Can We Bear to Imagine It?
Therese asks a good question below is response to the post on declining Mass attendance in Mexico: "Wonder how many hungry people would be fed; naked or poorly clothed, clothed; homeless, housed; injustices, made just; etc, if all Mexicans took their faith seriously???? Wonder how much better their country might be?"
I had just been conducting one of the mental experiments I sometimes indulge in. What if the Christian faith had never existed (as some feverently wish) and you could remove from the last 2,000 years of history all the ripples and consequences from the actions of intentional disciples? What if every last fruit of the faith over the centuries was wiped away? What would the world look like today? Can we even begin to imagine it? Can we bear to imagine it?
Would slavery, which had always existed in every culture and was accepted as a unchangable part of human life, have been largely abolished and made abhorrent? The concept of the individual, human rights and the rights of women, healthcare, education, political life - what would they look like if millions of people had never attempted to be the love of Christ in their time and place?
Just to give you a concrete handle - let's look at the latest figures for 2006 from Fides, the Society for the Propogation of the Faith. These are figures only for a few categories of Catholic apostolates. Remember - 50% of the Christians in the world are not Catholic.
51.7 million students are in Catholic schools (K through university) in 2006
5,000 hospitals, 17,000 dispensaries, 648 leprosary centers, 15,000 homes for the elderly, chronically ill and disabled, 10,000 orphanages, 14,000 marrriage counseling centers: altogether 83,500 institutions devoted to social ministry around the world in 2006 were run by the Catholic Church.
Did I mention the 186,000 Catholic lay missionaries? The nearly 3 million catechists?
And yet, when you consider that there are 1.1 billion Catholics in the world, your eyes start to pop when you consider what the impact could be if the majority of our people were well-formed intentional disciples whose baptism was coming to fruition.
Can we imagine the Dorothy Days and Mother Teresas and Thomas Aquinases and Frederic Ozanams who are in our parishes today - or crossing the street to avoid our parishes! - who do not yet know Christ and therefore, are not yet living their call? Can we begin to imagine the gifts and vocations that Christ intends to send us but we have not yet cooperated in calling them forth? Can we imagine what is at stake in our failure to evangelize and form our own?
Can we bear to imagine it?
posted by Sherry W @ 9:06 AM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
Having spent some time in Mexico, I must say that I find the above comment a little puzzling.
Even if mass attendance is decreasing, it is my experience that Mexicans take their faith a lot more seriously than we do.
The comment also seems to imply that the people of Mexico don't take care of their poor. There are a lot of poor in Mexico, and my experience was that the Mexican people often take their obligation to help the poor for granted. You just don't see too many instances there of people begrudging the poor help in the "get a job" kind of way that is oh so prevalent here.
I wish more Americans were more like Mexicans in both their seriousness about their faith and their sense of obligation to the poor! We need to be asking this question just as much (if not more) about our country as theirs.
Mark:
I can't respond specifically to what Theresa may have meant about Mexico in particular because I have never been there.
My question was not directed to the situation in Mexico but in general and as it pertains to the US in particular.
Of course there are devout people in Mexico. But it is obvious (as evidenced by the statistics presented) that the bulk of the population are not attending Church services. The people's faith and knowledge of their faith is superficial. If this weren't so, Protestant missionaries would not consider everything south of the border as a kind of open season hunting zone for Catholic conversions. Mexicans who emigrate to the US would not be converting in such great numbers. More Mexicans would be priests. The Latinos in my CCD classes would not be so ignorant of the basic tenets of their faith. We actually asked 8th graders where Jesus was born and not one could answer Bethelhem. It seems no matter how basic the question about the life of Jesus, they don't know the answer. Not only did the US catechesis fail them but so did their parents. Just think, these are the children of parents who actually cared enough to send their children to CCD classes. There are only 14 children (3/4 Latinos) coming from 2 major public schools in the Washingon, DC area. Where are the children of the rest of these universally devout Catholic emigrees?
The poor helping the poor is what happens all around the world amongst the poor. Ironically, when you are poor, it is easier to give the little bit of excess that you might have, as it is seldom enough to substantially affect your economic security or comfort. I went to Russia and my engineer counterparts had not been paid in over 6 months. Yet they still went out of their way to give us not only an adequate lunch but a lavish lunch while they sat at their desks eating food they brought from home. Individuals gave us beautiful and expensive for them gifts. It was touching. These were largely atheistic former communists. Helping each other and giving to each other is a mode of survival when you are poor or oppressed.
When people start becoming affluent, they start taking security in what they own and possess and tend to cling to it for fear of loosing that security. I know. I grew up very poor -- poor like my father picked coal for heating and junk metals for spare cash to put dinner on the table when times where really tough. When I graduated and moved to DC I was taken aback when a colleague's parent died and fellow engineers really struggled to put a dollar towards a card and flowers because in the back of their mind they had some better use for that dollar. Giving it up somehow reduced their net worth significantly especially when so many cards were passed around recently. Meanwhile just a few years before, people I did not even know in my hometown who made far less and had families, gave my family donations of 20 and even 100 dollars when my father died young at 49.
I grew up in a nominally Catholic ethnic area in the US. What was the realilty of the faith of the people? It was skin deep. Most do not go to mass regularly any more. They'll pray or better yet ask someone else they know to be one of those a little off but maybe more holy religous people to pray for them. They seldom want to admit that they actually love God or that they even care THAT much to actually pray unless there is some urgent need or its a holiday and everyone else is doing it.
This kind of faith seldom goes beyond a hedge against bad times and a hope for better times. It cannot survive prosperity. And indeed what happens when Latinos come to the US? What happened when ethnic Catholics became prosperous here in the US or even in the Old World? This faith dissipates and faith is put in self reliance, being all one can be, and augmenting and preserving one's net worth. It only took 2 decades for the faith of the Irish to disipate. Mass attendance is way down there as are vocations. They have joined the ranks of the post-Christian Europeans.
Catholics such as these are quickly cherry picked by the Protestants. This would not be possible if they truly had a deep faith. If the Catholics in Mexico and the rest of Latin America had a deep faith , Protestants wouldn't be considering everything south of the border as open terroritory.
More importantly, Mexico is a democracy. No one would stand for the corruption and inequities in wealth distribution. People would be converting everyone in society to a deeper faith that would not allow the kind of economic and social injustices that go on throughout Mexico. The same is true for the US. If we were better converted, we would not stand for an American company paying workers 50 cents a day and firing them if they missed work due to sickness because there is another person who wants the job as badly as they do. (This happened in the 80's when a company I worked for farmed work out to a Mexican factory.) Gangs would not be so successful or prevalent. I could go on and on.
With respect to "being devout," there is outwardly devout and there is inwardly devout. It is hard to tell which is which and in general I believe it wrong to assume. Yet, I remember attending feast day services when I was a child. Adults used to say if you say this or that prayer or devotion, something good will happen. It seemed to me that many participated more in hope of receiving a good, than in hope of being more deeply converted to God, the ultimate good. I do not exempt myself from this.
This sounds harsh re-reading it but the truth is God is sooo very good and these people deserve to have the best of life: the Love, Joy and Peace of Jesus. They deserve to know the deep love of God, the love that can bring joy even in the midst of tears.
Mark, my point was that if Mexicans and, indeed, all of us were more deeply converted -- rich and poor -- fewer people would find themselves in abject spiritual or monetary poverty.
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