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Re-Formation
Today
What the twenty-first-century
Church needs most are witnesses: men and
women on fire with missionary zeal
.
by George Weigel
Ecclesia semper reformanda: the Church
always to be reformed. Well, of course. But
today, as always, the question is, what makes
for authentic reform in the Church? Perhaps a
rabbinical story recounted in a popular 1950s
Catholic novel, The Cardinal, helps
focus the question.
The scene set by author Henry Morton Robinson
takes place in a New York hotel, where an early
attempt at ecumenical reconciliation and
interfaith dialogue, a kind of parliament of
religions, is meeting. After numerous vacuous
statements are made by this, that, or the other
Christian cleric, an elderly rabbi gets up and
tells a story.
There was a king, it seems, who owned a precious
diamond that he cherished more than anything
else in the world. One day, alas, a clumsy
servant dropped the diamond, which was deeply
scratched as a result. The finest jewelers in
the kingdom were summoned to the palace, but
despite their best efforts they could not repair
the king’s diamond. One day, however, an
exceptionally skillful jeweler wandered into the
kingdom and learned of the sad condition of the
king’s diamond. He volunteered his services –
and by his marvelous, almost miraculous,
craftsmanship, he carved onto the diamond a
beautiful rose, rendering the deepest part of
the scratch the rose’s stem.
In the novel, the rabbi does not explicate his
parable. But its meaning for a proper
understanding of ecclesia semper reformanda
should be obvious enough. All true reform in the
Church is by reference to what is deepest in the
Church: the “form” or constitution, which I use
in its British, not American, sense, given to
the Church by Christ the Lord. That deep “form”
is the root from which the disfigurement of the
Church can be transformed into renewal and
reform.
Authentic Christian reform, in other words, is
not a matter of human cleverness, and still less
of human willfulness. If the Church is willed by
Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit, then
authentic reform means recovering – making a
source of renewal – some aspect or other of the
Church’s “form” that has been lost, marred,
misconceived, or even forgotten. Authentic
reform means reaching back and bringing into the
future something that has been lost in the
Church’s present. Authentic ecclesial reform is
always re-form....
As in every other moment in the Church’s history,
living the motto ecclesia semper reformanda
in the twenty-first century will mean returning to
the sources, the roots, of Christian faith.
A
constantly re-forming Church is always
seeking the face of the Lord
This means, first of all, deepening the encounter
with Jesus Christ. As Pope Benedict XVI never
tired of repeating, Christianity does not begin
with an idea or a program but with a person: the
Second Person of the Holy Trinity, who walks along
the Emmaus Roads of this century and invites all
into the fellowship of his friends. A constantly
re-forming Church is a Church always seeking the
face of the Lord. Friendship with Jesus Christ is
not only the beginning of the Church, but also the
beginning of all authentic reform in the Church.
And as the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council
taught, not least in their efforts to return the
Bible to its rightful place in the Catholic
Church’s life, meeting the Lord means meeting him
in his word, the revealed word of God in Holy
Scripture. For from that meeting, we learn to see
the world aright.
Original sin, we might say, is both the original
myopia and the original astigmatism. Because of
original sin, we see the world askew: the myopia
of original sin gives us a squinty-eyed and narrow
view of the world and ourselves, while the
astigmatism of original sin further blurs and
distorts our vision. In order to see the world
(and ourselves) aright, we need corrective lenses.
Those lenses are ground by an immersion in the
Bible, through which we learn to see the world
(and ourselves) in proper focus.
This is especially urgent in times of cultural
confusion like our own. The culture of Me – the
culture of the imperial autonomous Self, the
culture of freedom understood as license and
willfulness – envelopes the twenty-first-century
West like a dense fog. Seeing through that fog
requires a visual acuity that the world can not
give. Seeing the world through biblical lenses –
through the “inversions” of the Beatitudes, for
example – cures our personal myopias and
astigmatisms so that the deep truths of the human
condition come into clearer focus.
Helping the people of the Church see the world
aright through biblical lenses is the first task
of the Church’s preachers, and thus renewing
homiletics must always be part of any authentic
ecclesial reform. Preaching-as-therapy,
preaching-as-political-education, even
preaching-as-moral-exhortation – none of these is
adequate to the homiletic task in a reforming
Church today. If we would look for models of how
expository, biblically rich preaching ought to be
done, we can look to another root of the faith
once delivered to the saints: the sermons of the
great Church Fathers. They, too, sought to help
their people see the world of late antiquity, in
which old certainties and venerable institutions
were crumbling, aright. Their world was not all
that different from ours, in which truth is
subjectivized and institutions once thought to be
built into the human condition (like marriage and
the family) are being deconstructed. And so
immersion in patristic preaching can be a way to
retrieve another lost element of the Church’s form
and make it into a source of renewal....
What the twenty-first-century
Church needs most are witnesses: men and
women on fire with missionary zeal
All of which is to say that the reformation we
need at this quincentenary of Wittenberg is a
re-formed Church of saints. The cultural
dissolution of the West precludes arguing people
into the faith. Very few people are going to be
argued into belief in a world that accepts “your
truth” and “my truth,” but not the truth.
Yes, the Church needs theologians. Yes, the Church
needs fully catechized men and women who can make
persuasive arguments, but what the reformed Church
of the twenty-first century needs most are
witnesses: men and women on fire with missionary
zeal, because they have been embraced by the love
of Christ and are passionate to share that love
with others; men and women who see the world
through a biblical optic; men and women sanctified
by the sacraments; men and women who know, with
Saint Paul, that the trials of the present age are
preparing within the ecclesia semper
reformanda an “eternal weight of glory” (2
Corinthians 4:17).
[This article is excerpted from
Plough Quarterly, Autumn 2017, Number 14, pp
45-49, Walden, New York, USA. See full
article online at https://www.plough.com/en/topics/faith/discipleship/re-forming-the-church]
George
Weigel is a Catholic theologian and
Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics
and Public Policy Center in Washington,
D.C.where he has led a wide-ranging,
ecumenical and inter-religious program of
research and publication. His twenty-four
books include Evangelical Catholicism:
Deep Reform in the 21st Century Church.
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illustration by (c) Kevin Carden
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