Posted by The WORD in other words (2022) by Fr Allan Meechan SVD – Divine Word College of Calapan
Friday 5th Week in Ordinary Time
When I was a child in Scotland, I once asked my father, “Why do the Protestants often say bad things about Catholics and hurt us so much? Our Church was there first. They got the bible from us, as well as their religion, but they changed them because there were certain bits they didn’t like? My father answered my rather simplistic question: “They would say that they broke away and became the real Church.”
I did not understand then that they were and still are dividing into subgroups and cannot possibly be seen as one Church. A pastor in a previous parish once told me that most of the sects in the town were fighting with each other, and I remember one pastor snubbing another pastor in front of many people. Dr. Scott Hahn joked about his own Presbyterian origins when he wrote, “They didn’t call us the ‘Split Peas’ for nothing!” I came to realize that their “real church” was unattainable.
Sadly, the moral laxity, arrogance and inflexibility of our own leaders at that time were largely the cause of the Protestant reformation. Even today we are confronted with our own sinfulness, and the sexual and financial scandals within the Church. We all echo St. Paul’s lament: “For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want.”
Yet, in spite of all our failings, God is always ready to forgive and bring the Churc back to the right way. We pray from Psalm 130, “If you, Lord, mark our sins, Lord, who shall stand? But with you is forgiveness, and so you are revered.” We also count on Christ’s promise at the end of the Gospel of Matthew: “And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”
As in today’s Gospel, Christ is the hope of all who follow him in whichever way. The Church, the continuance of his mission in the world, has to be the center, around which one day all must be brought together.
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