Friends,
This week Bishop Gruss and the priests from the Diocese of Saginaw are gathering together at the Columbiere Retreat Center in Clarkston for a retreat. Fr. John Riccardo and his apostolate Acts XXIX will be leading the retreat. Please pray for us as we come before Jesus to receive from him the word of renewal he has for each our lives individually and for our parishes and diocese.
In preparation for the retreat Bishop Gruss asked all the priests to read the book “From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age” https://a.co/d/700Lwbh
What an incredible book! Go read it.
Originally written as an internal document in 2020 from the president and leadership team at the University of Mary in Fargo, ND, it has been flying off the shelves of their university press to the wider public. It’s claim is that we are currently living not so much in an era of change but in a change of eras. In the past Christianity shared much of the same moral and philosophical assumptions about life with the wider culture and the societal institutions that governed it — in other words, Christendom. Things are different now, very different. The culture and the institutions that rule it not only don’t share the same assumptions as Christianity but are often hostile towards it. This new environment presents great challenges and great opportunities for the Church. The book explores those themes and lays out some strategies to guide the Church’s posture towards our post-Christian society.
I found the book to be a summary of my own assumptions about what it means to be a priest and a Catholic, but it also articulated other assumptions I didn’t even know I had.
There’s a lot of talk in the Church about pre-Vatican 2 and post-Vatican 2 styles and approaches to the Church. The whole conservative vs. liberal debates that surround the liturgy and ecclesiology.
People who experienced a thriving church in the years immediately following Vatican 2 where there was a lot of liturgical experimentation and optimism long for those days to come back. In the meantime a new generation of Catholics have arisen that want more reverence and solemnity in the liturgy and tend to interpret the Church’s moral precepts more closely.
To dramatically overgeneralize, post-Vatican 2 Catholics want the 1970s back and the newer generation wants the 1870s back. The truth is, neither is coming back because the Church has entered a new post-Christian culture. Doing ecclesiastical naval-gazing and fighting about styles and preferences that once defined the Church’s life in the Christendom age is no longer helpful.
God is inviting us to embrace the Gospel in our lives and communities in a way more similar to the Christians who lived in first 1000 years of the Church then the second. In other words, He’s calling us to interact with the world recognizing that, while it largely does not share our beliefs, we are still called to love the people in it and become witnesses to them of Jesus’ love. In short, to be apostles. There’s no blueprint to do that but we can be assured it will be a new expression of the Church more faithful to the Gospel and alive with the Holy Spirit.
How to do that is what me and the priests of Saginaw will be reflecting on this week. So pray for us. I’ll pray for you.
AMDG,
Fr. Stephen
