Stick with the Church; it is the ark of salvation. Yes, there are many animals, many sinners on board. As it was with Noah’s Ark, so it is with the barque of Peter! Don’t leap out of the boat to get away from the noise or the smells. Instead, do your bit to keep it clean, to tend to those most in need.
By Chris Sparks
In case you didn’t notice in the run-up to our country’s 250th birthday, there’s been a mild earthquake in the Catholic Church.
On July 2, the Holy See issued a formal declaration that the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) had gone into schism, prompted by the Society ordaining its own bishops. That means, SSPX clergy and lay faithful, estimated at around 500,000 across the globe, are no longer in communion with the Catholic Church, and “considered excommunicated.”
Wow.
The SSPX ignored a final plea for unity by Pope Leo XIV to not proceed with the episcopal ordination. “Filled with Christian affection, I plead with you and ask you with all my heart: Please turn back,” the Holy Father wrote.
They did not. Again, wow.
What now?
Amid the bewilderment and worry, I suggest we not dwell on the grave sin, but on the remedy.
Wholeness, not schism
The Church’s teaching authority cannot be frozen in the year 1962 — this must be quite clear to the Society — as expressed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009.
The Church has always said we must be “whole-Catechism” Catholics, and nothing less.
We must be whole-Scripture, whole-Tradition, whole-Magisterium Catholics, and nothing less.
We must be pro-life for the whole life Catholics, as St. John Paul II’s encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae and the Church’s social teaching, summarized in Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, makes plain.
We must be whole-heritage Catholics, open to the whole history, the whole body of the Church’s ecumenical councils, open both to what has stayed the same across 2,000 years as well as to the development of discipline and doctrine.
That means celebrating the goodness, beauty, and holiness of our heritage, but also confessing our sins, praying and fasting in reparation for those sins, and always seeking our personal and corporate sanctification.
That means recognizing that even the highest and holiest of us, the smartest, the best educated, the most spiritual, the most faithful of us must forsake pride for humility in the face of the Church’s teaching and discipline conflicting with what we think, we feel, we prefer to be true or good.
The Kingdom of Heaven
Now that can be made all the harder by the sorts of scandals and visible sins among the clergy that past decades have made plain.
But Jesus never pretended He was founding a Church without sinners!
The Church, the Kingdom of Heaven, is like a field with weeds as well as wheat; a net filled with good fish and bad fish; and it will be so till the end of the world. Jesus made that clear in the Gospels. It is understandable that those of us who are hurt or confused when we encounter that reality feel betrayed — why is this the case with the Mystical Body of Christ? But the warning label was there on the packaging.
It should come as no surprise that a Church that began with a holy Head and sinful leadership would continue as it began. Jesus is Lord, and perfect, and unfailing; His apostles and their successors have a much more uneven track record.
As it was, is, and will be
Again: That was baked in from the beginning. Jesus told us it would be so. He appoints His apostles; He castigates His apostles; He forgives His apostles; He loves, teaches, and feeds His apostles.
When the Apostles and disciples are faithful to prayer, Pentecost happens. When we grow afraid and forget the gifts we have been given, the Apostles and the disciples (all of us!) fall flat on our faces.
The leaders given us by Jesus to whom we are obligated to remain in communion were not perfect from the outset. Our neighbors in the pews are almost certainly guaranteed to not be perfect; indeed, even the saints often have weaknesses or failings. Our Lord and Our Lady are and always were perfect; the greatest of saints, St. Joseph and St. John the Baptist, are practically perfect in every way; and for the rest?
Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller compares the SSPX, now in schism, to the Donatists of the early Church, who found scandalous the mercy of the Church in welcoming back those who had publicly given up the faith under persecution. I can’t help thinking of the parable of the Prodigal Son — Holy Mother Church embraces sinners too readily for the elder brother’s taste, rewarding even the slightest sign of repentance and faith greatly, while at times demanding high hardship from the faithful, or at least supernatural faith in spite of the sins and failings of too many even among the leadership of the Church.
In order to be saved and to be made holy, we have to often accept the humility of knowing that we know nothing; that without Jesus, we are nothing; that all good and perfect gifts come from God and His Church, not from our own efforts or the apparently pure or perfect circle with which we surround ourselves; that grace brings us home, resurrects us from the grave, draws us into communion with God and neighbor, especially our enemies, especially those whom we find distasteful, difficult, or demanding.
Tolkien wisdom
That is why the great Catholic novelist J.R.R. Tolkien gave the following counsel:
Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. . . . There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death. By the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste—or foretaste—of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.
The only cure for sagging or fainting faith is Communion. Though always itself, perfect and complete and inviolate, the Blessed Sacrament does not operate completely and once for all in any of us. Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise. Frequency is of the highest effect. Seven times a week is more nourishing than seven times at intervals.
Also I can recommend this as an exercise (alas! only too easy to find opportunity for): make your Communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children—from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn—open-necked and dirty youths, women in trousers and often with hair both unkempt and uncovered.
Go to Communion with them (and pray for them). It will be just the same (or better than that) as a Mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man, and shared by a few devout and decorous people. It could not be worse than the mess of the feeding of the Five Thousand—after which our Lord propounded the feeding that was to come. … (The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings, p. 219).
Abide
Stick with the Church; it is the ark of salvation. Yes, there are many animals, many sinners on board. As it was with Noah’s Ark, so it is with the barque of Peter! Don’t leap out of the boat to get away from the noise or the smells. Instead, do your bit to keep it clean, to tend to those most in need.
Don’t flee the hospital because there are sick people here; you are sick as well, even if you think you are well. You need the medicines of the Church to remain well and enter Heaven.
Don’t abandon the Church because it is full of sinners. By God’s grace, the Church is ready to welcome even more sinners.
Don’t abandon the Church because the successors of the Apostles are as holy and sinful, as wise and foolish, as discerning and as blind, as great and as low, as the original 12 were.
Pray for everyone. Persist in the ordinary practice of the faith. Receive the Sacraments according to the laws of the Church. Persist in regular spiritual reading, especially Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium. Persist in regular prayer, especially for those most in need of Divine Mercy, and especially making use of those devotions to which Heaven and the Church have attached particular graces and promises. Persist in the works of mercy.
Persist, and abide with Peter, and so with Jesus Christ.
Photo by Liana S on Unsplash.
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