18
Sunday, Year B,
"Do not work for food that
perishes."
The Holy Catholic Church is greatly
interested in the affairs of men. For this, she is at once praised and
vilified. When the Church offers assistance to the poor, when she runs
hospitals and orphanages, when she helps negotiate terms of peace between
warring parties, then she is generally applauded, even by the irreligious. But
when she speaks about the social order, about marriage and chastity, about
integrity in political life, about the just limits of scientific research,
about the evil of abortion, or the illicit means of population control, about
immorality in art or music or fashion, then she is too often rebuked for
her involvement in areas of human life and activity that are judged beyond her.
Bluntly put, the Church is told to mind her own business and stay out of areas
of life that ought not to concern her. The Church, these critics would say,
should be involved in matters of a purely religious kind and not attempt to
influence matters that are not her competence.
The great divorce of religion–of matters of
faith–from public social, economic, political and ethical life has already been
successfully achieved, for the greater part, by almost every Protestant church
without exception. Religion has pretty well been reduced there to piety–and, at
that–a piety of a rather unholy sort. But the same trap has now also fettered the
thinking of a great number of Catholics who believe that the Church should not
overstep certain bounds. Priests have succumbed to this trend in preaching
about niceties of Christian fellowship (although they wouldn’t use that word),
or by making some strained, trifling application of a Gospel text, and by
avoiding all mention of those weighty moral and social problems that clamor for
the Church’s guidance, clarity, precision and correction: people’s everyday
moral problems. Our people are thus being starved; and they hunger–even when
they don’t realize it or acknowledge it–they hunger for the truth. Moreover,
the problem is compounded in our country where we are ever being reminded of an
imaginary ‘wall of separation’ between church and state, a wall that, if it
existed, would impede, if not stifle the effectiveness of the Church to make a
salutary change on social, ethical or political life. We are in great danger of
reducing the Catholic religion–which is to say, the fulness
of Christianity–to pleasant Sunday gatherings, to platitudes about "living
out our faith" (with no determinate meaning or application to life at
all), to a new Gospel of "unconditional love" (meaning, we can do
what we please and still love God), and to a vague moral doctrine that pretty
well leaves one to decide moral issues for himself. This is hunger, this is
starvation, it is spiritual death! (By the way, the
ironic outcome of this is that the relegation of the Church’s involvement to
purely religious matters has not produced within the Church a stronger dogmatic
emphasis in preaching and catechesis, nor has it led to a more reverent and
inspiring performance of her religious rites. Rather, ignorance of doctrine and
the bizarre rituals of the new age and of magic are ever on the increase.)
This proposed split of body and soul, the
divorce of matter and spirit, this banishment of the Church from much that
concerns what-skeptics-call ‘reality’, or the ‘real world’ (as if religion were
a fantasy), has largely succeeded. The resulting freedom from the Church’s
influence has given us leave to become materialists, sensualists, perverts,
swindlers, double-dealers in business, sterile in our marriages but richly
fertile in promiscuousness, sentimentalists or hard-nosed secularists–all
these, while yet free to continue to call ourselves Catholics.
"Do not work for food that
perishes." When we fail to become truly religious people, when the faith
is alien to our thinking, our voting, our daily choices, we are left to
creating our own opinions, to forming our own magisterium,
to inventing "values". We are left, in other words, with the
meaninglessness of things-as-they-are-given-by-God; we are left without
knowledge of the final destination of our lives and of the purposes for
which we have been created by God; we become blinded to God’s natural laws and
incapable of seeing His presence in the world. We are left only with this:
"working for the food that perishes." Living, in
effect, without God.
Our holy Catholic religion is the
enlightenment not only for the purely religious dimension of life, but of life
generally. "I am the bread of life", our Lord says. "Whoever
comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never
thirst." (This is only indirectly a reference to the Holy Eucharist–at
least at this point in our Lord’s discourse. Next week’s Gospel will focus the
attention specifically to this.) Jesus Christ is the satisfaction of all our
desires: of mind, of goodness, of truth, of beauty, of happiness. Consuming Jesus’s "bread" means ‘taking in’ His teachings,
adjusting our thinking and opinions to His truth, acting morally, observing the
Pope’s moral doctrines about the evils of contraception, abortion,
homosexuality and divorce. To quote again from this passage: ‘This is doing the work of God: that you believe in
the one sent by the Father, Christ.’ Being a fully observant Catholic is God’s
work. It is not the doctrine of man that we profess, but divine truth.
Believe Christ! embrace
Him! obey Him! He is divine ‘Bread’! Consume Him, lest
you hunger, lest you thirst, lest you die.