Christ, who is the salvation of all people at all times and in all places, had to find some way so that this salvation was in fact extended to all times and places.
The Church is Christ in all times and all places
…I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Mt. 28:20)
The Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, is the way in which Christ arranged to pass his message and deeds through time and space. He himself has said, “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these…” (Jn. 14:12). God is not limited by the coordinates of time and space; Christ is God but, as long as He was living in the flesh among men, He was also restricted by these coordinates.
Christ is the way, the truth and the life for men of all times and places. The Church is all of us, but within the Church, there are charisms which require a special calling because they need special consecrations. Priests and religious are at the service of the Mission and the universal fraternity because they have consecrated their entire lives to this service, and as the Spaniards like to say, they’ve put all the meat on the grill.
Presumably Christ continues to call, perhaps more so now than ever before, for shepherds as the flock increases and for fishers of men as the harvest is even more plentiful (Mt. 9:32-28). If Christ continues to call, then why is it that today there are increasingly fewer missionaries, people who are willing to leave their countries and their families to take the Gospel to other latitudes and longitudes? If Christ continues to call, why is it that the clergy is getting increasingly more elderly, and there are priests with 3 or 4 or even 5 or more parishes to look after?
As in the parable of the sower, the problem is not in the seed nor in the sower who is Christ. The problem lies in the different soils on which this seed falls. Christ continues to call but the response to this calling is each time more like that of the rich young man’s…
Bad examples
One of the reasons for the shortage of vocations is the bad examples that some of us priests and religious give to the world. It is precisely the scandal involving little ones to which the Gospel speaks about; each one of us can either be a sidewalk stone, which makes a path easier or a stumbling stone, which causes people to fall. In Greek, the word scandal even means stumbling stone.
It is a fact that due to the scandal of pedophilia many people have left the Church; but they who left were the “little ones” of the Gospel, those of little faith or of a faith that needed to grow to become mature. In a basket of apples, it is inevitable that there will be some rotten ones. This has already happened in the early days of the Church with the group of 12 apostles whom Jesus chose; one of them, Judas Iscariot, was a traitor.
Those who left Christ’s Church, because of the scandal of some priests, show that their faith was not in Christ but rather in the priest in question. They threw away the baby with the bath water; they threw away faith in Christ and Christ Himself because of the bad example of one Christian.
The Holy Order is a sacrament, the priest represents Christ and acts in the name of Christ, but he is not Christ. Just as there are good actors and bad actors, there are priests who represent Christ well and those who represent Him poorly. A priest is an icon of Christ, and our faith is in Him who he represents and not in the priest himself.
Self-referential youths
Don’t ask what your country can do for you but rather what you can do for your country. John F. Kennedy
A 17-year old young woman said to me in school, “Instead of believing in God I believe in myself, therefore I am my own god”. Like her, many young people today do not have any ideals, and being self-referential, their lives revolve only around themselves. The world has much to offer and the young people look at the world not as a plentiful harvest where the labourers are few but rather as a large buffet filled with beautiful and pleasant things that they do not want to miss out on. For them to obtain these goods is to gain life and to renounce them or be deprived of them is to lose life. Thinking in this way, they cannot understand when Christ said, “Those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (Jn. 12:25)
Majority of saints in the Catholic Church were from wealthy, noble and prominent families. They had everything that these mislaid young people of today so desire, and yet they left everything behind and considered all that as rubbish so they may gain Christ (Phil. 3:7-10). Just like St. Paul, these handsome and noble young people not only renounced money but also found in Christ an even greater treasure like the merchant in search of fine pearls who on finding one pearl of great value put all others aside (Matt. 13:45-46). It is a pity that today’s young people have never encountered Christ.
For them, they find it very difficult to accept that their lives are not about themselves; that their life is a relative value and what gives it meaning is what they do or do not do with it. Beethoven without his music would have been a Mr. Nobody; the same could have been said about Picasso without his paintings; the individual talents are geared above all to the common good and only after to the good of the individual. We do not live to be happy but rather we live to be useful to the society, and in so doing we become happy; if not, then we are useless even to ourselves.
The fact that we are social beings can be proven by what happens when we share our sadness with a friend, we become less sad. Similarly, we become happier when we share our happiness with others. The social well-being harmonizes itself to the well-being of the individual and vice versa; no one is happy surrounded by misfortune, nor is one happy at the expense of others, but only if one contributes to their happiness.
Happiness is the secondary effect of our altruism, the principal effect being the well-being of others. No one takes a medicine for its secondary effect but rather for its principal effect; all our action has a feedback, a return, a boomerang effect; that is, what goes around comes around.
Jesus said of himself, “I came to the world to serve and not to be served”. It is true that nobody would say, at least in public, that we came into this world to be served. However if we put our hypocrisy aside and are honest with ourselves, we will see that it is not to serve that we seek but rather to gain power, to be served by those beneath us, and this is why we are so unhappy.
The true path to greatness is in fact by serving. The great people in our lives were the ones who served us and not those who made use of us or dominated us. The great people in the history of mankind were also those who served and not those who made use of others like Hitler, Stalin and so many other dictators…
The devils of God the patronizing parents
Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’ (Mk. 8:31-33)
God is calling each one of us all the time. Nevertheless only a few young people say ‘yes’ to Him, and after winning the battles against self-reference and the beckoning of the consumer society, they still have to win over those who are the closest to them, their parents. Some parents, who are guided more by maternal instinct than by a true fatherly and motherly love, are opposed to God like Peter was to Jesus. Since they object the plans of God, then in the same manner that Jesus called Peter, these patronizing parents also ought to be called Satan or the Devil, which means the adversary.
There are countless stories of parents who had opposed their children and “fought tooth and nail” to prevent them from following the life to which God has called them. A father stopped talking to his daughter for 30 years for having rejected marriage in favor of becoming a missionary. Other parents, when they were unable to dissuade their children completely from God’s calling, resorted to influencing them in their choice of vocation from missionary to diocesan priesthood instead so that they could still keep them under their wings.
A priest whose father being a doctor forced his son to follow a career in medicine, upon finishing the medical program out of love and respect for his father, on the day of his graduation he handed his degree to his father saying, “Here is what you wanted from me, now I’m going to do what God wants of me…”.
I myself will always be grateful to my mother because she neither actively nor passively tried to divert me from my path. I still remember the day when upon hearing my father trying to convince me not to return to Ethiopia after my first three years there, she reprimanded him in a strong voice saying, “Be quiet man, for God can condemn you”. It is true that God does not condemn but neither would I want to be in the place of these parents on the day they stand before Him and try to explain their devilish position, opponents of His design with respect to their children.
Advice to the parents
Many mothers and fathers never completely cut off the umbilical cord, they love with a possessive and patronizing love that creates dependence and impotence, never leaving their children and always wanting to have a voice and to play a part in their lives, even when their children are married.
A good education is one that seeks to instill freedom, autonomy and independence in the learners. A good educator has as an objective to be no longer needed. Contrary to this, many parents always want to feel that they are essential in the lives of their children, eventually pushing them away in so doing.
Advice to the children
The opposition of those dearest to us is not something that Jesus had not already contemplated:
‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me…’ (Matt. 10:34-37)
To another he said, ‘Follow me.’ But he said, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ But Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ Another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.’ Jesus said to him, ‘No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’ (Lk. 9:59-62)
As in the past, Christ continues to call. The young people however, invaded by the ego of their parents and overshadowed by the creatures -- the world of today that seems to have so much to offer them -- turn their backs on the Creator and the only Lord of all.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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