A Reflection on What a "Poor" Wounded" Church Means

I've only aspired to be a simple priest: celebrating the Eucharist, hearing confessions, teaching and preaching are about my speed. Attaining positions of leadership or hobnobbing with the higher-ups never appealed to me. Ergo, I've always kept a low profile, but all my best efforts to stay off the ecclesiastical radar have been for nought. Lately I've found myself invited to join a couple of archdiocesan committees that directly advise the Archbishop of Chicago. These responsibilities are separate from, but not completely unconnected to the role I play as a director in the Salesian Community. What I have discovered in the short time I've been participating in these local discussions is that the challenges faced by the Archdiocese and those of my religious community are not all that different. We are both trying to deal with what it means to be Church, not in an era of change, but in a change of eras, as Pope Francis put it last year. Therefore none of us can expect that we will be allowed to simply remain in our own private Idaho, impervious to the trials happening around us. 

In these meetings it's easy to look at spread sheets, graphs, demographic projections and the like and conclude that the Church is a business like any other, and we are to make decisions based on the bottom line alone. But I can say that both in the case my Salesian superiors and on the diocesan side with Archbishop Cupich, that the message is clear: what we are about is the mission of evangelization. Whatever decisions are made are not meant first and foremost to improve the financial bottom line but to make us more effective proclaimers of the Word and ministers of the Sacraments. We are being called to discernment in the Spirit.

Part of this process is going to mean an examination of the material possessions of the Church. What buildings and institutions help us move the mission forward? Which served us well in their time, but their time has passed and we need to let them go? Which were products of a triumphalistic age meant to demonstrate the Church's power and status in the world, and again, need to be let go of for the sake of recapturing the Church's true identity? This can be a painful process. We're talking about parishes, schools, hospitals, retreat centers and any number of other works that people identify as the places where their faith was born, fostered and nourished. These are more than buildings, for many they are home. 

But we are called to not be bound by buildings, or anything material. They are tools in the service of evangelization, and we need to be open to switching tools when they no longer meet the needs of a new age. But, as I wrote, this isn't easy. In the 25 years since I entered Salesian formation, we have parted ways with incredibly significant works: schools, parishes (including one that represented our oldest presence in the Eastern United States), even our house of formation in Newton, New Jersey where generations of Salesians were formed, both intellectually and pastorally. Each closure or transfer of administration back to the local diocese was like a cut. A few of our men literally lost their vocations over these changes. I don't judge what's in a person's heart, but I will say that those who left over these changes forgot that basic truth that the building or institution isn't the mission, but its servant. 

There are further changes coming for the Church in the U.S. We can look at mergers and closures as the death of something. But we are best served by maintaining a spirit of discernment, with our eyes fixed on Jesus and how He is best served. 

I think of Pope Francis' call to be a poor Church for the poor: one that goes to the peripheries, reaching out to the spiritually wounded. It's a Church that "thinks outside the box," not bound by convention or tradition, as opposed to being guided by the living Tradition. A Church that makes the institution the focus becomes caught up with maintenance and self preservation instead of service. It looks inward instead of outward, becoming self-referential and irrelevant to the outside world. But a Church that eschews the outward trappings of power and status becomes a true sign of contradiction to the world, and more vital than we can imagine.

I also think of Pope Emeritus Benedict who, when he was still Fr. Ratzinger, wrote of a Church smaller, but more faithful. He took some heat when he repeated these words as pope, because some thought he was envisioning the Church an exclusive club of spiritual elites. But if we look back to his original words from the late '60's, we see quite the opposite. He wrote, in part:

"It (the Church) will become small and will have to start pretty much all over again. It will no longer have use of the structures it built in its years of prosperity. The reduction in the number of faithful will lead to it losing an important part of its social privileges.” ...  "As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members" …. . “It will be a more spiritual Church, and will not claim a political mandate flirting with the Right one minute and the Left the next. It will be poor and will become the Church of the destitute.”

But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret."

The vision of Fr. Ratzinger is not one of a spiritual elite, but one of a concentrated yet powerful force that is the antidote to postmodern impotence. It is a spiritual communion, united by Christ, that contradicts contemporary isolation and the disjointed logic of the moment.

This process of transformation will make great demands on all of us. More is going to be asked of us all: greater flexibility, greater humility, greater patience, greater faith. There's no doubt that this is a daunting reality. But we have a choice: we can either pretend everything is alright as it is, and no change is necessary-which is to live in a fantasy land. We can acknowledge the challenges, but see the solution as a recapturing of some past glory, or use some old agenda to meet new realities, which is bound to fail. Or else we can look at this as a moment of opportunity, an adventure in the Spirit. It will call for new solutions, true, but will also mean drawing from the store house of the Church's accumulated wisdom of the past 2,000 years. It will mean bold action, as well as prudent discernment. It will mean being open to the Spirit that calls us into an ever deeper relationship with Jesus Christ, the one we are called to proclaim: never forgetting that it is He we serve, it is He who is our portion and cup. He is the only riches that we have to share with the world.