A Response to Father Radcliffe

By questioning Father Timothy Radcliffe's statement recently posted to this blog, I fear I will be seen by some as uncharitable. After all, who could take issue with a call to love sinners or with a portrayal of the church as a home and sanctuary? And, yet, I believe that an overly indulgent and unchallenging approach to the Church’s teaching would render the Church ineffective as a vessel for sanctification and irrelevant as a witness to the truth in a troubled society.

The message of hospitality is always comforting, but the welcome extended to all by Christ’s Church cannot be divorced from the vigorous challenge offered to all by the Church’s teaching. The Church must always energetically exhort its members to live and act according to the mission, especially when the Church speaks to those possessing or seeking the political power to alter and reform society. Without that integral element of responsibility and accountability, Father Radcliffe’s statement strikes me as radically incomplete as a description either of Church or of home.

“The Church,” Father Radcliffe says, “should be a large, capacious home for all sorts of oddbods, saints and sinners, progressives and conservatives, the convinced and the searching.” Father Radcliffe protests that his statement is “not wish washy relativism.” Methinks he doth protest too much. Yes, the Church should always welcome sinners and seekers and indeed should seek them out with compassion. But the Church must also act with firm and loving correction, just as we should expect from our family members when we go astray and then later return home.

In framing his message of welcome and church as home, Father Radcliffe says that when we come to the Church, we should be left “untroubled and unafraid.” When seekers and sinners came to Jesus and after they had been greeted in love, did he not then exhort them to live as His disciples and to witness His truth to the world? Was Jesus constrained to leave those who heard him “untroubled and unafraid,” carefully choosing his words and actions with nuance and sensitivity so that no one would feel unwelcome, no would be subjected to pointed questioning, no one would be offended, no one would be left to conclude they might be in serious error, etc.? I seem to recall Jesus uttering the rather direct, arguably intolerant, words, “Get thee behind me Satan!” And, note, that this strong rebuke was directed toward a particular individual in a position of some or potential authority. Jesus’s words of correction were unequivocal, although the hope and ultimately the reality of reconciliation remained available after repetenance. Might there not be a message here for the Church today as well?

Let us further consider, could our Church be true to itself were it to receive in placid silence those who openly advocate racial segregation, those who call for extermination or the sterilization of the mentally infirm, those who advocate unrestricted license to abort the unborn, those who would undermine the institution of marriage by removing its foundation in the complementarity of the genders, etc., with speaking challenging words of truth and, yes, rebuke when merited? Does anyone really believe that the archbishop of Louisiana was reprehensively unwelcoming in 1956 when he warned Catholic legislators that they risked excommunication if they voted for a proposed law requiring separation of the races in school? Did his strong words improperly introduce conflict into the Church home? Some leaders of the Catholic Church in the Germany of the 1930s have been sharply criticized for inadequately challenging the rise of Nazi leadership in that country and for failing to exclude Nazi Party members from the Church. Would anyone today instead hold up such inaction as a model example of proper churchly tolerance?

In sum, if each individual is free to claim Catholic affiliation when it is comfortable and beneficial, while assuming a license without fear of any rebuke to emphatically and publicly reject Church teaching when expedient, then the witness of the Catholic Church to our larger society on any issue would be entirely undone.

Moreover, if we were to reconstruct the Catholic Church into a homeless shelter, housing all who seek shelter without challenge or correction, we thereby would sacrifice the very elements that empower the Church to offer the love and peace that we all seek. A gathering of people without a shared vision and purpose can never be a fellowship upon which the blessings of God's peace would be bestowed. Instead, to be a Catholic is to become one part of the worldwide Body of Christ animated by a shared belief in the Gospel and a commitment to values that are larger than any single one of us or any single parish. A community of faith is not a holding station for a disparate and dissolute group of unconnected people with no common purpose. If the Church were to devolve into an open-ended social club devoid of principled content and reluctant to exert any call upon its members, the Church simply would cease to be the Church.

I submit that this is also an impoverished view of home and family life as an analogy to the Church. A genuine familial love experienced in the home is both a balm and a rod. When we return home and are again among our most intimate family members, we can no longer get away with the pathetic excuses for failing to take responsibility that we offer to others. Nor can we avoid being called to account for the compromises of principle and affection that we make in the outside world. Our family knows from whence we came and knows what our true potential remains. To fully achieve the joy and fellowship of full membership in the Catholic Church, we likewise must accept the responsibilities that accompany that affiliation. This is no different than the accountability and sense of mutual obligation that exists among members of a family within a home.

Consider again the words of our Lord Jesus, which begin Father Radcliffe's statement: “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” The promise of love is accompanied by an exhortation to keep God's word. To live in the fullness of that love, and to experience God’s peace, we must overcome sin and join our will to that of the Lord. If we do anything less, we are left far from home.

Greg