The Need To Change Catholic Culture
What is it that Catholics do? What is our understanding of the job description for being Catholic?
The basic answer to this is Catholics go to Mass. The really good Catholics go to Mass every weekend. Medium Catholics go to Mass more often, but not weekly. At an even more modest level are Catholics who go to Mass at Christmas and Easter. The point is that we tend to measure how Catholic we are by the frequency of Mass attendance.
If Catholics are asked what is especially unique about being Catholic, what particularly distinguishes the Catholic Church from Protestant denominations, we would most likely say it’s our sacraments. We are big time dispensers of the sacraments. If a Catholic moves to a new parish and fills out a registration form for the new parish, they are more than likely going to mark on the form which sacraments the family has received. That is so the pastor in the new parish knows which sacraments remain to be received by family members.
The sacraments are obviously beautiful gifts to Catholic Christians. However, a great many Catholics who have left the Catholic Church received the basic sacraments of the Church, Baptism, Confirmation and the Eucharist. If they left the Church, they must not be thinking that they were going to miss anything important, so they must not have experienced any significant benefit from the sacraments they received. So what was missing?
Here is a teaching, a principle, of the Catholic Church that almost no one ever mentions or talks about. The teaching can be found in the following two sections of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
CCC 1072: “The sacred liturgy does not exhaust the entire activity of the Church”: it must be preceded by evangelization, faith and conversion. It can then produce its fruits in the lives of the faithful; new life in the Spirit, involvement in the mission of the Church, and service to her unity.
CCC 2111:…To attribute the efficacy of prayers or sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions they demand, is to fall into superstition.
What these sections of the Catechism mean is that what happens to the Catholics when they receive the sacraments in church depends on what happens in their lives before they walk through the church doors. If we have not made a commitment of our lives to Jesus, if we don’t understand the importance of a relationship with Him, if we haven’t made Him the center of our lives, then the sacraments will not be effective.
What is our disposition? What is our attitude? What is our expectation, when we come forward to be baptized, to be confirmed, to receive the Body and Blood of Jesus in the Eucharist? This is an essential issue for Catholics.
Jesus is always present, and His grace is always available in every sacrament. But whether His presence is fruitful and effective depends on our disposition. Otherwise, we are just going through the motions. It’s like the passage in the Bible which says that there was an area where Jesus could perform any healings because of the lack of faith in that location. He is not going to force Himself on anyone. We have to want Him, to desire Him and the grace that He so deeply wants to share with us.
Our Catholic culture needs a huge, dramatic change. We have to have a new, intense focus on our personal relationship with Jesus, as we have discussed in our prior postings. Then the sacraments can not only have an external beauty but also have an internal power and grace that are truly life-changing, truly transforming.
This is why many converts to the Catholic Church have an advantage. They bring to the Church their personal relationship with and commitment to Jesus with them. When they bring this disposition with them in their experience of the sacraments of the Catholic Church, the impact on them is very deep and powerful.
The parishes in the Catholic Church which have introduced one of the resources that helps their people develop this personal relationship with Jesus have quickly experienced a new zeal, vitality and growth. These parishes have made a commitment to follow a “discipleship” model for the parish. We’ll talk about what that means in our next blog.