Real Life Disciples: For such a time as this

This past week, I had the great privilege of being with all of our priests and deacons (well most anyway) for their annual Fall Clergy Days gathering. This year, Archbishop Coakley invited deacons to attend. On Monday night, I talked about our pastoral planning efforts over the past couple years.
 
It may seem odd, but I started not with where we are right now, but rather with the deep, amazing history of where we have been. Not just our archdiocese, but the whole Church. Years ago, I read a book during my master’s studies called, “How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization” by Thomas Woods. The author’s primary emphasis was to show the incredible force for good the Catholic Church has been throughout its history.
 
Hospitals, schools, nursing homes, universities, charitable organizations and other apostolates. The Church also is the source of numerous scientific discoveries and inventions, too many to count – everything from atomic theory to seismology to physics – which were all contributed by Jesuit priests.
 
Woods says, “By the 18 ^th century, writes historian Jonathan Wright, the Jesuits ‘had contributed to the development of everything from pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter's surface, the Andromeda nebula and Saturn's rings. They theorized about the circulation of the blood, the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon affected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light.’”
 
The Church also has contributed immensely to the care of widows and orphans, the sick and the poor. Again quoting Woods, “Even the Church’s harshest critics, from the 4 ^th century, Julian the Apostate all the way to Martin Luther and Voltaire, concede the Church’s enormous contributions to the relief of human misery.” And, no other institution on the planet has made more contributions in the field of education. By the time of the Reformation, no other secular government had chartered more universities than the Catholic Church. Even the field of modern economics is the brainchild of Spanish theologians.
 
The Catholic Church has been an incontrovertible source of “creative genius” in the world. And, it has been the same here in Oklahoma’s history – no argument.
 
Yet, the other point that Woods makes is that there has been a predominant intellectual and academic bias against the Church ever since the age of the Enlightenment in the late 1600s and early 1700s. He calls it an “enlightenment-prejudice” that would teach “All progress comes from religious sceptics, not the Church!” And, “whatever the Church touches is backward, superstitious, even barbaric!” With such a bias for centuries, the amazing historical contributions of the Church are all but lost for most people today. Add to that the current climate with recent scandal and we are left seemingly without a foothold as a Church. You could say we suffer from a huge “damaged brand.”
 
This is indeed a unique time in history. But, it also is a unique time for us. The archbishop has expressed in his recent pastoral letter, “One of the deepest desires of my heart is to see the Church here in central and western Oklahoma be a thriving Church that raises up more and more fervent missionary disciples!” You could say that’s exactly what the world needs today. And, more importantly, it’s exactly what the Church needs – nothing will repair a damaged brand better and faster than people who are fervent missionary disciples.
 
You may be familiar with others who have talked about the difficult challenges we are facing in our time. We find ourselves in a unique time in history, but it is not one that is entirely different from other periods. There have been other times of decline, and scandal and waning influence for the Church.
 
But, what Bishop Barron points out is that it was during those times that God raised up individuals who lived the Gospel in a radical way, in a way that “lifted,” “elevated” the world around them. People like Saint Benedict, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Therese of Lisieux, Saint Francis de Sales, etc. He has developed a whole series of powerful video studies on what he calls the “Pivotal Players!” He encourages – and I totally agree with him – that what the world needs now is more and more people like this; people who stick out in this time of history as a “sign of contradiction.”
 
The Church needs more people who decide to live out the Gospel in a radical way, and in a way that brings to the world the very thing that it desperately needs right now. The Gospel, our faith, the Catholic Church actually is the source of all that people in the world are longing to find, they just have been conditioned to think that the Church is the last place in the world they would ever find it. I think Archbishop Coakley’s desire for us as an archdiocese squarely meets that need, that deep hunger. So, let’s be who we were created to be!
 
From the book of Esther comes encouraging words for all of us: “For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father’s house will perish. And, who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”