A Summary

“...Signs of Hope among the people are many and they far outweigh the admitted sins and failing within the community. ”

In the Catholic Church today, there are many signs of hope. Catholics today feel their ability to relate to God is very good in and through the Church, and that is the principal purpose of religion. Catholics are clear that they relate to God in and through Jesus Christ, and, especially since the Second Vatican Council, the Church has made amazing strides in improving the means available for people to relate to Him, effectively. 

The Church has done so by updating and renewing its primary resources, namely the Scriptures, the Sacraments, the Creeds, its parish organizational structure, and the Liturgical Year. These are the means through which the Church touches directly the life of its members, regularly.

Each of these is a way the Church reaches its individual members, and affects the spiritual lives of those members. In doing so, it fulfills one of the two basic purposes of the Church. The second basic purpose is reaching and affecting the communal life of those members. To strike the most appropriate balance between dealing with the individual member as an individual and as a member of the church community requires a constant effort on the part of the Church, and one that is seldom achieved. The common tendency is to err in the direction of the individual or the community. Nevertheless, it is the duty of the Church to attempt this difficult balance. Each church member understands this difficulty as he or she experiences the difficulty of achieving this balance in family life, first and foremost.

The life of Jesus Christ is the main reference point for achieving this balance, and every other challenge in life. He managed both to meet the needs of the individual in his life, and communal needs.

Catholics are disciples of Jesus Christ. Individually, they strive to follow him by adopting his perspective on life and his Way of Life. The Church and its primary resources help and support individual Catholics in their efforts to follow Jesus in these ways.

While the Catholic Church has always emphasized the communal nature of the Faith and fostered communal expressions of that Faith it has not been as successful in updating its efforts in these regards today. Perhaps, this is one of the consequences of the Church’s almost total break with Judaism. Judaism also emphasises the communal nature of religion and does so more effectively, I believe, than Catholicism and other forms of Christianity. For example, Judaism is effective today, as it always has been, in communicating a sense of peoplehood or community to its individual members.  In addition, the Exodus is understood as the principal religious event in the history of the Jews, and the Exodus empasises the fact that religion is about the practice of justice and mercy towards all people as well as the worship of God. In the regular practice of their Faith the Jews attempt to spell out specifically what the practice of justice and mercy towards others involves.

Jesus was a totally communal human being as well as an individually spiritual man. He demonstrated this fact through his lifelong goal of working for the restoration of the people Israel, as well as in other ways.

Catholics today have the task of reemphasizing their communal nature, as well as their individual responsibilities. They are called to do so with something of the effectiveness that have demonstrated in renewing the primary resources of their individual spirituality. To state this is not to deny the fact that many individual Catholics and small groups of Catholics perform valuable social services. And, it is most emphatically not to deny that a great deal of good things have been happening within the community. It is simply to suggest an agenda for the future.

In a recent article in America magazine Bishop Thomas Curry of the Los Angeles archdiocese has heaped praise on America’s Catholic laypeople for their recent and past  accomplishments, which have been most impressive. He is correct in doing so, for the Signs of Hope among the people are many and they far outweigh the admitted sins and failing within the community. Bishop Curry is one of the few individual Catholics or Americans who have publicly recognized this fact. It is not a matter of false pride, but simply one of fairness, that all of us do the same.