Fred Sneesby - Observations on Culture, Faith and Politics

Easter Decision: Stay in the Church?

April 6, 2007

My membership to Sam’s Club just ran out. Time to renew. AAA will be sending me a reminder soon to re-up for another year. I’ve been paying my union dues every month. We let our zoo membership lapse a while ago; there’s something not quite satisfying about relating to the animals that way. I am a member of the Republican Party. No dues. In the State of Rhode Island, the GOP should be paying us to stay in. Let’s see … in checking any other membership cards in my wallet, there’s a library card that has no expiration date, a Blood Bank card for being a regular donor, and a few cards from stores that identify me as a more or less loyal customer.

I’m not much of a joiner, really. I don’t belong to much. I do belong to a church, though – the Catholic Church – and membership renewal time is coming up on Easter. I don’t know if other Churches do this on Easter, but in the Catholic Church we are asked to renew our baptismal vows on that day. I’m thinking about it.

My situation’s a little odd because my wife and I are excommunicated, my being a priest and our getting married. But we still go to the Catholic Church although we don’t receive the sacraments. I sort of feel like George Costanza in that Seinfeld episode when George is fired but keeps going to work anyway. If we belong anywhere, it is the Catholic Church and so, like other churchgoers, we’ll be giving some thought to renewing our baptismal vows.

Renewing them is getting to be a bit problematic.

It isn’t so much of a problem renewing our pledge to renounce sin and to share the life of the Trinity; it gets considerably thornier to bind ourselves to this particular Church. If only you could have Jesus without the followers! That is impossible, though. Commitment to Jesus is also a commitment to other believers and not just in the abstract. The “other believers” are real live flesh and blood people constituting a real live flesh and blood organization, and, unfortunately, this group of followers called the Catholic Church is doing its best to give people reasons to let the membership expire.

Should we enumerate them? I’d rather not. For reasons that easily come to mind and for others that we vaguely sense, the Catholic Church is not fulfilling its mission. This is not surprising for anyone at all familiar with the Catholic Church because the majority of Catholics do not know what the mission is. Worse still, the majority of Catholics do not know that we have a mission.

I group all the faults and failings under this one heading and, indeed, judge the severity of those shortcomings by measuring to what degree the Catholic Church is fulfilling its mission. For sure, the Church accomplishes many things – valuable and necessary things - but is it focused on a particular mission and marshaling its resources, human and material, to fulfill it? No it is not.

I do not pretend to have privileged information about the mission of the Church. For many years, I have used Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, Evangelii Nuntiandi (On Evangelization), to inform me about what the mission of the Church is. I look back with increasing fondness on Paul VI. He had the warmth of a loan officer and the charisma of a physics teacher but I think he stands head and shoulders above the popes who followed him. He wrote On Evangelization in 1975 at the end of the Holy Year and at the tenth anniversary of the close of the Second Vatican Council. We (that’s the papal “we” he’s using) wish to do so (i.e., encourage his brothers and sisters in their mission as evangelizers) on this tenth anniversary of the closing of the Second Vatican Council, the objectives of which are definitively summed up in this single one: to make the Church of the twentieth century ever better fitted for proclaiming the Gospel to the people of the twentieth century. Ah yes, the Second Vatican Council. I remember that.

Paul VI goes on to state the mission of the Church: "We wish to confirm once more that the task of evangelizing all people constitutes the essential mission of the Church." It is a task and mission which the vast and profound changes of present-day society make all the more urgent. Evangelizing is in fact the grace and vocation proper to the Church, her deepest identity. She exists in order to evangelize, that is to say, in order to preach and teach, to be the channel of the gift of grace, to reconcile sinners with God, and to perpetuate Christ's sacrifice in the Mass, which is the memorial of His death and glorious resurrection.

He defines more exactly what evangelization is: For the Church, evangelizing means bringing the Good News into all the strata of humanity, and through its influence transforming humanity from within and making it new: "Now I am making the whole of creation new.” But there is no new humanity if there are not first of all new persons renewed by Baptism and by lives lived according to the Gospel. The purpose of evangelization is therefore precisely this interior change, and if it had to be expressed in one sentence the best way of stating it would be to say that the Church evangelizes when she seeks to convert, solely through the divine power of the message she proclaims, both the personal and collective consciences of people, the activities in which they engage, and the lives and concrete milieu which are theirs.

Revolutionary. A little dry in the delivery, but he is calling for deep and powerful change.

Do we want to sign on for this mission? That’s the Easter decision to make. If you can do it in the Catholic Church, then go for it. If it means joining another Church, then by all means do so. It’s got to happen in a Church, though, even if that means just a handful of baptized who are pledging themselves heart and soul to one another and to Jesus’ mandate. I hope we all can make that act of faith. Jesus lives. Alleluia.