Pentecost Sunday - June 4, 2017

Homily for Pentecost Sunday

June 4, 2017

Why Be Catholic?

 

            I trust Wikipedia far more than I should. I also trust my GPS, my dentist, and my local newspaper (that last one might be a big mistake). We need to trust things like that because no one can figure out absolutely everything on their own! I know nothing about dentistry or auto mechanics – thus, I trust that my dentist and my mechanic know more than I do about their respective sciences!

            As great as it is to fix a car or show me the best route from Stamford to New Haven, there are more important matters in life – namely, how to love God well, to follow Him, and to get to Heaven. So wouldn’t Jesus leave us an authority to guide us on the most important matters? He did – He left us His Word in the Scriptures, and He left us His Church to teach His Word without error.

            Three thousand people converted to Christ because of Peter’s preaching on Pentecost – but it wasn’t his preaching alone that did it. It was the authority behind that teaching – authority because it was filled with the power of the Holy Spirit. Peter (our first Pope) and the Apostles (our first Bishops) were given the authority to teach and preach in Christ’s name! The Gospel features Jesus giving the authority to forgive sins to His Apostles, through the power of the Spirit. Clearly, Jesus entrusts His Church with remarkable authority – the authority to preach and forgive in His name!

            Some of our Protestant brothers and sisters say that the only authority we need is the Bible. But the Bible itself gives witness that the Church is indispensable – for example, 1 Timothy 3:15 says that “the pillar and bulwark of the truth is…the Church!” Besides, there are over 33,000 different Protestant denominations, all claiming that the Bible is their only authority – yet the Bible is not meant to splinter us into so many different groups with diverse teachings! Thus, we need an authentic interpreter of Scripture – one who can tell us how it applies to modern day.

            It’s a lot like our government. We have our Constitution, which is the foundational document of our nation. But how does that apply to today? Lots of questions come up that need answers – so we have the Supreme Court to help us interpret the Constitution.

            But we have one major difference – we have a promise that the Holy Spirit will never desert the Church (while our government does not have the same kind of assurance!). This makes sense – imagine that someone gave you a GPS and said, “Yeah, this is probably right, but it might make some mistakes.” How likely are you to trust the GPS – or that fake friend, for that matter? Not likely. So would Jesus give us His Church if it could be wrong every now and then? What kind of church would that be? It makes sense, then, that Christ would make sure His Church would have the gift of the Holy Spirit known as infallibility to make sure we wouldn’t stray off the path.

            Infallibility means that the Church would never teach an error. Infallibility does not mean that everyone in the Church is perfect. You may have heard of “The Keepers” which is a new Netflix documentary that discusses some of the evils committed by a priest in Baltimore in the 1960s. A friend who watched it posted on social media, “The Catholic Church is a corrupt organization! I will never set foot in a Catholic Church again!” I had to respond that while yes, there are many great sinners in the Church, there are many great saints as well. And only in the Catholic Church do we find the fullness of grace – through faith, Scripture, and Sacraments – which can take a sinner and make them a saint! The Church is full of imperfect people, which is a good thing – because I am an imperfect person! As the great novelist Walker Percy said to a friend who had converted to Catholicism, “The Church is a very untidy group you are hooking up with, but it’s the one thing that will be around until the end!”

            This past week in our middle school lunchtime bible study, we were asking the kids what they liked about being Catholic. I was expecting something like, “I like our church building, or the music, or the great coffee and donuts after Mass.” But in each session, they all said, “I like being Catholic because it is true.” There are a lot of perks to being Catholic. The saints, the beauty, the tradition…but all of those are not the main reason. We are Catholic because it is true. It is only here that we receive Christ’s true Body and Blood in the Eucharist. It is only within the loving embrace of the Church that we read and interpret Scripture rightly. It is only here that we encounter Christ in His fullness. St. Ignatius of Antioch said back in the second century, “Where the bishop is, there is the Church, and where the Catholic Church is, there is Jesus Christ.”

            Why be Catholic? Because it’s true, and it was established by Jesus Christ with the authority to lead us to Heaven. That’s good enough for me!