Published October 5, 2024
A Living Church
During a magnificent liturgy on October 3, at which two of my former students and a fellow parishioner from St. Jane Frances de Chantal Church in Bethesda, Maryland, were ordained deacons, it occurred to me that it had been exactly sixty years and four months since I first set foot in the Papal Basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican: which is, at one and the same time, an architectural, engineering, and decorative marvel; the stage on which the drama of world Catholicism is played out in a media age; a vast Christian necropolis in which many saints are buried; and the world’s greatest tombstone. The last, of course, is what gives ultimate meaning to all the rest, for it is the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles that makes St. Peter’s so much more than a tourist attraction, more than the baroque ecclesiastical version of the Empire State Building, Windsor Castle, or Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.
When I first came to the basilica in 1964 on a month-long parish “Grand Tour” of Europe, the vast nave of St. Peter’s—six hundred twenty-four feet long—was filled with cushioned bleachers, rising some twenty tiers about the floor and extending from the red porphyry stone near the atrium on which Pope Leo III had crowned Charlemagne “Holy Roman Emperor” in A.D. 800 to just short of the papal high altar and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s stupendous baldacchino. The bleachers had been built to accommodate the 2,500 bishops attending the Second Vatican Council, which was then on pause between its second and third working periods. That, more than half a century later, I would write a book about that seminal event was a thought that never entered my adolescent mind. Like just about every first-time visitor to the Vatican basilica, I was simply overwhelmed by its size and the magnificence of its decoration (another expression of Bernini’s genius).
Vatican II cemented in the global media’s mind what I’ve often called the “cowboys-and-Indians hermeneutic” of the Catholic Church: The Church is a vast, sprawling, international organism in which there are ongoing and sometimes bitter contentions, typically about power, between good Catholic progressives and bad Catholic traditionalists. That this “narrative” makes no sense of the Council is a point I hope to have nailed down in To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II. What struck me this past Thursday morning, however, was how that politicized cartoon of the contemporary Catholic reality was making no sense of what was going on, at and around the basilica’s Altar of the Chair (now, thanks to the generosity of the Knights of Columbus, being restored under a scrim that, this past Thursday, made it impossible for ordinands, congregants, and pilgrims to ponder yet another Bernini masterpiece, this one of great theological and spiritual significance).
For here was a living Church: men, women, and children, primarily from the United States but in truth from all over the world, joined in prayer to the Thrice-Holy God as fifteen men promised to become living sacrifices for the healing and sanctification of the world. They were being ordained by a man who stood in a line of apostolic succession that runs back to the band gathered in Acts 15 around the Galilean fisherman above whose bones we were praying. They had come from different backgrounds and had brought different life experiences to this moment. But they would not have been here if it were not the case that, as Pope Benedict XVI insisted at his inaugural papal homily on April 24, 2005, “The Church is young!” Young with youthful vitality. Young with youthful enthusiasm. Young with youthful optimism. And, yes (at least among those of chronological youthfulness), young with youthful naivete about what lies ahead. But not decrepit; not moribund; and certainly not dead.
The fifteen ordinands will serve dioceses that range quite literally from “sea to shining sea”: from Portland, Oregon, to the nation’s capital, with Tyler and Beaumont in Texas, Venice in Florida, Brooklyn, Nashville, Green Bay, Fort Wayne-South Bend, Duluth, Sante Fe, Rapid City, and Tulsa in-between. They are the products of vibrant Catholic families, parishes, schools, and campus ministries. They are being prepared for the priesthood at a reformed seminary, the Pontifical North American College (and it was a special grace that the college rector who began that reformation, Cardinal Edwin O’Brien, was present “in choir” for the ordination). These fifteen men will eventually return home to take up priestly ministry in local churches that face daunting challenges, including an ever more toxic culture and an increasingly cynical citizenry. But they will return to a living Church.
For that is what those parts of the Church in the United States that have embraced the teaching of the Second Vatican Council as authoritatively interpreted by two men of the Council, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, are: living cells in a living body, the Mystical Body of Christ in the United States of America on the edge of its sesquicentennial.
It may be hoped that the Synod on Synodality is aware of all that, and perhaps even learns from it and from similar expressions of living Catholicism around the world.
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George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Catholic theologian and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.