Change is needed because what is alive is changing

THE CHURCH IS LIKE A CORPORATION THAT’S ONLY INTERESTED IN ITSELF

I’M continually surprised by the feedback I receive when I write about the future of religion.

From where I sit, interest in religion is fading fast. Yet when I write about it, you send opinions and suggestions that are insightful, helpful, and thought-provoking.

You’re asking me to share hopeful ideas from around the world. Please help us understand what’s happening, you plead! Others claim to have an interest in religion but not in Irish Catholicism.

One writer this week commented: “Priests in Ireland come in three categories — a) middle-aged and old men who hold on desperately until the blessed relief of retirement comes; b) a small number of oldish men who live hoping change will come in their lifetime, which might make sense of their frustrated lives spent in service; c) recently ordained priests of varying ages who desire a prestigious position, power and security. They are overly conscious of their own importance. They insist their way is the only way.”

SHORTAGE

The writer is, in her words, “an ordinary Catholic mother whose family has abandoned religion.” Like you, I worry about the Church’s future.

I’m convinced we are stuck in emergency mode and going nowhere.

I firmly believe Albert Einstein was correct when he said that no problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it.

Many authors — mainly lay people — insist that we don’t have a shortage of priests but a shortage of people. There are ample priests to cater to the number of regular churchgoers. Instead, our mission must be to the ‘nones’ who are not interested in faith or religion.

Many theologians insist this is not a crisis but an opportunity to eliminate clerical structures that have long outlived their usefulness. We should embrace change and welcome it as a gift from God. We should be grateful for what we have and trust the Spirit to create a better future.

Pope Francis points the way. He says: “We are in an era of change.” We should accept that non-clerics are willing to “discern and reform” rather than “lament and condemn.” This will transform Christianity — not hasten its extinction.

The Czech priest Tomas Halik — a close confidant of John Paul II — understands the enormity of what Pope Francis is attempting. In this reform era, “the Church’s greatest competitor is not secular humanism… but a spirituality that rolls like a swollen river out of a trough dug by a traditional religiosity.”

Halik is a brilliant thinker and writer who converted to Catholicism in his early twenties. He considered becoming a Jesuit but was secretly ordained into a group of underground priests who risked their lives working as pastors in a seriously de-churched society.

For Halik, it’s not believers versus non-believers.

Many modern people are allergic to the church because it has become alienated from its mission and is content to remain aloof from the real world. The church has become like a modern corporation that is interested only in itself.

The real mystery is where those who remain will get the strength and patience to survive. Pope Francis has said that it’s not so much that people have left the church as the church has abandoned its people.

PITY

Jesus is not knocking at the door waiting to come in; he is trapped in the sacristy, waiting to be set free to bring hope to the real world and real people.

This fork on the road for religion presents a choice: do we hunker down in self-pity, or “do we go out to experience the risen Christ appearing in hitherto unrecognisable forms and places?”

Those who insist on holding on to the myth of an unchanging institution refuse to accept the suffering necessary to experience the Resurrection. Change is needed because what is alive is always changing. Traditionalism’s heresy tries to freeze what should be a living stream.

Halik is critical of those who stubbornly and scandalously oppose Pope Francis. He sees sexual abuse by priests as partly a compensation for the loss of their secular power; they made up for it “by exercising and abusing their power within the Church, particularly in relation to the defenceless, to children and women who did not enjoy their full rights within the Catholic Church, and still do not.”

The church must learn to accompany seekers in humility, recognising the Spirit at work in people genuinely struggling to find meaning; “not only they but we, too, will be transformed; we do not possess the whole truth, and the truth is our common goal.”

(Tomas Halik’s recent book is The Afternoon of Christianity: The Courage To Change. It was reviewed in The Tablet by Austin Ivereigh).