When ‘the Church’ Lets Us Down
Every now and then, people find counterfeit money, yet no one would ever say that the American dollar isn’t worth anything. Astronomers have discovered spots on the sun; nevertheless, we have never heard anyone deny that the sun is the light that illumines the world. And yet, we know many people who take hold of the falls and sins of a few Catholics – which are often scandalous –to be able to say: ‘They aren’t telling us everything! The Church is the work of the devil!’
This extreme point of view begins with a fact: there are scandals. To illustrate this, we can mention by way of example politicians who call themselves ‘Catholic’ but have agendas significantly contrary to the doctrine of the gospel, and despite this they approach to receive Holy Communion; high ecclesiastics involved in cases of corruption; ‘Catholic’ religious in favor of women priesthood… and the list could continue. This is nothing new under the sun. Already in 1937, Pius XI spoke of “that incoherence and discontinuity in Christian life which we have many times lamented. For there are some who, while exteriorly faithful to the practice of their religion, yet in the field of labor and industry, in the professions, trade and business, permit a deplorable cleavage in their conscience, and live a life too little in conformity with the clear principles of justice and Christian charity. Such lives are a scandal to the weak, and to the malicious a pretext to discredit the Church.”[1]
What does all of this go to prove? It proves that Our Lord espoused humanity as it is. Christ did not expect his Mystical Body to be free from scandal because He Himself was a stumbling block and surrounded by weakness.[2] Venerable Fulton Sheen expresses it thus: “If the human nature of Our Lord could suffer physical defeat and be a scandal, why should there not be scandals in Our Lord’s Mystical Body made up of poor mortals such as we?[3]
We have to be realists. “The experience of the Church is also the experience that there is evil amidst the men of the Church. Jesus himself said: there will be wheat and weeds.[4] If we were all wheat, the whole world would be Catholic. But there are weeds and wheat […] Thus, we see a Judas in the college of Apostles. Weeds and wheat! So it will be unto the end of time, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a utopian. A church made up of only ‘the good’ doesn’t exist. The Church is holy because her principle, means and end are holy. But we, who are sinners, are in the bosom of the Church. That is why we have to pray ‘I confess’ at the beginning of each Mass and why we must often go to Confession; we are not angels, we are born with original sin and we commit many sins everyday – the just man falls seven times a day.[5] But it is precisely the sight of evil in the Church, which is one of the greatest temptations for a Christian, that should lead us to have more faith in Jesus Christ who prophesized this when he said two thousand year ago: there will be weeds and wheat.”[6] That is, we have to understand well that, as Father Castellani said, “the Church in the future will perpetually have not only the just and sinners, but even heretics.”[7]
In the end, “scarcely a week goes by that people do not tell me that the Church or some representative of the Church has failed them and even hurt them badly.”[8] While many times those Christians who feel wounded become sad, the most frequent response is that they become angry and feel seriously disappointed and even betrayed, because they forget that no single priest, religious, bishop or cardinal represents the whole Church. No one denies that it is painful to see some member of the Church – a high member of the Roman curia, a priest, or a religious order – make the headlines of newspapers or blogs as the protagonist of some scandal and the resulting disillusion of the people and the clergy. The truth is, as Fr. Groeschel said – it is very probable that when one is closer to the Church, the greater opportunity one has of being hurt or disappointed by Her.[9]
So, we could ask ourselves, whether we are members of the laity, bishops, seminarians or pastors: ‘How can the Church disappoint us so often and still be the Mystical Body of Christ?’ Because we obviously have sufficient reasons to hope for a better example and care from the one who represents our adorable Savior in the history of the world.
Part of the problem is that we use the expression ‘the Church’ to describe innumerable things that are related but are to some degree quite different from one another. Thus, for example, Church could indicate a material building. It could also mean a particular Christian denomination, like the ‘Orthodox Church,’ for example. It could allude to a certain parish or a diocese, and thus someone could say: ‘I have problems with the local church.’ It could refer to all of the Christians in the world, or all of the Catholics, or to a member of the ‘Catholic Church.’
Another source of confusion is what we understand by ‘member of the Catholic Church.’ Many times, they speak about the Catholics in such and such country, and many times we read that a percentage of these Catholics are not in agreement with the norms of the Church regarding priestly celibacy or with what the Pope says about contraception for example. And the newspapers publish these percentages in big headlines. Now then, we have no idea if these ‘Catholics’ go to Mass, or if they contribute to support the Church or what kind of catechetical education they have received. Father Groeschel cites an example of a young woman, one of his relatives, who attended a Catholic school that taught not only that God was a woman, but that Jesus was a woman. And he adds, “her teachers need therapy, long-term therapy.” The point is that you can imagine what type of Catholicism this young lady had.
So then, we have to be careful when someone says ‘I’m a member of the Catholic Church.’ Because what does it mean when some corrupt politician or a journalist without a drop of love for the truth says: ‘I’m a Catholic,’ or when a blasphemous actress says: ‘I’m a Catholic’? They are doing a grave abuse to the Catholic Church while pretending to have an active participation in it, more than they ever had before.
1. Then what does Church mean?
Our proper law defines Church in a beautiful paragraph by saying: “The Church is Jesus Christ continued, diffused and communicated. The Church is the extension of the redemptive Incarnation, by means of the three-fold function: prophetic, priestly and royal. She is the new People of God. She is ‘in Christ, the nature of sacrament – a sign and instrument, that is, of communion with God and of unity among all men,’[10] she is an organically structured community;[11] ‘a people united in the unity of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’[12]”[13]
And thus, none of the scandals – the loss of faith of religious and their resulting behavior, sin, corruption, heresies, schisms, sacrileges, the abuse of power by ecclesiastics, etc. – disprove in any way that the nature of the Church is intimately divine, just as the crucifixion did not disprove that Jesus was God. If our hands are dirty, you cannot for this reason say that our whole body is. We must be convinced that the scandals we observe in the Mystical Body of Christ cannot destroy the substantial sanctity of the Church. The Church is holy and is not the subject of sins or scandals: men are the subject of these things, but not the Church as such.
Venerable Fulton Sheen cites one of the greatest scandals in the Church: Pope Alexander VI.[14] He comments: “How could a wicked man like Alexander VI be the infallible Vicar of Christ and head of His Mystical Body?” “For an answer,” Fulton Sheen continues, “go to the Gospel text where Our Lord changes the name of Simon to Rock, and then made him the Rock on which He built what He called ‘My Church.’ Our Lord on that very occasion made a distinction very few ever think of: He distinguished between infallibility or immunity from error, and impeccability or immunity from sin. Infallibility is the inability to teach what is wrong; impeccability is inability to do wrong. Our Lord made the Rock infallible, but not impeccable.”[15]
In any regard, in the majority of occasions when people say they feel disappointed by the Church, they are referring to the visible, exterior Church guided by the bishops and the Pope and by everyone else that has a certain responsibility in the Church: the clergy, religious, missionaries, some institution in the Church, or group in the parish, etc. And many times, we also can fall into the temptation of saying: ‘the Church has disappointed me… the Church has let me down… or even, has betrayed me.’
According to Father Groeschel, it is something that will happen to us sooner or later. “Almost every priest or religious can say the same thing and has some legitimate complaint or peeve about something that has happened in his long life of service to the Church – some place where he was dropped out or overlooked or cashiered or not understood. I’ve been a religious for forty-five years, and I can tell you that often I’ve been angry at a particular segment of the Church. The possibilities of being hurt are enormous, and they are greater the more one is involved. For example, generous people come to the Church looking for an opportunity to serve, to give substantially of their time and energy. Maybe they give their whole lives in religious vocations. For years things go well, and they are appreciated or at least given the opportunity to work hard and get something done. And then there is a changing of the guard. New leaders come in, and those of the ‘old guard’ are in the way. Little regard is given to all they have done with little or no personal recognition. The feeling comes over them that God has no regard for what they have done. They become, understandably but unwisely, angry at God, or at the whole Church from the pope down. It’s a terrible feeling. I know. The same thing may happen on a lesser scale to those who are loyal parishioners and members of the Church. They have been generous to the point of sacrifice. They given till it hurts – and then a new pastor or a new administrator comes, and they are completely forgotten. They know that God did not do this, but emotionally they feel that they have been rejected.”[16]
Perhaps one of the worst experiences of this type is when ‘someone in the Church’ teaches one of our loved ones something contrary to the teachings of the Gospel and our loved one ends up going astray. How many people, to give just a few examples, have been taught that they don’t need to go to confession or have been encouraged to embrace contraceptives to ‘protect themselves’ or are told that it is fine to enter into a new union after their marriage has failed but remains valid?
It must be admitted that sometimes those who occupy a place of authority in the Church are limited in respect to what they can do about a situation, and more so than what people commonly assume. For example, we see this in the Roman curia, where although many are very holy, at the same time some others are notably inept. Even so, one gets the feeling of being disappointed or betrayed by the Church.
2. Wounded by ‘the Church’
It has to be very clear in our minds that when we say ‘the Church’ or the leaders of the Church have disappointed us, obviously we are not referring to the Mystical Body of Christ. The Incarnate Word, who forms a single mystical person with his Spouse, is not the one who failed us. It was perhaps someone who exercised some authority in the Church, but not the Church herself.
And the reason that ‘the Church’ disappoints us is simply because it is made up of human beings. In effect, if we consider the matter well, the Church is a great community of people with original and personal sin. Here we are not referring to the Church Triumphant, the saints, or the Magisterium and Tradition of the Church, but rather to the human side of the Church that often can hurt us, and in fact has done so and will do so many times. It has happened to everyone, even the saints, and there are astounding accounts of these types of cases in the history of the Church.
Since ‘a picture is worth a thousand words,’ we will consider a few examples of people who in their lives were seriously hurt by ‘the Church.’
Padre Pio, for example, was practically under house arrest for decades by order of the Holy See. From the time he received the stigmata until his death, he never left the small town where he lived, San Giovanni Rotondo. Never! He was even prohibited for years from celebrating public Mass.
Another example: The Capuchin priest Blessed Solanus Casey[17] was never allowed to hear Confessions. And he only preached a sermon once or twice. He first entered a diocesan seminary and after four years of formation they dismissed him because they thought he didn’t have the intellectual capacity to be a priest. Without contradicting them, he returned home. Later he entered with the Capuchins but there also his studies went badly (both seminaries taught classes in German and Latin, and he only knew English, since he was the son of Irish immigrant farmers). His superiors thought that he would not be able to be ordained a priest, but his spiritual life
– from what they were able to perceive – was sufficiently advanced. This made his superiors decide to admit him as a candidate for the Priesthood, although not how Solanus had wanted. He was ordained as a simplex sacerdos, which in those times was used to designate those priests who could only celebrate Mass. He could neither preach nor hear Confessions and give absolutions, and he was never permitted to vote in the Chapters of his Order. People knew him as ‘the brother that says Mass.’ He had to explain a thousand times throughout his life why he wasn’t able to hear confessions. His first assignment was to a parish in Yonkers, New York. The pastor, not knowing what to do with a priest who could neither hear confessions nor preach, gave him the office of sacristan and porter. Those who knew him said that his acceptance of this humiliation was what sanctified him, and he became the greatest Capuchin who has ever lived on American soil.
Going back in time, we find Saint Alphonsus Liguori, now honored as Doctor of the Church, who was obliged to leave the very religious order that he founded, the Redemptorists, so that the order would not be suppressed. And it is no minor detail that although he was a bishop, he was not permitted to celebrate Mass in the Papal States. Incredible! Saint Joan of Arc was burned at the stake at the sentencing of the Bishop of Beauvais and eleven theologians. Inside the tower of the prison in Rouen, you can see on one side the decree of condemnation that led Saint Joan to her execution and on the other side is the Papal decree that twenty years later exonerated her and condemned her judges. The bishop had disregarded her appeal to the Pope and himself incurred an ecclesiastic censure.
And there are so many more! We could give countless examples. In a particular way, this has happened to many founders of religious orders.
3. An incredible story
Fr. Groeschel narrates what he titles an ‘incredible story.’ It is the story of “a bishop who was terribly hurt by the Church for thirty years. He was a bishop who lived in New York, Bonaventure Brodrick.[18] He worked as vicar of religious of the New York Archdiocese from 1940 to 1943. Bishop Brodrick earned his living most of his life by running a gasoline station upstate. Until we had these super new gas stations, there used to be a funny little gadget on the end of the pump nozzle that caused it to stop automatically when the tank was full. That gadget was invented and patented by Bishop Bonaventure Brodrick. He lived partially on the income from it.
“I have been able to reconstruct this incredible story, which goes back to after the Spanish American War when the United States took over Cuba. For some reason it was decided to make an American priest, Father Brodrick, auxiliary bishop of Havana. Bishop Brodrick went down to Cuba, and shortly after that the Cubans decided they didn’t want an American bishop. He was sent back to New York, but no one needed an auxiliary bishop. So, the archdiocese had to find him a job. He was put in charge of the annual Peter’s Pence Collection for the Holy See. But no one wanted a bishop in charge, so he lost that job. After a long wait he wrote a letter suggesting that it might be scandalous for a bishop to be without work. The answer came back, ‘Wait.’ And so he waited. To support himself he finally opened a gasoline station.
“Many decades later, Archbishop Francis Spellman was sent to New York. As the story is told, Pope Pius XII asked him to find out what had happened to Bishop Brodrick. No one in the archdiocese had any idea what had happened to the bishop, but they found an old address in a village upstate. Archbishop Spellman drove up to this address. It was a gasoline station. As the story goes, he got out and asked the boy serving gas, ‘Who owns this gas station?’ The boy replied, ‘Doc Brodrick.’ The archbishop asked where he lived. The boy indicated a little house nearby. The soon-to-be Cardinal Spellman went over and rang the doorbell, and an older man dressed in overalls came out. ‘Bishop Brodrick?’ The man answered, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘I’m Archbishop Spellman, and I’ve come to see if I can do anything for you.’ The reply was, ‘Come in. I’ve been waiting for you for thirty years.’ Cardinal Spellman made him auxiliary bishop of New York and vicar of religious. I don’t know anyone else who got hurt that badly by the Church.”[19]
The obvious question is: how can the Church of Christ disappoint us? How can this happen in the Church founded by Christ? We suppose that the Church should nourish and safeguard our faith, how is it that she herself can become a test of our faith? We find the answer in the Gospel. We don’t have to look any farther than what happened to the Apostles: they failed Christ when He needed them most. On the very day that He made them his sacred representatives, they fled from Him. Every year, on Holy Thursday, we celebrate the day of the Catholic priesthood. If we think about it, it is also the day the first priests failed Christ horribly. On the vey evening they were made alter Christus, they abandoned him. Does this not tell us something about ‘the Church’ (that is, the men of the Church)? We already mentioned that the Catholic Church is formed of more than a billion people with original sin.[20] That is already a lot of sin. And these people do extraordinarily good things, and some of them do extraordinarily bad things. The members of the Church are only perfect in eternal life, where they reflect the reality of the very perfection of the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ as Saint Paul says, “without spot or wrinkle.”[21] This is not the case yet for us who are wayfarers and pilgrims.
The world is full of absurdities, and we are speaking about the world of believers and nonbelievers alike. “In my life,” says Father Groeschel, “I’ve known dumb Jesuits, confused Dominicans, proud Capuchins, rich Franciscans, and Salesians who can’t stand small children. I’ve known merciless Sisters of Mercy and uncharitable Missionaries of Charity and foolish Daughters of Wisdom […] go visit Rome. They say it’s a city where Communists pray and prelates don’t. Everything in this world is a bit messed up, and often it is far better to laugh than to cry. When you have life all figured out, you can be sure that you are overlooking some important pieces of the puzzle. Life is mysterious.”[22]
4. So what should we do?
The immense majority of us – both as an Institute and on a personal level – at some point in time have felt disappointed and perhaps even ‘betrayed’ by ‘the Church,’ or rather, by some member of the Church as we have explained. When this happens, the first thing we must do is calm down. This is a good rule to keep in mind when someone hurts us: whether it is a superior, the sacristan, the lady from the Legion of Mary, my companion in the mission, or the secretary of a bishop, anyone. The Irish have a saying: ‘Take counsel with your pillow.’ Once we have calmed down, we can ask ourselves: do I really have to make a problem out of this? Am I expecting too much from mortal and fallible beings like me? Is what I am seeking or hoping from these members of the Church really legitimate? The answer might very well be ‘yes.’ It is very likely reasonable or even just. But the point is that we can never absolutely demand kind, respectful and faithful treatment because Christ himself did not find these things in the first members of the very Church that he founded. Moreover, Jesus Christ warned us: in the world you will have trouble.[23]
On the other hand, does not our proper law tell us “to consider ourselves ‘worthy of all afflictions’”?[24] These afflictions include mistreatment, injustices, slander, unjustified suspicions, those who speak ill of us, misinterpretations of our intentions, humiliations at the hands of precisely those who ought to help us, opposition and obstacles to all of our endeavors… and the list could go on and on.
As we said before: the Church is composed of weak and fallible individuals like us. That is why the members of the Church could be very good one day and very bad the next. Even on the same day and in the same parish, in the same diocese, in the same Vatican office, we can find both extremely charitable people and terribly cruel people.
Moreover, these ‘disappointments’ in ‘the Church’ are necessary to purify our faith. We mention this because we have to be able to educate others in this regard as well. Many, many people were educated in Catholic schools, made the Spiritual Exercises, or missioned in such-or-such a place and had good experiences. Many people in the Church have helped us as an Institute, Saint John Paul II not least of all and many others like him, and the experience was overall positive and encouraging. This is a good thing, but we should not think that this will always be the case. All earthly things pass away. Just as we need to apply Saint Ignatius’ tenth rule of discernment from the first week of the Spiritual Exercises in times of consolation, we should do so also when we are consoled by ‘the Church’: “Let him who is in consolation think how he will be in the desolation which will come after, taking new strength for then.” God permits these trials so that we may love him more and increase our merit. We rely on God, not on a human person, office, or sector of the Church, but rather on the Word Incarnate Himself.
So many religious, so many priests, become overly anxious because of ‘contradictions from good people.’ Although their concerns are very justified, they fall into the temptation to see only the tree of the bad things that ‘they do to us’ or the ‘bad things in the Church’ and lose sight of the forest of good things,[25] which unleashes the terrible experience of feeling disappointed or greatly betrayed. This is a problem and a temptation against faith in the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, indissolubly united to her Head, her Spouse.[26] When this temptation comes knocking at the door of our soul and our faith is most tested, it is helpful to reread a passage from one of the letters of Saint John of the Cross which says: “What is it you desire? What kind of life or method of procedure do you paint for yourself in this life? […] what need is there in order to be right other than to walk along the level road of the law of God and of the Church, and live only in dark and true faith and certain hope and complete charity, expecting all our blessings in heaven, living here below like pilgrims, the poor, the exiled, orphans, the thirsty, without a road and without anything, hoping for everything in heaven?”[27]
Saint John of the Cross’ case is truly paradigmatic and exemplary. After having begun the Carmelite reform under the direction of Saint Teresa of Jesus, his life “gives the impression of a man who is continually outcast and marginalized. A continual pilgrimage in solitude: ‘exiled and alone,’ as he says in a letter written from Baeza in 1581 to Mother Catherine of Jesus.”[28]
“To this very day they disregard the concrete crime with which Fray John of the Cross was charged and for which they carried out the sentence for ‘those convicted of the crime of rebellion’ indicated in the Constitutions, but very probably they deemed him to be an accomplice in the rebellion of the nuns in the monastery of the Incarnation when they elected Saint Teresa for prioress against the indication and command of the Provincial who presided over the election.”[29] Many of you already know that during his imprisonment in Toledo “they brought him down to the refectory three or four times, with the bothers present, so that he might be disciplined there.”[30] After escaping from the prison in Toledo, when speaking with Ana de San Bartolomé about his unjust imprisonment, the saint affirmed: “When God wants to make saints, he makes executioners of ones’ own brothers or children so that they may be holy. And in these days, he has evidently made use of these means.”[31]
It is not for nothing that our proper law also warns us by saying: “Woe to the superiors who destroy with their example what they preach with their words!”[32] The same could be said of any subject. “Hence all anti-testimony, all incoherence between expressing values or ideals and living them, all looking out for oneself and not for the Kingdom of God and its justice,[33] all falsification of the word of God”[34] many times disheartens and scandalizes others, making it difficult for them to persevere.
Despite all this, Saint John of the Cross never harbored any rancor against the Prior. He himself, who had suffered scorn and neglect from superiors, wrote later in his third precaution against the world something that can be applied to any member or sector of the Church, including our Congregation, and which helps us to conduct ourselves in the abovementioned situations. “Never be scandalized or astonished at anything you happen to see or learn of, endeavoring to preserve your soul in forgetfulness of all that. For should you desire to pay heed to things, many will seem wrong, even if you were to live among angels, because of your not understanding the substance of them. […] You are thus to understand God’s will: that even were you to live among devils you should not turn the head of your thoughts to their affairs, but forget these things entirely and strive to keep your soul occupied purely and entirely in God, and not let the thought of this thing or that hinder you from doing so.”[35] In the second precaution against the devil he says, “always look on the superior as though on God, no matter who he happens to be, for he takes God’s place. And note that the devil, humility’s enemy, is a great and crafty meddler in this area. Much profit and gain come from considering the superior in this light, but serious loss and harm lie in not doing so. Watch, therefore, with singular care that you not dwell on your superior’s character, mode of behavior, ability, or any other methods of procedure, for you will so harm yourself as to change your obedience from divine to human, being motivated only by the visible traits of the superior, and not by the invisible God who you serve through him. Your obedience is vain and all the more fruitless in the measure that you allow the superior’s unpleasant character to annoy you or his good and pleasing manners to make you happy.”[36]
There is no little truth in these sayings of the Doctor of Fontiveros. Often, it is the very people we love the most who hurt us the most. Those whom we do not love cannot hurt us much. For this reason, we should not believe ourselves exempt from hurting others. Our proper law speaks of this when it draws our attention to the damage that can be done among members of the Institute by murmuring. “The Brother slandered before the world can console himself with the satisfaction he feels when enjoying the appreciation and trust of his brothers; but if he is denigrated among his own, among those with whom he is obliged to live, the life of community becomes unbearable to him, unless he is equipped with extraordinary virtue.”[37]
Does this mean that the Mystical Doctor advises us to renounce our moral compass and refrain from discerning between moral good and evil? No. “In no passage of the Gospel message does forgiveness, or mercy as its source, mean indulgence towards evil, towards scandals, towards injury or insult.”[38] “If an injustice is committed against me, I have to see that it is an injustice; but what I ought not to do is immediately condemn that person to hell. […] Before trusting or mistrusting another, it is necessary to think, and to do this it is necessary to suspend judgment, not precipitate it; or rather, to proceed with caution.”[39]
Saint John of the Cross did not die bitter or sad, even though after having been the first general councilor of the Order he was gravely discredited by the very brothers whom he invested with the habit. No one defended him. Even the superior of the convent of La Peñuela where he went to die removed the nurse who attended to him from this office because he was displeased with the attention the nurse gave to Fray John. The superior also forbade the religious to visit John of the Cross often so that he might not be lacking ‘recollection and silence,’ and he did little more than complain about the convent’s poverty, as if to say: ‘and on top of all this, they bring me this sick brother.’
I suppose we could say that ‘the Church,’ or this small part of the Church that was the most important and beloved to John of the Cross, disappointed him or in a way even betrayed him. The saint suffered so much that his religious life was a martyrdom, just as painful as that martyrdom that he so fervently desired. But he remained at peace, and during this time wrote to a religious sister: “Have a great love for those who contradict and fail to love you, for in this way love is begotten in a heart that has no love. God so acts with us, for he loves us that we might love by means of the very love he bears toward us.”[40]
Today, great dangers loom over the Church. Consequently, we have to see things from their true perspective. While some people complain about the music in Mass or worry about the forests and plants or whether or not friars are wearing modified habits, the Church is confronting a hurricane that batters her on all sides, to which she will never yield because she is indefectible.[41] Such behavior is similar to those passengers who played on the deck of the Titanic while it was sinking. This is a time in which we must be faithful to the Church. This means that, as we have said on other occasions, these are marvelous times to be alive. “The Church is the embodiment of Christ as Christ incarnate is the embodiment of God. […] Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for it, to consecrate it, cleansing it by water and word, that He might present the Church to Himself all glorious, with no stain or wrinkle, or anything of that sort, but holy and without blemish […] Christ relives His Life in the Church. […] We do not see the beauty hidden in His Mystical Body any more than we would have seen the glory hidden in His Physical Body…
“The Body of Christ has today become the target in a game of theological darts. As secularists say that God is dead, so the necro-ecclesiologists solemnly proclaim; ‘The Church is Dead.’ She is found too holy for some; by others too human; as Caiaphas rejected Him because He claimed to be Divine, and Pilate crucified Him because He was not sufficiently one with Caesar…
“The law of the Body is the law of the Head: Crucifixion and the Empty Tomb. […] Now Christianity is under attack. That means that these are wonderful days in which to be alive.[42] Now we have to stand up and be counted. It is easy to float downstream in the current. Dead bodies float downstream. But it takes live bodies to resist the current. […] True Catholic life is not made from routine acts of piety, but by a crisis when a great choice is offered […] That is why these are great days in which to live. We can make decisions that will have a repercussion in eternity.”[43]
5. Strive to be wheat
For this reason, it is our job to strive to be wheat and not weeds. Moreover, our proper law explicitly prescribes “for our part, we must do everything possible to assure that the face of the Church be without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish (Eph 5:27).”[44] We have to know how to make the gift of God fruitful by our fidelity. We must be attentive, because the Lord wants us to bear much fruit. We must cultivate the wheat, but not lose our peace over the weeds. The sower, when he sees weeds sprouting in the midst of the wheat, does not react with complaints or alarm. We must find the way for the Word to be incarnated in each concrete situation and bear fruits of new life, although they appear to be imperfect or incomplete. The disciple is ready to put his whole life on the line, even to accepting martyrdom, in bearing witness to Jesus Christ, yet the goal is not to make enemies but to see God’s word accepted and its capacity for liberation and renewal revealed.[45]
May we learn this lesson well! All members of the Institute, whether they are still in houses of formation, in the monastery, or in a mission, have the privilege of dealing with many people with distinct lifestyles, different levels of education and different problems, who approach us for different reasons. And it is true that there are some people who are more difficult than others, just like there are some people who are very virtuous and holy. Whatever the case may be, for most of these people we are the face of the Church… and we cannot disappoint them. If we do not treat them well, it seems to them that the Church does not treat them well; if we are not interested in them, it is as if the Church has no interest in their worries and pains; if we do not do our job, it is as if the Church is not doing her job. We cannot let any of the souls who approach the doors of our parishes, our missions, our monasteries, our seminaries, etc. feel abandoned, ignored, misunderstood or dismissed without further explanation. Most of the time, we are dealing with the deepest part of their souls: their desire for God… their faith. This holds true also among us, within our Religious Family: we have to live charity with each other to the point of giving our lives for the others, as Saint John exhorts us. The way we came to know love was that he laid down his life for us; so we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.[46]
Fulton Sheen said: “Loving and serving are inseparable. […] Service of others is the highest service of self, and the best way for any man to grow in grace is to move forward in helpfulness. The mill wheel will cease to revolve when the waters of the rushing stream are cut off; the moving train stops when the glowing heat cools within the hidden chamber; and charity in this world will degenerate into mere professional schedules and statistical averages without inspiration, without power and without love as men forget the inspiration of Him Who said: ‘Greater love than this no man hath, that he lay down his life for his friend.’[47]”[48]
For this reason, our Constitutions indicate that “the Institute of the Incarnate Word recognizes the primary and supreme authority of the Supreme Pontiff, and professes not only obedience to him, but also fidelity, filial submission, [and] adherence,” at the same time manifesting our “disposition for service of the universal Church.”[49] Later, the Directory of Spirituality cites Saint Teresa of Jesus saying: “The Lord has brought you together here for that very purpose [salvation of souls]. This is your vocation; this must be your business; these must be your desires; these your tears; these your petitions… If your prayers and desires and disciplines and fasts are not performed for the intentions of which I have spoken, reflect and believe that you are not carrying out the work or fulfilling the object for which the Lord has brought you here.”[50] This means that our prayers, our holiness of life and all of our missionary labor is directed to the good of the universal Church, and we are entrusted with duties and responsibilities toward the Church in the particular land where we carry out our mission. Thus, through the force of prayer and arduous missionary labor, we ought to cultivate the local Church and gladden it with the fruits of a loving faith. Being wheat in the Church of Our Lord implies bearing witness to the primacy of Christ, who has “primacy over the souls and bodies of the members of his Mystical Body, and also over all men through all ages.”[51] It implies bearing witness to the primacy of the love of God wherever we may be and whatever office we hold in the Mystical Body of Christ. As we well know, to be a witness means ‘martyr’ and the Church is faithful in martyrdom – in giving witness. For this reason, we should feel like participants in this mission especially when we have to suffer those lacerating setbacks in ‘the Church’ that greatly disconcert us, when ecclesiastical scandals abound in newspaper headlines, when the one leading us leaves us even more confused and perplexed…
Yes, Fr. Groeschel affirms that ‘the Church’ has hurt or disappointed many who are close to her throughout her existence, not the whole Church, but part or members of her. Nevertheless, we must not forget that we are still in the Church Militant, not the Church Triumphant. We are preparing ourselves now to be part of the celestial Church one day. But if we do not fight to be faithful to the Church in this world even when others are not, then everything else that we do is worthless, since we will no longer be working for God’s service and honor. Serving Jesus Christ is the same as serving the Church, which is Christ Himself prolonged in history.
These are difficult times, and we must be “disposed for martyrdom out of fidelity to God”[52] as our Directory of Spirituality affirms. Sometimes we image that martyrdom has to be in a bloody manner, like the martyrs of Barbastro, Jerzy Popiełuszko, or Saint Maximillian Kolbe. Nevertheless, you all must be convinced that remaining faithful to the Church, her Magisterium, her living Tradition, and the charism of the Institute approved by the Church herself, implies today its share – sometimes very great – of martyrdom.
Saint John of the Cross himself teaches: “A soul has intense desires to be a martyr. God answers, ‘You shall be a martyr’ and bestows deep interior consolation and confidence in the truth of this promise. Regardless of the promise, this person in the end does not die a martyr; yet the promise will have been true. Why, then, was there no fulfillment of the promise? Because it will be fulfilled in its chief, essential meaning: the bestowal of the essential love and reward of a martyr. God truly grants the soul what it formally desired and what he promised it because the formal desire of the soul was not a manner of death but the service of God through martyrdom and the exercise of a martyr’s love for him.
Death through martyrdom in itself is of no value without this love, and God bestows martyrdom’s love and reward perfectly by other means. Even though the soul does not die a martyr, it is profoundly satisfied since God has fulfilled its desire. When these aspirations and other similar ones born of love are unfulfilled in the way one imagined and understood them, they are fulfilled in another, far better way, and render more honor to God than was thought of in making the request.”[53]
May the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church and Queen of Martyrs, grant us the grace of her protection against the harm and deceits of the enemy. It is true that we cannot prevent the enemy from doing his works, but we can prevent our works from becoming like his.
[1] Divini Redemptoris, 55.
[2] Cf. Hebrews 5:2, 2 Corinthians 13:4.
[3] Ven. Fulton Sheen, The Rock Plunged into Eternity, chap. 5.
[4] cf. Matthew 13:25ff.
[5] Proverbs 24:16.
[6] Cf. Carlos Buela, IVE. El Arte del Padre. Part 3, chap. 15. [translated from Spanish]
[7] Castellani. Prédicas domingueras II, 5th Sunday after Epiphany. [translated from Spanish]
[8] We will freely follow Fr. Benedict Groeschel, Arise from Darkness, chap. 4.
[9] Father Benedict Groeschel, Arise from Darkness, chap 4.
[10] Lumen Gentium, 1.
[11] Cf. Idem, 11.
[12] Saint Cyprian, De oratione Dominica, 23; PL 4, 553. Cf. Lumen Gentium, 4.
[13] Directory of Spirituality, 227.
[14] Alexander VI was Pope from August 11, 1492 to August 18, 1503.
[15] Cf. Fulton Sheen, The Rock Plunged into Eternity, chap. 5.
[16] Father Benedict Groeschel, Arise from Darkness, pg. 65
[17] Solanus Cassey was born November 25, 1870 and died July 31, 1957. He was beatified by Pope Fancis on November 18, 2017.
[18] https://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bbrob.html
[19] Arise from Darkness, p. 68-69.
[20] Currently, there are 1.345 billion Catholics registered as of 2019. This is 17.7% of the world’s population. Cf. https://www.vaticannews.va/es/iglesia/news/2021-03/cattolico-crecen-en-el-mundo-1345-millones.html.
[21] Ephesians 5:27.
[22] Arise from Darkness, p. 71.
[23] John 16:33.
[24] Saint Catherine of Siena, Dialogue, 100. Cited in Directory of Spirituality, 76.
[25] Cf. Constitutions, 123.
[26] Ephesians 5:25-32.
[27] Saint John of the Cross, Complete Works, Letter 19, To Doña Juana de Pedraza in Granada Segovia, October 12, 1589.
[28] José Vincente Rodriguez, San Juan de la Cruz – La biografía, epilogue. [translated from Spanish]
[29] Gustavo Nieto, IVE, Cuanto más herido, más pagado. [translated from Spanish]
[30] Ibid.
[31] José Vincente Rodriguez, San Juan de la Cruz – La biografía, chap. 14. op. cit. OC, I, 62. [translated from Spanish]
[32] Saint Joseph of Calasanz, Life, 31, sentence 46. Cited in Constitutions, 112.
[33] Cf. 2 Corinthians 4:2.
[34] Directory of Spirituality, 293.
[35] Saint John of the Cross, The Precautions, 8-9.
[36] Idem, 12.
[37] Directory of Fraternal Life, 77; op. cit. Saint Marceline Champagnat, Chronicles from the Institutes of Marist Brothers, “Opinions, Conferences, Sayings and Instructions.”
[38] Dives in Misericordia, 14.
[39] Leonardo Castellani, Prédicas domingueras II, Fifth Sunday after Epiphany. [translated from Spanish]
[40] Saint John of the Cross, Letter 33, to a discalced Carmelite nun in Segovia Úbeda, October-November 1591.
[41] Cf. Matthew 16:18.
[42] The emphasis is Sheen’s
[43] Venerable Fulton Sheen, Those Mysterious Priests, chap 10.
[44] Directory of Spirituality, 258.
[45] Cf. Evangelii Gaudium, 24.
[46] 1 John 3:16.
[47] John 13:13.
[48] Venerable Fulton Sheen, The Way to Happiness, chap. 45.
[49] Constitutions, 271.
[50] Saint Teresa of Jesus, Way of Perfection, 1, 4-5; 3, 10. Qtd. in Directory of Spirituality, 93.
[51] Directory of Spirituality, 4.
[52] Directory of Spirituality, 36.
[53] Saint John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book 2, chapter 19.13.
