Be a Minister to Christ

Several MOJ contributors (including Rick Garnett, Richard Stith, Michael Perry, Michael Sacperlanda, and Tom Berg) have recently addressed issues relating to the roles of Catholics and other Christians in public life—be that life in the liturgy of the Church, in prayer, or in the political and public events of the day. I think that many well informed people (lay, clerical, and religious) have the impression that the role of the laity in particular is something new in the Church that resulted from various promulgations of the Second Vatican Council that would include the Decree on the Laity and the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. But this would not be an accurate assessment. While the role of the laity can be traced back much earlier (and I agree with Michael S. that Professor Eamon Duffy’s excellent book The Voices of Morebath demonstrate this in one particular country, i.e., England, but we should also not forget about the roles of people like Thomas More) we need to take stock of what Pope Pius XII said in his first encyclical letter Summi Pontificatus:

This collaboration of the laity with the priesthood in all classes, categories and groups reveals precious industry and to the laity is entrusted a mission than which noble and loyal hearts could desire none higher nor more consoling. This apostolic work, carried out according to the mind of the Church, consecrates the layman as a kind of “Minister to Christ” in the sense which Saint Augustine explains as follows: “When, Brethren, you hear Our Lord saying: where I am there too will My servant be, do not think solely of good bishops and clerics.” You too in your way minister to Christ by a good life, by almsgiving, by preaching His Name and teaching to whom you can. (N. 89)

Throughout this letter, Pius XII identifies and discusses the important role of lay Catholics, especially in the temporal spheres of human existence.

When times get difficult for people, as Michael P. points out regarding the junta years in Argentina, what happens? Where is the Church? What are its members doing to avoid catastrophe? As Rick points out, we are sinners, and we do not always respond well to the circumstances at hand. But, by the same token, it is important to recall that some folks do what they can to stop the nonsense of the day. It may not be much, but they do what they can—which people later down the line may say was not enough. But what would these post-event critics have done differently if they could have done anything?

Questions have certainly been raised about what did Catholics do during the Third Reich in Germany. Let me pose three illustrations that develop this.

The first comes from a story related by Archbishop Raymond Burke in his 2004 Pastoral Letter On Our Civic Responsibility for the Common Good. In the early 1980s he spent a summer in Germany while he was doing his graduate studies in Rome at the Pontifical Gregorian University. He went to Germany to improve his German language skills useful to his academic work. But this opportunity to study in Germany also presented him with the occasion to serve the local church. Archbishop Burke relates that during this period he had some conversations with the lay sacristan at a parish. This man was a teenager at the time the Nazis came to power. As the Archbishop relates (N. 2), this person was “haunted” by the question how the people of his beloved country “could have permitted such horrible evils to happen at all or to go on for so long.” Other conversations in which the archbishop participated suggested that some Catholic bishops did little if anything to teach against the evils of the day, i.e., Nazism. But as I have said, people tend to do what they can to combat the evil of the present moment. History may judge that this was not enough notwithstanding what was attempted to rectify a difficult situation. And this brings me to the second illustration that involves Germany.

This story relates the work of Father, then Bishop, then Cardinal Clemens August von Galen. The Third Reich did not care for von Galen, and, because of what he tried to accomplish in the name of God and the Church, he did little to improve his image amongst the Nazis. But improving his image held by this regime was not his particular concern since he was a dedicated pastor. In a homily that he delivered in the summer of 1941, he exhorted the faithful to withstand the evils of the Nazis with these words:

[S]teel yourselves and hold fast! At this moment we are not the hammer, but the anvil. Others, chiefly intruders and apostates, hammer at us; they are striving violently to wrench us, our nation and our youth from our belief in God. We are the anvil, I say, and not the hammer, but what happens in the forge? Go and ask the blacksmith and see what he says. Whatever is beaten out on the anvil receives its shape from the anvil as well as the hammer. The anvil cannot and need not strike back. It need only be hard and firm. If it is tough enough it invariably outlives the hammer. No matter how vehemently the hammer falls; the anvil remains standing in quiet strength, and for a long time will play its part in helping to shape what is being moulded.

Von Galen did what he could with the resources available to him to stem the evil of his day.

A third illustration is the life of another German, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the army officer and Catholic who also understood the evil ways of the Nazis. He was one of the principals in the unsuccessful attempt made on Hitler’s life in 1944. When the assassination attempt failed, Von Stauffenberg was summarily executed and his family was punished by the Nazis.

While his particular method of countering the evils of Nazism may well be critiqued, von Stauffenberg did what he could to stem the evils of his day.

But there is yet another story that I would like to relate today involving our own country, the United States. We are troubled by a war, by poverty, by white collar and conventional crime, by infidelity, by drugs, by terrorism, and by many other problems. To borrow from Michael P.’s question: “will someone please tell us what the… bishops of the Catholic Church—my Church, our Church—were doing during” in these times? But this question should not be restricted to the successors of the Apostles since it involves all of us. Archbishop Burke’s formulation of the question seems more appropriate to me: how can the people of our beloved country permit such horrible evils to happen at all or to go on for so long? Again I will suggest that people tend to do what they can. Individual bishops, individual dioceses, individual parishes, individual priests, individual religious, and individual members of the laity do what they can and what is proper to their calling to address the evils of our time. The fact that we individually and corporately may be doing something is not to say that we are doing everything that we can.

I would like to conclude this posting with this thought. I, for one, think that one of the greatest evils that has been going on in this United States is the wake of Roe. I suspect that I have not always been welcome by colleagues in the teaching profession because of my views on this grave matter, but I try to do what I can to stem the tide of this evil even though my actions are at best very modest. But I must acknowledge that other brave souls have shown me how to use the tools of reason and explanation to meet the challenges of this calling to which all of us have been summoned and to which some of us have responded. As of the most current count, there have been over forty million abortions performed in the U.S. since Roe was decided. That is a lot of death with no end in sight despite the claims by some persons in or seeking public office that the nation must keep the procedure legal but rare.

What can be said of those who are haunted by this iniquity? And how can the people of our beloved country permit “such horrible evils to happen at all or to go on for so long”? Let us begin by realizing we do what we can do and what we cannot, but let us also not fail to ask what more can we do? We can be a minister to Christ, that is what we can do, and there are many ways of responding.     RJA sj