At the close of the Great Jubilee Year of 2000, Pope St. John Paul II drafted a blueprint for the Church in the next millennium in his Apostolic Exhortation Novo Millennio Ineunte. Through his Petrine office, the Pope played the prophet by emphasizing that the Church must “shine ever more brightly” in the third millennium. Not prone to echo merely pious sentiments, the Holy Father’s words are a clarion call to us Catholics living in dark ecclesial times especially by reminding us that Church’s luminosity is nothing more than a reflection of the light of the face of Christ in every historical period. Darkness sets in then when we have “not first contemplated His face.” Confronted with scandalous silence piled upon scandalous actions, many Catholics feel abandoned by the Church. But once we allow the prophetic character of JPII’s program for restoring the Church’s luminosity to invigorate our lives we realize that it is not the Church that has abandoned us, but we the Church. By failing to contemplate the face of Christ we are incapable of “letting our light shine before men”(c.f. Mt 5:16). But if we listen to what the Successor of Peter told us almost 20 years ago, we can find a path back to the light.
Before outlining his program, we would be remiss if we ignored an important point that the Holy Father makes: “We are certainly not seduced by the naive expectation that, faced with the great challenges of our time, we shall find some magic formula. No, we shall not be saved by a formula but by a Person, and the assurance which he gives us: I am with you!” (NMI, 29). Notwithstanding, the program is not something new but a revitalization of those practices that are at the heart of the Christian life. These things are pathways to the face of Christ.
The Plan…
The first is a commitment to a holiness that is devoid of any mark of “minimalist ethic and a shallow religiosity” (NMI, 30). We must each strive to attain a “high standard of ordinary Christian living” by which we judge everything on a scale of sanctity. What I mean by this is that we live in a detached manner asking whether each and everything we do is contributing to our holiness. God is, by His loving Providence, is providing at each and every moment means to grow in holiness. We need only say yes and fully embrace what He has planned to give us from all eternity.
The “scale of sanctity” is related to the second pillar of the saint’s program: grace. Fidelity to grace is the key to growing in holiness. The pursuit of holiness is not enough because it is not something we can ever obtain on our own. It depends solely upon how much sanctifying grace we are given. As the word grace (gratis) suggests it is pure gift. What that means is not that we must sit back and wait for it, but that we must be active in receiving the gift. Receptivity and passivity are not the same thing. We must have the docility to receive it in the manner in which God intends to give it to us, but also seeking out those encounters in which God bestows those gifts.
The remaining three pillars are related to those encounters. The first is the rediscovery of the face of Christ in the Sacrament of Penance (c.f. NMI, 37). Mercy is for the contrite and it is through the Sacrament of Penance in which our contrition and Christ’s mercy meet. In an age in which sin remains bound by self-appointed victimhood, freedom is found by approaching the mercy seat of the One Who became a willing victim for us. These true encounters with Christ, mediated by a Priest, should be frequent enabling us to see them as necessary even when our sin is not grave.
Likewise, the Sacrament of the Eucharist must be restored to a primacy of place. The Pope “insist[ed] that sharing in the Eucharist should really be the heart of Sunday for every baptized person” (36) but we should be willing to go further and make the sharing of the Eucharist the heart of every day. By contemplating the face of the suffering and resurrected Christ in the Eucharist, we are being conformed to Him Mass by Mass. If we really believe that Christ is present and the source of all life, “where else would we go” but to Mass? Our Lord will not be outdone in generosity so that when we generously make ourselves available for Daily Mass, we find it harder and harder to stay away.
Marked by the communal prayer of the Eucharist, we must also contemplate the face of Christ in prayer. Prayer, especially mental prayer, is the ordinary means God uses to gift us with His grace. Reading the signs of the times, especially the “widespread demand for spirituality,” the Pope called upon the Faithful not only to pray, but to be educated in the art of prayer. This meant going the great spiritual masters of the Church like St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. More explicitly the Holy Father is saying that rather than looking elsewhere, especially in New Age spirituality, for “methods” of spirituality, that we should all re-connect with the mystical tradition of the Church. All too often Catholics are told to pray, but in truth do not know how to. Therefore parishes should become not just places of prayer, but schools of prayer where prayer is taught.
…And the Difference it Makes
While this plan will help individual Christians, it isn’t immediately apparent how it will help the Church. Holier lay people aren’t going to fix corrupt prelates, especially when those prelates sit in the high places of the Church. To see things this way however is to make a very worldly mistake, namely, seeing the Church as an institution and not as an organism. The Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, is the extension of the Incarnation throughout time (c.f Mt 28:20 and this previous post). The Church is holy because Christ is the Head. The Mystical Body is holy because it has the Holy Spirit as its soul. All those who share the indwelling of that same Spirit are members of that body. But it also has members that have become diseased and are no longer capable of acting as parts of that same body. And just as a body has varied means to heal diseased parts of the body, so too the Church has the same power because it is always the Person of Christ who acts, even if He uses other members of the body as instruments.
Holy Members of the Church, both Militant and Triumphant, are healthy members of the Body that act to heal the diseased members of the Body. They represent the true hierarchy of the Church. The hierarchy of the Institutional Church, a hierarchy that will disappear, is meant only to be a sign of the true hierarchy. Sometimes it fails as a sign and that’s when it is incumbent upon the true hierarchy to step up—not to lead the Institutional Church per se, but to be translucent members allowing the light reflected from the face of Christ to shine through them. And if we put St. John Paul II’s plan into action and seek his intercession, that will be enough to heal the Church and be a light to a desperately dark world.