Some days it seems as if the easiest job in the world is to tally up the bad news. War continues to rage in Eastern Europe and the Middle East and crime and violence in Chicago never take a holiday. Congress is in gridlock. With a presidential election not many months away, 64% of Americans say they would like an alternative to Biden and Trump. All kinds of issues are swirling around about migration and the southern border; the homeless crisis is not solving itself; and the Chicago Bears and the Chicago White Sox keep reminding us that they are the really needy ones. In the Church an aging pontiff is trying to push us to become a more Spirit-led Church, while the supporting structures continue to crumble. In our Archdiocese between 2000 and 2019, Mass attendance declined by 35%, baptisms by 40% and weddings by 33% and fewer than 20% of Catholics attend Mass regularly. We could go on and on but we all have the picture.
This is one of the reasons I found participating in the annual Rite of Election and Continuing Conversion at Holy Name Cathedral so uplifting. This past Sunday February 18, the eight members of our adult catechumenate, their sponsors, a few family members, and the leaders of our RCIA were among the more than a thousand people that quite literally filled the church. This is one of four services in which those who are preparing for Easter Sacraments (Baptism, Confirmation, and First Communion) are formally affirmed and declared “elect” by Cardinal Cupich or an auxiliary bishop. While the other three services may not have been as well filled, it was an awesome moment to see more than half of the congregation in the Sanctuary responding to the call to full membership in the Catholic Church. Having attended this event every year, this is the most crowded ceremony I have seen in a long time. And this is only one Archdiocese. This same ritual is happening in churches and cathedrals all over the world.
Of course, statistics tell us that more people are leaving the church than joining it and that not everyone who is received into the Catholic Church at Easter will remain active in it. My point is that even amid all the gloom and doom in our world and in our church, people are still being drawn to the community and finding value in it. It reminds us not to take what we have for granted or overlook the opportunities we have to model our faith to others. The same statistics also tell us that the people who make up what is now our nation’s largest religious denomination (“none”) are not all averse to organized religion. Many of them are actively searching. How we represent our Catholic faith at work or at the grocery store or at a condo meeting may make a difference. It also means that we should not assume that the visitors or new faces we see at Sunday Mass are Catholic. They may be people of another faith or of no faith who want to see what Catholic worship is like. People want to check out what the actual experience of the community is like before they check out what the group believes. Hence, the smile we show the visitor, the handshake we offer at the sign of peace, and the actual engagement we exhibit in the responses and in the singing at Mass are clues to outsiders of how much the worship means to us. After all, everyone else is just as weary of bad news as we are. The Good News that has touched our lives is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is meant to be good news for everybody.
This past weekend I was not very visible at Assumption. About six months ago I had been invited by the Adult Faith Coordinator at Immaculate Conception Parish in Elmhurst to preach a parish mission, something I had not done in about ten years. This meant preaching at all the weekend Masses and giving a presentation Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday evenings. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it turned out to be a lot of work at the last minute! But it was also nice to experience another Catholic community seeking to address the same issues that we all face. As Pope Francis said on his visit to the United States in 2015, “One of the great challenges facing the Church in this generation is to foster in the faithful a sense of personal responsibility for the Church’s mission, and to enable them to fulfill that responsibility as missionary disciples, as a leaven of the Gospel in the world.” Leaven, you know, is not much to write home about all by itself. However, its impact can be felt throughout the loaf of bread. That is the ministry to which Pope Francis has called us. We may not see ourselves as very important, but that does not mean that our influence does not matter.
Fr. Joe
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