The Universal Church
13 December 1998 09:21
The following contribution is from the UK Director of the Aid to the Church in Need charity ( http://www.kirche-in-not.org )
It was very early on a Monday morning in a village on the edge of Mongolia. Even before 5am them were over 500 people crowding into the church waiting for Mass to begin. The litany of the Saints was sung, the Rosary prayed. People of all ages were there: young people in bright clothes, old men in their grey Mao suits, tiny children kneeling on little cushions and bigger school children squeezed in behind them. All came to kneel at the altar rail, either to receive Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament or to receive a blessing from the priest. Spiritually fortified, these people then went out to their daily toil: in the factories of the nearby town, the local fields or to the local school where the red flag still flies over the mud playground. This was a scene I was privileged to witness in China a few years ago: I felt very humble to be part of the same Universal Church – the Body of Christ.
Yet, in everyday parish life in this country today there is now a contrast to this universality: there is an insidious insularity creeping in to all things. It is so easy to forget the Church is more than the local church and parish. Many parish priests feel like administrators caught in the trap of the local and parochial. Ad nauseam talk of community, parish family, awareness groups, committees, rotas, the parish debt, the roof fund, the brick fund, the diocesan administration fund, the parish draw, the Christmas bazaar, coffee mornings, jumble sales and so on are all signs of this.
There is a danger that the local church becomes a club with club members focusing purely on money: the church fabric and even the local liturgical presentation. These inward looking tendencies exclude so many people who do not become involved on the inside, either because they are too busy or too fragile to cope. It can also leave a big gaping spiritual hole: a vacuum that the parish hardly has to time to recognise amidst its worldly busyness.
How can we reconcile the dilemma of this insularity and universality facing the Church? I remember visiting a parish on a housing estate in East Kilbride (Scotland). The parish priest, a big and warm man, with a direct presence. His mother had a great devotion to Our Lady of Fatima, and after a visiting priest preached there about Aid to the Church in Need and spoke of Eastern Europe and its spiritual needs, Fr Mick decided he had to do something.
His parish and his people have real problems. The church was in danger of being burnt down or vandalised if left open. Yet, he knew the answer. There was a small area outside the west door of the modern church. He got a gardener in and made a haven of peace and prayer, with a beautiful statue of Our Lady of Fatima. People now walk up from the estate to pray there. The husband of one Catholic lady wandered up one evening and he has now been received into the Church.
Fr Mick put it like this: “An inward looking Church is a dying Church. The four walls of this building are not the Church.” He had prayer and vision. His parish was not a cosy club, despite all its own real problems. His people were looking to God, not to one another, and looking out in love.
Back in China, I visited a hidden cemetery in woods two kilometres away from that village. There were buried the Christian faithful of the nearby villages in amongst the bamboo bushes; huge mounds of earth with wooden crosses on top, like gigantic mole hills. The relatives are only allowed to visit their family graves twice a year with the express permission of the local authorities. Yet, amongst these family graves there was a clearing where a formal tombstone stood. Here were buried four priests, four nuns who had been brutally stabbed to death, brothers and lay-people: they had all died for the faith, our faith, in 1968.
I stood in that clearing in the wood and I thought of all those 1968 dreams of hippy peace and love that were illusions in the West. Then, as I looked at that grave I thought of what real love meant for these priests, religious and people – the Way of the Cross. Only then did I really understand sornething of Tertullian’s words: sanguis martyrorum, semen christianonun – the blood of the martyrs, the seed of Christianity.
That was why the local church was full, the seminaries packed and hundreds of young girls becoming novices. For as one priest in China said: it is only through the flow of blood and tears that this new life has come to the Church.
At the close of this terrifying century of martyrs, perhaps we could look back, look out and look forward in prayer. After all, we do proclaim that we are part of the historical and Universal Chuich: that can help not only just parishes, but individuals in their own daily lives and the difficult struggles which they face.
Neville Kyrke-Smith
