SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I LEAVE?

Many of his disciples no longer accompanied him, so Jesus asked, "Do you want to leave too?" Simon Peter answered   him, saying, "Master, to whom would we go?"

John 6:60-69

Many people tell me that I'm nuts for being a Catholic priest. I hadn't been ordained but a day when the first person came out of nowhere to challenge me on this. I have told this story before, but it immediately came to mind when I read this gospel. It happened at one of the receptions, following my first Mass.

I was standing there in my new black suit and Roman collar - a little proud of myself - when all of a sudden, a stranger approached me and stuck a pin in my balloon. "I can’t imagine anyone as intelligent as you seem to be would still be a Catholic, must less become a priest! I got out of all that craziness a long time ago!"

I stood there, shocked, like I had been shot at close range as she went down her well-rehearsed list of things wrong with the Church.  When she finished, she disappeared into the crowd, never to be heard from again - at least that is what I thought.

Like me, St. Peter must have been challenged many times about his decision to stay that day, when so many others walked away because of Jesus teaching on the "bread of life" because he writes many years later, in the first of his two letters, "Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence." (I Peter 3:15,16) When I am challenged, I try to follow his advice.

That first happened when I was 26. I am now 82.  At 82, I agree wholeheartedly with Peter. "To whom would I go?" I have been offered a lot of so-called alternatives, I recognized more problems in our Church than most of them, but I can say this much in all honesty. I haven't seen anything yet that I would trade all this for! 

I served as a chaplain at Bellarmine for 14 years. One of the most important questions facing those youth going in their young adulthood was "Why do you stay in the Church?" Why do you choose to remain Catholic, when so many others your age were walking away? I am sure many of them had been challenged seriously, maybe even in an angry way.

Well, I used to remind them, every once in a while, that I was not "assigned" there by the bishop. I didn't have to be there. I had plenty of other jobs - too many jobs, in fact. But I wanted to be there and I choose to do that because I wanted to help to give them, and those who questioned them, reasons to stay in the Church so that they did not "walk away,” or worse, just "drift away." 

I volunteered to do Sunday Masses to help give them reasons "to stay in the Church." I volunteered because I wanted to help them move from an inherited faith, to a personal faith. There are many people today who claim they want to be "spiritual, but not religious." Archbishop Dolan of New York described them this way, "They want to believe without belonging. They want to be sheep without a shepherd. They want to be part of a family, but they want to be an only child."  The fact of the matter is that Jesus founded a church on Peter, one of those who did not walk away, and Jesus promised that "the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" and that he would "be with it always, until the end of time."  The truth of the matter is, we are not individually children of God, we are God's family with many siblings and as a family we are called to be our brother’s and sister’s keepers.

By the way, the woman who challenged me fifty-six years ago contacted me a couple of years back to apologize and to tell me that she had returned to the Church and was absolutely loving it for the first time in her life. As that great "theologian," Yogi Berra put it, "It ain't over till it's over."