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THREAD: THOUGHTS ON THE ROLE OF CHURCH IN THE WORLD/STATUES
The Catholic Church, as âhierarchyâ, falls way behind the times - usually by hundreds of years. We proclaimed Papal Infallibility 350 years after the beginning of the Protestant Reformation (800 yrs post Great Schism.)
The Catholic Church, as âhierarchyâ, falls way behind the times - usually by hundreds of years. We proclaimed Papal Infallibility 350 years after the beginning of the Protestant Reformation (800 yrs post Great Schism.)
We were a little more snappy when we got heated about modernism - just 120 years after the events of the French Revolution, when ideologies that had been picking up steam for centuries were expressed through violent overthrow.
Today statues are being torn down, and we get angry. Fair enough. We also start accusing each other, fellow Catholics. Classic. But, as a Church, the Body of Christ in the world, we have been largely silent/complicit with regards to the sins that secular society is raging over.
(There are beautiful, courageous, prophetic exceptions to this silence, and they are guiding lights for us. But the mob doesnât make distinctions, & overall the Church in the 2nd millennium seems to have been perfectly in step with the world and the times re: race, slavery, etc)
So now events are taking place that are the results of long festering anger, fed by worldly ideologies that have been gaining hold of us for centuries.
And while the Church has promulgated documents (often hundreds of years after they could be truly impactful), we need more than that. We need prophetic voices who cry out in the power of the Spirit, while our people are still listening, before their hearts are closed.
And we need to figure out how to act as the Body of Christ in the world. The Church has a physical role in the world. We are called to serve the lowly, the hungry, the thirsty, the poor, the homeless, the sick, the imprisoned.
We are called to be Jesus in the flesh for others, and to serve Jesus in the flesh in others.
So itâs fine to be angry about some of the statues being torn down by the mob, like Bl. Serra - righteous anger is a response to injustice. I think there is fear in here too, which is probably reasonable.
But these occurrences are late dominoes in a chain that has been toppling for a long time.
My heart yearns for another way, a way that is prophetic rather than reactionary.
My heart yearns for another way, a way that is prophetic rather than reactionary.
In the light of the Holy Spirit, we can really discern the signs of the times and be a voice and a BODY that speak and act right now.
The meek voice of the Lamb always gets drowned out by angry mob, but the people that make up those mobs are our flock, our sisters & brothers, and many of them have sought & still seek what Jesus offers. They give up when they look to us & we fail them, or never even acknowledge.
So right now itâs a question of where to spend our energy: shocked, hurt, angry, afraid, picking up the pieces of fallen statues and trying to somehow keep dominoes 112 and 113 from crashing down...
Or we could ask Jesus to do something new.
Or we could ask Jesus to do something new.
We could root ourselves once again in the Spirit, learning from events both past and present, asking for conversion, begging for a double portion of the prophetic gifts promised to the Church...
That we may really act as what we are called to be, and what we are: the Body of Christ in the world, and a pillar of fire that carves a path through this desert and reveals the Kingdom.
That got a little grandiose and I apologize but TL;DR mostly Iâm saying: instead of being reactionaries that are WAY to late to the party, letâs ask Jesus to renew the prophetic voice of the Church, which has been very weak for a very long time. This is what the world needs.
