Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Buffalo News - 100 churches may shut, mergeThis is so sad, so hard, AND so necessary. The unfortunate fact is that Buffalo has always had too many parishes and church facilities. One only has to take a quick drive throught the Broadway/Fillmore area to see this. It didn't matter so much when there was an abundance of people & priests. The city will of course suffer the deepest pain from this process. Where Catholic's once dominated neighborhood life we are now the minority. As surely as short sighted, even cowardly, flight to the suburbs has destroyed our city it has destroyed our parishes too.
So while it's obvious, to me at least, that the Diocese has to make appropriate decisions about the allocation of resources, the real question is: Will renewal be administrative only? Or, will the people of our diocese experience a genuine renewal of spiritual and liturgical life? Will people be able be attend a Mass that follows the missal? Can our children expect to be catechized in keeping with the teaching of the universal church? Will they be taught to cherish and revel in the mystery of the sacraments? Will young people be prepared authentically for marriage? Will young couples be strengthened and guided to build strong Catholic families? Will those families raise up the next generation of priests, religious AND parents?!
I travel all over the country to all sorts of parishes. Tonight I had dinner with some wonderful young people. The JPII generation. The hope. There were also some older folks too. In some cases I fear all we can do is hope that they cause no more damage. Everyone I meet has ideas. Conservative, liberal, orthodox, dissenting; they all have ideas. Programs, processes. Is it really that hard? Jesus gave us the church to guide us. We've had 2000 years set things up. Why are we constantly reinventing the wheel? How can we go forth living the simple message of the gospel if we cannot give our simple assent to HIS church?
The opportunity embedded in this crisis is to complete the reform of the Church according to the teaching of Vatican II as authentically interpreted by Pope John Paul II. The opportunity, in other words, is for a genuinely Catholic reform of the Church—not the transformation of Catholicism into another American “denomination,” not Catholic Lite. Only the authentic reform of Catholic belief and practice will enable the Church to become what it must in 21st-century America: a vibrant evangelical movement that proclaims the Gospel in and out of season and that, in doing so, helps rebuild a culture of life capable of sustaining the great American experiment in democratic self-government.
posted by JTC 10:05 PM
