The reading contained this passage:
"You know that those who are recognized as rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones make their authority over them felt. But it shall not be so among you. Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all. For the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many."
At the risk of offering my own mini-sermon on the topic: I suppose it's as clear to everyone else as it is to me that, had our leaders embraced this servant leadership approach taught by Jesus and made it their animating philosophy over the course of my lifetime by serving the victims and the church, enormous amounts of suffering, criminal behavior, depletion of treasure and destruction of public reputation could have been averted.
I didn't preach this past weekend, but I attended three masses, each presided over by a different celebrant. FWIW, none of them addressed McCarrick or Wuerl or Pennsylvania or Vigano or anything of the sort. That is not to say that what I heard was irrelevant to the life of our community. But for whatever reasons, none of these preachers chose to go in the direction of the scandals that are in the headlines.
What was your experience this past weekend?
We got a sermon about Catholics being servants to others. The Church Ladies and men's club were praised for the raffles and fish frys. There may have been a nod to the CCD lady, but it was all rather self-congratulatory, so I tuned out and wished I'd stayed home and made corn bread.
ReplyDeleteThe new priest at our sister parish came up several weeks ago to reassure everyone that what was happening "out in Pennsylvania" was not happening here. Probably true. The parish has only six kids who attend regularly with their parents.
The biggest crisis in our parish is that the old timers are having meltdowns about the absorption into the larger parish. There is a lot of bitterness about money and turf.
Going to be some meltdowns around here, too, I'm afraid. Our parish is going to be the one absorbing a small town parish nearby. They're going to try to keep that church open for at least one Mass a week. Both churches are going to lose some Mass times, it can't be avoided.
DeleteOur new pastor became available to our parish because his former parish is a smaller one that is "merging" with a larger adjacent parish, elsewhere in the diocese. I put "merging" in quotation marks because, as it's reported to me, it's not a merger among equals. The new entity will be given a new parish name, and there is some intent to keep both church buildings in use, but who knows how long that will be sustainable?
DeletePeople's emotions over this sort of thing are genuine. I don't dismiss them. People become attached to a community, and the building symbolizes the community (which is how it is supposed to work). And then there is the more practical consideration of "that stained glass window has my grandparents' name on it", or (which would be applicable in our household's case, if our parish ever needs to merge), "I gave $X thousands of dollars to three different capital campaigns over the past Y years. To what end? So they can knock the building down and put in a Hair Cuttery and a Starbucks?"
I have no sympathy for people who see the parish church as a personal shrine to their family or whose faith is tied up in stuff.
DeleteOr: "I moved to this place because it was only a block away from the church and we could be involved with parish life, but now it's just going to be an empty building!"
DeleteOr: "I have spent half of my life with the daily sound of church bells, and now that they are silent, I feel I have lost something"
Or: "The church was the center of my local life. But many of the neighbors who I used to see at Mass no longer show up because of the inconvenience and difficulty to adapt to a new place and integrate with a new set of peope. I have lost part of my community."
Golly, you are an unsympathetic crew. You don't even give people little red or blue (not gold, of course) stars for trying to find new ways of saying, "I love my rut."
DeleteI save my sympathy for people who are poor, sick, alone, and homeless. People who want to sit in a comfy, warm pew and stare lovingly at their grandparents' names on a stained glass window make me tired. There was a lot of that in the Episcopal Church, and families that had endowed the parish with all those gewgaws were automatically on the vestry and lording it over the rest of us.
DeleteI presume that Our Lady of Czestochowa and La Virgin de Guadalupe will go to the sister church eventually. Possibly the sale of the old property will enlarge that parish so they can build a chapel.
Welcome to the world mainline and other Protestant denominations. I live near Oakland, CA, the home of scads of small black churches in such denominations as 57 varieties of Baptists, COGIC, AOG, etc. They are closing one after the other. Two buildings not too far from me have been converted into condos (nicely done, I might add). In general, from what I have read, the aging of the congregations and the lack of younger members is what is causing this to happen. Move over, Roman Catholics: you have a wide variety of company in the world of shrink-wrapped church buildings.
DeleteWe got about what Jean got -- how to be servant leaders, mostly in the parish. Of course, we have a food pantry that serves others and are involved in an ecumenical community action organization, so we have more servant opportunities than fish fries.
ReplyDeleteFunny, Deacon Jim, that you thought of church leaders serving themselves to sex -- or power. I thought about our current rulers of the Gentiles, who can't even say a good word on America's behalf about Murder in the Consulate because of their corporate business plan. Maybe that's just the difference between Ds and Rs.
Tom, that is interesting. I agree there are lots of servant leadership opportunities in the secular world!
DeleteI don't know. We were talking the other day about evangelization. IMO, there would be one question on a diocesan survey about which parishes to close: How does your parish show Christ to your larger community? If a parish is not performing, as a parish, any corporal acts of mercy, shut 'er down. No fair listing the community fish fry that charges $20 a head.
DeleteNope. Our pastor didn't go down that road. Actually quite a bit had been said previously about the subject. In addition to things addressed in homilies, a couple of weeks ago there was a Sunday afternoon prayer service in which several of the clergy vented at length, attended by mainly the daily Mass crowd. Prayer and fasting were urged. Well, okay, I suppose that's always salutary. But it was addressed to people who didn't have anything to do with the scandals, by people whom I assume didn't. The last instance of scandal that I have heard about in the archdiocese happened about 20 years ago, and it was dealt with promptly. Everybody has done the required safe environments training. Records have been opened to the state attorney. I think people are "woke" enough now that any sketchy behavior isn't going to be tolerated or swept under the rug. I honestly don't know what more can be done.
ReplyDeleteKatherine, yes, a month or two ago, our pastor spoke for a few minutes at the end of every mass, basically saying that in the archdiocese we're committed to rooting out abuse and other forms of misbehavior. He was brand new to the parish - had only been there 2-3 weeks at the time, and I'm sure some of the more inattentive parishioners were asking themselves, "Who is that guy?" - so I'm sure it wasn't comfortable for him to get up there and talk about such a difficult topic. But he did very well. Then, the following week, there was an audio "letter' from Cardinal Cupich.
DeleteThe priest who gave the homily this weekend did not talk about sex abuse and cover-ups, no. But the discovery of the sex abuse scandal is still fresh in France, people don't know what to make of it and reactions are all over the place. Pretty much the only consensual thing to say would be "The Church is suffering", being careful to avoid saying what one means by that. And few people have absorbed the shock enough to have the ability to be bold and make statements that would not be consensual. They do not yet know what to say.
ReplyDeleteOh, and also, in France two youngish priests have committed suicide this past month. Both had recently been accused of misbehavior, and both cases were looked into by the police and dismissed as too mild to pursue. It's a measure of the shock and of the inability to cope...
DeleteThat's sad!
DeleteFrom the August letter by pope Francis to the people of God: "penance and prayer will help us to open our eyes and our hearts to other people’s sufferings and to overcome the thirst for power and possessions that are so often the root of those evils. May fasting and prayer open our ears to the hushed pain felt by children, young people and the disabled. A fasting that can make us hunger and thirst for justice and impel us to walk in the truth, supporting all the judicial measures that may be necessary. A fasting that shakes us up and leads us to be committed in truth and charity with all men and women of good will, and with society in general, to combatting all forms of the abuse of power, sexual abuse and the abuse of conscience."
ReplyDeleteAnd also: "It is impossible to think of a conversion of our activity as a Church that does not include the active participation of all the members of God’s People. Indeed, whenever we have tried to replace, or silence, or ignore, or reduce the People of God to small elites, we end up creating communities, projects, theological approaches, spiritualities and structures without roots, without memory, without faces, without bodies and ultimately, without lives.[2] This is clearly seen in a peculiar way of understanding the Church’s authority, one common in many communities where sexual abuse and the abuse of power and conscience have occurred. Such is the case with clericalism, an approach that “not only nullifies the character of Christians, but also tends to diminish and undervalue the baptismal grace that the Holy Spirit has placed in the heart of our people”.[3] Clericalism, whether fostered by priests themselves or by lay persons, leads to an excision in the ecclesial body that supports and helps to perpetuate many of the evils that we are condemning today. To say “no” to abuse is to say an emphatic “no” to all forms of clericalism."
DeleteI just think that inviting/directing the entire people of God to engage in prayer and fasting - traditional penitential practices - is to suggest a couple of things that manifestly aren't true: that all the people of God are complicit in sexual abuse; and that the problem is one of those vast and deep spiritual mysteries for which no more practical solutions are at hand than to pray.
DeleteNot that anyone elected or appointed me as spokesperson for the People of God, but if they had, my position would be, "Hey - this crisis is not our doing. We're already jumping through hoops and putting up with significant inconveniences that imply that we're guilty until proven innocent - mandated training, criminal background checks, monthly update bulletins - in the name of child protection, even though we're not the ones from whom the children need protecting. Not to mention suffering the collective shame of seeing a church we love dragged through the mud because some priests and bishops can't keep their hands to themselves and their trousers zipped up.
"Instead of asking us to fast and pray, let's try a different set of remedies: removals, terminations of episcopal and priestly privileges, and jail time for any and all perpetrators regardless of clerical rank. To coin a phrase: go fire yourselves. Then we can talk about prayer and fasting."
Back in the 80's, one of the guys I ate lunch with was an older technician who was a born again. While waiting to get into Wendy's, there was a little boy standing in front of the ice cream counter. My friend said that in earlier times, one could buy the kid an ice cream cone. But now he couldn't because it automatically makes one a pervert. Now all this suspicion permeates society and I think there's a price to be payed in social cohesion and trust. I never encountered a child molester as a child and didn't know they existed. In general, adults were not seen as possible enemies though strangers were not automatically trusted.
DeleteJim, Amen.
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