A GREAT MANY CRITICS OF THE CHURCH SHOULD PLAN TO BE DISAPPOINTED (AGAIN) BY WHOMEVER THE CONCLAVE CHOOSES [AS POPE]

The Church after Pope Benedict {MY COMMENTS AT THE END}

ARCHBISHOP CHARLES J. CHAPUT, O.F.M. CAP. ARCHBISHOP OF PHILADELPHIA

Since the lava flow of media commentaries about Pope Benedict XVI's resignation began nearly two weeks ago, dozens of people have asked me why the Holy Father "really" resigned, and who the next pope is likely to be.
Given the extraordinary nature of the event, both questions are inevitable. Happily, Benedict's reasoning has been simple and clear. The Church faces serious challenges worldwide. At 85, his declining health and energy impede his ability to serve the Church as effectively as she needs. Resignation is an act of unusual humility, as well as careful judgment. These qualities, along with his courage, have distinguished his entire priestly life. By this action, Benedict also reminds us that, despite the unique authority invested in the Petrine office, the Pope is first and finally the bishop of Rome — and bishops do grow old and retire to private life everywhere else in the world.

Who will be the next Pope? Nobody knows, and while speculating about the future can be a pleasant form of entertainment, it's also fruitless. Pundits don't vote. Special interest lobbying in the media has little or no effect. Catholic teaching develops over time, but it doesn't fundamentally change; and Catholic life, in the end, is ordered to truth, not consensus or polling. Baptism is more than a Catholic tribal ritual. It matters — now and into eternity. And faith is not a religious clubhouse; it's meant to be lived actively, consciously, radically. It has adult implications. As St. Paul reminds us, we have a duty to "speak the truth in love." Truth unguided by mercy and love becomes a special kind of cruelty. Love unguided by a passion for truth about the nature of the human person, human relationships and human dignity isn't really "love" at all — it's a sly form of injustice and deceit.

What that means is this: A great many critics of the Church should plan to be disappointed (again) by whomever the conclave chooses. And yet, anyone who sincerely and unselfishly seeks God will continue to find a welcome in the Catholic Church, no matter who bears the title of Pope.

Timothy George, who ranks among the leading Evangelical authors and scholars of our time, described Benedict last week as "the greatest theologian to become pope since the Reformation," a champion of the culture of life, the Word of God, religious freedom, the pursuit of Christian unity anchored in truth, and the unembarrassed proclamation of the kingship of Jesus Christ. These words of praise, coming from across Christianity's historic confessional divide, confirm the real legacy of Joseph Ratzinger. This is how faithful Catholics and so many other believing Christians will remember him.

The work he leaves behind of course is sobering, and not just for his successor but for all of us who call ourselves Catholic. A bishop friend of mine said recently that what we need now more than anything as a Church, both locally and globally, is a "re-formation" — the kind of fundamental, root and branch conversion that goes vastly deeper than the pet issues of American media and political culture to a transformation of hearts, and thereby behavior.

In that regard, sometimes the best lessons for the future can be learned from the experience of the past. Five centuries ago, just a few years before Luther's "95 Theses," the Catholic reformer Father John Colet delivered a blisteringly frank homily to a cathedral full of English bishops and senior clergy. To an unamused audience, he argued that "never was there more necessity and never did the state of the Church more need" a profound effort at purification — not away from Catholic belief, but back toward living it more zealously, more honestly, more faithfully, as if this world and the next depended on it, because they do.

Colet spoke to a convocation of clergy. Today he might need to leave room for quite a few laypeople. But the message is worth remembering by all of us in the years ahead, whatever happens in Rome.

MY COMMENTS: I've been reading from various sources how the Catholic Church is bleeding members, that we are in decline and that the next pope has to turn it around or the Church will cease.

I suspect we are declining in numbers. But I saw some startling statistics just yesterday. Since 1910, worldwide, (and 1910 is the year my father was born) the number of Catholics has tripled to 1.2 billion! So that means that in 1910 there were 2/3rds fewer Catholics in the world.

While I hate seeing decline. We do have to ask ourselves the question about the last 50 years. Prior to Vatican II and up until the 1960's there was an explosion of Catholics, those first 50 years, but the second 50 years saw a bit of a decline. Just why is that?

Of course Vatican II's wrong implementation led to confusion in the Church and an erroneous sense amongst that all religions or no religion were equal. What is the point of evangelization if everything is equal and anyone can be saved by any religion or no religion.

With the dumbing down of catechetics from a very good foundation given by the Baltimore Catechism to a coloring book Catechism that places the Catholic faith on the floor of a sinkhole, poised to collapse and swallow the faith, one can see how Catholics faced with the onslaught of media and government secularism could not withstand that sinkhole's Armageddon.


Recently and exchange between Father Chicken Little and Father Chicken Hawk made clear the root sourse of this malaise of progressives in the Catholic Church when Father Chicken Hawk stated unambiguously the following on February 22, 2013 at 10:08 AM:


"Pie in the sky when you die" may be comforting to some, but it misses the mark of Catholic belief and teaching.

As a member of the downtrodden, the anaweem, the last who will be first, poor Father Chicken Little stated a grand truth that reverberated so loudly that Father Chicken Hawk had no response that he could stick his ungodly talons into to grasp the truth and bring it to his caricature of a beak to shred to smithereens, similar to the scribes and pharisees who remained speechlessly in front of our Lord's come-backs to their nonsensical remarks:

If not for the pie in the sky in virtue of the Resurrection of our Lord, I would not be a Christian, that would be ridiculous. Maybe I would simply be a secularist [agnostic].

Of course Chicken Little is in good company with the likes of His Holiness, Benedict XVI, Pontifex Maximus Emeritus when he states while still Pontifex Maximus this past Wednesday in his brilliant farewell address the following:

[In the un-Chicken Hawk-like experience of the true Church of Christ]... one can touch what the Church is – not an organization, not an association for religious or humanitarian purposes, but a living body, a community of brothers and sisters in the Body of Jesus Christ, who unites us all. To experience the Church in this way and almost be able to touch with one’s hands the power of His truth and His love, is a source of joy, in a time in which many speak of its decline.”