Bound in Love

We see inside the Catholic Church today some of the tensions that would naturally arise between a component of the church that was nostalgically looking for a return to Christendom or foolishly thinking that nothing really had changed and everything was fine versus a component of the church that is already adopting an apostolic strategy.

The author notes that we see apostolic zeal and apostolic strategies in operation with impressive results such as conversions to the faith especially among the young new movements and religious communities being born or rediscovering that their vitality institutions being founded or reformed a deepening life of prayer being expressed. These are not the majority, but that is part of the nature of an apostolic time. The author says that our problem is that much of the church is still in a Christendom mode and so is unable to cope with the current culture. We see this expressed within the priestly community sometimes when elderly priests don’t understand why these young fellows want to pray in Latin or wear a cassock.

The author quotes Paul the sixth in his encyclical on the new evangelization written in 1978 as guidance for what we should do to move forward in the transitional time that the church finds herself in.

The first step of course is to admit the reality. The times are a-changing, and the wind is no longer with us. Well, that was pretty much the state of things at Pentecost wasn’t it? They had been told by their resurrected master to go and make disciples of all nations, and now they had received the gifts of the Holy Spirit to empower them to do what was asked of them.

And what were their resources at the time? We had 11 bishops but no extra priests; they had no deacons; they had no theologians; they had no religious orders; they had no seminarians or seminaries; there were just a few hundred Christian believers; there was only one country with any Christians in it; there were no church buildings or no schools there were no written Gospels; they had little money; they had no experience in foreign missions, and they had no friends in high places, and the greater society either did nothing about them or did not like them.