I guess I should apologize. We had advertised that Cardinal Cupich would be here this evening to dedicate our new parish center. Unfortunately for us, Pope Francis has summoned him to Rome, to prepare for a meeting of the heads of all the bishops’ conferences from all over the world later this month, to focus on the problem of abuse in the church. Francis has chosen Cardinal Cupich to help lead that meeting. This is among the more important gathering of bishops during our lifetimes, so we should keep Cardinal Cupich in our prayers. The cardinal will be back here on March 30th, and we’ll dedicate the parish center then. So instead of the cardinal this evening, you get me. If you don’t like what you hear this evening – I can truthfully say that it’s the pope’s fault.
This is a
challenging Gospel reading today. “Blessed
are you who are poor” / “Woe to you who are rich”. How does that apply to me? Well, I guess that depends: Am I poor, or am
I rich?
Are we poor
or are we rich? is a complicated question for many of us in Arlington Heights,
IL and the surrounding suburbs. But it’s
also an important question.
First, let’s
understand what’s at stake here: according to Jesus, we’re in a zero-sum situation. If we’re among the have-nots here on earth,
we’ll be among the haves in the kingdom to come. But the opposite also holds true: if we’re
rich here on earth, we shouldn’t expect riches in the world to come; what we’re
enjoying now is all the reward we’re going to get. So for
that question I’ve posed - Am I poor or am I rich? - the stakes are pretty high.
Second, if
we have a comfortable, middle-class existence in this community, like my family
and I have, then most of the world would consider us to be rich. The median income for people all over the
world is about $10,000 a year – that means that half the people on the planet
subsist on less than that. To have a
single-family home, and one or more autos, and live in a community with good
schools and low crime, and work in a decent job, and send the kids to college,
and have a closet full of clothes, and some savings socked away for retirement:
to most of the world, these are all marks of the haves, not the have-nots. So if what I’ve just describes sounds like you
– and it sounds exactly like me – then we need to understand that this Gospel
passage is meant to warn us, and people like us.
I really
think we need to take Jesus’s admonishments about wealth seriously. Many of us need to grapple with the fact that
wealth and riches pose grave spiritual dangers for us. Jesus talks much more about the spiritual
dangers of wealth than he does about crime or illegal immigration or whatever
else keeps the American people divided and stoked with fear and rage. Wealth, says Jesus, is a deadly threat to our
eternal salvation.
I’d like to
offer a few thoughts about wealth and its spiritual dangers.
The first is
that the danger of wealth is that it can become a false god for us. Money can substitute for God in our lives. Elsewhere in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus warns us, “You
cannot serve both God and money.” We
have to devote our lives to one or the other.
We need to choose between trusting God or trusting our own money.
I’ve spent my
career in the business world, and I’ve known men – and probably women, too, but
the examples that are coming to mind are all men – who have thrown away a lot
of good and important things in their lives in order to make more money. I’ve known men who have ruined relationships,
triggered divorces and alienated their own families by working every day, and
every evening, and all weekend, every single week. There is something that can be corrosive
about money and commerce in our lives. The
demands put on us by the pursuit of money and career, the cost it exacts from
our personal lives, can force us, and those we love, to pay a very steep
price.
In the face
of those corrosive demands, we must be willing to pull back. Some of us may literally need to choose to be poorer
in order to serve God.
My second
thought is that some of us become well-off without any particular intention of
becoming rich. Some of us acquired
wealth by inheriting it: from our parents or a deceased spouse or some other
family member. And some of us have
high-paying jobs because we’ve been called to a vocation that happens to pay a
lot. There are a lot of nurses and
teachers in our faith community, and some of those positions pay pretty well. And God really does call some of us to be physicians
or attorneys or business leaders or financial experts. Those can all be honorable and holy vocations,
ways to put our gifts in service to others. If those are the gifts we’ve been given, we
should be confident that we’ve been given them for the sake of building God’s
kingdom. If we are one of those
fortunate people, then I think our Catholic response needs to be to live lives
of responsible stewardship. That means,
first of all, offering thanks every day for the good fortune that has been
bestowed on us. Second, it means that we
should think of our wealth, not as belonging to us, but instead as belonging to
God; he has entrusted us with these gifts, and it’s our obligation to use them
as he would wish us to. To my mind, that
means using wealth to help those in need, rather than spending it on luxury
items for ourselves. Those of us who have
been entrusted with wealth have a special responsibility to be aware of the
needs around us in this community, and to be willing to respond to those needs. As Luke has Jesus saying elsewhere, “To whom
much has been given, much is expected.”
My third
thought about wealth is that some of us really are called to live radical lives
of poverty. Members of religious orders
actually take vows of poverty. We should
be grateful to those sisters and brothers and priests in our midst who have
embraced poverty for the sake of the kingdom – for our sakes. They are showing us true Christian
living. But let’s note that you don’t
have to be a religious sister to embrace a life of poverty. We can do it without joining an order. And all of us need to ask whether there are
things we can do to scale back and simplify our lives. I suspect that for many of us, to live a
poorer and simpler life would be to live a holier life.
Do you think Jesus is only talking about monetary poverty and wealth? What about wealth of intelligence? Wealth of talent? Wealth of power and influence? Seems like that wealth also has pitfalls.
ReplyDeleteAs a retiree, I have a wealth of time that I am squandering, spiritually speaking, adding to my many other sins.
C'weal has a story about a desert monastery that the article's author visited, which led him to write about work/life balance that might be a sidebar to this topic.
"...a wealth of time that I am squandering..." Jean, me too. Right now I have more time than money. Friends are trying to jumpstart Alpha in our parish. But I am dragging my heels because I don't want to commit to an evening a week for 10 weeks, with a Big Weekend Retreat at the end. I know I need to get on board with the Great Comission.
DeleteOkay, I just read something about Alpha that made me view it more favorably. It appears that the "more Catholic than the pope" (akin to the church ladies?) crowd don't like it. So contrarian that I am, that makes it worth a second look.
DeleteI think I will actually be attending an Alpha at some point this spring or summer - they're trying to get it organized. I'll report whatever I'm able.
DeleteJean, that's a very interesting angle, and one that didn't occur to me.
DeleteI do think that he is talking about money - although, as you say, there could be other types of wealth as well.
The ways one grew wealthy in those days tended to be pretty exploitative of the poor, cf Zacchaeus, or the Roman soldiers whom John the Baptist admonished for extorting. Not that it's not among the range of possibilities these days, either. But the economy is quite different, and questions of how wealth is acquired are more complicated. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg became fabulously wealthy by founding companies that attracted a lot of investors and consumers. There is still the possibility of exploiting employees (Amazon warehouse employees apparently don't earn very much), but on the whole, it's not quite the same as piling up riches from slave farm labor, or sacking and pillaging a neighboring kingdom.
Apropos of time having a value as well as money, part of the reason for Amazon et al having a bad rep as employers is that some of them expect workers to put in such long hours that there is little time for family or anything else. Some employers have generous vacation time on the books, but also have a culture that makes employees afraid to actually use it. This to me seems almost worse than a sub-par wage.
Delete"Balance" is the key word here, a concept that society has a lot of trouble with.
Maybe someone could start a discussion about whether these renewal programs work. My sense is that Catholics are inordinately reliant on workbooks and videos, the programs attract the same people who like church already, and you can predict what certain individuals will say and who's going to monopolize the discussions.
DeleteThere is a whole subset of spouses of Catholics, converts or not, who already feel out of it who never go to those things. I know when they're there because we all stand nervously off to the side at coffee hour after First Communions, Christmas, and Easter. The Church Ladies basically feel that who cares about them as long as they're raising their kids Catholic.
Hmm. Maybe I should have a chat with our new priest about all this. Not.
From what I have read, some conservative Catholics don't like Alpha because it was started by Protestants - by Anglicans in London. But the program, from what I know of it, is a conservative, "orthodox" view of christianity. So the conservative Catholics might like it if they tried it. The Catholic version has been adapted apparently to add specifically Catholic material.
DeleteAlso, again, according only from what I've I read, there is a big push towards the charismatic expressions of prayer and understandings. Some people might not feel terribly comfortable with that.
I do not know anyone personally who has done the Alpha course, although it has been offered at various churches (of different denominations) in our area. They usually advertise it to passerbys on the road outside using big signs.
Agree with Jean - most of these programs are attracting the choir, and speaking to them primarily. Have no idea how successful they are at attracting new recruits.
Have any of you ever heard of a program called Landings? It is one of the many that attempt to bring back the fallen away to the Catholic fold. Most of those programs have no lasting impact either, according to the studies done by CARA. A bump after Christmas or Easter (when they are usually offered) and then the returnees realize that the things that drove them out in the first place are still operating in the church, so they leave again. My former parish offers Landings - it is run there by the woman who worked with the Paulists to develop it. It's supposed to be a national program, but I have never heard of it being offered anywhere else. Of course, I don't keep up with the local Catholic churches much anymore. You all here are my only Catholic community these days. ;)
Anne, I haven't heard of Landings, I'll try to find info on it. We've utilized a program called Christ Renews His Parish (CRHP, pronounced "Chirp"). It's difficult to say what it's impact was; pretty strong, I think, for those who went through it, but we ran out of interested people after a while.
DeleteAlpha has some pretty amazing success stories, and there are people in this archdiocese who have used it who are on fire about it. It seems more respectful of people's time than programs like CRHP that require an attendee to give up an entire weekend.
If we do Alpha right, it shouldn't just be the current parishioners cycling through it; it's premised on inviting outsiders. Our pastor has talked about requiring baptism parents and engaged couples to go through it as a requirement for baptisms and weddings. We'll see how it all shapes up.
One thing that I did like about what I heard about Alpha is that it is trying to engage the unchurched. We're not trying to "poach" anyone. If someone who is not connected to a faith community ends up engaging or re-engaging with Catholicism, that's a good thing. But it's also a good thing if they connect with another church, at least they're worshipping and (hopefully) being supported in their faith somewhere.
DeleteJim, you mentioned that your pastor talked about requiring engaged couples and baptism parents to go through it. To me, making it a requirement would be a mistake. Particularly with the engaged couples, they already have so many hoops to jump through. Maybe invite them to come after the wedding to keep them connected with the parish.
DeleteHow does one define a "success story" for such a program? Just curious.
DeleteUgh, "requiring." Yet another reason not to be Catholic. Parish leaders love those long, windy, and often expensive hoops they make everybody jump through.
How to define "success": some of it is pretty subjective ("my personal relationship with God is much stronger after having gone through this program"). Some of it is objective and measurable: mass attendance is up, collections are up, number of children enrolled in religious ed or the parish school is up, etc.
DeleteCha-ching.
DeleteWe had CHRP for 20 women's and 18 men's, then let it go on hiatus and brought it back this year. It's two biggest strengths, I thought, are the 16 to 20 weeks of formation a team goes through between Receiving and Giving, and its design to identify and recruit people for parish ministries.
DeleteThe revival, I hear, has become a wholly owned subsidiary of Matthew Kelly, who is fine for people's inner Protestant, imho, and it is now called Welcome.
Like a guided missile, my pastor soared right past the Gospel and landed on Jeremiah this morning. Lots of talk about that tree in the lava bed, and the lava bed, included, wealth along with other things that people put before God. So you win the day, Jim, hands down.
ReplyDeleteI'd give a few bucks to the parish center fund, if it isn't fully covered yet, to be a fly on the wall when your pastor opens his email tomorrow.
Tom - if you think that homily has the potential to p*ss people off, you should have seen my earlier draft :-). I was going to talk about the preferential option for the poor. I was going to try to illustrate that by talking about raising the minimum wage - a hot topic at present in Illinois - and the immigrants at our southern border.
DeleteMy pastor is really supportive of my ministry and my preaching - I'm very blessed.
The only thing you did to soften the blow was put yourself on the sinner's bench with the others. As it happened, I passed on my copies of Dorothy Day's Loaves and Fishes and of the major sermons of St. Basil the Great to a guy who had asked for that kind of reading Sunday morning. I reread both every now and then and see myself for the toadstool I really am.
DeleteJim:If we do Alpha right, it shouldn't just be the current parishioners cycling through it; it's premised on inviting outsiders.
ReplyDeleteHence the big signs by the roadside in front of the churches advertising Alpha. Trying to reach a few outsiders.
Our pastor has talked about requiring baptism parents and engaged couples to go through it as a requirement for baptisms and weddings.
Wow. What IS he thinking? The studies done by CARA (and others) show that marriages in the church have plummeted dramatically during the last 15 or so years. I have heard at least a dozen stories from friends about how all the hoops caused their kids to get married outside of the church. Sometimes on a beach somewhere, and sometimes at the far more welcoming not-Catholic church down the road. So they become "nones" or maybe even Protestant (horrors).
I haven't read the most recent stats, but I did read on the CARA website a year or two ago that infant baptisms were the lowest they've been since CARA started keeping track.
A whole lot of young adult Catholics are ambivalent about the church. They are standing at the door. Will they step inside ad stay for a while, or will they walk out that door, and take their fiances, spouses, and kids with them?
As it is now, many young couples only seek marriage in the church, and baptism for their children, because of pressure from parents and grandparents.
Our kids had no pressure at all from us. Of course, by the time they were getting married, I had joined the "dones" and my husband and I were no longer attending a Catholic parish. But all three were raised Catholic and educated mostly in Catholic schools through high school graduation (one went to Episcopal schools for high school and the first three years of elementary). All three of our children have gotten married during the last 5+ years. Only one married in the church - and only because he married a young woman from a very devout Catholic family. They had to go through lots and lots of marriage prep. What shocked me was when they called the parish to schedule the baptism for their first born. The hoops for that were far, far worse than they used to be. At my former parish, parents had to go to a baptism prep course. They complained when they were expected to go again for their later children - when it was tough to impossible to find a baby sitter, and they had already done it once. When we had our own kids baptized (between 33 and 40 years ago), we just called the church and scheduled it. No bureaucratic pain at all. When my husband and I got engaged, we called the church and scheduled the wedding for three months later. We had three or four chats with a priest and that was that, even though it was a "mixed" marriage.
When our son and his wife asked for baptism for their son, not only did they have to go through an even longer and more demanding baptism prep course than the one young parents objected to at my former parish years ago, there was a requirement for the godparents to attend a course too!
With the exception of the young neo-trads and young uber-coservatives (whom some call the young fogies of the Catholic church), it seems that many of the young adults you all are so desperate to keep might be driven away if someone doesn't put some brakes on these time-consuming and ever multiplying requirements for marriage and baptism. The Alpha course on top of everything else? Your pastor does not seem to be thinking clearly.
Anne, I agree about all the multiplying requirements. Around here they're not quite as complicated, but we do have our share of requirements. It seems that the hoops for engaged couples are meant to try and prevent broken marriages by "educating" them. But no one has proven that this approach works. And it is pretty daunting for a young couple. When we got married it was a whole lot less complicated, similar to your experience.
DeleteEverybody talks about how important "welcoming" is. But we're just not good at actually doing it. Sure it's important to greet people when they come into the church door. But it's even more important not to drive them away by too much red tape when they come to receive the sacraments.
TOO MUCH RED TAPE??? Don't you know that God must be protected from the sinners and unworthies??
DeleteOh, wait ...
IMHO, Catholics might do well to spend more time listening to people instead of presenting them with info and and quizzes, time-tables, assessments, and the never-ending diatribes of the Church ladies that start with, "If your faith really means anything to you, you will ..."
Anne, Jean et al - I certainly am sympathetic to the idea that there are too many hoops to jump through. I've made those same arguments myself, many times.
DeleteOn the other hand ...
Just observing what is happening, it seems to me that the decline in weddings, and to a lesser extent baptisms, has been happening regardless of how many or how few hoops are put up to jump through. Our parish traditionally has been a minimal-hoops place (in part because I've argued for that - I don't like hoops), but we're experiencing the same decline as other parishes.
If you look at a hundred couples getting married in the church, 20 of them there because they are sincerely committed to the church. The other 80 are there because of cultural or family or personal pressures / desires that aren't very connected with faith. 'I went to this church when I was a kid, and it would please my mom and my grandma to have the wedding there'. 'The church will look great in pictures, and they have a long aisle for me to walk down.'
I think that split between the two groups - between lively faith and not-very-lively faith - has always been there, but over the last few decades as family ties weaken and social pressures subside, I think the second group is just passing on the church wedding completely. The few weddings that continue to happen in church are the remnant first group - those whose faith really is alive.
Alpha's premise is that it will give the attendee's faith a supercharged spiritual vitamin shot - it's going to perform the spiritual equivalent of a Steve Rogers -> Captain America transformation.
There is no doubt that a lot of people will decline to go through Alpha as a condition for weddings and baptisms - and they'll go somewhere else (or maybe just not do the church thing at all). The Alpha gurus say, Expect that; a lot of seed falls on barren ground, or gets devoured by birds, or withers in the heat of day. But the so-called success-story parishes report that, over time, those who do attend Alpha become attached to the community - and over time, the community experiences real growth. In a place like Chicago, where the city has lost a million people over the last 30 years, for a faith community to experience growth - well, that's not the usual pattern.
Jean, you mentioned "ch-ching". Yes. That is an outcome of growth: collections increase, the parish is able to fund programs and investments that help its parishioners, which further strengthens their 'attachment' to the community - it's a virtuous cycle of growth. No money, no mission. Even Jesus had a keeper of the purse. The parishes and schools that close are the ones that aren't financially viable.
The whole point of infant baptism was to ensure the kid got the sacrament in case he died.
DeleteForcing parents to go through a three-month program while trying to deal with a newborn strikes me as counter productive on many levels.
And if these programs offered super-charged vitamin shots of faith, I and my kid would be SUPER CATHOLICS. Sadly it's more like the sacraments are constantly dangled like a carrot on a stick while you slog through workbooks, readings, and quizzes.
I think I am capable of the odd spark of the divine as much as the next cynical old bag. But pardon me if I find it more in a kind word or deed than a program.
Enough from me. I gotta run to the store before the ice hits. Stay safe there in Chicago, Jim!
Thanks Jean, you be careful, too! We're getting the freezing rain right now. I just walked 50 feet across a parking lot and nearly did the purler of a lifetime.
DeleteGetting back to Jim's point about the church having long aisles to attract brides who have no idea of matrimony's meaning, I just heard a credible (from the bride-to-be) report that a much coveted reception venue demands that the marriage service, whatever it is, be performed there and not in a church. Or on a beach. (The greedheads are with the Church on the last point.)
DeleteWalking down a long narrow aisle with no room to turn back is a good analogy for marriage, and it might help brides know what they're getting into if, at the rehearsal, there are squalling babies on either side of her, the in-laws are whispering loudly that her dress makes her look fat, someone keels over and 911 has to be called, the groom is late and drunk, and the flower girl barfs on her dress.
DeleteThat definitely should be added as an official hoop. Except, I think the flower girl's barf should be saved for the official ceremony.
DeleteJean, you mentioned "ch-ching". Yes. That is an outcome of growth: collections increase, the parish is able to fund programs and investments that help its parishioners, which further strengthens their 'attachment' to the community - it's a virtuous cycle of growth. No money, no mission.
ReplyDeleteIt is likely that the claims made for Alpha are optimistic, at least as far as outcomes go among those who aren't already committed but want more education and a smaller, closer community..
Your comment to Jean about the $ is timely. Last night my (always a protestant) husband came in after a 2 1/2 hour trip home from the deep wilds of the central Virginia countryside. So he listened to the radio. Someone interviewed the Pres. of Catholic University and asked about the sex abuse scandals and the feeble and pathetic and half-hearted (although the reporter didn't actually use those words) attempts by the church to address them decades after they should have been addressed.
The truth is that these crimes have been committed - and covered up - for the much of the history of the church from what we know from the scholars who have studied it. But even the relatively recent spate of crimes and coverups go back decades and through multiple papacies.
Anyway, my husband was horrified by the interview - he said to me something along these lines - "I couldn't believe this guy. He said the big problem with the sex abuse scandals is that they are causing Catholics to leave the church. And that means that there is less money for church operations."
Apparently he continued on that theme for a while. Money. Said my husband "He didn't even mention what was done to the kids. He didn't mention how many of their lives were ruined, and how their families were devastated. He didn't even mention that these acts were crimes that were hidden by church officials. He never even mentioned MORALITY. The only thing he mentioned was that it's costing the church money".
Sounds like the prez of CUA needs Alpha, too :-) Or at least some pointers on giving public interviews ...
DeleteAt any rate, speaking as a parent who has been paying college tuitions for the last umpteen years and has another 3/4 umpteen years of college tuition payments ahead of him, and watching tuition increase, Venezuela-like, every year: it's hard to find my sympathy place for a college administrator crying poverty.