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Life Ways Does the Church "Deserve"
My Loyalty Today? A fast-paced highly technological and computerized society such as our own easily falls into the trap of demanding instantaneous answers for everything at the push of a button. There is immediate closure to everything. Facts are printed out without a second glance. From these facts decisions are made, courses are plotted, lives are altered. In searching for the truth, however, we usually don't seize on such instantaneous answers. It is a search that involves the darkness of faith. We have to be attuned to a certain inner dialogue and to a dialogue with others. Truth proceeds often from the depths of mystery and far outstrips our capacity to analyze and understand. An essential aspect of the vocation of the lay faithful is an understanding of the truth of the Church. The Church today receives a lot of bad press. She suffers from the weakness of her members, as well as from the antagonism of those who wish to reduce her reality to a delusion. The person who lives outside of faith has a limited perception of the Church. In essence they say, "Listen to me. What you have thought to be this is in reality nothing but that." Some attempt to re-order and straighten out the graced event of the Church. They want to convince Catholics that when they say "believe" they actually only mean that they have an idea in their mind about something: an idea that can easily be exchanged for another. Cardinal Ratzinger in the book Rapporta sulla Fede states that the Church is not ours but God's. In a country where government belongs to the people and is the exercise of our responsibility for our lives as a collective whole, Ratzinger's statement might not register for us. In the Church we do not encounter something we have created. Instead, we continually rediscover the mystery of the "Other," of God who in Jesus Christ, through his Spirit, saves and gathers all in the unity of the Truth. This Truth is guarded, protected and communicated to the world by the Church, the sacred holder of this trust. The Church is an event of grace. The Church cannot be limited to a simply social, manipulable institution. She can never be subject to ideological, political instrumentalizations. The Church's message and her service are reduced to a supplement to society's already structured agenda. Such a reduction of the mystery of the Church to a mere puppet of the whim of a powerful few would limit the participation of the faithful in the internal work of the Church to functional considerations. The radicality of the Gospel would give way to criteria of power, status and efficiency. But this is not so. Central to Pope John Paul II's pontificate and teaching is not power, status or efficiency, but rather the image of the Redeemer of Man. The lay faithful are called to live, witness and share the power of Christ's redemption. This alone is the key and full meaning of human existence. Christ alone, the Redeemer of Man, gives meaning to everything that exists. Today more than ever before it is necessary that the lay faithful exercise the universal priesthood that is theirs. They have a unique responsibility to bring to others the radicality of the Gospel and the possibility of a new and better life. Of all the people I have met, the most strikingly Christian is a gentleman who begged on the streets of Chicago eleven years ago. Sam had been partners with a friend in a business venture. This friend had appropriated all the revenue, and closed the business in order to enter another more lucrative career. In the process Sam's arm was permanently damaged. As he rattled his can up and down Chicago's sidewalks swarming with people, he often encountered his old friend. Sam begged from him as he begged from anyone else. I will never forget how this man, reduced to destitution and deprived of family and home, absorbed the power of violence with love: forgiveness offered to his friend who daily brushed past his outstretched hands. "Messiahs" bombard us from every side. Countless sit-coms invade American living rooms and hearts proclaiming a message, offering solutions, promising happiness. Will we Christians be capable of living and proclaiming a different message? In homes, schools, hospitals, government, court rooms, corporate offices, gas stations, hovels, we must show that Christianity is the most fully human proposal, in harmony with the vocation, experience and destiny of the human person. Christ is the cornerstone of every genuinely human civilization. Christ has revealed the Absolute of Love, the authentic antidote for the violence on our streets and in our hearts. In our Catholic belief and experience of the liturgy, we live and proclaim our powerful hope and unshrinking certainty in the definitive statement of the Paschal Mystery. This hope gives us the capacity to build new experiences of Christian living which are the sign of God's Kingdom leavening our world.
Copyright © 1999-2003, Daughters of St. Paul. All Rights Reserved.
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