Bureaucracies are all the same. They seem to thrive on obstructionism—insisting on unnecessary procedures and red tape. 

Regardless of whether they are governmental, business or not-for-profit agencies, bureaucracies stifle innovation, creativity and enthusiasm. They are impersonal and mechanical in their interaction with the individuals and communities they claim to serve.

Church bureaucracies are no different except that they often claim a higher authority for their obstructionism. Ecclesiastical red tape is every bit as frustrating as the secular version, but it can be even more irritating when Church bureaucrats act as if they were God’s emissaries. The reason is that while there is an institutional (incarnational) dimension to the Church’s daily life, her truest nature is personal not institutional. As a result, when people who work for the Church—whether clergy or laity—obstruct the Church’s pastoral mission, the offense given is truly a grave one.

Writing about the Second Vatican Council’s teaching about the Church, Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) said this:

Church is not a contrivance or an apparatus, not merely an institution or one of the usual sociological entities—she is a person. She is a woman; she is a mother. She is alive. The Marian understanding of the Church is the most categorical antithesis to a merely organizational or bureaucratic concept of Church. We cannot make Church; we must be Church. And we are Church, and Church is in us only inso far as faith shapes our being, above and beyond anything we do. Only in Marian being do we become Church. At the origins, too, Church was not made but born. She was born when the fiat was awakened in Mary’s soul. This is the most profound desire of the [Second Vatican] Council: that the Church might awaken in our souls. Mary shows us the way. (Joseph Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism and Politics)

We are urged to take our petitions for spiritual as well as material needs directly to Mary. There is no red tape in her, no roundabout or unnecessary procedures. Mary hears our voices. She responds by interceding for us immediately before the throne of grace.

We can be confident that our Blessed Mother clears away all obstacles to our becoming Church, the People of God, member’s of Christ’s Body, by showing us the way to say “yes” to God’s will for us—even when we are confused, frightened or unsure.

There is no bureaucracy in Mary, no unnecessary procedures or red tape. In her there is only complete openness and the desire to help us become happy, joyous and free.

The Church should be like Mary. We who are the Church should cast aside all pettiness, all rushing to judgment and all rigid interpretation of rules in order to listen to others and respond to their needs. When that happens, the Church will awaken in our souls and we will be free.

Nick Ring’s Madonna and Child

Spartanburg, SC

When somebody has an answer for every question, it is a sign that they are not on the right road. (Pope Francis)

Gaudete et Exsultate (Rejoice and be Glad) On the Call to Holiness in Today’s World by Pope Francis is one more instance of this pope’s inspiring, prophetic, hope-filled and occasionally controversial teaching. 

Pope Francis makes it very clear that holiness is not something that only a saint can achieve. All are called to holiness and all have the potential—aided by God’s grace—to become holy. “These witnesses may include our own mothers, grandmothers or other loved ones,” the pope says. “Their lives may not always have been perfect, yet even amid their faults and failings they kept moving forward and proved pleasing to the Lord” (#4).

I like to contemplate the holiness present in the patience of God’s people: in those parents who raise their children with immense love, in those men and women who work hard to support their families, in the sick, in elderly religious who never lose their smile. In their daily perseverance I see the holiness of the Church militant. Very often it is a holiness found in our next-door neighbors, those who, living in our midst, reflect God’s presence. We might call them “the middle class of holiness.”

Here Pope Francis rejects what might be called “the elitism of sanctity” and calls attention to its presence (not perfectly or completely but truly) in ordinary people, the middle class of holiness. This emphasis on what the Second Vatican Council called “the universal call to holiness” is not unique to Pope Francis, but, as always, this pope uses vivid images and gestures to reinforce his teaching. 

Critics accuse Pope Francis of sowing doubt and confusion by urging flexibility in the application of traditional Church teaching to concrete situations. Gaudete et Exsultate will not silence those who question the pope’s orthodoxy. In fact, the Holy Father uses this apostolic exhortation to challenge those whom he considers “subtle enemies of holiness” to cast off their “narcissistic and authoritarian elitism” and embrace a more open, loving and forgiving attitude toward the struggles of ordinary people who seek to follow Jesus in spite of their weakness, selfishness and sin. 

When somebody has an answer for every question, it is a sign that they are not on the right road,” the pope says. “They may well be false prophets, who use religion for false purposes to promote their own psychological or intellectual theories. God infinitely transcends us; he is full of surprises. We are not the ones to determine when and how we will encounter him; the exact times and places of that encounter are not up to us. Someone who wants everything to be clear and sure presumes to control God’s transcendence (#41).

These are challenging words—addressed to those who claim that the teaching of this pope causes “confusion” among the faithful who long for clarity and certainty in the Church’s teaching. 

Perhaps the most serious issue for many of the pope’s critics is his statement that defense of the unborn and other social justice issues are “equally sacred.” 

Our defense of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear, firm and passionate, for at stake is the dignity of a human life, which is always sacred and demands love for each person, regardless of his or her stage of development. Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged, the vulnerable infirm and elderly exposed to covert euthanasia, the victims of human trafficking, new forms of slavery, and every form of rejection. We cannot uphold an ideal of holiness that would ignore injustice in a world where some revel, spend with abandon and live only for the latest consumer goods, even as others look on from afar, living their entire lives in abject poverty (#101).

This is the both/and of Catholicism. While it’s undeniably true that defense of the unborn is a grave responsibility for Christians and all who affirm the dignity of human life from the moment of conception to the point of natural death, we cannot be faithful to the Gospel if we neglect any of the other issues of morality and social justice which the pope calls to our attention. We must be both radically pro-life and uncompromisingly firm in our opposition to all forms of injustice. 

As always, the words of Pope Francis make us uncomfortable even as they assure us of God’s mercy and encourage us to find both hope and joy in the life of missionary discipleship to which we are called by virtue of our baptism. 

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