You are come together today, fathers and right wise men, to hold a council … but I wish that, at length, mindful of your name and profession, you would consider of the reformation of ecclesiastical affairs; for never was there more necessity and never did the state of the Church more need endeavors.
—JOHN COLET, remarks to the leadership of the Catholic Church in England, 1512
Every person is precious in the eyes of God. But Christianity is not simply a religion for individuals. Jesus didn’t come to be our private life coach or to have us follow him on our own. He came to build a family that would set the world on fire with God’s love.
We need to turn now to what it means to be a member of that family we call the Church. We need to examine what it looks like to live our Christian vocation together, because that’s the most fruitful way to fully witness our faith. But first, we should probably consider three of the problems that make it hard for us to do that: the cults of individualism, institutionalism, and clericalism.
Individualism is the idea that we can find God adequately on our own. We’ve all had friends tell us “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” By that they usually mean they find purpose and communion with some higher power without the baggage of a religious tradition or other people telling them what to believe. This may sound appealing. But it isn’t Christianity. As one scholar put it, “spirituality is about man’s search for God, while Catholicism is about God’s search for man.”1
As we’ve seen, American life has always had a deep individualist streak. The first colonists were shaped by Reformation theology and hard frontier experience. So it’s no surprise that many Americans have a strongly individualistic approach to their faith. And Catholics—who’ve been breathing American air for generations—are no exception. Many come to Mass, but they aren’t active in their parish. Nor do they try to share the Church with others.
All of us are prone to the second problem, institutionalism. U.S. Catholics are used to the Church as a large institution. We have big buildings. We run a huge network of schools, hospitals, parishes, charities, and ministries. It’s easy to abdicate our personal sense of mission to the official religious machinery. It’s easy to tie up our energies in bureaucracy. Catholics also tend to think of their Church as part of the permanent furniture of American daily life. Even if we drift away from the faith, even if we never donate a dime, we want our childhood parish to stay open on the corner—for nostalgia’s sake.
And the Church is not just a physical institution, of course, but a social one as well, with strong ideas about helping the poor and building the common good. In that, we assume that the Church will be reasonably accommodated by the government. After all, plenty of self-described Catholics already serve in national leadership roles.
A third problem we find in the Church is clericalism. Clericalism is a peculiar kind of codependency. It distorts the roles of both priest and people. On the surface, clericalism is an excessive stress on the role of ordained leadership in the Church, and a demeaning of the lay vocation. And history has plenty of ugly examples to support that view.
But the American reality is more complex. If “Father” is responsible for everything, and if “Father” has some unique and reserved access to holiness, then “Father” is also blamable for everything—and everyone else is off the hook in terms of his or her obligations of discipleship. That can be a very convenient alibi. Lay Christians are right to complain when they’re treated as second-class citizens in the Church. Especially today, there’s no excuse for it. But with rights come duties. And in Baptism, the missionary duties apply to all of us. As Benedict XVI said some years ago, “[The Church needs] a change in mindset, particularly concerning laypeople. They must no longer be viewed as ‘collaborators’ of the clergy but truly recognized as ‘co-responsible’ for the Church’s being and action, thereby fostering the consolidation of a mature and committed laity.”2
Individualism, institutionalism, and clericalism are all detours from a genuinely Christian life. Yes, a personal walk with God is vital. Yes, Catholic institutions are important. And yes, our priests, deacons, and religious have an irreplaceable role of leadership and witness in the work of the Church. But each of these things can also become a weed that chokes our discipleship (see Mt 13:22).
Deep change—some of it deeply problematic—is already happening in our culture. And that means change has come to the Church. This change is uniquely painful because it involves the convergence of many compounding factors: the decline of traditional religious faith among the young; rapid technological and social shifts; a culture of noise that drowns out the Christian message; a falling off in Church practice; aging and overbuilt infrastructure; an increasingly hostile legal and political environment; and ambitions and divisions within the Church herself.
Bluntly put, the habits of thought that have traditionally guided the Church are inadequate to the very different pastoral terrain American Catholics will face in the next ten to twenty years. The Church of tomorrow won’t look like the Church of today, much less of memory. And most of us aren’t ready to deal with the emerging new realities.
From the cross at San Damiano, Jesus spoke the words “Repair my house” to Saint Francis. As Francis came to see, Christ meant rebuilding not just a ruined chapel, but the wider Church. Francis’s reform of the medieval Church—and through the Church, of the medieval world—began in obedience, not rebellion. And it grew one soul at a time. In our own day, like Saint Francis, we need to repair the Lord’s house. We need to prepare for the likelihood of a smaller, poorer Church. But even more, we need to ensure that in the years ahead she is a more vigorous, more believing, more explicitly missionary Church.
That means cultivating in our clergy and laypeople a better sense of who and what the Church is, separate and distinct from the culture around us—a family of families; an intimate community of Christian friendship with a shared vocation to sanctify the world; a mother, teacher, and advocate; the path to eternal joy; and an antidote to the isolation and radical individualism of modern democratic life. It means recovering a sense of Catholic history and identity; a deepened habit of prayer and adoration; a memory of the bitter struggles the Church endured in this country; a distaste for privilege; and a love for personal and institutional asceticism.
The “power” of the Church resides not in her public statements or material resources, her structures or social services, but in her ability to form and lead her people—and to be their first loyalty. When Catholics trust their leaders and believe their teaching, the Church is strong. When they don’t, or when they lose sight of who and what the Church is, she’s weak. This is why bishops are so gravely accountable for their actions and inaction. It’s also why Catholics who undermine trust in Church teaching sin so seriously against their own Baptism.
To recover the Church’s identity, we first need to recall our own. Our lives are a gift of God’s love. As Catholics, we believe that God himself is a Trinitarian communion of persons united in essence and in love. Before his election as pope, Joseph Ratzinger described that love beautifully:
[God] loved me first, before I myself could love at all. It was only because he knew me and loved me that I was made. So I was not thrown into the world by some operation of chance … and now have to do my best to swim around in this ocean of life, but I am preceded by a perception of me, an idea and a love of me. They are present in the ground of my being … God is there first and loves me. And that is the trustworthy ground on which my life is standing and on which I myself can construct it.3
Unlike the rest of creation, God made us in his image and likeness so that we, too, can live in communion, both with God and other people. The world tells us that we exist to satisfy our will; that we become more human by getting or taking what we want. Jesus taught the opposite. He shows us that being an image of God means living in communion founded on self-gift.
Jesus warned that those who seek to cling to their lives will lose them, but those who lose their lives for his sake and for the sake of God’s kingdom will find them (Mt 16:25; Lk 9:24). The Second Vatican Council and Saint John Paul II echoed this in their constant calls for us to make a gift of ourselves to God and to others. Only in making our lives offerings of love do we grow more human and become the persons God created us to be.4
The Church, then, is a communion of persons filled with the Holy Spirit, who give themselves in love to each other and to God, together. Their communion—when it’s lived zealously and joyfully—shows the world the loving communion that exists in God himself. In this communion, we’re called to help each other achieve holiness. Different people have different roles to play. And these don’t exist in competition with one another, but are complementary and placed at the service of others.5
We’re also called—every one of us—to bring the Gospel to all those we encounter. We can’t confine the love of God to our family, our parish, or our particular culture. Rather, we all have “the exalted duty of working to assure that each day the divine plan of salvation is further extended to every person, of every era, in every part of the earth.”6
* * *
SOME KEY PASSAGES OF Scripture shed light on what this looks like. We can turn first to 1 Corinthians 12. This is where Paul describes the way the gifts of the Spirit allow us to work together for our mutual growth in Christ. This passage is so familiar that we can easily become dulled to its significance. So it’s important to read it carefully, as though encountering it for the first time:
To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good … All these are inspired by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills. For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.
For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the organs in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single organ, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.
The first thing to note is that the gifts we receive from God are for the common good. Paul lists a number of such gifts, including prophecy, healing, and service. But we can grow the list even more. Marriage, for example, is meant for more than just a husband and wife; it’s also meant to build up the Church and to spread the Gospel. As Paul reminds us, no one can say that he or she has no role in the Church. We’re all part of the same body, pursuing the same holiness, with gifts from the same Spirit that God has given according to the plan he has for the world. We’re all of us called to serve and preach the Gospel to each other.
When we sincerely seek to do that, the Church is strong, even when her numbers are few. The early Church Fathers were fond of comparing the Church to a field with a variety of plants. As Saint Ambrose wrote: “In this field there are the priceless buds of virginity blossoming forth, widowhood stands out boldly as the forest in the plain; elsewhere the rich harvest of weddings blessed by the Church fills the great granary of the world with abundant produce, and the wine-presses of the Lord Jesus overflow with the grapes of a productive vine, enriching Christian marriages.”7
To use another metaphor, Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who goes out to hire laborers to work in his vineyard (Mt 20:1). We’re all laborers at work in the vineyard of the Lord. As Saint Gregory the Great urged the people of Rome, “Keep watch over your manner of life, dear people, and make sure that you are indeed the Lord’s laborers. Each person should take into account what he does and consider if he is laboring in the vineyard of the Lord.”8
We should also recall the parable of the talents, in which a hard master gives different servants different amounts of silver to watch over while he is gone (Mt 25:14–30). To one he gives five talents, to another, two, and to the last, one. When he returns and finds that the first two servants have invested their money and made more, he rewards them. But when he discovers that the man who received only one talent was afraid and didn’t put it to use, he takes it from him and gives it to the man who doubled his five talents.
Our God isn’t harsh, but he’s given us many good gifts: money, health, time, our vocation, the sacraments—the list goes on. These gifts were not given lightly, but so that we could use them for God’s glory and for the love of our brothers and sisters. No one’s gifts and talents are so insignificant that they can’t be put to good use for God’s kingdom. Life is short. Our time in this world is brief. One day, we’ll each be called to account for our stewardship. God will ask us what we did with our gifts and why. Did we use them to build up the Church, or to indulge ourselves? Did we share them, or did we hoard them? On that day, we want to be led out of the smallness of our hearts and into the joy of our master (see Mt 25:21).
Jesus uses three images to describe using our gifts for God’s kingdom: salt, light, and leaven, or yeast. He says the kingdom of heaven is like “leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till it was all leavened” (Mt 13:33). He also tells his followers: “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Mt 5:13–16).
Note the logic at work here. Yeast mixes with flour and makes dough rise. We sprinkle salt on our food, and the meal tastes better. We turn on the lights of a dark room so we can see. The yeast, salt, and light aren’t the focus of our attention. Rather, they impart their qualities to something else to make it better. And so it should be with the work of the Church in the world.
One of the most important—and beautiful—biblical passages describing the Church comes when Jesus lays out his vision of Christian life after the Last Supper account in the Gospel of John:
I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. You are already made clean by the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you. By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. (Jn 15:1–17)
A grapevine has two distinct parts. The leaves, fruit, and green branches come out of the old gnarled wood of the vine itself. These branches must be cut back, sometimes brutally, so that the vine will produce more and better fruit. We in the Church are the many branches that come from Christ, the vine, and we must remain in Christ if we want to experience his divine life.
The verb “abide” (in Greek, meno) is very important to John. It suggests us living together in a deep unity with Jesus. The branch has nothing that the vine has not given it. It receives all its life from the vine. Separated from it, the branch withers and dies. Connected to it, the branch lives and brings forth beautiful fruit. We must be connected to the Body of Christ, the Church, in order to receive the Holy Spirit through her. We do this by letting the Spirit work in and through us, keeping Christ’s commandments and loving as he loved. It’s our unity with Christ in the Spirit that allows us to work for the building up of his Church.9 The point of this work and the Christian life as a whole is not burden and drudgery, but joy.
Jesus gives us commandments and invites us to be members of the Church so that our joy might be full. Living in communion with him and those united to him is what we were created to do. Hence, “the Church is not here to place burdens on the shoulders of mankind, and she does not offer some sort of moral system. The really crucial thing is that the Church offers him [Jesus Christ]. That she opens wide the doors to God and so gives people what they are most waiting for and what can most help them. The Church does this mainly through the great miracle of love, which never stops happening afresh.”10
We become engrafted to Christ the Vine when we enter the Church in Baptism. Baptism is an underappreciated sacrament, probably because so many of us were baptized as children and have no memory of the event. We take it more as a given than as a gift. As a result, many parents come to a better understanding of Baptism only by witnessing the Baptism of their own children. It’s in Baptism and in Confirmation that we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
John Henry Newman describes Baptism as the sacrament that makes us like the Ark of the Covenant, because it brings the glory of God in the form of the Holy Spirit down to dwell in us.11 All other sacraments and vocations stem from Baptism and from its missionary mandate. In Baptism, Jesus designates each of us to proclaim the truth about him as a prophet. He calls on us to order the world to his glory as a king. And he anoints each of us a priest to offer him the spiritual sacrifice of our life and love—to take the pain and toil and beauty of the world and raise it back up to him in worship.12 This is a great dignity, a high calling, and an immense gift.
* * *
HAVING OUTLINED THE MEANING of our life in the Church and our baptismal calling, we can turn to three ways in which we can live out that calling. The first is through works of charity. We can too easily think of our charitable works as the same sort of good efforts made by secular people or institutions. But that’s a mistake. Scripture gives us a different picture. Note Jesus’ famous words in Matthew 25:31–46:
When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left. Then the King will say to those at his right hand, “Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.” Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?” And the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” Then he will say to those at his left hand, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” Then they also will answer, “Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?” Then he will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.” And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
The biblical scholar Gary Anderson helps us draw two key points from this text. First, charity to the poor has the power to open the gates of heaven. This is because charity is a sacramental act. Jesus tells us that when we give to those in need, we give to him. When we reach out to the poor in love, we encounter him. Recall the story of Saint Martin of Tours, who when confronted with a shivering beggar divided his cloak and gave away half. That night he dreamed of Christ, who was wearing the piece of cloak he’d given away.
Second, we tend to think of works of charity separately from the Mass, but for the early Christians the two were tied intimately together.13 Anderson explains: “In the Eucharist, one re-presents the love Christ showed the world by the self-offering of his life. In alms-giving, the layperson has the opportunity to participate in this divine act by imitating God’s mercy in his or her daily actions.”14
Anderson offers us two more ways to think about our works of charity. First, charity is an expression of faith. It declares what we believe about the world and the God who created it. Consider Mother Teresa. People were drawn to her because she lived with a deep trust in God and his love for the poor. Her acts of love proclaimed that God is love: “They reveal to us the hidden structure of the universe.”15 Second, and more radically, Jews and Christians have often thought of charity as giving God a kind of loan. When a woman gave alms to a beggar, she wasn’t just giving money to a person. She was making a loan to God. Her acts of charity were like enduring prayers for mercy that the Lord would not ignore.16
We mustn’t think of this in a crude way, as though we can manipulate God by our good works. That would be pointless. God can’t be used as an instrument of anyone’s will. Rather, God inspires us to love the poor and then gives us the “reward” that we earn by his help.17 We call them works of charity, after all, because they’re performed with the love the Holy Spirit gives us, and the Holy Spirit is charity itself. The beauty of charity is that it forms both those who give and those who receive, and it grows in the exchange. In giving our love, we’re “rewarded” with more love to give.
That’s how God’s love works: He gives love to us, we respond with acts empowered by that love, and then we and those we love grow in love. This dynamic exists in another vital part of Christian life: friendship. As C. S. Lewis saw many years ago, friendship is suspect in a hypersexualized culture, where any nonsexual love between two close friends can seem dubious. But Christian friendship is immensely important. We need the Church as a whole to be our family. But we also need particular friends, close friends, with whom we can share our interests, joys, and troubles while following Jesus Christ. Even in the strongest marriages, spouses need more than each other. We’re on a journey to a heavenly home, and we need all the help we can get.
Societies in the past have seen friendship as a great good worthy of contemplation. Aristotle made friendship the culmination of his famous Nicomachean Ethics. Ancient thinkers like Cicero wrote lavishly on the theme. And in the so-called Middle Ages—the term “Middle Ages” is an Enlightenment vanity—an English monk named Aelred of Rievaulx read Cicero’s work. He knew good material when he saw it. So Aelred decided to blend the Roman statesman’s thought with the wisdom of the Gospel. His insights can help us understand what Christian friendship is and the benefits that it brings.
A medieval monk might sound irrelevant to our own time and concerns. But Aelred was like us in surprising ways. In his youth, he was torn by conflicting loves and friendships. Some of them were sinful. These hurt him deeply, but he found the love of Jesus Christ to be a source of healing. Aelred writes that true Christian friendship begins with two people who are drawn to some quality of holiness or virtue they see in each other. Since both persons love Jesus Christ and want to build their friendship on their love of Christ, Jesus is, in a real sense, the third person in their friendship.
The love that the two friends share helps them love Christ more. And as their intimacy increases, so their intimacy with Christ also grows.18 As the friends go through life, they encourage each other in holiness. They also correct each other. They enjoy each other’s company. They share each other’s fears and confidences. Aelred’s description of one friend praying for the other, and the love of one’s friend moving into one’s love for Jesus Christ, is striking:
And thus a friend praying to Christ on behalf of his friend, and for his friend’s sake desiring to be heard by Christ, directs his attention with love and longing to Christ; then it sometimes happens that quickly and imperceptibly the one love passes over into the other, and coming, as it were, into close contact with the sweetness of Christ himself, the friend begins to taste his sweetness and to experience his charm. Thus ascending from that holy love with which he embraces a friend to that with which he embraces Christ, he will joyfully partake in the abundance of the spiritual fruit of friendship, awaiting the fullness of all things in the life to come. Then, with the dispelling of all anxiety by reason of which we now fear and are solicitous for one another, with the removal of all adversity which it now behooves us to bear for one another, and, above all, with the destruction of the sting of death together with death itself, whose pangs now often trouble us and force us to grieve for one another, with salvation secured, we shall rejoice in the eternal possession of Supreme Goodness; and this friendship, to which here we admit but few, will be outpoured upon all and by all outpoured upon God, and God shall be all in all.19
Despite the strife of the world and their own flaws and failures, friends enjoy a foretaste of the peace and rest we’ll experience fully in heaven. Their communion together in Christian love mirrors that communion of the Trinity toward which their friendship leads them. Aelred is clear that this type of friendship is not possible to share with many people, maybe three or four at most over the course of a lifetime. But it’s important for all Christians to have such deep, Christ-centered friendships that help them grow closer to God.
* * *
AELRED’S NOTION OF SPIRITUAL friendship also helps us understand the dynamics of Christian marriage, the third way we can live out our vocation in the Church. The idea that a man and woman united in the love of Jesus Christ can draw closer to God through their love is central to the Sacrament of Matrimony. That’s why Vatican II said that “authentic married love is caught up into divine love.”20 The Apostle Paul describes the relationship between Christ and the Church as a marriage, and he teaches that Christian marriages are icons of that union and Jesus’ complete self-emptying love (Eph 5:21–33). This means that when we’re baptized, we become part of the body that is espoused to Christ. A spousal covenant between Christians, then, takes place within the spousal covenant of Christ and the Church. The love between spouses “is elevated and assumed into the spousal charity of Christ, sustained and enriched by his redeeming power.”21
The catechism for the 2015 World Meeting of Families explained it this way: “In the case of marriage, when husbands and wives give themselves to one another with a love that imitates Jesus, their gift of self to each other is part of the work of Christ, joining in the same spirit of Jesus’ own gift of himself for the Church. When the spouses exchange their vows in church at their wedding liturgy, Christ receives their nuptial love and makes it part of his own Eucharistic gift of self for the Church and the Father who, pleased by the offering of the Son, gives the Holy Spirit to the spouses to seal their union.”22
These are more than just religious-sounding words. They have intensely practical consequences. Because married love is so closely united to Christ’s love for the Church, it requires making Christlike sacrifices and is a “cruciform self-sacrificial communion.”23 Through this cruciform communion, spouses are more united to Jesus Christ.24 By giving and receiving love, even in their ordinary obligations, Vatican II notes, spouses “are penetrated with the Spirit of Christ, who fills their whole lives with faith, hope and charity. Thus they increasingly advance toward their own perfection, as well as toward their mutual sanctification, and hence contribute jointly to the glory of God.”25
Couples live out the call to holiness given to them in Baptism through their marriage, and they live out their baptismal priesthood, too. In marriage, their daily lives become “spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Pet 2:5).26 Because of the dynamics of love, this makes them more of a man and woman; through dying to themselves, they live more richly.27
This vision of marriage, like the nature of the Church herself, is radically alien to the spirit of our times. Marriage, again like life in the Church, is in many ways “a long walk of mercy.”28 It requires that spouses bear with each other in forgiveness and love (Col 3:13) and offer their bodies to each other in a chaste and holy way.29
And just as the Church must bring new life in Jesus Christ into the world, so a vital part of marital love is being open to the gift of children. One of the ways in which a good Christian marriage mirrors the divine is that, just as God’s love overflowed into creation, so the love of man and woman should overflow into new life. The family is the “domestic Church” where parents preach the word of God to their children by example and instruction.30 It’s a school of deeper and more fruitful humanity.31
Vatican II teaches that one of the key graces a couple will receive through the Sacrament of Matrimony is God’s aid in fulfilling the “sublime office of being a father or mother.”32 The Latin word the Council Fathers use for “office” is munus, which also means “service,” “duty,” and “gift.” A munus is an honor to receive and a burden to bear. The munus docendi is the teaching office that every bishop holds, the gift of grace and the responsibility he has for upholding the truths of the Catholic faith in his local Church. Parents have a munus for doing exactly the same thing in their homes.33
Marriages aren’t just for parents and children, though. Like the Sacrament of Holy Orders, marriage is devoted to the salvation of others and confers a special grace for a particular mission to serve the people of God and evangelize the world. Spouses are called to make their homes places of charity and mercy so that they can be empowered to go out and spread the Gospel. They’re also called to invite others into their homes, so others, too, can experience the love of Jesus Christ, especially those without a family of their own.
As American culture becomes more estranged from Christian faith, Catholic homes need to become countercultural sanctuaries where visitors can taste the joy and freedom of the Lord. True hospitality is not a small thing. In a lonely, cynical, distracted culture, it’s a massively important thing. It’s a vital form of Christian life and a means by which Christ’s love can reach others.
In 1512, the English priest and educator John Colet—a friend of Erasmus and Thomas More—delivered a blistering sermon to a convocation of leading clergy in his country. Speaking just five years before the start of the Reformation, he pressed his brothers to turn away from ambition, comforts, and worldliness and to reform the Church by reforming their own lives. His audience was bishops and priests. But his message applies equally to every Catholic believer, and just as urgently now as then.
Which is why, at this point, readers may have noticed that, in a chapter on “repairing God’s house,” they’ll find no new ideas for projects, programs, studies, procedures for nominating bishops, committees, structures, offices, synods, councils, pastoral plans, changed teaching, new teaching, budget realignments, sweeping reforms, or reshuffled personnel.
None of those things matter. Or rather, none of them is essential. The only thing essential, to borrow a thought from the great Leon Bloy, is to be a saint. And we do that, as a Church and as individuals, by actually living what we claim to believe, and believing the faith that generations of Christians have suffered and died to sustain.
If we want to repair God’s house, if we want to renew the Church, we need to start with a reform of our own hearts, with an unflinchingly honest look at ourselves. And we certainly have a motive to do so: We can count on demanding times ahead. However we manage it, we need to be bolder and more loving in our Catholic witness, both personally and as a family of faith.
Because anything else, no matter how pious its veneer, is dead weight.