never quits. And, in the end, he does something almost
miraculous: He wins the title from the great champion Max Baer.
People who love this film love it for a reason, despite its
violence: In many ways, the character of Jimmy Braddock embodies the
very best of American virtue. The trouble is: Less and less of that
virtue now seems to survive in American life, except as a form of
nostalgia. And nostalgia is just another thread in the same cocoon of
unreality that surrounds us 24 hours a day on our TVs, in our theaters,
in our mass marketing and on the Web.
In a sense, our political and economic power, our addictions to
comfort, consumption and entertainment, have made us stupid. David
McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, said recently that we’ve
become “historically illiterate” as a nation. He told the story of a
student at a prestigious university who attended one of his lectures and
thanked him afterward. Until she heard him speak, she said, she had not known that all 13 of the original American colonies were located on the East Coast.
The illiteracy goes beyond history and other academic subjects. Notre
Dame social researcher Christian Smith and his colleagues have tracked
in great detail the spiritual lives of today’s young adults and
teenagers. The results are sobering. So are the implications. The real
religion of vast numbers of American young people is a kind of fuzzy
moral niceness, with a generic, undemanding God on duty to make us happy
whenever we need him. It’s what Smith calls “moralistic therapeutic
deism.” Or, to put it in the words of a young woman from Maryland, “It’s
just whatever makes you feel good about you.” As Smith observes: “It’s
not so much that Christianity in the United States is being
secularized. Rather more subtly, either Christianity is [degenerating]
into a pathetic version of itself or, more significantly, [it’s]
actively being colonized and displaced” by a very different religious
faith.
This is the legacy — not the only part of it, but the saddest part of
it — that my generation, the boomer generation, has left to the Church
in the United States. More than 70 million Americans describe themselves
as Catholics. But for all practical purposes, they’re no different from
everybody else in their views, their appetites and their
behaviors. This isn’t what the Second Vatican Council had in mind when
it began its work 50 years ago. It’s not what Vatican II meant by
reform. And left to itself, our life as a Church is not going to get
better. It’s going to get worse. So if we want a real renewal of the
Catholic faith in Philadelphia, in the United States and worldwide, it
needs to begin with us, right here and right now.
That leads me to my second point: what we need to do about the pastoral realities we face. In
calling for a Year of Faith, Pope Benedict said that “the renewal of
the Church is ... achieved through the witness offered by the lives of
believers.” That means all of us — clergy, religious and lay. We all need repentance, and we all need conversion.
The clergy abuse crisis of the past decade has been a terrible
tragedy. It’s caused great suffering. It’s wounded many innocent
victims. It’s turned thousands of good people away from the Church. As a
bishop, I regret these things bitterly, and I apologize for them,
especially to the victims, but also to our people and priests. God will
hold all of us who are bishops to a hard accounting for the pain that
has resulted. And I accept that as a right judgment.
But if we’re honest — and there can be no real reform, no real renewal,
without honesty — we need to admit that the problems in American
Catholic life today are much wider and much deeper than any clergy
scandal. And they’ve been growing in our own hearts for decades. If
young people are morally and religiously ignorant by the millions, they
didn’t get that way on their own. We taught them. They learned from our indifference, our complacency, our moral compromises, our self-absorption, our eagerness to succeed, our vanity, our greed, our lack of Catholic conviction and zeal.
We made this moment together — clergy, religious and lay. And God will only help us unmake the failures of the past and remake them into a moment of renewal, if we choose now to serve God’s purposes together.
If we really want new life in the archdiocese, some of what we need to do is obvious.
We need to protect and educate our young people. We need to impress on their hearts that salvation is not
just a pious fiction, but a matter of eternal consequence: a gift that
cost God the life of his own Son. Our Catholic schools are vital in this
work. St. John Neumann founded our schools 150 years ago to protect the
faith of our young people from Protestant pressure in the
classroom. But our same Catholic schools are even more important today
in a time of aggressive secularism, moral confusion and bitter criticism
of the Church.
We need to do much more to support the priests, deacons and religious
who minister so generously to our minority communities. Minorities bring
a huge transfusion of new life into the Church. We also need to help
our minority communities see that they too share God’s call to be missionaries.
We need to use our material resources far more wisely, and then we need to be accountable for them.
We need to be eager again to invite young men to the priesthood, starting with parents who encourage their sons in the home. Nothing
is more heroic as a way of life than a priesthood lived with purity and
zeal. And we need to form our young priests to be more than just
maintainers and managers, but real missionaries: new men for a new kind
of mission field, with a hunger to bring the whole world to Jesus
Christ.
Finally, we need to build a new spirit of equality, candor and
friendship that weaves together every vocation in our Church.
Priesthood, the diaconate, religious life and the lay vocation: Each has
a distinct and irreplaceable importance. There are no “second class”
Catholics and no “second class” vocations. We need each other.
In a way, being together today in mid-November to talk about the future
of the Church is exactly the right time for our theme. November is the
month of All Saints and All Souls [Days]. It’s a time when the Church
invites us to reflect on our own mortality and the universal call to
holiness we all share. Life is short. Time is the one resource we can
never replenish. Therefore, time matters. So does what we do with it.
In the end, renewal in the Church is the work of God. But he works
through us. The privilege and the challenge belong to us, so we need to
ask ourselves: What do I want my life to mean? If I claim to be
a Catholic, can I prove it with the patterns of my life? When do I
pray? How often do I seek out the sacrament of penance? What am I doing
for the poor? How am I serving the needy? Do I really know Jesus
Christ? Who am I leading to the Church? How many young people have I
asked to consider a vocation? How much time do I spend sharing about God
with my spouse, my children and my friends? How well and how often do I
listen for God’s will in my own life?
The Church has many good reasons why people should believe in God,
believe in Jesus Christ and believe in the beauty and urgency of her own
mission. But she has only one irrefutable argument for the truth of what she teaches: the personal example of her saints.
And that brings me to my third and final point: who we need to be and who we need to become.
When we end our time together today, I have a homework assignment for
you. Sometime over the Thanksgiving weekend, I want you to rent or buy
or borrow a copy of the 1966 film about Sir Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons.
I want you to watch it with your family. Here’s why: More was one of
the most distinguished scholars of his time, a brilliant lawyer, a
gifted diplomat and a skilled political leader. Jonathan Swift, the
great Anglo-Irish writer, once described him as “a person of the
greatest virtue this kingdom [of England] ever produced.”
Above all, More was a man of profound Catholic faith and practice. He
lived what he claimed to believe. He had his priorities in right
order. He was a husband and a father first, a man who — in the words of
Robert Bolt, the author of the original play and the 1966 film — “adored
and was adored by his own large family.”
A Man for All Seasons won Oscars for both "Best Picture" and
"Best Actor," and it’s clearly one of the great stories ever brought to
the screen. But it captures only a small fraction of the real man. In
his daily life, Thomas More loved to laugh. He enjoyed life and
every one of its gifts. Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist scholar and a
friend of More and his family, described More as a man of “amiable
joyousness [and] simple dress ... born and framed for friendship ...
easy of access to all,” uninterested in ceremony and riches, humble,
indifferent to food, unimpressed by opinions of the crowd and never
departing from common sense.
Despite the integrity of More’s character, and despite his faithful
service, Henry VIII martyred him in 1535. More refused to accept the
Tudor king’s illicit marriage to Anne Boleyn, and he refused to
repudiate his fidelity to the Holy See. In 1935, the Church declared
Thomas More a saint. Today — half a millennium after he died and a
continent away — this one man’s faith still moves us. That’s the power
of sainthood; that’s the power of holiness.
Here’s the lesson I want to leave you with: We’re all called to martyrdom. That’s what the word martyr means:
It’s the Greek word for “witness.” We may or may not ever suffer
personally for our love of Jesus Christ, but we’re all called to be
witnesses. In proclaiming the Year of Faith, Benedict XVI wrote:
“By faith, across the centuries, men and women of all ages, whose
names are written in the Book of Life ... have confessed the beauty of
following the Lord Jesus wherever they were called to bear witness to
the fact that they were Christian: in the family, in the workplace, in
public life, in the exercise of the charisms and ministries to which
they were called.”
The only thing that matters is to be a saint. That’s what we need to
be. That’s what we need to become. And if we can serve God through the
witness of our lives by kindling that fire of holiness again in the
heart of Philadelphia, then God will make all things new: in our Church,
in our families and in our nation.
