Is the Church in crisis?

By Fr. ROY CIMAGALA, roycimagala@gmail.com
April 16, 2013

To give a quick, blunt reply, the Church has always been in crisis. That’s its character, it goes with the territory, since it has to deal with all kinds of people, some brilliant and faithful, others not so, etc. That it appears in crisis today is no breaking news.

I suspect that the question is raised today because of that survey that reportedly showed dwindling numbers of churchgoers. But I consider that question moot and academic, with hardly any practical use other than to provoke or embarrass some people.

Ok, there is some supposedly serious reason why such decline is happening. But that’s precisely the reason why the Church continues to be in some trouble. Even with Christ, there already was severe crisis. He had Judas and some Jews pestering him. He was crucified, remember, for carrying out his mission.

After him with the Church established, the crisis has not stopped but continues to fester under different forms and ways and in different circumstances. The problem the Church has to contend up to the end of time will be lack of faith and everything that follows it.

Try imagining persuading people about a supernaturally mysterious God, about spiritual and supernatural realities like faith, hope and charity, God becomes man who is Christ, the role of the Holy Spirit, the nature and mission of the Church, etc.

To top it all, try imagining making people understand about our weakened human condition, the reality of the devil, sin and temptations, and the need for abiding ascetical struggle, the development of virtues, the recourse to the sacraments, etc.

But remember Christ and his apostles. Many times, Christ had to scold his apostles for their lack of faith even in the face of the obvious. Such will be our predicament. We just have to learn to live with it, and continue to do something about it, always with the help of grace. It’s an exciting life, what we have.

The survey, I suspect, was clearly politically motivated. It came out all of a sudden. I’ll see if I have enough motive to bother to check who were behind it. It was meant to be like the North Korean threat, to pressure the Church to bend to the preferences of some politicians.

Remember that we are in an election campaign season, and the RH issue is kind of hot. Even some clerics put themselves at odds with the official Church stand on it and are twitting and facebooking their questionable views among which is precisely the claim that with the Church position on RH, many people are deserting the churches.

Critics of the Church will always exhume past scandals, slamming it with the current ones and even inventing some, to support their claim. Well, we are in this imperfect world. Nothing is new. We just have to try our best to be hopeful and do whatever we can to spread the truth in charity and goodness.

As to the survey result that many are deserting the Church, many of my friends echo the same observation that I have. The churches here in the country are filled with people. More Masses are scheduled. The churches have to be expanded. And during big feasts, one has to be blind not to see the tremendous popular piety flooding even the streets.

That there are many imperfections in this public display of piety should not surprise us. We just have to look at our individual selves and see how even with our best efforts we are still short of what we ourselves consider to be the ideal Christian life.

And try to extrapolate this situation to the whole of society, and, thus, we should not be surprised to see the many gaping imperfections around. But it would be wrong to stop there. What we have to do is to continue with the effort to improve in all aspects and in all levels of Christian life.

Christian life is a matter of faith, hope and charity put into action. It’s not just something to be desired and professed. And we are given all the means so we can truly live it.

It can be both easy and difficult, depending on how we look at it. It’s easy because God is behind it. Difficult, because there are truly tremendous challenges involved plus our weaknesses and temptations and the complications we ourselves make.