Pope Francis' Missionary Church - by James V. Schall, S.J.

In CWR

 

“Each Christian and every community must discern the path that the Lord points out, but all of us are asked to obey his call to go forth from our own comfort zone in order to reach all the ‘peripheries’ in need of the light of the Gospel.”
— Pope Francis, The Joy of the Gospel, #20.

“The kingdom is here, it remains; it struggles to flourish anew. Christ’s resurrection everywhere calls for the seeds for that new world, even if they are cut back, they grow again, for the resurrection is already secretly woven into the fabric of this history, for Jesus did not rise in vain. May we never remain on the sidelines of this march of living hope?”
— Pope Francis, The Joy of the Gospel, #278.

I.

When I finished Pope Francis’ first encyclical, The Light of Faith, I concluded that Francis’ pontificate would concentrate on the parish, on local communities and dioceses as centers of worship, belief, and charity. The Church would be less in the public eye. This example of a vibrant local life would be the basis of the attraction of Christianity to the Gentiles. 

On finishing Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel, however, I have to conclude differently. Francis is concerned with an active, “missionary” Church that is very much involved with everything else through its attention to and delight in its own communal life. Time Magazine’s making Francis the “Person of the Year” is enough to tell us that Pope Francis’ short pontificate so far has not been a quiet affair to which few have paid attention. From the moment of his election, Francis came on not so much as a tiny seed but as a full grown mustard tree, to adapt a famous parable. 

Since the day of his election, Francis has often, sometimes daily, made headlines of one sort or another throughout the world. Most everyone has an opinion about him. No one can ignore him, not even those who would like to. He is obviously likeable. He appreciates community life. One of the Renaissance popes (Leo X, d. 1521) quipped to his brother: “God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it.” I have the impression that, in the best sense, Francis has enjoyed being pope. He seeks to know everyone. He drives his security forces crazy. But he has an exuberance that is catching. And he has something to say and he says it; let the chips fall where they may. He tells everyone he loves them. He tells us that he is a “sinner.” He does not think he is always right. He thanked Archbishop Marchetto for correcting him on the issue of the continuity of the Church before and after Vatican II. 

Aside from The Light of Faith, which had Benedict XVI in its background, we have seen very little of Francis’ overall thought. He has a sparse paper-trail. He gives short, familiar homilies in Santa Marta’s chapel, each with three points. His Wednesday audiences and talks in L’Osservatore Romano are generally short and homey. He affirms every settled doctrine of the Church, but wants to present it gently, in a new context. What he says is always full of personal comment. We know much of his experiences in Argentina. They loved him in Rio at World Youth Day. Several of his interviews have gained worldwide attention and sharp controversy. 

The Pope clearly wants to shift the attention of the Church to a missionary, outgoing mode. He does not want anyone to stay at home. We not only are to experience the joy of the Gospel ourselves, but its contagion is to be brought to others. The Pope prods those who stay at home or in bureaucratic offices to get out in the streets. He wants bishops and priests to have open doors. Somewhere he commented that churches should be unlocked—which makes one smile because of the experience of many parishes: if they do not lock their doors, they are constantly vandalized. But he speaks from his own experience where doors of churches can be left open. This is the goal of any peaceable society. 

The Pope has many ideas about economics and politics. He does not hesitate to tell us about them. To many, they sound very “south of the border,” even beyond Mexico way. Pope Bergoglio admits that he is not an expert in these matters. But he insists that attention to the poor is part of his and everyone else’s job. He wonders why we cannot find politicians who can figure this problem out. Actually, a good part of the world’s poor in recent decades have passed out of extreme poverty (see “Towards the End of Poverty,” The Economist, June 1, 2013). Many people at least seem to know how to accomplish this goal. But this Pope will not be content with less than everyone. This insistence is both refreshing and a little frustrating. No one can mind too much to be reminded of things yet to be figured out. St. Thomas, whom the Pope cites frequently in The Joy of the Gospel, however, said that such things often can only be done “gradually.” 

II.

But if I am asked what is the overall impression left by this Exhortation, I have to say that it is very much “this-worldly” oriented. It points horizontally, not vertically. The inner life of the Godhead is not much spoken of. When the Father is mentioned, it is always in the context of the love of the neighbor whom God loves in Christ. Unlike Benedict in Spe Salvi, there is little attention given to “eternal life.” When Francis mentions the “kingdom of God,” he does not, as one would expect, cite Augustine. He mentions actual cities and is rather surprised by them. When Augustine talked of “the City of God,” he said that it began among us, but could not be achieved in this world. No existing city would ever be this Kingdom. Augustine, with good reason, was leery of the ambitions of the cities of this world. 

Of course, this emphasis on actual cities is Aristotelian. We are social and political animals. What concerns Francis, if I might put it that way, is the second great commandment. He obviously does not deny the first, the love of God. But Francis’ attention is given to God’s love as it exists among us. But he thinks not enough response is given to it. He wants to improve the world by emphasizing the joy of Christianity that we can experience in our lives and worship. The love of neighbor is an active thing. This pope believes in action. He talks of contemplation at times, but with overtones of Ignatius of Loyola’s simul in actione contemplativus; we behold God’s action in the doing of what needs to be done. 

Pope Bergoglio is much more oriented to modernity, to modern culture, than the previous two popes. He cites John XXIII, and sometimes Paul VI, though he certainly cites John Paul II and Benedict—and de Lubac, Guardini, Newman, Bernanos, and the various documents of episcopal conferences. He is open to modern science. He is aware of skepticism, relativism, and atheism, but he has a certain sympathy for their adherents. 

So what do I think the Pope is doing with his strong emphasis on missionary activities? He lightly touches the difficulty of political obstacles in most nations of the world to allow for much real missionary work. He mentions the basic right of religious freedom and its lack in many nations. He does not name many names. So his missionary activity first begins at home. The “joy” of the Gospel is designed to be a beacon of light in the world. It can only be seen if believers themselves see it. 

Modernity is, briefly, the position that no truth is found in things or in ourselves. We are free because we are liberated from all religion or philosophy that would limit our freedom, individual or corporate. Religion of any kind is an enemy to this liberty. Once this freedom is established, man can go forward, as Benedict pointed out, to create a world in his own image. Man is not made in any image of God. He makes himself in his own image. Once free of any transcendent claim, man is free to create a truly “human” world that has no outside demands of a god or nature. Science and politics with this background will be able to make man into what he ought to be. 

What Pope Francis seems to be doing in this Exhortation is, as it were, to present an alternative to modernity within modernity. This alternative is itself inner-worldly. That is, the emphasis is on the effects of Christianity as it truly ought to be lived in the here and now.

Another legitimate version of this living as Christians ought to live would be the admonition in Scripture that Christians will often be hated precisely because they do live as Christ asked them to live. At the end of time, it seems possible that there will be little faith. But we are dealing here with what is in fact a legitimate approach, as far as I understand it. There has always been a question of what is, in fact, the “inner-worldly” purpose of revelation. Granted that it can and often is rejected, still what would the world look like if the famous ancient phrase “see how they love one another” were practiced as a missionary endeavor? 

As far as I can see, Pope Bergoglio is bent on proposing for us a way to put into effect what the Didache once said about Christians wanting to live quietly and peacefully in the world. But this would initially involve not only Christians themselves with a life of joy in their communities, but also of intelligently confronting issues of sin, economic and political disorder, self-love, and other aberrations that prevent us from helping others. 

In the process, we do not cease to be sinners. Hence, the Pope has much to say about forgiveness and mercy. His particular proposals may be debated. Nietzsche’s complaint was that Christians did not live like Christians—so why worry about them? Pope Bergoglio’s exhortation is that we will all “worry” about them when they live in love and display the joy that Christ showed them. This love is not just a personal thing, though it that too. The Pope speaks of “structural” impediments and cultural habits that prevent us from living as we should. 

But at bottom, what this Exhortation seems to be is, indeed, an answer to classical modernity that, when spelled out, does everything modernity hopes for, only better and more securely because it is rooted in the real nature of man and is open to the gifts that have come to us in revelation. The Pope’s impatience has its charm. It also has its dangers. After all, most men who have ever lived on this planet have lived in very imperfect circumstances. The Church was for them too. Few lived in really fully developed economic and political orders with scientific and technological support that enabled man the leisure and time to create a civilization. Paul VI called it a “civilization of love,” and Pope Francis would probably call it the same. 

So while the function and inspiration of the Church is surely to stand for joy and fulfillment in this life, it never forgets that we save or lose our souls in the societies in which we live, whatever their condition. Some societies are better than others. And we are fortunate if in our lifetime we have lived in one of the better ones. One does not know this—“who are we to judge?”—but it is quite possible that more souls reached their transcendent end from the gulags and concentration camps than from the fashionable addresses of our culture. 

But that is no argument for setting up concentration camps. That is the Pope’s point. We must try with all our energy and strength for something better. Pope Bergoglio’s impatience is “this-worldly,” if you will, but it is not “utopian” or modernist. That, I think, is what this detailed Exhortation really has to teach us.

The Tridentine Masterpiece - by Donald S. Prudlo

In Crisis

“Nam oportet et hæreses esse.” (1 Cor 11:19).  “It is fitting that there be heresies, so that those who are true, may be manifested among you.” 

How appropriate is this sentiment of St. Paul’s when we apply it to the Ecumenical Council of Trent.

In the annals of difficult ecclesiastical births, none was so trying as the effort to marshal a council following the dawn of the Protestant Reformation.  Even when it met it was plagued by intermittent attendance, sickness, military threats, and political machinations.  Yet 450 years ago, on 4 December 1563, after sporadic meetings lasting over eighteen years, the Council of Trent closed its deliberations and forwarded its decisions to Rome for Papal approval.  What it accomplished during those eighteen is staggering.  If all the other 20 ecumenical synods were put together, they would not equal the dogmatic output of the Tridentine Council.  In terms of Church doctrine, no Council has had a wider effect.

The implications of this go much further however.  Trent did not even begin to meet until twenty-five years had elapsed since Martin Luther’s excommunication.  For reasons that included politics, geography, fear of conciliarism, and lack of papal leadership, the Council was severely delayed.  During that time large sections of the Church were ripped away: Germany, Poland, the Low Countries, Switzerland, Britain, and Scandinavia.  By the time the Fathers of Trent assembled, those areas were gone, though a few would later be patiently recovered for the Church.

With that said however, this generational delay allowed the Church time to collect her thoughts.  The great theologians of the Mendicant orders (and the young Jesuits) began to focus their efforts to create a comprehensive answer to the Protestant challenge.  The Council would be no knee jerk reaction, nor a mere repeat of the ineffectual Lateran V.  The theologians and bishops came to Trent with a thorough understanding of the theological issues at stake, a firm grasp of Protestant claims, and a sober realization of the seriousness of the task which lay before them.  In a certain sense, the delay of Trent was a providential blessing.

While the postponement of the Council was keenly felt throughout Christendom, and though the sessions were at times tense, the outcome was astonishing.  There exists no area of Catholic life that the Council did not address, refine, or reform.  Dogmatically, things which were assumed for over a millennium were defined for the first time (or reaffirmed definitively and solemnly).  The canon of scripture—including the Deuterocanonicals—was proclaimed, along with the septenary number of the sacraments.  Apostolic Traditions were held to be received with equal reverence to the scriptures.  Of course all of these had been accepted immemorially, but Trent re-established them as cornerstones of the Catholic faith.

Of course the Council was eager to address the particular claims of the Lutheran and Reformed movements, but in reality it went much deeper than that.  Instead of merely anathematizing heretical tenets, the Fathers of Trent took the occasion to root their answers in a wholesale reaffirmation of lived, hierarchical, traditional, liturgical, and mystical Christianity.   Nor was the Council needlessly divisive; in clarifying the faith they had no desire further to alienate those outside the fold.  For example, the first decrees it issued were condemnations of Pelagianism, the same heresy Luther himself attacked as latent in late medieval scholasticism.  The Council reasserted the Augustinian position that first grace is absolutely unmeritable by us.  Following that however the Fathers took up a wholesale defense of the intrinsic nature of Justification, that we are really made new creations in Christ, grafted into him and regenerated and, with our graced wills now freely able to do good, merit a real claim to eternal life.  The Tridentine documents on Original Sin and Justification are some of the most theologically sophisticated works ever to be produced by an Ecumenical Council.

Following upon these pivotal decrees the Council turned its attention to the ordinary means of justification and sanctification: the sacraments.  Their grace-conferring characters were confirmed.  Transubstantiation received a substantial defense while the sacrificial nature of the Mass was firmly established.  The Council confirmed the value of celibacy and tightened Church law regarding Marriage.

This is only a sampling of the dozens and dozens of dogmatic decisions reached by the Council, but it is well to draw attention to the manner in which these decisions were framed.  In the first place the Council truly wished to cast these ideas in such a way that Protestants—suspicious of scholastic subtleties—would be able to appreciate.  One of the striking achievements of Trent was that the Council managed to communicate the substance of the medieval Christian tradition without the cumbrous scaffolding of scholastic terminology.  Rather the documents of the Council are filled with the language of the Bible and of the Fathers.  This is an underappreciated aspect of the Council which anticipates the genuine desire for mutual ecumenical understanding, while at the same time taking seriously the Church’s duty to safeguard the deposit of faith.

Trent should also not be seen as an authoritarian Council, intended to reduce Catholic intellectual life to mere rote obedience.  There were many theological traditions represented at Trent: Thomists, Scotists, Augustinians, devotees of the via moderna of Ockham, and even some inclined to the more extrinsic, imputational theories of the Protestants.  The Fathers in their decisions retained Catholic dogma, while permitting a wide latitude of interpretation about that dogma within the various theological schools of Christendom.  Far from silencing theology, Trent merely set the boundaries of the “garden,” within which the thinkers of the Church were free to meet and explore the depths of revelation.

Equally significant were the decrees of Reform that the Council accomplished.  What the Tridentine Fathers brought about was no mere “Counter-Reformation” as it has sometimes been derisively called.  Trent was no reflexive reactionary gathering attempting to circle the wagons.  Rather Trent was the culmination of a period of “Catholic Reform” which had its roots long before Luther, and could be seen in the rise of observant Religious orders, in the purified Church in Spain, and in the great humanistic and artistic achievements of the Renaissance.  Trent set its seal of approval on all of these movements, consolidated them, and gave them an impetus which was to last for hundreds of years.

Indeed it was only after the conclusion of the Council in 1563 that we begin to discern its epoch-making effects.  A congregation was set up for the implementation of Conciliar decrees (today the Congregation for the Clergy).  Under its supervision seminaries were created for the first time, leading to the professionalization of the clergy, instructing them in theology, philosophy, Latin, and canon law, and equipping them to keep their congregations Catholic and to begin to win back those fallen away.  Great reforming bishops like Charles Borromeo and Francis de Sales, fired by the Council’s mandate, reformed their dioceses from top to bottom, providing models of episcopal leadership that would endure well into the modern world.  The incomparable Roman Catechism was written for parish priests, to help them instruct the laity and catechize them in a systematic way for the first time in history, with the aim of beginning the theological education of the lay members of the Church.  The artistic, musical, and mystical traditions of the Church were reaffirmed and given new life and new forms.  The insights of humanism aided in the revision of Jerome’s Vulgate bible, and St. Pius V undertook the great streamlining of the Latin liturgy and Divine Office.  While partisans of medieval liturgical pluralism might blanch a bit at the homogenization of the Roman liturgy, one cannot deny the tremendous success of the Missal of Pius V, particularly in the mission territories.

The Council of Trent did indeed stanch the bleeding.  Northern Europe was gone, however the spirit which the assembly breathed into the Church stopped the spread of Protestantism, and indeed helped whole territories to be won back to the Church, such as Poland and southwest Germany.  More importantly it equipped the Church for worldwide expansion.  For every Protestant lost, 10 souls were gained—in Asia, in Africa, in the Americas.  Trent was a missionary revolution, producing a streamlined, purified Church, free of the corrupting accretions of the late medieval period.  It was also that rarest of things in Church history: a Council of Concord.  We are used to the fruits of a Council being disorder and chaos, and Church history supports our present experience—one need only look to the confusion following Nicea and Ephesus, or the conciliarist councils of the fifteenth century.  

Trent was different.  Its spirit inspired a whole age of the Church, lasting hundreds of years.  Nominalist historians have derisively called it the “invention of the Roman Catholicism,” as if Trent fundamentally altered the faith.  In spite of their inaccuracy they identify a central point.  Trent stamped its ineffaceable image upon Catholicism, but it was successful not because it innovated, but rather was able to present that faith “once for all delivered to the saints” in ways that were perfectly suited to its place in history.  Even though responding to new challenges and situations, Catholicism will indeed be “Tridentine” forever.

A obsessão de S. João Paulo II - por Nuno Serras Pereira

25. 09. 2013

As agências noticiam que para a semana será anunciada a data da canonização - declaração infalível da santidade - de João Paulo II. Este grande Santo não passará a sê-lo, por ser glorificado pela Igreja nesse dia, já o é inteiramente; mas essa celebração solene torna esse reconhecimento público e oficial de modo a permitir o seu culto litúrgico.

Como todos os outros Santos também João Paulo II foi feito participante dos sofrimentos, incompreensões e injúrias de Jesus Cristo. Uma delas, recordo-me bem, e está, com todas as letras no primeiro volume da sua biografia escrita por George Weigel (a pedido do próprio Santo Padre) foi a acusação, não só por parte de descrentes mas também de vários sectores da Igreja, obsessão pelas "questões fracturantes”, para usar este chavão de que a RR parece gostar, particularmente pelo aborto. Uma vez que essa “obsessão” era, como todos podem verificar, uma verdadeira Missão talvez não fosse descabido invocá-lo como S. João Paulo II, o obcecado.

Seja como for, nestes tempos insólitos, peçamos instantemente a sua intercessão. S. João Paulo II, rogai por nós!

Renewing the Church and Her Mission in a Year of Faith - by Archibishop Charles Chaput, ofm cap

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.