David Ancell / Sunday July 28, 2024
I was just at Defending the Faith at Franciscan University of Steubenville. It was, of course, an on-fire experience. There’s always something about being in a space at Mass with a bunch of people who really love Jesus and really want to be there. The atmosphere of the place can easily leave a better impression that the talks do, even though there are a lot of good talks that we heard.
One speaker said something that I really want to ponder here. He talked about how we need to invite people in to the Church, and if we spend all of our time talking about the problems, people aren’t going to want to join. Well, he’s right. No matter what may be going on, the Catholic Church is where we receive the fullness of truth, and the ordinary means of grace, better known as the Sacraments. There is just no better place to be.
We definitely don’t want to be those people criticizing everything that goes on, including many things that aren’t matters of faith or maybe even aren’t real problems. Some people make a spirituality out of talking about problems in the Church. This just isn’t going to lead people to Christ. To be honest, I have some sympathy for such people because I remember what things were like as I was coming of age. It was hard to know who to trust to tell the truth.
In fact, that’s really the thing that I want to ponder. How do we show the great love of God and the great graces he brings through his Church but be realistic about some of the things that are going on? It was always an odd position of mine as I was a young adult trying to say that the Church was the place to be but that, well, there are scandals. Not only that, you also need to realize that, if you want to know the fullness of the truth, you won’t likely get it from official diocesan or parish instruction. Even if they didn’t say anything technically wrong, it didn’t mean that they provided enough of the truth for us to be able to fully understand or live the faith. That said, I do think things have improved greatly in the formation department in the last twenty years.
I was part of an excellent RCIA team when I was in my early 30s. We really did try to teach the truth in a way that showed what a positive good every teaching of the Church truly was. However, a discussion came up when we were told not to talk about dissent from Church teachings. A few things did get said about problems in the Church however. There was once an outside speaker who said things that I had to kind of sneakily debunk in the next talk I gave. Once again, I actually agree that we can’t spend large amounts of time on problems, but . . .
Somehow, we do have to convey some of the problems just to give people a realistic picture of what things are like. After all, look at all the stories in the Bible about the people whom God chose to lead. We are not in Heaven yet, and so things are not perfect (and the speaker I mentioned earlier made note of this in his talk). As far as teaching, I think we have far better resources than we had when I was a high school or college student, but dissent still exists. Has it ever not been a problem in some way? I’m a lay Dominican, and the Dominicans were founded to preach against an extremely destructive heresy over 800 years ago.
While spending loads of time on problems is one extreme, not mentioning problems or downplaying them too much is another. If we don’t give a proper perspective, people will find out the problems. It’s hard to say how they will respond when they do, especially if we are not regularly meeting with them anymore to walk with them through it.
So, we don’t need to spend our time simply on problems in the Church. However, I think it is wise to say that we have had a period of time when the Church’s teaching was not properly taught and therefore do have a lot of Catholics who don’t know their faith. We want to equip you with the fullness of the Faith. We can even spend a session on different periods of trouble in the Church and the saints that led the reform. I’d argue we can even do this without making it a central theme. After all, we really need to spend our time telling people about God’s love for them, what he wants to give them, and how our lives in Christ should be lived.
Category: Response
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