Resumed 6th Sunday after Pentecost
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Rhetorical question here, but how many of you have ever struggled with patience? Perhaps some of you are better than I, but it’s been a long struggle to stay calm and not get easily frustrated. I will say that I am better now than I used to be, but I’m still a work in progress.
As our Lord talks about the kingdom of heaven, in today’s Gospel, he uses two images that require patience: a mustard seed and leaven. One certainly involves more patience than the other, but both require patience. If you plant the mustard seed in the ground, it takes a while for it to bloom and become that large bush where the birds dwell. And even with leaven, it’s not like you add the yeast to flour and immediately the dough starts rising. You have to wait, sometimes overnight, for it to really rise. So, besides the fact that our Lord teaches us that the kingdom of heaven starts small, He is also teaching us that we need to be patient as the kingdom of heaven grows.
This is important for us to remember as we see the numbers of Catholics who practice their faith decline. In many ways we are impatient, we want to see huge numbers at Mass, living their faith in the public square, and transforming the City of Man to be more like the City of God. But sometimes, God makes us wait.
Now, this is not to suggest that we sit on our rumps and be passive. The decline in the number of Catholics who are practicing is startling, and should shake us out of complacency. In many ways, COVID exacerbated the problem, but even if we didn’t close down our churches for two and a half months, we would have still seen the same decline, just at a slower rate. After all, do we really think that, but for COVID, lukewarm Catholics not living their faith and not allowing the faith to transform their private and public lives would have led to more people wanting to be Catholic? I think we are fooling ourselves if we take that position. Catholics who don’t live for the kingdom of heaven tend not to attract new Catholics, no matter how many come to Mass each Sunday. It’s like pretending that we’re going to make a profit on selling a widget for $1 when it costs $2 to make, as long as we just sell a huge amount of widgets. The math doesn’t add up. So the spiritual math of expecting people in pews who aren’t committed to the faith to stem the tide of Catholics leaving the Church isn’t there.
But, at the same time that we should recommit ourselves to living a Christ-centered life, and spreading the Gospel in our daily lives, both at home and at work, by word and by deed, we shouldn’t freak out that numbers aren’t growing right now. That’s hard to do; I know. As I mentioned, I’m impatient, and so when I looked at our October counts for St. Matthew, both the Ordinary and Extraordinary Form Masses, there was that quick sense of panic that things aren’t growing, which means I’m not making a difference, which means I’m not doing a good enough job or simply enough period; I need to do more (even though I was feeling like I was burning the candle at both ends). It’s easy to get caught in the numbers game, and treat the Church like a corporation, where, if the profits don’t rise consistently every year, we aren’t doing something right (profits being akin to people in the pews for the church).
Growth of the kingdom takes time, and often happens in unseen ways. In all reality, the Church started with less than 100 people at Pentecost, who spread the Gospel, and thousands were converted in that one day. But those thousands were from around north Africa, the Holy Land, and Asia Minor. When you get them spread out, you don’t really have a mega-church.
We probably tend to think about the churches St. Paul founded like dioceses (which many did later become) and presume that the diocese had lots of people, like the Diocese of Lansing does (we’re a smaller diocese, and we have, as of 2019, around 191,000 Catholics). In fact, from what I have heard and read, the Church in Corinth likely had 50-150 people. And they had so many problems that St. Paul wrote them two epistles. The Church in Rome likely had more people, and spread more quickly, but there were more people in Rome, especially slaves and immigrants, who were very eager to hear the Gospel and put their faith in Christ. I don’t have any sense of the numbers, but maybe no bigger than our diocese, and likely smaller. It took time and fidelity for the Church in Rome to blossom into the populated metropolitan diocese that it is today. In almost every place where the Gospel has been planted, like the mustard seed, it took time to grow before it became a large bush in which the birds to dwell. As we are now living in pagan times once more (if not officially, than de facto), we should not be surprised that it will take some time for things to grow once more.
[The Church] will become small and will have to start pretty much all over again. […] The reduction in the number of faithful will lead it to losing an important part of its social privileges. It will be a more spiritual Church, and…will be poor and will become the Church of the destitute.
He also said, “Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. […] Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.” Again, that was said in 1969.
We cannot be complacent in sharing the Gospel, but as the Lord said, the kingdom of heaven starts small, and takes time to grow to its full stature. May the Lord grant us patience and fidelity in the meantime, and help us to be those faithful witnesses that will draw others to the joy and hope of the Gospel. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.