John said to Jesus, ‘Master, we saw a man who is not
one of us casting out devils in your name; and because he was not one of us we
tried to stop him.’ But Jesus said, ‘You must not stop him: no one who works a
miracle in my name is likely to speak evil of me. Anyone who is not against us
is for us.
Mark 9:38 - 40
Letting go is never easy. The difficult
farewell as you leave your child for the first time in the hands of carers or
teachers is, for some, wrought with stress and emotion. My children never looked
back. They loved their carers, they loved their teachers. I especially wanted
their teachers to know about their unique gifts, about the things that were
important in their lives. I wanted to know if they cared about my kids, if they
would listen to their idle chat and make sense of their worlds for them as we
had.
Well, their teachers did care and love
them in their own way. My sons were ‘characters’ (which is the best way to put
it) and my daughter somewhat reticent. Yet they all left school well prepared
to take on the next stage of their lives. As parents, we never quite totally
let go. I still tell my grownup kids how much they are loved.
For the last four weeks, the letter of St
James has featured in the lectionary. Since the Reformation this letter has
been attributed the title of ‘Catholic’ since James, a Jewish Christian in the
mid-first Century AD taught that faith alone is insufficient for salvation.
Good works flow from faith, and they are the evidence. This certainly
contradicted the conclusion to which Martin Luther arrived. Our Catholic
tradition has maintained this understanding, and from it flows a great sense
of, and commitment to social justice.
And so Mark (9:40) reminds us that we are
not alone, that anyone who is not against us is for us. It’s hard to swallow, I
know, because we can get hung up on what we consider to be immovable
principles; it’s hard knowing that if I do let go of my anxieties, my kids will
still do well at school, they will (and need to) develop resilience and fortitude.
The world is not black and white, there is plenty of grey in between, the realm
of collaboration and compromise, and of course, compassion.
Mark does give fair warning, however, if
we become obstacles to the truth, to the Gospel, promising apocalyptic terror
to those who would destroy another’s faith. Such is the seriousness of the
responsibility to nurture and grow faith. This is the same faith that calls us
to act with justice, in accordance with the Lord’s decrees.
Responding to those 124 million who live
in food crisis nations, the 200 million children labourers (73 million of whom
are under the age of 10), the 20 million plus 'modern' slaves (including an
estimated 4,300 in Australia), sexual and physical abuse of children, family
violence, the extraordinary number those living in poverty, let alone the seas
of plastic refuse, global warming, are the clearest evidence that despite all
that has been achieved in civilisation (Christian or otherwise) we are no
better off, no more charitable, no less needy of salvation than ever. While the
kingdom may well be upon us, I suspect that the apocalypse co-exists with it.
This does not mean that we are dealing
with overwhelming challenges or that we should just give up. We live in a most
amazing, beautiful world. Change of epic proportion can happen (the end of the
black slave trade, the end of English colonialism). If God is for us, who can
be against? It’s a matter of faith and action.
Peter Douglas
St. John Paul II envisioned a big
church. So why are millennials feeling excluded?
by Greer
Hannan
I have a
postcard of the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro taped up next to
my office computer. Picture a near-replica of St. Peter’s Basilica plunked
onto a tropical plain in Côte d’Ivoire. Guinness World Records registers
it as the largest church in the world, overtaking the original in the Vatican
by almost 9,000 square meters. I have never been there, but the postcard
reminds me of an observation my favorite philosophy professor regularly made to
his students: “It’s a big church.”
In those lectures, he was usually reminding
us that the church was big enough for both Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus;
for St. Francis of Assisi and St. Louis, king of France; for Opus Dei and Voice of
the Faithful. It was an injunction to put our intellectual
differences or preferences of piety aside and remember that we have one faith,
one Lord and one baptism.
It was a
message that John Paul II had a gift for communicating, especially to my
millennial generation. Most of my earliest memories of television feature the
pope descending from an airplane and kneeling to kiss the soil of places like
Auckland, New Zealand; Kigali, Rwanda; or New Delhi, India. His pilgrimages to
every corner of the world showed me that the church is as big as our globe: We
may speak a multitude of languages, live under different forms of government
and be born of every race and ethnicity under the sun, but we are one body in
Christ.
John Paul’s zealous canonization of scores
of lay people as well as religious illustrated again that it is a big church,
big enough for every vocation and walk of life. More than anything, his way of
speaking directly to young people, urgently inviting and encouraging my
generation to put our gifts to the service of God in the world, taught me that
it is a big church, and the church needs us in it—needs our energy, our
talents, our questions.
I was largely unaware of the contentious
theological and political issues that often divide public opinion about a pope.
I was not reading encyclicals or following internecine ecclesiastical debates.
Ideas matter, but they were not the source of the belonging I felt. What was
convincing to me was this shepherd’s evident love and joy, especially in the
presence of children my age.
John Paul II died in the spring of my
senior year of high school. At the time I was feeling overwhelmed by doubts
about my faith, and the sexual abuse scandal had taught me to distrust church
leaders. I was battling serious depression, and I was deeply angry at God.
Nevertheless, I crawled out of bed at 3
o’clock in the morning to sit alone, huddled in front of the TV in my family’s
dark and silent house, volume turned down low, watching the papal funeral in
St. Peter’s Square and weeping despite myself. It was a big church, packed to
the gills with all the world’s dignitaries that day. In the center, the book of
the Gospels rested on top of his casket, and when its pages fluttered in the
wind and its cover blew closed, it looked so lonely and so final.
By all reports, the Basilica of Our Lady of
Peace of Yamoussoukro is fairly empty most Sundays, since less than half of the
country is Christian. Empty, too, are the more modestly sized parishes I attend
in Louisville, Ky., the seat of the first Catholic diocese west of the
Appalachian Mountains. Today, the throngs of young people who attended World
Youth Days in Denver, Manila and Toronto are largely missing from the pews.
Commentators put forth myriad reasons for
the religious disengagement of millennials. I suspect that it is simpler than
any of their generational theories: The message that we heard proclaimed by the
church’s chief evangelist in our childhoods has been drowned out by other
voices in our lives contradicting that message. Too many of us have been told
from the pulpit or in a classroom or by a lay minister that we are too gay or
too female or too mentally ill or too divorced or too disabled or too brown or
too poor or too childless or too sinful to serve the church.
Gay men apply to seminary and are denied
entry based solely on their orientation. Developmentally disabled children are
excluded from the sacrament of confirmation, their parents told that the kids
would not understand what they receive. A theology graduate student diagnosed
with P.T.S.D. is informed that her mental illness had undermined her
relationship with God and she should withdraw from the program. The altar of
nearly every church I have seen is inaccessible to people assisted by
wheelchairs or walkers, preventing them from lectoring, cantoring or
administering the Eucharist. Some dioceses have closed all their schools in
impoverished areas putting a Catholic education out of reach for poor families.
Today’s young adults see the same hypocrisy
when they look at the church’s history. Until the founding of St. Augustine’s
Seminary in Mississippi in 1920, black men were barred from U.S. seminaries and
instead had to seek ordination abroad. In the same era, African-American women
were largely excluded from joining communities of
religious sisters.
A person’s sense of belonging can suffer
death by a thousand pinpricks. A girl sees a column of boys assisting the
priest at Mass, the smallest acolyte unable to reach the altar. Being too short
to perform the tasks of an acolyte apparently is not a problem but being a girl
is. A priest tells his congregation that no one who is divorced—even those
divorced who are not remarried—may serve as a liturgical minister. Retreat
talks on vocational discernment emphasize commitment to either marriage or
religious life. They leave millennials who have not taken either path feeling
excluded from God’s work. Couples experiencing infertility hear again and again
that the goodness of marriage is illustrated primarily in terms of openness to
children. If they have no kids, how good can their marriage be?
There are countless other examples of
Catholics who have heard the message that their gifts are unwanted. It is a big
empty church, but if you are going to come wearing stained blue jeans or
standing with your unmarried partner or carrying a screaming infant or
struggling with a disability or in the throes of your own loud weeping, maybe
you should sit in the back pew.
Pope Francis has his own evangelical gift
for reminding us that it is a big church, big enough for all of us who have
been told such things. His humility and his candor are compelling in the same
way as John Paul II’s warmth and zeal. But the church is much bigger than the
pope, and his message needs to be echoed by words of welcome in our parishes,
schools and dioceses. The people who have the greatest power to wound us or
encourage us are the people closest to us
More
destructive than the newspaper articles detailing the clerical sexual abuse
scandals I grew up reading have been the crushing personal experiences of those
close to me at the hands of representatives of the church. More powerful than
the joyful witness of John Paul II in my life has been the profound witness of
my mentors and friends, fellow pilgrims who persist in the church despite being
told some of the same discouraging messages I myself have been told.
Unfortunately, negative messages are insidious; they become an ear-worm and can
deafen people to words of welcome and encouragement.
My own pilgrimage has taken me to places I
never expected to set foot and shown me the vastness and diversity of the
church. I’ve walked four miles up a dirt road to hear the Divine Liturgy of the
Byzantine Rite celebrated in a little wooden church perched on a Ukrainian
hillside. I’ve been prayed over by people who were sleeping on Dublin’s
streets. I’ve been welcomed to eat, pray and celebrate with L’Arche
communities. I’ve had candles lit for me at a shrine an ocean away by friends
who knew I was struggling. In the name of Christ, a pair of friends gave me a
home and a sense of safety when I lost my own. On the occasions I’ve been
confounded by doubt, others have told me they have faith on my behalf.
I have found the Eucharist and been offered
belonging on every journey I’ve made. It keeps me coming to the church, even
when the church’s pews are empty, even when I’ve been made to feel that I
belong in the last row.
It is a big church, and I have seen enough of it to know there is still
room in it for me and for anyone who has felt like they were turned away at the
door.
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