The Church Must Be Rejected
Those who hate the Church can be forgiven, since most Christians make the Church a hateful thing. But woe to those whose uncharitable lives cause scandal and make the Church despised. “Everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but the one who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.”
The non-believer is neither the Church’s enemy nor our problem. The enemy of the Church, and our problem, comes from within. For example, if people speak against the Church, the Risen Body of The Son of Man, that sin can be forgiven, since the grace of God may yet enter into their hearts to cause their conversion. But what of the man who, after receiving the Holy Spirit of God, chooses not to live by the Spirit. What can he hope for?
The North American Martyrs, whom we remember today in the Church’s liturgy, were French Jesuits. The Jesuits were masters of the interior life of prayer and the discernment of spirits, promoted first by their founder, Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Therefore, when confronted by the hostility of some of the Native Americans, the Jesuits did not despair of their mission. They understood that such was to be expected from anyone who fears the Church, and who consequently blames the Church for their sufferings.
At the same time, the Jesuits knew every Native American to be capable of a relationship with the Church through the formation of the interior life, that a sin against the Son of Man could be forgiven, while the Christian remains called to stay true to the Spirit of Christ at work in the heart. Regarding the Huron people, for example, the Jesuit missionaries wrote home to France about the goodness of their hearts, and of their openness to Christ.
It seems to me that in these times of tyranny in which we live, the Christian does well to disenthrall himself from the warring political tribes of our times so as to see clearly again his mission. A disciple of Christ is a man who verifies that he is meeting the Risen Christ in the Church, growing in his conviction that those who blaspheme against the Church are not the real enemies (God knows they have their reasons) but that they can be forgiven.
The most pressing concern of the Christian should be his interior life of prayer. Because the man who lives by the Spirit bears fruit, but not in the way that an ordinary man may produce some new product or project, but like the Jesuit martyrs who, buried in New York like grains of wheat that fell to the ground and died, bore the fruit of evangelization and conversion, in the likes of a Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, who would be born in Auriesville just ten years after these Jesuits were buried there.
Not only is the rejection of the Church by the non-believer not our problem, but it is by and through the rejection of the Church that Christ works most powerfully in the world. “The Son of Man must go to Jerusalem, and be rejected by the elders, and be crucified.”
In his first homily to us after becoming Pope, the Jesuit currently at the helm of Peter’s Boat said, “I would like that all of us might have the courage – the courage – to walk in the presence of the Lord with the Cross of the Lord: to build the Church on the Blood of the Lord, and to profess the one glory, Christ Crucified. In this way, the Church will go forward.” +
