We find ourselves in a moment that is pivotal in the life of the Catholic Church. In addressing the many challenges we face, the choices we make in these coming years will define the life of the Church for generations to come. They are no different than the choices with which the Fathers of the Church were faced in their own age.
These challenges come from both inside and outside the Church. Let’s look briefly at some of those from outside, beginning with the great storm of secularism that is raging all around us. It is fed by the lie that it is the human person who is the standard and the source of truth and ethics. It’s the perversion of the revelation in Genesis that man is made in the image of God. Rather, the world wants us to believe that God is made in our image. And we have seen the collateral damage in every aspect of life.
When you marry that storm with the materialism and consumerism that mark so much of our lives and the attack on religious freedom that we are undergoing, it’s clear that to be a believer is to live in a hostile environment. Now, if that’s not bad enough, what about the challenges within the Church?
Divisions within
This list is unfortunately long and growing longer. We see complacency in the observance and living of the Faith. We have more and more of our sisters and brothers, members of this great mystical body of Christ, who know of the Catholic faith only what they read in a newspaper or see on TV, who are rejecting a faith that was not passed on to them by parents or pastors but by what they may encounter in social media. The Church is growing in division; we are becoming tribalized, and social media is tearing at our unity of faith.
Further, there is in our midst the grave evil and crime of abuse that has shattered the lives of innocent young people and their families and those who know and love them. Quite frankly, the priestly abuse crisis has wounded the entire body of Christ and has caused many of our good, hardworking, generous, faithful priests to at times minister under a cloud of distrust when trust is so critical for priestly ministry to be effective.
Yet, as I look upon that stormy landscape, my mind turns to a passage in the Gospel of St. Matthew, which also appears in the Gospel of St. Mark, on which St. Augustine reflected with his congregation in a time that was perhaps equally stormy. You know the story well: the apostles are in the boat, a great storm arises, and Jesus is seemingly asleep. Augustine reminds his listeners nearly sixteen centuries ago that the barque of Christ, the Church, even amidst the fiercest of storms, with the grace of the Holy Spirit will never sink.
What seems to be the Lord’s inactivity is actually his divine protection, for he was testing the apostles on whether or not they believed enough in his grace to steer their ship amid the storm. Do we have the faith to believe that Christ is alive in our midst in our hour of greatest need? Do we have faith enough in ourselves?
We who have been blessed, adopted into his Mystical Body, fed by his sacred Body and Blood: do we have faith enough to rise to the challenges before us? Augustine told his listeners that it was their moment to rise to the challenge. Allow my poor words to be joined to the great, towering words of Augustine. We can, we must, we will rise to the challenges of our age, and I believe that the Patristic Fathers of the Church can give us a roadmap to help us to rise to these challenges.
Remedies of divine origin
There have always been remedies—tools for renewal and spiritual rebirth—at our disposal in the Church because they are of divine origin and they are constitutive elements of the very life of who we are in Christ. What are these remedies?
There is the reverent, faithful participation and celebration in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. There is the sacrament of reconciliation where we encounter the merciful, loving presence of a Father who will never turn his back on his children. There is the living, beautiful tradition of our Church as it has been articulated through the centuries as one seamless, divine outpouring of the truth that is not to be compromised, not to be dismissed. With the guidance of the Magisterium in the beautiful diversity and devotional life we share, these tools have always been at our disposal.
But the Fathers perhaps give us two others. I came to that realization at the most unlikely of moments—reading the Wall Street Journal. It was April 2018 that I stumbled upon a review written about the movie Paul, Apostle of Christ. It relates the beautiful friendship between Paul and Luke amid the earliest great persecution of Christians under the tyranny of Nero.
In the article, the author, who is not a believer, raises an intriguing historical question. She notes that there is a general consensus that when Paul died in the middle of the 60s— A.D. 66, 67—there were roughly 2,500 Christians alive, and by the middle of the fourth century there were 23 million Christians. During those years, the penalty for being a Christian was persecution and even death.
So, she raises the question: “How is it possible that when the Church was so persecuted, so much attacked in such a hostile environment, that it found its greatest evangelical growth?” This is the era of the Patristic Fathers. I think there are two answers to that question and perhaps others yet to be identified.
The first is that it was the era of heroic individual holiness. Secondly, it was the age where Christian communities were places of authentic charity so that those who gave their lives for Christ knew that their wives and children would have a family that would care for them to the end. What I would like to suggest is that in our own stormy time, the Fathers and the faithful upon whose shoulders we stand are inviting us to do the same thing.
Heroic witnesses of holiness
I had the privilege to live five years in Rome as a student priest attending the Pontifical Gregorian University. It was my custom early in the morning, when time permitted, to go to the Vatican and sit under the Bernini columns well before the tourists arrived. I loved its quiet and its beauty.
After a few months, I learned what the historic significance of that Square really was. Those Bernini columns that outline the Basilica’s piazza mark the outer perimeter of what once was the wooden stadium on top of the Vatican Hill—the spot where thousands of Christians lost their lives because of their Faith.
The statues that adorn those Bernini columns are what I call the quiet sentinels of the men and women they represent, many of whom died in that place for Christ. How sad it is that most who enter that square have forgotten this basic fact. When the Christians went to their death singing the Psalms, singing for joy as did Maximilian Kolbe in Auschwitz the night before he died, it is because they understood that to stand with Christ is to stand totally—fully, completely, and without compromise—with the Lord.
To seek holiness is to seek the fullness of Christian life and the perfection of charity. It is to seek spiritual progress so that one could enter into the very mystery of the Trinity and the intimate union between the Father and the Son who is the Holy Spirit. It is to be acquainted personally with the mystery of the cross, which is the road to perfection in life.
Our forebears knew the penalty, and I call them heroic for a reason, because in the end, when the penalty is severe, life does not admit for mediocrity or compromise. They knew the cost, and they were willing to pay the price and to give up their lives in the solemn singing of praise to the God they believed in, who held them in his hands and would never let go.
As they did, so must you and I do. For now the Church needs leaders who are fearless, authentic, faithful, and holy, who truly can be called our fathers. The Church needs its members, all of us, to seek holiness in a fearless, honest, and authentic way. That is the ingredient beyond all others that will help calm the storm, even if it means that our life is the cost that must be paid. The Fathers of the church, by their example and by their inspiration, can lead us forward to do so.
Let us be inspired
So, let us be inspired by the example of the Fathers, who admitted their own sinfulness and through their humility and conversion grew in their intimate relationship with the Lord. They had no difficulty admitting their faults and failings and having mercy on the lapsed who fell and sought a way back into the Church. As Jerome himself said, “Do not despair of the Lord’s mercy, no matter how great your sins, for great mercy will take away great sins” (Commentary on the Book of Joel).
Let us be inspired by the witness of an integrity of life such as the one lived by Ignatius of Antioch who said to his people, “If you do not have Jesus Christ on your lips, then it is useless to have the world in your hearts” (Epistle to the Romans). In the end, Ignatius offered his life as wheat to be ground in the teeth of beasts, for he knew that the only person who mattered was Jesus the Lord. He would allow himself to be a fragrant offering in a witness that knew no compromise.
Let us be inspired by their singlemindedness of desire, for in the end, in our materialistic world, how often do we have divided hearts where our possessions possess us? It was the Fathers who reminded their hearers that the only possession worth striving for is Jesus. The only fire in the heart worth stoking is the fire to have him, to seek him, to love him, and to serve him by loving our neighbor in true and full generosity.
Let us be inspired by the men whom we call our Fathers who devoted their life to prayer. St. Ambrose says, “Lengthy prayers are usually filled with empty words, while neglect of prayer results in indifference to prayer” (Treatise on Cain and Abel). The Fathers taught us that prayer is not just recitation of words; it’s a heart on fire to seek, to love, to be one with Christ the Lord.
Finally, let us dare to be inspired by the confidence that the Fathers of the Church had in their hour of need. Allow me to quote St. John Chrysostom: “Let the waves rise, for they cannot sink the boat of Christ. I have only contempt for the world’s threats. I find its blessings laughable. I have no fear of poverty, no desire for wealth. I am not afraid of death, nor do I long to live except for your good. I concentrate therefore on the present situation and I urge you, my friends, to have confidence.”
The Fathers of the Church are a great gift and hidden treasure, for they can inspire us by their example to heroic holiness. Who among us is ready to follow that example?
The poison of division
We live in a time when the Church’s unity is being fragmented, when the divisions within the Church are growing. Perhaps in part it’s because of the media world in which we live. Forgive me for being blunt, but we are almost devolving into armed theological camps that refuse to dialogue. Many define themselves by their preferences, whether liturgical or theological. Many speak of following one pope over another, at times with an unbridled zeal to try to “save” the Church, as if we did not already have a Savior who is Christ the Lord.
This impulse to divide is spiritual poison, and the Fathers of the Church knew that. In a different age, they fought valiantly to seek unity of belief by expressing the unfathomable mystery of God’s Son, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, who took on a human life like ours in all things but sin. The great Christological struggle of their age, trying to affirm Christ’s true humanity and true divinity in one divine Person took centuries to settle. Now it is the Faith upon which we stand, one divine Person united with two natures, distinct and not mixed.
This struggle of how to hold divinity and humanity together is at the heart of the divisions we now experience in a new form. What the Fathers struggled to keep united in Christological terms we are struggling to keep united in ecclesial terms. Put simply, the Church has a human dimension and a divine dimension, and they must be held together in unity.
There is no hypostatic unity in the Church, as there is in the mystery of the Incarnation. However, there is real unity between the divine and human dimensions of the Church because we form the Mystical Body of Christ in the world. Therefore, the Church has a divine origin, a divine constitution, a divine mission that cannot be remade, rebuilt, or reformed. But the Church also comprises people such as me and you—sinners, frail, who fail. And somehow, we are all held together in the mystery of the power and grace of the Holy Spirit.
A Church both human and divine
If this sounds theoretical, allow me to illustrate it further. There are some who are comfortable only with a divine Church, a church where every member is totally converted, where there are no struggles, no weaknesses, no failures. Such a tendency can forget the redemptive power of forgiveness and mercy.
Then there are others who want only to celebrate the humanity of the Church, thinking that they can rebuild it in their own image or according to their own theology or their own opinion. This forgets that there is a definitive, divine mission and truth that is not open to revision.
In our own age, we must reflect upon the mystery we form as the Church of Christ, a community that is both human and divine, with neither dimension to be lost. Truth and mercy stand side by side in the Church, and to lose one is to betray its founder, Our Lord. This is the great struggle of our age. If we do not hold both dimensions together, we will betray the example given to us by our Fathers in faith.
Cardinal Francis George of blessed memory once said, “I expect to die in my bed. My successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.” These are not consoling words from a Cardinal of the Church. But it’s less known that Cardinal George completed that saying with these words: “And his successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history.”
The Fathers of the Church are here for us in the hour of our great need, and they challenge us to live true, authentic, personal lives of holiness, building communities where truth and mercy kiss. And if the price to be paid is to be imprisoned or even put to death, then so be it. Let us pay the price; for when the world is at its worst, the Church must be at its best.