Things We Need.

So we’ve now officially joined the ranks of other dioceses around the country who have a Great Plan for organizational revamp and a managed decline.

Readers observe that our bishop states that he is here to give us not what we want, but what we need, while The Catholic Moment urges us not to go hankering for them old ways.

A serious question might be: How do many of today’s bishops arrive at the decision of what we need?

Certainly there is data available to see that we are losing our brothers and sisters to other religions–or to no religion, in many cases–and there are studies and self-reporting on the reasons why. Abuse scandals are always high on the list, but there is also diminishing faith in God and, as a recent poll noted, in Christ’s divinity.

Of equal or greater import, arguably, is why those of us who are left do not also leave, and why those who convert or who return to faith in this era do so. What has captured us enough to make us come, stay or even return from estrangement?

A worthwhile exploration of some of this can be found in Brandon McGinley’s new work, The Prodigal Church: Restoring Catholic Tradition in an Age of Deception.

McGinley is neither a radical nor an idealist, but a thoughtful & devout pragmatist. He is a “revert” who, having found his own way back to the Church, undertook an analysis of the great inheritance of the Church that has been dissipated, like the wealth of the Prodigal Son, and what we might do if the Church is to be what it is meant to be.

The theme of dissipation is an apt one, as he notes that something once dissipated, like grains of sand, or the misspent inheritance in Christ’s parable, is permanently gone and cannot be recovered. One can only go back to its source to rebuild. The arms of the Father were this source in the Gospel story, and the same is true for the Church today. Such a return is meaningless, however, without an acknowledgement of what one did wrong, how one got to his position of penury, and repentance for that.

McGinley avoids a simplistic blame game, and rejects the idea of a mere cultural rewind to the Tridentine 50s—a time when the Church was in a lot of trouble already, behind its respectable facade. Yet he also zeroes in on a number of modern practices that push away the person trying to connect with God in the Church today. His generation, he observes, was formed without necessarily opposing the second Vatican Council, but equally without any enthusiasm for what it has done practically and what it has come to represent.

What is it today that pulls in the non-believer, or the former believer? In the end, McGinley points to authenticity: living as though what we believe matters, as though it is God doing the heavy lifting, not ourselves. For example, having strong pious traditions and devotional practices (even ascetical ones) that young people especially desire. Not being locked into the “new (“stagnant, uncreative, backward-thinking) traditionalism” of repeating missteps of the 60s and 70s, often now re-packaged and served up once again.

Having “a welcoming church”, to take one example noted by McGinley from his own experiences of returning to faith, has a lot more to do with finding ways to have accessible, open churches in which people can rest before the Eucharist or gather to build moments of peace and friendship than it does with “Name-Tag Sundays” or similarly superficial, awkward, if well-intentioned overtures.

He reminds us of the incalculable impact of liturgies and celebrations based on the liturgical calendar, that are memorable precisely because of their transcendence and their strangeness from the things of the everyday world. Remembering the cool wax of the crisscrossed candles on your throat on St. Blaise’s day stays with you far more than, say, staring at a jumbotron beside the altar. These things are maybe “a little weird and a little mysterious, and yes, a little frightening” yet that is what makes them stay in the soul and the mind even when one is far from God:

It’s dispiriting how few of those moments, outside of Communion itself, we have left. The point of making the life of the Church more accessible to modern sensibilities–simpler, less mysterious, less otherworldly–was to bring the life-giving, elevating and perfecting grace of Christ to more people. It was, at its best and most sincere, and attempt to renew the Church though authentic innovation. It failed–there’s no better word for the sad outcome.

McGinley, The Prodigal Church, location 646.

In other words, if we live in a world that doesn’t think Christ is God (and increasingly, we do), the remedy in all matters, even the practical ones, is to live the truth that He is, and to acknowledge and communicate that fundamentally He does the work that saves.

Along these lines, McGinley warns against the message we send and the damage we do in trying to conform to the world’s expectations and to integrate them into our plans and decisions for “renewal”:

“Too often our projects of renewal are based on our own methods and wisdom. Diocesan programs are regularly laid out in PowerPoints and flowcharts that are indistinguishable from the products of corporate committees. They’re shot through with corporate cliches like “resource management” and “measurable outcomes”and sometimes the new jargon of Silicon Valley–”disruption” and other concepts that make donors smile while leaving everybody else confused and demoralized. Concepts like prayer and grace and holiness are reduced to bit players or, maybe worse, inclusion among the “measurables”.

This is not the way of the gospel. Our prodigal Church, having dissipated her inheritance, needs first to trust in the healing power of the Father’s grace, love, and mercy. After all, this is what He wants more than anything.”

McGinley, The Prodigal Church, location 775

He further notes:

“Jesus doesn’t need a PR consultancy; He doesn’t need a brand; He does’t need focus groups. These worldly efforts only get in the way. When the Church embraces the methods of the world, whether in the bourgeois spirit . . . . or in the bloodless “best practices” of a corporation or non-governmental organization, her identity and its allure—that is, the Person of Jesus Christ—are obscured. What Jesus can use are fearless prophets and radical signs of contradiction who, in their methods and their message, point the world to Him.”

McGinley, The Prodigal Church, location 886

“In the same way that the Church shouldn’t act like a corporation or an NGO, the bishops shouldn’t seem like CEOs or executive directors . . . . chilly episcopal statements that have been drafted by risk-minimizing attorneys should be avoided.

McGinley, The Prodigal Church, location 937.

McGinley’s core message is one that we can take to heart, and which provides at least one key to understanding why so few of our contemporaries do not understand Christ to be Lord: because sometimes, wittingly or not, the Church fails to act like it. There is great danger in trusting only in our own projects and plans, failing to value things that are not of our own control or creation.

Against this backdrop, McGinley offers some clear-eyed observations from the layman’s pew, and a number of practical suggestions that can help those who are interested in “what we need”.

(All citations to McGinley’s book are to the Kindle edition.)