Ask Them For God.

In our last post, which took the form of an annual survey, readers’ answers made clear that there is much concern with the direction in which our diocese is proceeding.

With that comes a lot of angst. How does one remain steadfast to what he believes is true, obedient to the extent that that is possible, unswayed by imprudence or injustice further up the totem pole, and yet not be consumed with resentment?

Please take a few moments to watch Fr. Gregory Pine’s new summary of Thomistic thought on the office of bishop. There is much to think of here as we navigate the state of our Church, and more so, the state of our souls.

Among Fr. Pine’s observations, these seem particularly relevant to us:

“[Bishops] have a stable obligation to the things of perfection …. they are meant to equip the local church with everything that it needs–not as the deliverance of their own personality, but as pertaining to their hierarchical position for the Church . . . . Bishops ought to give us God.”

Perhaps Church politics, both those local and those further away, have had the tendency to rob us of the beauty of an appointment created in the mind of God.

This appointment is ordered to the perfection of God’s people, and only thus merits its authority. As Fr. Pine observes:

This is the point of hierarchy, of the hierarchical power within the Church: that it bestows upon us things from high, as they flood from their fontal source through the conduits of the apostolic college, that they come to us sweetened, as it were, by the transmission….

….these graces come to us through those by whom we are known and loved, with a particular pastoral solicitude and care.

God could tend to all sheep in all times and places, but He appoints shepherds so that the sheep might know His love through the love of the shepherd.

Graces sweetened by their transmission. Would that this could be so for all pastures within the Church.

For that, Fr. Pine advises that we pray and that we fast. And that we never tire of asking our Shepherds to do that for which they were chosen and ordained, nothing more and nothing less: that they give us God.

Without this, what can they become but the inverse of their office–witholding love where they should give it, covering in dim earthly banality that which they should illuminate, offering silence or platitudes or sly dissent when they should be the first among all to proclaim the gospel from the rooftops, bilking the household of the Church rather than pouring out their substance to sustain it, busying themselves with the futilities of this world rather than drawing their flock beyond it into the divine mysteries, basking in the captain’s chair of ego and position rather than washing the feet of those at the table.

This is the office of shepherd turned inside out, turned against itself and made grotesque: a thing for which the Evil One must campaign without ceasing, a thing gravely to be feared.

Those who love their bishops, and love that which their bishops are called to be, must not through their exhaustion, exasperation or cynicism permit their bishop to become nothing more than a barren husk of his calling–a parody, the father of none, the apostle with no message. The shepherd flailing his staff at an empty plain.

For just as husband, wife, father, or mother turned against the nature of their calling can destroy those they engender, so may such an inside-out bishop do to those arrayed before him & placed under his charge.

Losing himself, so also he loses others. And that may God forbid.

So we pray. Fast. Offer reparation.

And ask them for God.

What insights did you find in Fr. Pine’s commentary? Drop a comment below.