What if “the” Church really became “our” Church? What if each of us took personal responsibility not only for some of the great works accomplished by the Church but also in the face of the corruption that, during its pilgrimage throughout history, has tarnished the Church, its purity and sometimes its reputation?
Catholics have much to be proud of. Just as this month’s graduates – and we wish them our heartfelt congratulations on the remarkable achievements of their time, discipline and hard work! – can rightfully be acclaimed for their success, so also can we look back on the long record of our service as a Church to a humanity hungering for wholeness and holiness. The world is far better off because of our many charitable, educational and healing institutions.
The Gospel, however, does not measure “success” by cataloguing and measuring past deeds. This can quickly turn into pride and triumphalism, whereby we view our wealth more as an arsenal of power than an instrument of service. Looking back, like Lot’s wife, can calcify us and turn the living Body of Christ into more of a museum than a thriving family, a hotel for the rich instead of a hospital for sinners.
To be honest, we have to recognize the seeds of corruption that the Evil One has sown among us and which, unfortunately, have often taken root and grown like weeds, threatening to choke off the harvest of grace. This is the risk of freedom and autonomy, as Pope Francis recently noted in one of his daily homilies. We are all sinners, but the corrupt have taken a step beyond, in that they have become hardened in their sin so that it becomes a habitual pattern. Their “genetic code” – as the Holy Father put it – has not changed, since they still have a relationship with God and can turn to Him. Instead, however, they have made a “god” of themselves and their own desires.
The temptation to corruption can occur at any time in places high or humble. The damage of which those in authority – both in sacred and secular office – are capable is enormous as we see when public officials abandon their moral conscience in order to placate constituents or conceal their own complicity in some form of plunder. But although the corrupt may do a lot of harm, the saints do much good.
When faced with what seems to be very limited resources, Jesus challenged His Apostles not to withdraw from the people making demands on them but to hurl themselves right into their midst. The all-too-human reaction when confronted with overwhelming demands is to flee, as the Apostles wanted to do when they told Jesus to send the hungry crowd away. “Good luck to you” was their recipe for success in the face of a hungry and weary crowd, but Jesus had an entirely different response – God’s response – to go “feed them yourselves.”
As the saying goes, whoever is not part of the solution is part of the problem. Whether at the level of next-door neighbors, a personal friendship, a family, a neighborhood or an electoral district, no needs will be met by cataloguing past achievements or acquired skills. Just like every graduation is a beginning of a new journey, so also success is measured by what we will invest in our relationships now. Can it be any different for our Church family and on every level: domestic, parish, diocesan and universal?
The Church must never harden into a “them” instead of an “us.” If it does, it will only turn more into that cold-seeming, heartless, bureaucratic fortress that everyone says we do not want to be. Only the Church of “us” – our Church – is capable of responding in a human fashion, person-to-person, in the way Jesus did and, yes, especially to sinners. Perhaps the remembrance of our own reality – as sinners in need of a Savior – will spare us from its very hardened state of the corrupt whom we may be all too tempted to point the finger at – even as the other three fingers point back to us.