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"The Church Does not Exist for Her Own Sake"

6/14/2012

2 Comments

 
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  As we seek to re-engage inactive Catholics, we should heed Pope  Benedict’s recent homily on the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter, in a Mass  concelebrated by 22 new Cardinals: “The Church does not exist for her own sake,  she is not the point of arrival, but she has to point upwards, beyond herself,  to the realms above.”
     
For the new Cardinals, receiving the red biretta would be a heady  experience, not to mention concelebrating with the Pope around Bernini’s Altar  of the Chair. And yet the Holy Father reminded them that their new attire is  about responsibility, not privilege; service rather than power. The red, in  fact, signifies their willingness to love their brothers and sisters unto death. 
      
His words are also a gentle reminder to all Catholics that simply being  Catholic—i.e. just being a card carrying member—is not an end in itself. What do  I mean? 
     
Consider that every faith tradition has its own particular pitfalls. For  many Protestants, who view the church as an exclusively invisible reality, a  nebulous unity of all people who love Jesus, the temptation is to view the  church as expendable. That’s why the video, “Why I Hate Religion but Love Jesus,” has become a Youtube sensation.

Catholics, on the other hand, know that the Church is both visible and  invisible; yet our temptation is to focus on the institution alone and forget  that the Church exists to lead people to Jesus Christ. The visible aspects of  the Church are indispensable, because we are material beings who experience the  divine life of grace through our bodies (and thus, our senses). But the Church  we see, smell, touch, and taste exists to make visible the invisible mystery of  God. 

The Pope points this out, declaring that “The Church herself is like a  window, the place where God draws near to us.” It helps, of course, that above  Bernini’s Altar of the Chair is a stunning alabaster window that irresistibly  attracts the eye with, as the Holy Father describes it, the “light that comes  from above, without which (the world) would be uninhabitable.” 
      
Without the transcendent reality, Bernini’s sculpture is just a piece of  furniture. And let’s be honest, far too many Catholics grow up seeing the  sculpture but never the light behind it. 

They do the right things, the visible actions that we  Catholics do, but they never experience in personal terms the invisible reality  of Christ’s love in their lives. And so they drift, with the majority of  Catholics leaving the Church not in anger but in apathy. 

Some become  disillusioned with Catholicism, but find an evangelical congregation that talks
openly and convincingly about Jesus and the difference he makes in your life.  They have a personal experience of faith, and they believe everything in their  Catholic past was empty ritual.“I went to the Catholic Church my whole life,”  they attest, “But I never knew Jesus or heard the gospel.” We could rightly  quibble that they saw Jesus and heard the gospel in every Mass they attended,  but perception is reality; not objective reality, of course, but subjective.
Others become disillusioned with Christianity in general, and feel the gnawing  emptiness of a life without faith. 

Meanwhile, we who practice the faith might feel a certain indifference to  these inactive Catholics, knowing that we have found the fullness of faith and  losing little sleep over those who used to sit around us. Or if we are concerned  for them, we sometimes are more motivated to simply get them back to the  Catholic Church, as if merely “being a Catholic” is an end in itself.     
      
Yet as the Pope reminds us, occupying a pew is not the goal. Rather, the  Catholic Church is the sacrament of salvation, the most complete expression of  the Christian life and the path most conducive to union with Jesus Christ. The  Church exists not to perpetuate the institution, but so that people in every generation might know Jesus Christ and the abundant life he gives.

So in the task of reaching out to inactive Catholics, we might ask ourselves two questions. First of all, why are we inviting persons back in the first  place—just to be Catholic or to know Jesus Christ? And secondly, when they come  back, what kind of parish will they be finding; one in which Jesus is moving in  the lives of the people, laity and clergy alike, or one with beautiful  furnishings but no compelling vision of the light shining through? 



2 Comments
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    Mike Allen is the Director of Family Life and Evangelization for the DIocese of Lexington.

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