In the wake of recent headlines about the bruising cuts made to federal funding of various Catholic ministries, Pope Francis’ words from his 2013 apostolic exhortation “Evangelii Gaudium” seem timely and worth pondering: “I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security. … my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security.”
It is good to read the whole apostolic exhortation, but that paragraph reminds us that innovative religious women and men essentially created the notion of social services, both in the United States and elsewhere. They were doing massive good for the poor, the migrants, the oppressed, the sick, the orphaned and uneducated (and doing it long before governments ever thought to get involved). Among other things, religious like Mother Cabrini, Elizabeth Ann Seton and Katharine Drexel and their spiritual daughters and sons established food-security outlets, family support centers, home health care programs, migrant services, orphanages, hospitals and schools.
Almost all these ministries were funded by the dimes and dollars of faithful Catholics who may not have grasped finely nuanced theologies, but who recognized need and understood their purpose as Christians, which was (and is) to serve others as we would be served.
The pope’s warning about “structures which give us a false sense of security” may someday be called prophetic, particularly when it comes to church dependence upon secular or bureaucratic structures. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about the direction U.S. social services are headed, but that is not new — in fact, it has been true since at least 2011. Then, the USCCB’s Migration and Refugee Services was dealt a financial and ministerial blow when the Obama administration denied the bishop’s anti-human trafficking grant application because of Catholic teaching on contraception and abortion.
Of course our important aid programs must continue, but given how easy it is for government — any government, in any era — to withhold funding on a whim, perhaps we Catholics should rethink our too-deep dependence upon such support, which makes our work so vulnerable and (perhaps) keeps us from closely stewarding what monies we have beyond (at this point) paying off lawsuits. We rightly demand a preferential option for the poor, but does that mean we must make ourselves — and the poor — so reliant upon governments that without their funding our ministries dry up?
In an April 2013 homily, Pope Francis said something else worth remembering on this subject: “The Church is not an NGO. It’s a love story … But when organization takes first place, love falls down and the Church, poor thing, becomes an NGO. And this is not the way forward.”
He repeated the thought in the 2018 apostolic exhortation, “Gaudete et Exsultate,” where he warned against a Christianity that “becomes a sort of NGO, stripped of the luminous mysticism so evident in the lives of Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Vincent de Paul, Saint Teresa of Calcutta, and many others.”
Francis wants us — the church that is the People of God — to go out from ourselves and bring forth ministries to others that are about not just the material but the spiritual and Christ-filled. The dearth of religious men and women who were able and willing to seek out the margins and serve the poorest, the neediest among us certainly means the laity must step up and become founders and servants; we will have to learn how to build greatness upon something more than the material, believing once again in the power of small mustard seeds over transient allocations.
The ongoing lesson of the crucifix is that sometimes disturbing things are permitted so that something great might be enabled to occur. Perhaps losing immense government funding is meant as a spiritual challenge for us to become once more that sacrificing, socially inventive and innovative church of yore — that great “love story,” in the world but not of it — because we know full well that this world, and its powers, is not all there is.
This column was updated at 11:30 a.m.
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