Dominica XXI per annum

23 August, A.D. MMXXVI

+ A.M.D.G. +

“Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are his judgements and how unsearchable his ways!”

            There are few judgements of the Lord more inscrutable – more difficult to justify by human reason – than His choice of Peter, the poor fisherman from an obscure corner not only of the Roman empire but even of the Jewish world itself, to lead the divine society he founded that is the Catholic Church. However, our Lord turns worldly criteria on their head when He tells Peter, “flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.” What flesh and blood – the wisdom of this world – has not revealed to St. Peter is his dramatic profession of faith in response to Christ’s question, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter responds, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” The basis of Christ’s choice of Peter is not any human quality he has, but that Peter is attuned to what is revealed by God.

            The Church, the world would tell us, is imperfect. It is out of date, tired, old-fashioned, and “on the wrong side of history” – maybe helpful for people back in the day, and maybe helpful even now for some, but hardly for everyone. Of course, there is a truth here; the Church is imperfect! She is a divine society with a heavenly destiny, but she is also composed of men and women who are imperfect, marked by original sin and subject to many forms of human frailty. But the Church is the body of Christ, which means that just as Christ is both perfectly human and perfectly divine, so too is the Church.

            Christ promises that the gates of the netherworld will never prevail against His holy Church. This promise is fulfilled through the Church’s teaching about faith and morals. The gates of the netherworld do not prevail against the Church – against the members of Christ’s body – because the Church faithfully teaches all that is necessary to spend eternity with God in Heaven instead of in the netherworld. Christ’s promise that the gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church is precisely about the Church’s authority to teach on faith and morals – Her authority to guide us in the ways of life, rather than the ways of death.

            We often think of the Church’s teaching as something that restricts us, something that makes us less free. What business does the Church have, we might think, telling us what to do? However, far from being a force that restricts us, dogma – the Church’s definitive teachings – frees us. Flannery O’Connor, a great American Catholic writer of the 20^th Century, in an essay she wrote about being a Catholic author, addressed the criticism of many people that adhering to Catholic dogma would restrict her abilities as a writer. She responded that, “Dogma is an instrument for penetrating reality. Christian dogma is about the only thing left in the world that surely guards and respects mystery.”

            “The only thing left in the world that surely guards and respects mystery.” Whether it is the way one ought to run a business, how one ought to worship God, or the right way for a man and a woman to express their love for each other according to their state in life, the Church’s teachings do not restrict us but free us to do what is right and good. They guard and respect the mystery of who are as made in God’s image and likeness as His beloved sons and daughters. They protect us from the ultimate boredom and banality (or unoriginality) of evil. Further, dogma, “is an instrument for penetrating reality.” It tells us what is real, instead of a world that ignores truth (or even the possibility of truth!) as inconvenient to its relentless pursuit of pleasure. Placing pleasure above truth is ultimately a lie about who we are as men and women – rational souls with a higher calling than mere seekers of pleasure.

Dogma – the definitive teaching of the Church – frees us because it rightly orders our lives. Without the guidance of Christ’s Church, what we have is not more freedom, but chaos. Without order and structure in your life, you do less of things you want to do, not more. When you have an ordered life, when you keep a regular schedule and a calendar, when you’re intentional about the way you spend your time, you have the freedom to say “no” to less important things, because you’ve already made time for the most important things. Order and structure make you freer to do what you really want to do with your time.

            So too does the Church’s dogma have the power to order our lives and make us more truly free. The Church’s teachings are not blunt instruments of torture imposed by crabby old men who want others to share their misery. They are a gift from a God who loves us and wants to order our lives according to what is true and good to make us more truly ourselves, capable of fulfilling the grand calling He has given us – the great adventure of sainthood.

The most beautiful and important realities in life are not the easiest to understand. In fact, they are the most mysterious, the impossible to understand – why do I love this person the way I do? Why do I feel so attached to this place, to these people? Why does my heart soar when I hear my favorite song? Why do I have a sense that some things are right and some things are wrong?

Our tendency is to jettison, to put aside, something that no longer makes sense. Just as we throw away countless disposable items every day, dogma and doctrine seem disposible, to be discarded when they no longer feel right. But a world without mystery, a world where everything makes sense, is a shallow world that will not hold our attention very long. We see evidence around us of that all the time – the world with the attention span of a goldfish – because the deeper meanings have been lost when we lose dogma’s ability to penetrate deeper realities.

But a world in which everything is mysterious would also be inhuman. It would leave us confused and disoriented. Thus, in His infinite wisdom, God has provided us with a rock, a place of refuge to be relied upon, that makes us more human by guarding and respecting the great mysteries of life, a custodian of divine revelation that penetrates reality, based not upon what flesh and blood have revealed, but the power to guard and respect the great mysteries of human life and Christian faith guaranteed by the Lord’s promise: “Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld will not prevail against it.”

At times, dogma doesn’t make sense. We’re not anti-rationalists as Catholics. We believe in the harmony of faith and reason. But that doesn’t mean there’s always a harmony between faith and my reason. Sometimes, we have to wrestle with dogma, to persevere through confusion and misunderstanding to grasp the reason behind what doesn’t seem to fit me anymore. But we don’t do that on our own. We do it guided by a Church that helps us in that struggle, who is a custodian of sacred teachings that penetrate deeper realities, and guards and respects greater mysteries.

The Church is called to be a prophet, a voice crying in the wilderness in our world. She helps us to see beyond what flesh and blood would reveal to us. Flesh and blood – shallow human opinion – would see the Church as a worn out relic of another time. But our heavenly Father – just as He revealed to St. Peter that his friend Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God – reveals something different to us: “the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband,” in which are fulfilled the Father’s words from the Book of Revelation: “Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them.”

This beautiful city, this bride adorned for Her Husband, this dwelling place of God with men, is His holy Church, the Catholic Church, prophesied in the Scriptures, founded by Christ Himself, and enduring to this very day and even until the end of time itself. The Church will never be out of date, behind the times, or on the wrong side of history because the Church’s teaching “is an instrument for penetrating reality … the only thing left in the world that surely guards and respects [the most important] mystery.”

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

XXI Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXVI