There’s a disturbing trend within our churches today. Simply put, we are seeing the embrace of our churches become less-and-less inclusive. More-and-more, our churches are demanding a purity and exclusivity not demanded by Jesus in Gospels.  

Indeed the very word “inclusivity” is often glibly dismissed as being part of the “I am spiritual but not religious” ethos, as if being inclusive were some kind of light-weight, New-Age thing rather than a central demand within Christian discipleship itself.

What does it mean to be inclusive? We can begin with the word “Catholic”.  The opposite of “Catholic” is being narrow, exclusive, and overly selective in our embrace. “Catholic” means wide, universal. It means incarnating the embrace of an abundant and prodigal God whose sun shines on all indiscriminately, the bad as well as the good.

In the Gospels we see that Jesus’ passion for inclusivity virtually always trumps his concern for purity and worthiness. He associates and dines with sinners without setting any prior moral conditions that have to be met before those sinners are deemed worthy of his presence. His disciples, much like many good sincere church-people today, were forever trying to keep certain people away from him because they deemed them unworthy; but Jesus always protested that he didn’t need that kind of protection and that, indeed, he wanted them all to come to him: Let them come to me! Indeed, that is still Jesus’ call: Let them come to me, all of them!  

We need to be more inclusive. I highlight this because today our faith families are shrinking and instead of us weeping empathically about this loss of wholeness we are more prone to be secretly gleeful about it. In the words of some Catholic commentators, they were Cafeteria-Catholics, picking and choosing which parts of the Gospel they like and turning a meaty Catholicism into Catholic-Light.

Such a judgment, however sincere and well intentioned, needs to operate under two huge caution flags: First, such a judgment leaves the person making it rather vulnerable. Who is a true, fully practicing Catholic? Only Jesus and Mary were fully practicing Catholics. Everyone else, without a single exception, falls short. We are all Cafeteria-Catholics. We all fall short; all have shortcomings, and all live the Gospel somewhat selectively. To cite the most salient example: many of us bear down more on church-going and private morality, to the neglect of the non-negotiable Gospel demand apposite justice; others simply reverse this. Who’s closer to Jesus? Who’s more of a Cafeteria-Catholic?  

The second caution flag is this: The God that Jesus reveals to us is a God of infinite abundance. Inside God there is no scarcity, no stinginess, no sparing of mercy. As the parable of the Sower makes clear, this God scatters his seed indiscriminately on every kind of soil - bad soil, mediocre soil, good soil, excellent soil.  God, it seems, never worries about someone receiving cheap, undeserved grace. God embraces both the missteps of our immaturity as well as the bitterness and resentment within our maturity.  Good religion needs to honor that.

Exclusivity can mask itself as depth and as passion for truth; but it invariably reveals itself, in its inability to handle ambiguity and otherness, as rigidity and fear, as if God and Jesus needed our protection. More importantly, it often too reveals itself as lacking genuine empathy for those outside its own circle; and, in that, it fails to honor its own abundant and prodigal God.

Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher, and award-winning author, is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. He can be contacted through his website  www.ronrolheiser.com.