This is the first part of a two part reflection by Father Kelly on the attitudes we hold towards those Catholics who no longer attend Mass regularly.
One of the commonly repeated political comments I have heard since I returned from Rome has been that Europe is fast becoming post-Christian. This opinion is shared by more and more Americans, especially on the right. It is a comment based upon observation of the declining percentages of people in Catholic Europe who attend at Sunday Mass. It is based on the supposition that to be a Catholic, the first, perhaps the principal criterion is that one go to Mass.
I am not suggesting for a moment that a Christian should stay at home on Sundays. To worship God in the midst of the Christian Church is the duty of every Christian. But the question is whether attendance at Mass on a Sunday in high numbers is enough to prove that a society is Catholic or Christian. Can a society be called Christian when the percentages worshipping God in the Church is small and dwindling?
Those in doubt are lost?
The single greatest problem with the exclusive use of Church attendance as a criterion for Church affiliation is that it closes the door on those who have not yet come to conversion. What if Peter had not glanced at Jesus in the house of Ciaphas? What if Christ had been just with him there and then? If Christ had punished him for his betrayal right there, condemned him as he deserved, the Church would have been without Peter. But Christ holds his judgment and waits for the man to recover and repent. Peter loves greatly and it is love that makes him weep. Tears wash away his guilt, as Augustine tells us "with the tears of devoted love, he wipes away the dirt of denial." 1
Those who demand that all Catholics be at Mass on Sunday or forfeit the name of Catholic, seem to believe that the pilgrimage must begin on Monday and end on Saturday. On no account must there be a Sunday when a Catholic is unsure, lost, bewildered or angry. I encourage all people to be there at the altar of the Lord Sunday after Sunday. But I honor with the name of their baptism all those Catholics who are walking a troubled road, seeking out truth in many places. The great tragedy is that as they walk on that road, they are often abandoned by us who have found the refuge of faith within the Church.
Many younger Catholics stop practicing their faith after they leave home. Much of this is a statement of autonomy, as they escape from the restraints of parental control. Exposure to learning and to secular values weakens the attachment to the values of the Church. For the young and the restless, the search for personal values begins in the early twenties. In the search for happiness, a search that cannot ultimately be successful without Christ, Catholics are often totally at sea morally. But they bear the mark of Christ from their baptism and, if they have been blessed with a good family, they retain the memory of good Catholic parents. Distracted parents may get a little comfort and direction from a comment by St Augustine that, even as he lived a sinful and carnal life, he never forgot the reverence with which his mother had spoken the name of Jesus.
What do we call those seeking people, if not Catholics? Those who seek God with a sincere heart cannot be locked outside the Church. Even in their doubt, even in sinfulness, they are still the children of God in baptism. What do we call baptized people who are skeptical at the Catholic Church’s positions? Even in their wanderings, they are our brothers and sisters.
Does Christ not sit and eat with such as these? Does Christ not admonish the Pharisees that the Son of God came for the cure of the sick, rather than the reassurance of the healthy? Does not the Doctor of Grace remind us that the righteous are often tempted to close tightly the purse from which our ransom must flow?2 The sinner can yet be saved, even after the self-righteous have set down their conditions and their dead-lines. That divine purse is deep and its golden grace is given away generously even to those who show the slightest partial faith and repentance. It is not for us sinners to shut the Church in the face of someone who is knocking today or who may knock tomorrow.
Nor can one pass by Augustine without properly representing his opinions on ecclesiology. He certainly demanded that Catholics attend at the Eucharist. For Augustine the Church was truly universal, extending beyond all social and political barriers. What defined the Church Catholic, the Catholics, was that all her members shared in the celebration of the same Eucharist. Cardinal Ratzinger wrote that "Like the City of God, the People of God, as the community in which the City consists, is identical with the Church, in so far as that is the people on its pilgrimage -that is, that group of the Saints of God who are called from among men." But Augustine does not forget that there must be people within that Church who are further away from Christ than those who have achieved holiness. There will always be acommunion sacramentorum, those who come to the sacraments less than penitent, who worship with faint hearts, and whose dedication is lacking. But their distance from the saints is measured by a lack of love, an unwillingness to turn around their lives. In sermon 82 Augustine:
"The people who throng our churches at the festivals of Jerusalem, fill the theatres on Babylon’s high days; yet they serve, honor and pay homage to Christ. This is true of all who are signed with Christ’s sacraments, yet who hate his commandments, and also true of others who are not even signed with the sacraments, true even of pagans, even of Jews." 3
The Church should have an insatiable thirst for souls. That means that it seeks out the fallen, the sinners in the world. These are the same ones who are cursing Christ in secret, though they bless him in public. Christ knows who has real faith, he can feel the true touch of faith just as he could know that a person of real faith had touched him in Luke 7:36 when he knew that a person of faith had touched him, even in the middle of an unbelieving crowd.
Yet we Christians cannot know who is faithful and who is not; we must await the Day of Judgment when Christ will separate the wheat from the chaff. Until then, the Church must persevere in patience, a patience that is from God himself. The Church must contain both the saint and the hypocrite. The Church must exploit all means to bring the person of no faith to a true relationship with the Lord Jesus. Augustine challenges his listeners to be patient; after all, the Church claims that its real home is in the heavens. If this claim is true, then let us show some patience for those who are bound to earthly things and find it hard to escape to the heights of heaven. The Church must be there for those people in order to lead them patiently away from their carnal concerns.
The Church does not live in a sociological cocoon. In each age it becomes influenced, one could say infected, by the prevailing culture. Ironically, that cultural infection sometimes survives and becomes canonized by nostalgia. Look at the Catholic Church’s long fascination with monarchy and the right of ruling families to continue even after they had ceased to be just or effective. Just look at the retrospection among Catholic clergy towards archaic forms of dress. This plague of romantic retrospection and canonization of some non-existant golden age of faith retards the Catholic Church in its mission of preaching the Gospel. A young Irish cousin tartly told me last year; “You priests! You want us to be like our grandmothers. I am not my grandmother!”
In this new century, we Catholics are inevitably infected and influenced by the culture into which we attempt to plant the Gospel. Our culture is identified by most observers as selfish, we feel but we do not want to become involved; we believe but we do not want to belong; we articulate without becoming committed. Just visit a Starbucks coffee shop, the icon of this generation. People sit alone, working on their laptops. People rush from their lonely apartments or from their families to sit among others. But they do not communicate; they simply want to be assured that they are not alone. We face a generation that yearns for community, but is afraid of commitment. It is into that furrow that the seeds of the Gospel must be sown in our age. Those who seek to enforce an alien cultural paradigm on any generation always fail. The cultural reality of 2006 is that there is immense fear and distrust of congregations, groups, organizations and formalities. Condemning people for not attending Sunday Mass when these young people exist within that culture is to throw away a whole generation. Christ dealt with an alienated generation by inclusion, by empathy and by generosity.
1 Augustine Sermon 296, 2
2 Augustine Sermon 296,2
3 En. in Ps. 61, 10