In my diocese, we're starving this Lent.
I don't mean we're voluntarily fasting from food or pleasures, although I'm sure many are. I mean we are starving for spiritual nourishment and for all of the liturgical, sacramental and traditional supports that are our God-given right as members of the Catholic Church.
We go without.
We're told that we must administrate for the future and plan for the shortage of priests and expect more church closings and parish school closings and, most of all, get used to the fact that we won't have what we need and we'll be getting more of what we don't like.
So while we have fewer Masses this Lent, and sand instead of holy water in the entry fonts, we have plenty of clowns miming their way through the Stations of the Cross. We don't have enough opportunities for individual confession, but we've got plenty of "clustered" parish penance services, ecumenical reconciliation services and other services which are not equal substitutes for private, oral confession but are being used that way anyway.
We've got some wonderful priests, who are suffering a daily martyrdom for their faithfulness to the Magisterium, and we've got plenty of priests who tailor their actions to stay under the diocesan radar. We have a lovely Tridentine Mass at one location but have great difficulty in holding onto a priest to celebrate it. And while we have a few reverent liturgies, we are bombarded by keyboardists and soloists and lay administrators who say we must make Mass more relevant to increase attendance and contributions. We have significant numbers of lectors and "extraordinary" ministers, who are turning out to be kind of ordinary because we use them all the time, even if it means the priest has to sit down to make room for them.
We have only a few seminarians, but it's apparently our own fault because we waited too long to plan. But now we're starting to make lots of plans and they look and sound very much like corporate business plans with closings and mergers and economic forecasts and legal liability reports. We even have a catchy tagline that's great for public relations, not to mention how good it looks on letterhead. We hardly have any Eucharistic Adoration because we're told no one will come, but people keep asking for it anyway.
We have beautiful old churches that are historically and architecturally significant but we never use them and most are boarded up. We also have modified churches without kneelers where the altar has been relocated and so has the Blessed Sacrament so that everyone is confused when they walk in until they get their bearings by asking someone else who shrugs their shoulders and says, "It's behind that door over there."
In our diocese we have one of the world's most extraordinary shrines, a site that pilgrims come to from all over the world. But we never talk about it.
We have several diocesan parish schools that are still open where we use the state education department's curriculum because we want our students to stay competitive with declining secular standards. We absolutely scoff at using the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I don't think it's allowed in our corporate plan.
We're sure that prayer is important, but we couldn't find a place for the contemplative, cloistered community we once had here. Invited here more than half a century ago, their mission was to pray for priests and vocations. We let them go. Did I mention how few seminarians we have?
Lent is a time of particular longing, of deep need. In my diocese, we are living such yearning as David did in Psalm 63: "O God, thou art my God, I seek thee, my soul thirsts for thee; my flesh faints for thee, as in a dry and weary land where no water is."
So don't speak to us about spiritual nourishment. We've given it up for Lent.
