No Golden Age

Fifth Sunday of Easter
    We often tend to think of the early Church as perfect, where everything went as the apostles wanted it to go, where it was easy to follow Christ, and there were no struggles.  Today’s first reading should let us know that it was not as easy as we may have imagined.  Yes, the Apostles were filled with the Holy Spirit, and many Jews were joining the Church by becoming baptized.  Even Greeks were seeking baptism and following Christ as His disciples in His new Church.  But the Greek-speaking Jews (St. Luke uses the word Hellenists) started to complain that their widows didn’t seem to get the same care as the Hebrew widows.  It also sounds like the Apostles had their hands full, and perhaps had too many responsibilities, which made their service less than it could have been.
    So, they created a new set of ministers in the Church, deacons, who would receive the Holy Spirit, and would take over the mission of service at table from the Apostles, so that the Apostles could focus on prayer and preaching the Gospel.  They chose seven men, including St. Stephen, to fill this new office in the Church.  We know the rest of the story: Stephen also starts preaching, and ends us getting stoned to death.  More and more persecutions start, and St. James the Greater, the brother of St. John, is martyred.  Antagonism becomes more and more heated between the members of the early Church and the Jewish leaders, who thought that Jesus was a heretic and led people away from God.  So maybe it wasn’t quite as easy and perfect as we so often imagine.
    Why mention this?  Because we ourselves experience difficult times in the Church, but it helps to know that it’s never been easy for the Church.  There are always new challenges and new opportunities for the Church.  There are always periods of growth, and periods of decline, whether from internal or external forces.  Even as we may be convinced that we are not in a golden age of the Church, there truly has never been a golden age: each epoch of history had its own joys and struggles to which the Church had to adjust.

    And while God desires all to be saved, and we know the ordinary path to salvation runs through baptism and daily living the life to which Christ calls us, God has also allowed periods of decline, not only in one parish, or one diocese, but sometimes every across countries.  The example that comes to my mind most often is North Africa.  North Africa, because of its connection to Rome, had been a vibrant area of the Catholic Faith.  Some of the greatest saints and theological writers had come from there, including St. Athanasius, St. Anthony, St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. Cyprian, and St. Augustine of Hippo.  There were struggles, as many of those saints had to deal with heresies that would spring up from time to time, but the faith was strong.  But then, the barbarians from Europe swept across much of North Africa from the west, and the newly formed Islamic religion came from the east shortly thereafter, and Catholicism was more or less snuffed out entirely in the matter of a hundred years or so.  Why did God allow this?  I couldn’t tell you.  But allow it He did.  Did it mean He loved North Africa any less than the rest of the world?  Certainly not.  But those few who remained had to adjust to a new way of living their faith in the midst of fewer structures and more regular persecution.
    How does the Church survive such struggles?  We stay faithful to Christ and following Him, we ask the Holy Spirit to guide us, and we live up to our call to be “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own,” as St. Peter said in our second reading.  We ask the Holy Spirit to guide us, and follow the Apostles, as the Church did in our first reading.  We do not give in to the temptation to let our hearts be troubled, but have faith in God–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–knowing that God’s ways are sometimes mysterious, but are always for our good.
    In our own diminishment as a parish, we can easily fall to the temptation to despair, to not trust in God’s plan.  But, as we prepare to meet this Wednesday, I would invite you to do what the Church has always done during difficult times: pray and trust in the Holy Spirit.  That’s why I invited you last week to pray the novena to the Holy Spirit, asking for His guidance for our parish, whatever the will of God may be.  And, as I also said last week, I don’t know exactly what that will might be; we will discern it together on Wednesday, given the facts that we have, and using the reason that God gave to us to help us to follow His will. 
    But the key is that, whatever you decide to recommend to Bishop Boyea after this Wednesday’s meeting, God calls us to remain faithful to Him and continue to not only say that we are Catholic, but show it by our actions, both in this parish and in the wider community.  People are still hungry to know the love of the Father, and Jesus reveals that to us, and He calls us to reveal Him to others.  No matter how the realities of the structural church change and call for adjustments, if we follow the Holy Spirit and live as disciples of Christ, we can have the confidence that we will one day see the Father, and be enveloped by His love in the kingdom of heaven.  There is not golden age of the Church.  There is simply the streets of gold upon which we hope to walk in heaven, as a result of our fidelity to Christ through all the days of our life on earth.  That is our ultimate goal, and the Holy Spirit will help us to get there.

Nuts!

 Sunday within the Octave of Christmas
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Probably my favorite mini-series is the HBO story, “Band of Brothers,” about the Easy Company of the 101st Airborne Paratroopers in World War II.  Episode 6 deals with the Battle of the Bulge, and there is a scene of the paratroopers at Christmas, pinned down and surrounded at Bastogne.  The soldiers have dug foxholes, as best as they can, in the cold, hard ground, with snow all around them.  There is not enough ammo.  And while there is tree cover, the Germans continue to pepper the Army paratroopers with mortars that blow the tops of the trees from their trunks.  Many of the soldiers lack adequate winter gear.  It was not a great situation.
    In one scene, Col. Sink addresses the men of Easy Company: “Men, General McCauliff wishes us all a Merry Christmas.  What’s merry about all this, you ask?  Just this: we’ve stopped cold everything that’s been thrown at us, from the north, east, south, and west.  Now, two days ago, the German commander demanded our honorable surrender, to save the USA encircled troops from total annihilation.  The German commander received the following reply: ‘To the German commander: nuts!’”

Col. Sink addressing Easy Company

    As we are assembled on this Sunday within the Octave of Christmas, perhaps, honestly, we’re feeling like the men of Easy Company.  It certainly has been an interesting year.  I know that early in the year there were inquiries about, and even a possible visit from, the Institute of the Good Shepherd providing future sacramental needs for those who attend this Mass, and then Bishop Boyea announced that some guy, unknown to most, if not all, here, was going to become the new pastor.  What was this priest like?  Did he celebrate the Extraordinary Form?  Was he kind?  Was he orthodox?  What did this mean for St. Matthew as a part of the Catholic Community of Flint?  Maybe you’re feeling like the jury is still out on this new pastor.
    And then we had the infamous Traditionis custodes.  I know that it was a time where we wondered what would happen.  We heard about some dioceses where the Extraordinary Form was cancelled entirely and immediately.  Or some had one last celebration before being shut down.  I know it was tough to wait, but our bishop lovingly allowed us to continue to celebrate according to the usus antiquior, and even came out to celebrate the Sacrament of Confirmation for us.
    And then last weekend we had the responsa ad dubia from the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments.  That seemed like another bomb, and right now Bishop Boyea has said that we’ll keep to the status quo while he further reviews the document.  And that’s just on the worldwide scale.  In our own daily lives we have attacks and frustrations with which we have to deal, sometimes even from family and friends.  Maybe we feel like Easy Company, surrounded by enemies, not having adequate amounts of ammunition or winter clothing, with trees exploding to the left and right.  Sometimes it probably feels like friendly fire, instead of from the enemy.  So what do we do?
    First and foremost, this is a time of great spiritual benefit.  Whenever things are most difficult and frustrating, there is the opportunity for the greatest spiritual growth.  Yes, our Lord did many great things (healings, exorcisms, even raising people from the dead) while He was ministering around Judea.  But His greatest accomplishment was achieved through His Passion and Death, and subsequent Resurrection.  We can choose to capitalize on this time, or we can let it go to waste.  Do we let these struggles draw us closer to the Cross of Christ, or do they push us farther away from Him?  Do our challenges encourage us to embrace Holy Mother Church all the more, or do we look for consolation in those who have walked away from the Church of Christ, which is necessary for salvation?  Just as St. Catherine of Siena and St. Bridget of Sweden, or St. Theresa of Avila and St. Robert Bellarmine became great saints that proved the holiness of the Church even in the midst of schisms and heresies, so we have the opportunity to become great saints today.

    Secondly, the saint who would be celebrated today except that his feast day is on a Sunday, St. Stephen, is a great example of the power of prayer to change hearts and situations.  Recall that St. Stephen was one of the first deacons of the Church, appointed by the apostles themselves.  St. Stephen starts preaching Christ immediately in Jerusalem, and getting into debates and arguments with the chief priests and scribes.  Even though Stephen encounters many attacks on the identity of Jesus, Stephen counters their arguments at each turn.  This infuriates others so much that he is put on trial, and then condemned to be stoned to death.  His death, in the Acts of the Apostles, is very similar to the death of our Lord.  
    Standing at his death, and consenting to it, was a man named Saul.  No doubt the Church in Jerusalem was nervous about their future.  This man Saul was starting to round up the disciples of the Lord and imprison them for heresy.  No doubt, as they came together for Mass, they implored the Lord to save them from their enemies.  They likely fasted and prayed that their persecution would come to an end.  And it did, in the most likely way ever: Saul was converted, and became the greatest missionary in the history of Catholicism.  This was probably not what the Church in Jerusalem had in mind; but it was much better.  And I like to imagine that St. Stephen, in heaven, was pleading with the Lord to give Saul that extra bit of grace that would change him from a persecutor to a promoter of the faith.  
    There has been no small amount of blogposts written, and Facebook articles shared, and opinions expressed, some from true experts, some from those who only claim to be experts.  Imagine if those same people, instead of being Social Media warriors, used that time for prayer and fasting for Holy Mother Church (and, I imagine, some of them do).  Imagine what great graces could be accomplished, in us or in others.  We could be the Stephens imploring God’s grace upon the Sauls of our day.
    The reality is that we are at battle, but most of all with the world, the flesh, and the devil.  We are surrounded, and we often don’t always think that we have the equipment that we need to be successful.  But we do have the food which sustains our souls, which pushes us to be the saints God calls us to be in the times God calls us to be, and that is the Eucharist.  In the Eucharist we find the sustenance to keep fighting, not to surrender, and to suffer through some devastating attacks.  But just as the men who made up Easy Company and who braved the cold of Bastogne for a cause greater than themselves, so we, men and women, can brave these times, remaining in the loving embrace of Holy Mother Church, and become a Greatest Generation of our own in the Church.  
    At the end of Episode 6 of “Band of Brothers,” explanatory notes are given.  They read: “On December 26, 1944, General Patton’s Third Army broke through the German lines, allowing supplies to flow in and the wounded to be evacuated.  The story of ‘The Battle of the Bulge’ as told today, is one of Patton coming to the rescue of the encircled 101st Airborne.  No member of the 101st has ever agreed that the division needed to be rescued.”  God will help supply us with all we need.  Sometimes, no matter how exhausted we are, we have to keep fighting.  He has given us the victory already, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  Amen.