May They Be As One, a Pastoral Letter

Dear Sisters and Brothers –

I love

 

That first paragraph was easy to write. After that, I wrote and deleted, wrote and deleted, and wrote and deleted some more. I did so because each new paragraph revealed that I easily succumb to the ubiquitous temptation to “us versus them” thinking. One sentence read, “It seems to me that this message should easily and obviously wave from every Catholic church façade, but it doesn’t.” Implicit: We get it, but they don’t. Us versus them. I also wrote, “In some quarters, the Church seems to have forgotten that ‘the Church is not a tollhouse; it is the house of the Father, where there is a place for everyone.’ (Evangelii Gaudium, 47) Implicit: We’re not a tollhouse; some others are. Again, us versus them. 

Our secular society invites us to such thinking. Even the Church is unreflectively doing it. It is often subtle and hard to notice. But we must resist it because we are called to more, to a different way of being in the world. At the Last Supper, in what is known as the Final Discourse, Jesus prayed for his disciples: “… may [they] be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us .…” (John 17:21) And at every Mass, during the Eucharistic Prayer, we pray for this grace, in some version of the words, “… grant that we, who are nourished by the Body and Blood of your Son and filled with his Holy Spirit, may become one body, one spirit in Christ.” (EP III) Every movement toward “us versus them” thinking is a movement away from one of the deepest longings of Jesus. This is something we should all add to the list of petitions we place before God each day.

To return to my intent, I began with those banners because they say something radically different from the storm raging around us, in both our secular culture and the Church. The exclusion of, and the vile and dangerous rhetoric against, members of the LGBTQIA+ community has increased, deepening divisions and potentially inciting acts of violence and harm. Thus, those banners proclaim messages that are as important as ever. I hope they are seen as an invitation to everyone, no matter which pronouns he/she/they choose. I hope that they communicate our belief that God has long been active in the lives of everyone prior to their walking through our church doors, that the role of this faith community is simply to water the seeds that God has already planted in his/her/their hearts. And I pray that those banners communicate that we are a community that longs to receive the graces God is giving to the world through the lives and faith of our LGBTQIA+ sisters and brothers.

We cannot be a church of camps, if we are to be authentically catholic, which literally is to be universal, open to all, inclusive of everyone. So let us ask God to continue to bless our St. Ignatius Parish community, that we may be, ever more authentically, the Catholic faith community we seek to be.

Oremus pro invicem.

Fr. Greg