Editor’s note: The following is the complete text of Bishop Leonard P. Blair’s homily on the occasion of the Prayer Service for Healing and Reconciliation, celebrated Feb. 28 at Findlay St. Michael during the centenary of the Diocese of Toledo.
This prayer service of penance and healing for our diocesan centenary is meant to respond to a need at the very heart of our humanity, and at the very heart of the Christian life; namely, our frailty, our need to forgive and to ask forgiveness, not just in the wider world but also, and even especially, in the Church.
The Church can be publicly represented in many ways, by friend and foe alike. In the modern world individuals and communities have experienced unprecedented change, and feel anxious. In a world that is increasingly impersonal and bureaucratic, whatever is institutional and authoritative can be perceived as threatening, rightly or wrongly in a given situation.
The need for a healing of experiences and memories is not, however, because the Church is an institution. Much more deeply, it is because the Church is a family, a family of faith, a family of weak and sinful human beings from top to bottom and bottom to top.
In his recently published book “The Difference God Makes,” Cardinal George of Chicago points out that our American culture emphasizes voluntary relationships, but downplays relationships that are “given” rather than chosen.
The most “un-choosable” and closest relationship, of course, is to our family. The Scriptures — Old Testament and New — make it clear that you can’t just walk away from your parents, or your spouse or your children, even when things are trying, painful and broken. In any family, there has to come a day of maturity too, when we realize that our parents are not perfect, and that even if our children disappoint or wound us, they are our children still. It is our duty to uphold and cherish the relationships that faith tells us we have no right to “un-choose.”
Faith also tells us that membership in the Church is membership in God’s family, a communion in the life-giving unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Jesus says, “No one comes to the Father except through me.” And we cannot belong to Christ without his Body. We cannot be a Christian without one another in the Church. And we cannot be “whole” as the Church without the fullness of communion instituted by Christ on the rock of St. Peter’s faith and on the Apostles, of whom the Pope and bishops are the successors.
Ultimately the Church is not a voluntary association, as our culture defines it. If we are convinced of the Christian faith, then the Church is not something we chose to join or not, to take or leave. No, if by faith we know that the Church is God’s family, then you and I can’t walk away from it, even if our spiritual fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers, children and cousins are not perfect, even when they are trying, hurtful, unjust and downright sinful.
We are all a great grace to one another, and sometimes we are also each other’s great cross. There has never been a Church in this world free of human weakness and sin, as anyone who reads the New Testament and Church history can see. In the inscrutable providence of God, the traitor Judas was one of the 12, and came to a bad end because he despaired of repentance.
Every saint is a converted sinner, as they would be the first to tell you. Remember, St. Peter betrayed Jesus too, but what a difference repentance makes! Saints are often difficult personalities, as they would also be the first to tell you. The great majority of them suffered, sometimes terribly, at the hands of their own. So let’s get rid of a sugarcoated and false view of holiness in the Church.
As the Second Vatican Council taught: “The Church, embracing sinners in her bosom, is at the same time holy and always in need of being purified, and incessantly pursues the path of penance and renewal” (“Lumen Gentium,” 8). It says “incessantly pursues” because the need is always painfully obvious among her members, and it is always a struggle.
Jesus says, “When your brother or sister sins against you, do everything you can with that person within the household of the Church to bring about peace in the family of faith. Peter asked, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him? As many as seven times?” And what did Jesus answer? “I say to you, not seven times but 77 times.”
When the Church’s membership — whether clergy, religious or laity, among themselves or in relation to each other — is alienating or alienated, offending or offended, then we have to be like our heavenly Father in the Gospel. We have to “Go in search of the stray.” In a family we are not permitted to say good riddance, or to write other members off.
In the 100 years of the Diocese of Toledo that we celebrate in 2010 we have had our share of saints and sinners, that is to say, the repentant and the unrepentant. Both holiness and sin are never private, as the sacrament of penance makes abundantly clear. We are united in the body of Christ. Our virtues and vices have an impact on all others. And as we celebrate this prayer service we have to heed what our Lord says: “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
This “prayer service for healing of experiences and memories” takes its inspiration from what Pope John Paul the great did on the eve of the third Christian millennium. He acknowledged that certain words and actions of Church leaders and Church members over the centuries had been hurtful and wrong. He expressed sorrow and asked humanity for forgiveness. “The Church,” he said, “asks forgiveness for the historical sins of all of her children. … Recalling all those times in history … when … instead of offering to the world the witness of a life inspired by the values of faith, indulged in ways of thinking and acting which were truly forms of counter-witness and scandal.”
As the Holy Father is to the universal level, so is the bishop locally. As the spiritual father of the Catholic community of our diocese I ask forgiveness of the wider community of northwest and north central Ohio for anything that the Catholic Church here “has done or failed to do” contrary to discipleship in the Lord Jesus Christ. It is important, too, that we Catholics forgive the sins committed against us by others over the past century.
As the spiritual father of the Catholic household of faith, I also ask forgiveness, and ask that there be forgiveness, within our Church: among us clergy, religious and laity, among ourselves and toward each other. At the same time, we clergy who teach, sanctify and govern as shepherds bear a special accountability, as do those religious and laity who exercise a public ministry and responsibility in the Church.
And so to anyone who has ever been treated harshly, rudely or has been otherwise offended by us clergy in the exercise of our ministry, or treated poorly or unjustly by anyone acting in the name of the Church — I ask, the Church asks, for forgiveness.
To those who have looked for authentic teaching and good example in faith and morals, and ever found instead defective teaching or bad example — I ask, the Church asks, for forgiveness.
To anyone who has ever had an experience of the Sacred Liturgy, especially the most Holy Eucharist, that was not celebrated faithfully and reverently, in accord with the Church’s tradition — I ask, the Church asks, for forgiveness.
To those who look to the Church to be a voice against prejudice, social injustice and other sins against the life and dignity of the human person, and ever were disappointed by silence or indifference — I ask, the Church asks, for forgiveness.
To those who have in any way been the victims of any abuse, sexual or otherwise, whether as a child or as an adult, and to the parents, or siblings or friends of those who were abused — I ask, the Church asks, for forgiveness.
To those who needed the Church to be with them in sickness, in grief, in trauma, in turmoil and ever found her representatives lacking in presence or compassion — I ask, the Church asks, for forgiveness.
To those who have offered their talents for the mission of the Church, but experienced an injustice in the Church’s workplace — I ask, the Church asks, for forgiveness.
For whatever ways any representative of the Church, beginning with myself, has hurt, offended, dismissed, ignored anyone — I ask, the Church asks, for forgiveness.
My dear brothers and sisters, sin and sorrow for sin is not the end of the Christian Gospel. Jesus says, “Repent and believe, because the kingdom of God is near.” During Lent mercy is near; forgiveness is near; resurrection is near to those who know their need for God and for one another in Christ.
May all of us appreciate ever more deeply what it means to be members of a family that faith does not permit us to “unchoose” — the new family of God created by the precious blood of a spotless Lamb, who for us sinners was lead to the slaughterhouse and opened not His mouth. May the purification of Lent lead us and our diocese to Easter joy.
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