Our Diocese is in the midst of an intensive period of self-study called Faith in Our Future. The aim of this endeavor is to prepare us for the projected realities of the Church going forward while at the same time honoring the work of the Church that brought us to where we are today.
One-hundred years ago the expansion of the Church in the U.S., and particularly here on the East Coast, fueled by immigrants from throughout Europe, saw the construction of hundreds of parishes that have now become redundant. Small ethnic centered parishes are no longer normative or sustainable.
While aging buildings and shifting demographics are an essential part of the dialogue, the underlying reality is also the dramatic decline in the number of priests in our diocese and throughout the world.
The Gospel for this 14th Sunday of the Year recounts the time in Jesus’ ministry when he sent forth his disciples to engage in the early work of evangelization. “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest. Go on your way;” he tells them.
This painful reality is abundantly clear again in our own time. In world hungering for meaning and yearning for a sense of salvation we have the message and the rites to respond to that need yet we lack the adequate human resources to do so. The harvest is indeed abundant and the laborers are few. That approximately two-thirds of active priests in the U.S .will be retired within a decade is a bone chilling reality. Not only priests but also the numbers of professed men and women religious – brothers, sisters, and nuns – continue to plummet.
While at present a significant majority of Catholic School students have never met a religious sister, the painful reality is that in the future tens of thousands of Catholics will have only occasional encounters with priests. Mass will become a rare experience as Communion Services will become more normative. Access to the Sacraments will be limited in dramatic ways.
This is a challenge for all of us. Can it be that Jesus intends the Church to fail – by no means! While this is not the first great crisis for the Church in its history, this is one is ours and it demands our attention. The quick responses – married priests or women priests – are not quite the answer. Seminaries for men and women in Protestant denominations aren’t faring much better than are we.
What we need are families who value priesthood and are open to vocations from within their family. We need prayerful support for the men who are taking up the cross and making the sacrifice in response to the call. We need to reinvigorate a culture of vocations within the Church. It might sound cliché but mentioning the idea of priesthood to the young men in our schools, parishes, neighborhood and homes.
The harvest is indeed abundant, yet we are losing so many souls to the wiles of secularism because we lack the means to feed the needs present within. Let us then, not only pray for the priests we have, but for the ones we need.
July 10 – Being one’s neighbor is to enter into a dialogue of mercy
In a catechesis this past April on the Year of Mercy, Pope Francis offered the following insight:
“The compassion shown by the Samaritan is an image of the infinite mercy of God, who always sees our needs and draws near to us in love. The command to love God and neighbor, then, is supremely practical; it entails caring for others even to the point of personal sacrifice. By the end of the parable, we see that the ‘neighbor’ is not so much the man in need, but rather the one who responded to that need with compassion. Jesus tells all of us to be neighbors in this sense: ‘Go and do likewise.’ He himself is the model of the Good Samaritan; by imitating his love and compassion, we show ourselves truly to be his followers.”
Francis is challenging us in a new way here. Typically when we hear the parable of the Good Samaritan we can be lulled into the familiar ways of thinking that this parable is about helping other people.
Indeed it seems that we must reverse some of our thinking to appreciate the totality of this parable. I need not just focus on you as my neighbor, but rather think of me as your neighbor. To an extent this changes the process of thinking about this parable in significant ways.
The suggestion that we focus on ourselves as neighbor does not suggest that the parable is “all about me” but rather that the perspective on the self as being the neighbor should impact every interaction we have with people during the day.
To see myself as your neighbor takes me out of the role of dominance and power and creates a deeper sense of equality, and perhaps introduces a notion that I might need you instead. I am not necessarily in control of the situation, I am not the one who is making a magnanimous decision, I am not the one who is giving generously to you.
No, instead I might be the one in need of your mercy, help, or generosity. Perhaps together you and I as neighbors need to think about the well-being or welfare of another person or family.
We so prefer the image of ourselves doing great things for another that we can fail to be generous in cooperating or even worse, in receiving.
It is not easy for us to accept the generosity of others, to allow other people to be Good Samaritans for us. I know that it is difficult to accept the generosity of other people, even in small ways. There is an expectation of self-reliance and independence that must be sacrificed in order to allow others to exercise the grace of Corporal Works of Mercy, to themselves be Good Samaritans.
It can be too easy to offer mercy, and way too difficult to accept it.
In this Year of Mercy we are being forced to consider mercy as a dialogue. We are not just “doers” of mercy or “receivers” of mercy but we are engaged in mercy. In giving we receive and in receiving we give. But in order for that to be effective we must have the perspective of ourselves as neighbor. In this way we recognize our shared humanity and shared dignity in a deeper way.
As we place ourselves into this parable, taking the perspective ourselves as neighbor changes the view that we have. It also gives a context to the inevitability experience in each of our lives of needing to rely on the grace of God in others at various points in our lives.
One has to wonder, given his response to Jesus at the end of the parable, if the young man who posed the question to Jesus could see himself as a neighbor at the end.
We will not be able to move forward or to fully accept the mercy that God extends to us until we open ourselves to the dialogue of neighbors in the world in which we live. For many of us this is particularly challenging as many of our relationships lack the basic dynamics to even start the conversation.
Father Garry Koch is pastor of St. Benedict Parish, Holmdel.