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A Reflective Prayer of One Who Wants to Stay in the Church
Lord
I want to be where you are. When you walked this earth you were criticized because you “ate and drank with sinners.” You forgave Peter who denied you; you asked your Father to forgive those who crucified you. If to be with you means to “sit with sinners” and be associated with the lowly, so be it. Your saints make up that “Cloud of Witnesses” that preceded us into heaven. These witnesses lived side-by-side with all kinds of people: those who were famous, and the infamous; scoundrels and saints. They were not exempt from rubbing elbows with criminals and outcasts, philosophers and the very simple. They believed, as I believe, that each person was created by you out of love. Each one with whom they lived was capable of heights of sanctity as well as depths of depravity. You offered each one your grace and your sacraments in this Church—this mysterious blend of human and divine, of the eternal and the things of the moment, the mortal and the immortal.
T
oday more than ever the words of the great theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar ring true, “The collection of sinners in the Church, to which we all belong, has acted more or less idiotically in all ages of the Church.” 1 A fellow theologian, Henri de Lubac, used St. Augustine’s keen description of the members of the Church: “Even the best of her children are never any more than in the way of sanctification, and their sanctity is always liable to shipwreck; all alike have to flee from the evil of the times to the mercy of God.” 2
1 2
Von Balthasar, Hans Urs, Elucidations, p. 309, Ignatius Press, 1998, San Francisco. De Lubac, The Splendour of the Church, p. 68, 1963, Paulist Press, Glen Rock, N. J.
News media reporting clergy sexual abuse are springing up once again. Some members of my Church want to get out of what looks like a crumbling institution. Sometimes my faith is shaken. Lord, again I repeat: I want to stay with you. Lord, I want to stay in this Church and be nourished by her sacraments. Lord, I need the Church. You know I do. I need the nourishment of your Body. I need the forgiveness of my sins. I will need her to anoint me as I depart from this life.
P
erhaps our times resemble the days when John Henry (Cardinal) Newman entered the Catholic Church. He seemed to others to be taking a step backward when he left the Anglican Church and became a Catholic priest, and he wrote: “Ours is not an age of temporal glory, of dutiful princes, of loyal governments…. Rather it is like the first age of the Church, when there was little of station, of learning, of nobility, of wealth; when Christians were despised and hated by the great and philosophical as a low rabble…or a foul and unprincipled conspiracy…. We certainly have little to show for ourselves.”3 In today’s language, it seems some want to “bail out” of Peter’s boat. Yet, Christ, you are in this boat. I want to stay within the Church, love it, and pray for it all the days of my life. I am a child of this Church, and I want one day to be with this same Church in heaven. Help me for I am weak. I am poor. I am totally dependent on you. Reach out your hand in mercy to those whose faith suffers during these days. Reach out even through me if you desire.
Amen. 3
Ibid., p. 195, de Lubac quoting Cardinal Newman.