Franciscan at Home

In this article, Sarah Pedrozo invites us to see that Christ is not so far removed from all the bustle of Christmas after all.

Amid all the hustle and bustle of Christmas preparations normal to our culture these days, it is easy to be swept up into a seemingly endless list of tasks. Everything from packing and traveling, to hosting guests and dealing with varying family dynamics, not to mention the added expense of presents and charitable donations can all combine to make us overwhelmed and exhausted. Where, we might wonder, is Christ in all of this? How can we hope to truly join in the Advent preparations of getting ready in heart, mind and soul for the birth of Christ when we have so many additional demands on us? Maybe we simply wish to leave it all behind, withdraw from the world and spend Advent and Christmas in prayerful retreat. While there is no doubt that it is always a challenge to keep Him at the center of our Christmas activities in the midst of an increasingly secular society, perhaps what we need more than a change of location or activity is a change of perspective.

St. Bernard of Clarivaux wrote that, in reality, we can think of three comings of Christ. The first occurred in the stable at Bethlehem, over 2000 years ago. The 2nd Coming will take place in the future, at a time known only to God, when Christ will return in glory and majesty. But the 3rd coming is going on right now. It is the time in between the 1st and 2nd Comings, called a “ hidden intermediate coming,” when “only the elect see the Lord.” St. Bernard says that in this 3rd Coming, Christ comes “in spirit and in power.” There is a unique synthesis in activity between all three comings of the Lord. Particularly at Christmas, the activities we engage in (during the 3rd coming) reflect the 1stcoming while at the same time preparing us for the Final Coming of our Lord.

Infallibility can be a difficult and misunderstood issue both for Catholics and enquirers, so clarity about what is meant by infallibility is of great importance to anyone engaged in the ministry of teaching the Catholic faith. We need to be able to explain why, and to what extent, the Church has the power to teach without error.

Infallibility is a supernatural gift bestowed on the Church by God in order to preserve her from doctrinal error. The first question that confronts us is why God would make such a gift. To this question, Blessed John Henry Newman offers the following answer:

Supposing then it to be the Will of the Creator to interfere in human affairs, and to make provisions for retaining in the world a knowledge of Himself, so definite and distinct as to be proof against the energy of human skepticism, in such a case – I am far from saying that there was no other way – but there is nothing to surprise the mind, if He should think fit to introduce a power into the world, invested with the prerogative of infallibility in religious matters.[i]

Here, Newman goes straight to the heart of the matter. The gift of infallibility protects the work Christ came to accomplish. As well as dying for us, Jesus came both to reveal God and to show us the way to Him (John 17:26). It is inconceivable that having done this, and returned to heaven, Christ would not have left some mechanism by which this knowledge could be passed on, with certainty and undefiled, to all subsequent generations.

By way of analogy, Newman offers us the example of creation. God not only creates, He also takes care to preserve His creation so that it does not fall back into nothingness: which, having been made from nothing (ex nihilo) it is apt to do at every moment without His sustaining action. Likewise, when God teaches and communicates truths about Himself to mankind, He takes care to preserve it, and this is done through the establishment of the Church endowed with the gift of infallibility.[ii]

Jason Gale explains how the Credo ultimately contains only a single dogma, whose mystery can and must be spread out in many aspects. There is a direct relationship between the person of Christ and the one Deposit of Faith. In catechesis, we say that we teach Christ, but we also say that we teach the Catholic Faith. The Creed, Sacraments, morality, and prayer not only describe what is found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, but also summarize for us God and his plan for salvation. This plan is fully revealed and receives its power in Jesus Christ. He is the center of our faith and life. When our faith and life blend together, we describe ourselves as persons of integrity. The integrity of the Catholic faith is sometimes overlooked in catechesis. We must strive to teach the whole of who Christ is as expressed in the Church’s faith.

What is the greatest word, the most powerful word we say in our life? Each of us has his or her own answer. So, let us ask: what is the greatest religious word? It is ‘Amen’.

When you receive Holy Communion you say ‘Amen’. You receive Jesus into your life. ‘Amen’ is ‘Yes – I accept you Lord’. We could say our ‘Amen’ better – be more loving, more thankful, be a more religious person when we say our ‘Amen’. I do not want to go into how good or how poor our ‘Amen’ may be. I do want to show how special we are just in being able to say our ‘Amen’ to Jesus.

We say another ‘Amen’ at end of the Eucharistic Prayer - the central part of the Mass - and we are saying ‘Amen’ to what the priest has just said – and what has happened. We are part of this long prayer. It is our prayer, too. Let us look at what is happening in this Eucharistic prayer and what is at the same time happening to us.

In the centre of the Eucharistic Prayer, the priest takes the bread and says ‘This is my body given up for you.’ Then, taking the chalice, he says, ‘This is my blood shed for you so that sins may be forgiven’, ending, ‘Do this in memory of me.’

The words of Jesus refer to his death and he wishes us to remember this. Good Friday is all about our remembering. We gather together in Church to remember the death of Jesus.

St John tells us who Jesus really is – the eternal Son of the Father. He also tells us why Jesus is dying – to save the whole world. We come together and allow the Church to guide us, to lead us in this remembering. We could say that we share in the memory of the Church.

I recently found myself in conversation with a non-denominational friend about the many attacks on the Christian faith in the world today. During the course of our conversation, she said many times, ‘I just trust in my personal Lord and Savior Jesus Christ’. At the time I didn’t think much about this point, but later I concluded: in the end, my faithful friend is right - it is about being in relationship with Jesus Christ and trusting that He will care for us in all of our needs. In fact, I thought, this truth concerning relationship and trust is what we ought to be catechizing for. Blessed John Paul II had famously made a similar point: the sum goal of all catechesis is ‘to put people not only in communion with—but in intimacy with Jesus Christ’.[i] It is Christ who leads us into the Trinity.

Is there a foundational way which we are called to follow as Christ summons us to share in the life of the Trinity? Blessed John Paul II suggests that it is poverty: ‘The Church feels ever more strongly the impulse of the spirit to be poor among the poor, to remind everyone of the need to conform to the ideal of poverty practiced and preached by Christ, and to imitate Him in His sincere and active love for the poor.’[ii] John Paul wants us to conform to ‘the ideal of poverty practiced and preached by Jesus Christ.’ And so, what kind of poverty was ‘practiced and preached by Christ?’ For our answer we can turn to the great charter for holiness in the Beatitudes, and in particular to the first Beatitude: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’.[iii] For it is in this Beatitude that we discover the mystery of our call to surrender to God.

The Catechism reminds us that spiritual poverty is the ‘abandonment of ourselves to the providence of the Father in heaven who frees us from the anxiety about tomorrow’[iv]; it is an entrustment of ourselves to God in all things. Trust, placing ourselves in the care of life-giving providence, is the most concrete act of our living sonship with God. And if we wish to imitate Christ’s pedagogy we will catechize for a deeper understanding of what it means humbly to unite ourselves in trust to the will of the Father.

For a great variety of reasons, many people who have received the grace of Baptism and Confirmation at a young age, and thereafter were regularly nourished with the sacrament of the Eucharist, do not progress to becoming faithful Catholic adults. The definition of what is sometimes called a ‘practising Catholic’ can be approached from different angles, but the reality is that even many of those children who sat obediently in the pews every Sunday, embraced their faith gladly and had some experience of Catholic family life cannot now be considered ‘practising Catholics’ in any sense. The same is unfortunately true of adults who become Catholics, usually now through the RCIA. Some estimates indicate that as many as 50-70% of new Catholics (neophytes) cease to practise their faith within two years.

Naturally, the reasons for failing to continue living a Catholic life are as diverse as the people who act on them. The pressure of a materialistic culture, constant undermining by family members and friends, or a failure to understand that the Church’s moral teaching is also good news and liberating for the individual; all these and many other factors can result in the drifting away of those who once took a full part in Catholic life. Somehow the Good News has failed to penetrate beyond the mind and to be absorbed within the soul. A sense of being one with Christ and with his Church in the life of the Trinity has stalled somewhere along the way, and the gradual process of transformation into members of Christ’s body has been interrupted.

It is not my purpose here to discuss those many factors which may interrupt a person’s progress more fully into the life of Christ, but rather to look further back at the foundations which underlie the original formation of that person as a Christian. There is insufficient space to outline a systematic and comprehensive approach, but I would like to look briefly at three areas which may contribute to the problem and to show how clear teaching on the identity between Christ and his Church is of foundational importance.

It was the first day of my final college course in Religion. One semester way from graduating at a public university and I had, through God’s grace, been able to maintain my faith. Our professor was one of the most highly respected on campus, a kind of cult figure with amazing gravitas and all the confidence of a great rhetorician. He sat in the desk in the front of the room as we sat with notebooks ready, and pens poised to transfer his knowledge onto paper. ‘I am a recovering Catholic,’ he began, and that statement acted as a thesis for the rest of his course. Frustrated with his childhood faith, anger and brokenness often spilled over into the class.

It was this image of former Catholics that I carried with me from college into full-time catechesis. With nearly 29 million former Catholics in the US[i] and an estimated 519,000 no longer attending Mass in England[ii], there is a tendency to assume that those who have left the faith have done so bitterly, and because of specific doctrinal teachings. However, recent experiences throughout the Church have illustrated that individuals like my professor are the exception, not the norm. What if our approach to welcoming people home began not with a caricature of the angry ‘recovering Catholic’ but with the more accurate and Biblical image of the lost sheep? What if our catechesis addressed the central obstacles to conversion that so many in western society face? The New Evangelization demands that we articulate the timeless truths of the faith with renewed ‘ardor, methods and expression.’[iii] To do so effectively requires knowledge of whom fallen away Catholics are and why they left their faith.

Marcus Grodi explains how he came to discover that the Church has given us all that we need to help us know how to defrag our minds, to put everything in order in a systematic and organic way.

How does one determine truth? This was the core of my own journey to the Church, and though I won’t repeat the details here, I must admit this journey, for me at least, did not cease once I became Catholic. I knew my old Protestant ways of determining truth did not work and led only to a cacophony of conflicting opinions that divides Christians from other Christians. But then once inside the gates of the Church, I was sadly stymied by the unexpected breadth of opinions and sad divisions amongst Catholics. To some people these divisions seem no different than the divisions amongst Protestants. For others these divisions have caused them to leave the Church and return to the more comfortable confusion of their past. Then there are those who are not happy with the bishops and have begun defining a Catholicism on their own terms.

But how are Catholics to determine what is true when we are surrounded by so many seemingly faithful Catholics with conflicting opinions and lifestyles? Allow me to approach this quest with the illustration of a personal experience—of my own ignorance.

Why it is more than doctrine that keeps Catholics and Protestants apart

I will never forget the first time I entered a Catholic Church and attended my first Mass. It was a strange, otherworldly experience. Not because I felt I was entering the holy of holies, but I was entering into an experience I had come to intellectually believe, but had never personally witnessed. I had lived 36 years as a Pentecostal Protestant and 13 of those as a pastor. I had spent my life trying to construct a Christian experience that was as far from the Catholic experience as one could get.