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Thinking About The Church And Our Lives As Catholics

July 25, 2015 Featured Today No Comments

By PHILIP TROWER

(Editor’s Note: This essay is an abridged version of a 2009 talk Philip Trower gave to the David Foster Summer School in England.)

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I want this evening to share some thoughts with you about what being a Catholic has come to mean to me since I was received into the Church 56 years ago. If you are quick at arithmetic you will already have worked out that that was in 1953. Since then a lot of water has flowed under many bridges.
I do not mean that the Church’s teachings have changed. I only mean that I have had a lot of time to reflect on her teachings, especially those about the nature of the Church and our role in it, and so, I hope, to deepen my understanding of them.
Trying to deepen some aspect of the faith by quietly thinking it over in a prayerful way is something we should all do from time to time if we want to keep our faith vibrant and strong.
Otherwise it is all too easy to fall into seeing the Church the way outsiders do. There are lots of religions in the world and Catholicism is just another one of them. It has leaders or rulers, in this case called priests, with its own particular beliefs and practices which it expects its followers to obey, and if they do they will get help in this world and go to some kind of “heaven” when they die.
I am exaggerating, of course. I know you all have a much better knowledge and understanding of the faith than this, especially those of you who have attended the summer school before. But I suggest that what I have described represents a way of looking at things which our minds tend to drift into when we don’t think about the Church and the faith in a prayerful way often enough.
The first point to grasp and hold onto is that the Church is unique. There is nothing else like her anywhere in the world. Of course she has elements which we find in other religions; belief in a supreme being, and the value of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, for instance. But she is in essence different in kind or nature from all other religions.
In the first place she is, we believe, the teacher and guardian of the one true Revelation from God, which it is part of our duty as Catholics to make known as widely as possible. Spreading the Good News is not or should not be seen as an optional extra by Christians. But there is more to it than that.
As members of the Church you aren’t just members of an organization. You are living and taking part in a great supernatural mystery. Indeed one could say you are helping to activate it. You are helping to draw down and distribute throughout the world the graces and blessings our Lord won for us all by His life, death on the cross, and Resurrection. We could call it His great human rescue operation.
And you are doing this not only when you are at Mass or saying prayers, but by all your actions done for love of God as long as you are in a state of grace. This could be anything from playing football to studying for exams.
The reason we need rescuing or saving, as you know, is that owing to the Fall, we all, except our Lady, start life in a state of spiritual separation from God, and, without His intervention and help, once we are born we rapidly move into a state of indifference or opposition to Him.
The Church does not, of course, operate independently of our Lord, as if He had gone back to Heaven leaving us to carry on by ourselves. It does it in union and cooperation with Him.
This is why we talk about the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ. The Church is like a biological organism with our Lord as its head and we as the rest of its members. This mysterious spiritual Body or organism is held together in two ways. Like a human body it has a soul and the equivalent of a physical life principle. In a human being, the soul holds the parts of the body together as one, while a biological life principle is the source of its natural physical activities.
Similarly with the Mystical Body or the Church: We speak of the Holy Spirit as the soul of the Church. At the same time we use the word grace for the life principle animating each of us, the cells.
Theologians call grace a share in God’s life. They also make a distinction between what they call “actual” grace and “sanctifying” grace. Actual grace is something short term, like a shot in the arm to help us through difficulties or some special work He has given us. Sanctifying grace on the other hand is a lasting state or condition which we are raised to by Baptism. It is a kind of higher level of existence.
As long as we do not break the connection with Him by sin, we are in what is called a “state of grace.” A state of grace is a state of friendship with God. Other names for the Church which help to explain these realities are “Bride of Christ” and “Temple of the Holy Spirit.”
The name “Bride of Christ” reminds us how being unfaithful to God in any way is like a man or woman going off with someone else’s wife or husband, while “Temple of the Holy Spirit” indicates how closely we ought to remain united as a community.
It is an awe-inspiring thought, isn’t it, that “from all eternity” God foresaw that He was going to create you and me at this particular period of history and call us to be members of His Body and united with Him in His great “rescue operation.”
That means making the fruits of His redemptive death available to as many people as possible so as to maximize the forces of good in the world and to help keep the forces of evil at bay.
But it is also important to remember that He has not chosen us because we are cleverer or better than other people. As St. Paul explains in one of his epistles, in order to keep us from getting proud, God, for the most part, likes to achieve great results by employing small unimportant people so that the world can see He is behind it all.
Let’s now look at the different ways in which our Lord wants us to take part in His great rescue operation. As God made man and head of the Church, He is a priest, a prophet, and a king, and in each of these roles He gives us a tiny share.
Our “priesthood” as lay people, as I’m sure you know, is not the same as that of bishops and priests who have received the Sacrament of Ordination. We cannot offer the sacrifice of the Mass or forgive sins. Nevertheless the priesthood of the laity or common priesthood of all the baptized, as it is also called, is a genuine priesthood.
We exercise our priesthood in the first place of course at Mass when we unite ourselves in our hearts and minds with the sacrifice our Lord is making on the altar through the ordained priest. As the Third Eucharistic Prayer puts it so beautifully and tellingly, “You never cease to gather a people to yourself, so that from the rising of the sun to its setting a pure sacrifice may be offered to your name.”
But we should not think we are only exercising our priesthood when we take part in strictly religious activities. As members of God’s priestly people we are called to make everything we do an act of worship, whether it is studying, or, if we are adults, looking after our family, working in an office or on a farm, playing football or golf; in other words, carrying out as best we can whatever happen to be the “duties of our state,” as the Church so helpfully calls the life God has called us to.
This equally applies to the ordained priesthood. They too should make everything they do an offering to God, whether it is writing a sermon, checking the parish accounts, getting their car fixed, or playing golf. Obviously, offering Mass is infinitely the highest of their activities. But everything else we do is to be attached to and sanctified by it. In the words of the founder of Opus Dei, St. Jose Maria Escriva, we have, in this sense, to turn the whole day into a Mass.
That is why it is customary for Catholics to start the day with a morning offering in which we ask God to accept all our thoughts, words, joys, actions and sufferings throughout the day for His honor and glory and any special intentions we have.
We also exercise our priesthood when, in addition to Mass, we join in other parts of the Church’s official prayer life like the divine office or liturgy of the hours. Morning and evening prayer or devotions like benediction are examples.
Never slip into thinking of the liturgy as just the Church’s official prayers.
The mystery of our Lord’s life, death, and Resurrection, as you know, made up for the sins of the whole world from the beginning to the end of history. But what you may not realize is that the liturgy activates and applies that mystery and its healing powers to the present moment. This happens supremely at Mass. But the whole liturgy contributes to it as well. The inner power and significance of what took place 2,000 years ago is in some mysterious way perpetuated down the ages through the liturgy and our taking part in it.
To sum up what I have been saying about our priestly role, we can turn to the rather surprising expression St. Paul uses when he says that our trials and difficulties enable us to make up for “what was wanting in the sufferings of Christ.”
Nothing, of course, was wanting. But our Lord in His generosity allows us to play a secondary role in His rescue operation by uniting our difficulties and sufferings to His when He offers them to His Father.
Because of this, the Church sometimes now refers to us as co-redeemers, with our Lady as the supreme co-redeemer or co-redemptrix.
We can think of grace and evil in the world as if they were contained in two tanks connected by a pipe and a valve. When the level rises in one tank it goes down in the other and vice-versa. So it is important for the world that the priestly people should as far as possible be living good and holy lives. When they are not, as we see happening at various times and places in the history of the Church, the level of grace in the first tank drops, sometimes catastrophically, allowing the level of evil in the other tank to rise with correspondingly harmful results.
Secular historians normally attribute all the good things in history to the genius of certain individuals and other purely natural causes. But as Catholics we can be sure that things will look very different at the Last Judgment. We shall discover that what has chiefly kept the forces of evil at bay and promoted what is good has been the fact that ever since Pentecost, somewhere or other in the world, Mass has been continuously offered, the divine office recited, the sacraments administered.
And the same thing can be said about all the prayers, penances, and acts of virtue and charity done down the ages by what from the world’s point of view have been myriads of utterly insignificant men and women.
What now about our share in our Lord’s prophetic role?
This is a little easier to explain. A prophet is not just someone who predicts future events. In a wider sense he is anyone who bears witness to truth of the highest kind — that is to say, truth about the ultimate meaning of life and right and wrong ways of acting. In this sense our Lord was the supreme prophet. So we exercise our share in our Lord’s prophetic role whenever, through our words or actions, we help spread the Good News of the salvation and eternal happiness He won for us.
It is not only missionaries who do it. Parents do it when they teach their children the faith, teachers when they instruct their students, and all of us at any time when we contribute to making the faith intelligible and attractive to our neighbors, or, if necessary, stand up for the truth when it is unjustly attacked.
Finally, there is our share in our Lord’s kingly role. Here we have to make some distinctions. As God-Man, our Lord is King of the Universe. But He did not confer all this universal kingly authority on the apostles who were to govern His Church or their successors.
Their authority, one could say, concerned promoting faith and morals and whatever was necessary for protecting and preserving them. On the other hand, the day to day running of life in this world He left in the hands of those we now call the secular authorities, who may or may not be Christian.
This is why, in spite of His universal kingly authority, which we celebrate toward the end of the Church’s year with the Feast of Christ the King, He could say to Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world,” and to the Jews, when they tried to embroil Him with the Roman authorities: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” He was establishing the distinction we now take for granted between Church and state.
We share in His kingly authority, one could say, when we act both as good citizens and good members of the Church. This is where the role of the laity differs most from that of the ordained priesthood. The “things of this world” are essentially the laity’s province without this making them any less members of a “priestly people.”
So there you have some of my thoughts over the last 50 years or so about Holy Mother Church, which I hope will help you to appreciate even more than you already do how blessed you have been to receive the gift of faith which has made you one of her members.
Never, never fall into thinking of the Church as some kind spiritual department store that you visit from time to time in order to get certain spiritual goods and services, but are not otherwise connected with.

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