Every Saturday for the last 44 Saturdays, I published a real life story from my 55 years of priestly experience. This year, I will simply feature one of my favorite religious cartoons every Saturday under the title CHURCH CHAT. I hope you enjoy them too!
HAVE A FEW LAUGHS ON ME FOR CHRISTMAS
Today, Jesus was teaching in a synagogue. It happened to be a Sabbath day, a day of no work. Jesus had already gotten a reputation for being loose when it came to observing the hundreds of rules and regulations about what could and could not be done on the Sabbath. Curing the sick was one of the things listed under “work” by the Scribes and Pharisees, something they interpreted as forbidden by the third commandment.
Jesus was teaching when a stooped woman showed up. He noticed her and was told she had been bent over for eighteen years, unable to stand erect. He called her over and healed here right then and there! Jealous of his popularity and threatened by his interpretation of the Law, the chief of the synagogue objected. It says that he was “indignant.” Like the Scribe and Pharisees in the earlier story, who came hoping that Jesus would do something so that they would have something against him, this synagogue chief and those with him were enraged by the actions Jesus. It was like fire and gasoline meeting on the synagogue platform that day!
Jesus knew what these “orthodoxy police” were up to, and in a rather in-your-face move, he healed her anyway, calling them “hypocrites.” These defenders of orthodoxy were so enraged by this bold challenge to their interpretation of tradition that they began to plot what they could do to stop him. Their plots led to Jesus’ death.
I have had similar experiences with our own local “orthodoxy police.” In 1983, I was asked by Archbishop Kelly to be pastor of our cathedral and to do something to revitalize it. The congregation had started dying in the 1950s and had dropped to about 110 members, mostly widows who lived in the high rises of downtown Louisville. In the fourteen years I was there, we grew to over 2,100 members by reaching out to “fallen away” Catholics. They came from everywhere - 67 zip codes in all! Well, you would think every Catholic in the diocese would be thrilled to see our dying cathedral parish come back to life. Many were, but some weren’t! I think it was more out of jealousy than anything, but the “orthodoxy police” came out of the woodwork “to see if they could find some reason to accuse us.” One of them, a schizophrenic, actually pulled a knife on me over a homily he didn’t like. Another one, an elderly priest, used to come into Mass after I had come down the isle, sit in a back pew and take notes during my homilies. He sent his notes to the apostolic delegate. He was also part of a group of “traditionalists” Catholics who published an anonymous (of course) “white paper” that circulated around the diocese. Never mind that most of their venom were lies and half-truths. Never mind that we had welcomed back hundreds of discouraged and inactive Catholics, some of whom had been gone, fifty years or more! Never mind that we did liturgy by the book, followed the marriage laws of the church and never challenged the dogmas of the church! Never mind that the Archbishop himself knew what we were doing and approved of it. They were very mean and jealous people and they were so cowardly that they would not put their names to their attacks.
The Church has been charged with teaching the message of truth and moral goodness, but when we are seduced into joining destructive and divisive groups, even those who do their character assassination while hiding behind the word “orthodoxy,” we are no better than the Taliban, Al-Queda or ISIS. Jesus “welcomed sinners and ate with them” as a way of bringing them to the truth. Jesus did not “crush busied reeds nor quench smoldering wicks,” but encouraged people in the truth. Jesus scolded James and John for wanting to “call down fire from heaven and burn up the snubbing Samaritans.” In fact, Jesus’ harshest words were not directed at people who failed on their path to God, but at the cruelty of religionists who were out to preserve what they considered to be the purity of religion. Blaise Paschal may have said it best when he wrote, Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
Finally,
let us never forget that it was a group of fanatic “religionists” who flew
planes into the World Trade Center a few years back, no doubt thinking they
were doing God a favor! As Pope Benedict said, “true religion builds bridges”
and “must never be used as an excuse for violence.” Pope Francis said this: “I
think we too are the people who, on the one hand, want to listen to Jesus, but
on the other hand, at times, like to find a stick to beat others with, to
condemn others. And Jesus has this message for us: mercy. I think — and I say
it with humility — that this is the Lord's most powerful message: mercy.”
The first insight that came into focus, as I read the book, was the realization that decluttering could make my life richer, not poorer. Once the clutter was gone, my personal space could be a whole lot easier to clean - meaning less work! The second insight that came into focus was the realization finding what I truly needed would be a whole lot easier to find - meaning less wasted time. The third insight that came into focus was the realization that I did not need to own things like 30 pairs of black pants of various waist sizes, 50 outdated old text books from high school, college and former jobs that I used to have, 150 file folders from the 150 priest retreats I did in 10 countries when I had most of the truly important information in my computer. Then there was the 15 years of weekly clippings of my columns in The Record pasted into albums when I had all of them in books of three anthology volumes. Finally, I had to ask myself things like this: does one person really need three Crock Pots of various sizes?
I don't need to belabor the point by listing all of the other categories of clutter that I had in my condo and garage - things like outdated spices in kitchen drawers, outdated pill bottles in the bathroom and duplicate tools and broken things of all sorts that I never got around to fixing in the garage! I won't mention things like the six boxes of old vacation pictures that I reduced to two that I had not looked at since I took them years ago - many in duplicate and triplicate. I reduced two three-drawer file cabinets full of paper down to one and got rid of the other file cabinet!
Reading the book is what motivated me to roll up my sleeves and dig in all during December 2023 and into January 2024! Once I got started, I was on a roll! In less than two weeks, between Good Will, the Second Hand Store at St. Thomas More Parish, the condo recycle bins and the dumpster, I filled no less than three full pick-up truck loads, two recycle bins and probably half a dumpster. After it was over, I found myself going through the house actually looking for useless accumulated things to get rid of that I might have missed! It was like getting to your goal in a weight-loss program. It felt great!
However, just as it is easy to gain weight again, after losing it, sadly, I have to report today that it is time for me to engage in some serious “house cleaning” again. It may not be as bad as it was a little over a year ago, but this coming January, it will be time to “take out the trash” once again!
The Church has
attempted to do the same. In a moment of great humility, something rare for our
church at that time, the bishops of Vatican II admitted that the church is “semper
reformanda” — “always in need of reform.” The human side of the church,
just as all human organizations, has a tendency to fall into sin and decay and
must be called back to fidelity, over and over again, as it moves through
history.
In the above
reading, which depicts a dramatic and public gesture of outrage, Jesus’ anger
boils over. It is very important to remember that this anger of Jesus was not
directed at people who sinned or failed in all their everyday ways. His anger
was directed at those who controlled religion and used it to abuse simple
people who wanted to get close to God.
He had pity and
compassion on the outcasts, the sick and sinner, but he was outraged at what
had happened at the hands of their leaders to the religion he loved. In some of
the bluntest words coming from the mouth of Jesus ever recorded, he called them
“snakes, phonies and frauds.” He said they were like “whitewashed tombs … all clean and pretty on the outside, but filled with
stench and rot on the inside.” He was shocked by the sight of the Temple being turned into a marketplace with something to sell in every corner.
It is extremely important
to note that Jesus was not against organized religion, but what these people
had done to organized religion. As this Gospel story tells us, he did not come
to tear down the temple; he simply came to clean house! The temple had become a
marketplace, and they were out to make a profit in every corner of it!
It saddens me when,
because of their abusive practices, some people never see beyond the packaging
when it comes to religion. They see only the earthenware jar and never the
treasure it holds. The purpose of religion is to serve, not be served. The goal
of healthy organized religion is the personal transformation of people, not the
using of people to serve the institution!
It is also sad
that many people naively assume that organized religion is evil simply because
it has gotten off track here and there in history. Jesus was clear that he did
not come to destroy organized religion but to lead it back to its original
purpose.
Without organized religion, we would not have
the sacred Scriptures, we would be split into millions of personal opinions and
small little cults, and we would not have a way to offer support to other
believers around the world. Yes, the church may need a good “house cleaning”
every now and then, but the organization of the church will always be needed to
stay one, holy, catholic and apostolic!
As Kenneth
Woodward has pointed out, for the last thirty or forty years people have
operated out of a romantic notion that all the ills of the church reside with
the institution — so that if only we could reform it, we ourselves would be
better Christians. The truth is quite often the other way around. The
institutional church will only get better when each one of us is reformed and
transformed. Much like my condo and your houses, the church will become a more life-giving
institution when each one of us looks within ourselves, get our acts together
and get around personally to “cleaning house” every once in a while! As the
famous Goethe puts it: “Let everyone sweep in front of his own door and the
whole world will be clean!”
