by Dan Masterton
What is your image of the Church?
Sometimes, you can get a sense of someone’s image without even asking them directly. When our lives of faith or our view of the Church come up in conversation, people’s reactions and the places they go organically can often tip this off.
For some people, their response jumps right toward the bishops. As they talk about the way the bishops declare and explain teachings — and in reality, if the bishops spontaneously come up, it’s usually to criticize them — you get a sense of that person’s probably hierarchical image of the Church. For these folks, the Church is its clergy.
In a similar way, sometimes people’s responses focus on the teachings themselves, the dogmas and doctrines and the catechism points and the expectations for Christian living. This image is one of rules and limits, of Church as police state or rulebook.
And sometimes, folks will describe a gathering of people, whether around the altar for a Sunday Mass, banded together for a charity collection drive or service project, or gathered for a social affair. Here, you see an image of community and the life they seek to share.
In truth, our Catholic faith and our Catholic Church is all of these things — we are bishops and clergy and teachings and a Christian lifestyle and a community of believers. And more. Yet, if we find ourselves particularly frustrated or disappointed by our bishops or priests, or we find ourselves particularly frustrated or disappointed by shortcomings in pastorally sharing and learning this faith, we may end up with a limited sense of our Church, and struggle to see past its bishops’ limitations and missteps or its inability to maintain a strong pastoral sense.
I think our faith is strongest, and perhaps most true to Christ and the Gospel, when it begins from a sense of the Body of Christ — that is, both a community of believers gathered in Christ’s name as well as the Eucharist that Christ instituted and gave us a gift to celebrate together and propel us outward to loving action. From there, yes, we turn to our bishops and priests for teaching and leadership, but we ourselves can learn and teach, too. And we look to our Church for a cohesive, coherent transmission of our faith and lifestyle, but we seek to live it out in grace, in accompaniment, and in mutual support and struggle to be all the love God made us to be.
As I go further into adulthood, and meet more and more lapsed or non-practicing Catholics, I count the blessings of having had a moderate and pastorally sound parish to grow up in, of knowing grounded and real religious brothers and priests in the Viatorians and the Congregation of Holy Cross, and of finding parishes as an adult and maintaining relationships where this pastoral, human, joyful community could continue to be found. And I wonder how we can bring more people, especially these Catholics, into positive experiences that might reignite a rogue ember and start a fire of faith in them anew.
In some ways, Bigger than Ourselves is meant to be idealistic, in that it portrays an ultimate hopefulness and good that comes when everything lines up well and people come together in the best ways. Yet, it’s also meant to be a feasible, realistic portrait of Church life and parish life — no one in this story and no behavior in this story in fairy-tale-ish or wildly unlikely. In fact, the people, their ponderings, and their actions all come from real life relationships and experiences I’ve had in my Church life.
I’ve long believed that my best form of evangelization isn’t systematic theology, apologetics, or debate and argument; it’s a life of faith, well lived, often understated but never hidden or diluted. I think the same is true of Church life and parish life — our steady dedication to coming together in Christ as the Body of Christ and responding with individual and communal lives of love and joy can show others the good of this life in Christ. I think this St. Brendan council of young, old, and in between; of lay and ordained; of deep faith and emerging dedication — they are an image of a community we can be and the good we can do, with and for each other, and for Christ’s sake.
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