~ Happy Birthday! Somewhere in your Catholic education or formation, no doubt you learned that Pentecost is the “birthday of the Church.” This is the day Jesus sent the Holy Spirit upon the disciples and His mother, as we heard in our first reading, giving them the courage, wisdom, and zeal to carry out the last command to “Go… and make disciples of all the nations….” This is the day that Jesus appeared to the disciples, as we heard in our Gospel, and breathed on them and gave them the Holy Spirit.
Friends, on this birthday of the Church, you and I should prize belonging to the Church, being members of the Church. Our Catholic faith is that “pearl of great price” that was passed on to us, often at the cost of great sacrifice, by ancestors who were martyred for their faith all the way to our grandparents and parents. How many of us have parents and grandparents who loved the Church, who loved their faith, who passed it on to us… not only by building great monuments to the faith like cathedrals and basilicas and even this parish church, but also passing on their love for Christ and faith in the Church by their example and prayer.
Our parents and grandparents and forebears in the faith make real a great line of St. John Paul II, who said, “Love for Jesus and His Church must be the passion of our lives.”
Yes, we Catholics should passionately love our Church. Like our family, we are “born into it” at baptism. Like a mother, our Church strengthens us in Confirmation, forgives us in Reconciliation, feeds us in the Eucharist, consoles us with the Anointing of the Sick, and gives us away in Matrimony or Holy Orders. Like our family, our Church is there at birth, maturity, sickness, and death. Like a family, we might quarrel at times and complain about one another, but, like a family, we rarely leave, can always return, and we carry our family name, traits, and pride forever. The Church is family, our spiritual family.
These days, many people, including many Catholics, have no use for the Church. They want to love Jesus, and do good for others, and be spiritual, and find God everywhere, but they do not want the Church, or at least what they see as the trappings, the bureaucracy, the burden of the Church. Fr. Ronald Rolheiser, an Oblate priest who is a lecturer and a writer observes that people today want “Christ without the Church, a King without His Kingdom.” But we Catholics say, sorry, but you cannot split them, Christ and the Church. Jesus remains alive, powerful, accessible, and active in His Church! The Church is Christ. After the Second Vatican Council, it became popular to say that We are the Church. This is true, but it is also true that Christ is the Church, and the Church is Christ. After all, it’s not always about us, but it is always about Jesus.
Now, let’s face it, at times it can be very difficult to love the Church. Again, the Church is like our family. At times it is hard to love our family, as we recall past hurts, sadness, or dysfunction. The Church is Christ, and since Christ was both divine and human, the Church is divine and human, too. In her divine order, the Church is beautiful, holy, spotless; on the human side, she can be sinful, ugly, and clumsy. That’s because her members are. That’s because I am. That’s because you are.
Once, at a World Youth Day, St. John Paul II said this to over a million young people gathered: I should like to ask you, dear young people, a favor: be patient with the Church! The Church is always a community of weak and imperfect individuals. God has placed His work of salvation, His plans and His desires, in human hands. This is a great risk, but there is no other Church than the one founded by Christ. He wants us to be His collaborators in the world and in the Church, with all our deficiencies and shortcomings.
We love the Church, warts and all. We stick with her. We pass on the faith to our children. We cherish community, tradition, and shared struggles over privacy, convenience, and freedom, with its chant of “leave me alone.” Listen again to Father Rolheiser:
What we must challenge is the pathological individualism and excessive sense of privacy within our culture. Especially must we challenge the fallacy… that our lives are all our own, that we owe nothing to anyone besides ourselves, and that we can buy into family, neighborhood, and Church how and when we like it. We are Catholics; we belong to the Church, at the core of our being. We did not choose Jesus and His Church; they chose us. And we are eternally grateful they did.
Friends, I am so proud to say that I am a Catholic, a baptized and fully-initiated member of the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church. I am a son of the Church as much as I am the son of Rogers & Shirley Vien. I could be nothing else. Yes, sometimes the Church drives me crazy, and there are so many things I think I disagree with and even more that I don’t understand, but in the end I love the Church: its history, its tradition, its sacraments, its ritual, its community, its saints, its popes, its values, its grace, its mission, its diversity, its inclusivity, its commitment to peace and justice… and I suspect that very many of you feel the same way. Today is our Feast, the Feast of the Church.
Our faith, our Church, goes back to Jesus, His Mother, His Apostles, His Spirit unleashed at Pentecost. “Love for Jesus and His Church must be the passion of our lives!” May this Eucharist, which we now celebrate and share, cultivate within us a deep and passionate love for Christ and his Church!