To start this Gospel reflection, I had originally planned on reiterating, yet again, the statistic that only 30% of Catholics believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist; and I believe that if we can align Catholics with understanding and accepting the Eucharist, it could solve many other matters throughout the Catholic Church and possibly throughout the Christian world. Ok, I technically just did reiterate that, but let’s continue!
Namely, though I still believe in said hypothesis, I happened to watch an interview today with Bishop Robert Barron about the severe decline in Catholic school enrollments, and that multiple schools have either shut down entirely, or they no longer staff mostly nuns, brothers, and priests as teachers. Which means there is a larger issue at hand than the statistic about the Eucharist.
Bishop Barron summarized it this way: It’s a problem with the “nones” and the “nuns”. In the case of Catholic schools, Bishop Barron means that because the number of priests and other clergy has declined in recent years, Catholic schools are having to hire non-Catholics, or non-Christians altogether, to staff classrooms. This has created two central problems: 1.) Catholic schools funded in a more traditional manner may have staff who don’t subscribe to all or any of the Church’s teachings. 2.) Some schools referred to as Catholic schools are more like public schools, except with some bonus classes in theology or along those lines.
Now, before I go any further, I do *not* claim to be an expert on the education system overall, including Catholic education. However, the data itself reveals a lot about our current state of affairs: Our Western society is being infiltrated by questionably secular values, while we also watch and experience an alarming decline in family values, the crucial importance of heterosexual, monogamous marriages, and painfully subjective worldviews of “Do whatever makes you happy” and “Be whatever person, gender, form of life that you want” – as if the people who live in reality are the deluded ones, and the people with alternative worldviews are living the real reality. Does your brain hurt yet?
So then, what exactly is the larger issue at hand? In short, the Catechism. Yet that one word does not make for an easy solution. But we must talk about it. That is, although a good number of Catholics are well-educated in the Catechism, and they strive to live according to God’s will and our salvation through Jesus Christ – a disturbing percentage of Catholics are not quite so plugged into what, specifically, our faith teaches.
And this is not just limited to cradle Catholics who were baptized but have never attended Mass / received other Sacraments, or “Chreasters” (Catholics who only attend Mass at Christmas and Easter), or rebellious young adults who want to find their own path in life. Even some Catholics who attend Mass regularly and have received Sacraments (Penance, First Communion, Confirmation, Marriage), have either been influenced by secular ideas, or by Protestant related denominations that have essentially reinterpreted the early Church Fathers’ works as mostly symbolic, and that the Catholic Church essentially spent the first 1500 years –yes, 1500 years – in the dark until the Reformation swooped in and made it all better.
Except that’s not what happened. It cannot be overstated that a belief system with ~30,000 different sects is anything but united in objective truth about God’s will and the Church’s role in teaching us how to carry that out. After all, if you have one Church that traces back to Christ, yet 30,000 sects now basically claim that Church is false; and the Church, in return, must spend a massive amount of time separating fact from fiction, then it forces me to ask this question again: Does your brain hurt yet?
Not only does my own brain hurt when I think about the unfortunate, unnecessary, unproductive, unbelievably entitled divisiveness among Christians, it is no wonder the “nones” now comprise 17% of the U.S. population alone.
This is real talk, folks. And in an era of real talk conversations – or more accurately, ideological wars – that flood social media sites, while apparently bringing out the dark side of people’s personalities, our “real talk” is a bit corrupted these days. However, we also do not have to live in a doom-and-gloom world or based on the mind-numbing number of post-apocalyptic movies released within the last 20 years.
Instead, we can choose to build and live in a world where we clearly understand the difference between objective truth and subjective truth, and then adjust our lives accordingly. And for my fellow Catholics out there, we can help build and sustain God’s kingdom by fully immersing ourselves in the Catechism. That also cannot be overstated: The Magisterium (A.K.A. teaching office) gave us the Catechism for a universally important reason: To make us into true Catholics who truly believe in the Sacraments, which are truly from God, who truly wants us to have wonderfully rich life and an eternal relationship with the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Knowing that, we see that 30% of Catholics not believing in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is not just a one-off statistic. Catholics: We MUST be properly catechized. It is mind-blowing that this isn’t the case. To the point that the priest who said the Mass I attended this past weekend not only reinforced the Eucharist as the core of our entire connection with Christ, but even had to explain, in great detail, *why* the Eucharist IS the Real Presence of Christ. To me, it was almost surreal.
Moreover, I have much respect for the priest for making the following comments: *Those Catholics who do not believe in the Real Presence in the Eucharist are, well, not real Catholics. *That there is a reason several people were there in the pews at Mass, yet some pews were empty. And Covid is now not so primarily responsible anymore. Rather, when we let secular values influence our faith, we need to revisit Matthew 6:24: “Jesus said to his disciples: ‘No can serve two masters. He will either hate one or love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.’”
And while Jesus refers to material or trivial concerns in that passage, it readily applies to every area of life. As such, I leave you with this question: Do you want to serve the secular world, or do you sincerely want to serve the Catholic faith?
If the latter, then please – please, please – *know* the Catechism. Accept the Catechism. And *live* by the Catechism. It is the ONLY way to be a fully-fledged Catholic.