St. Paul VI insightfully stated in Evangelii Nuntiandi, “Contemporary man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, or if he listens to teachers, he does so because they are witnesses.” This is the crux of why the Church’s evangelization efforts fail abysmally in the face of secularism’s wake. The tidal wave of secularism has already come and decimated our culture, we simply cannot seem to see it. The damage is done. Our culture is collapsing while we keep pretending like everything is “fine.”
The evangelization efforts of the Church in the West fail because they look more like a marketing gimmick than an authentic witness. We call people to Christ while we ourselves have not begun in earnest on the path to holiness. Our words and actions do not line up, and young people especially walk away when they get a whiff of inauthenticity or hypocrisy. Why shouldn’t they?
My generation and those after me have come up in a world that told them they are only alive because their mother chose not to abort them, that marriage—even in the Church—isn’t a life-long commitment between one man and one woman, that Catholics can pick and choose whatever teachings they like and don’t like, and all they need to do is be some vague sort of a good person to go to heaven. We have been raised in the Church of moralistic therapeutic deism and bureaucracy.
Those we are trying to reach instinctively know this relativism is a lie and that if they can pick and choose, then there is no reason to stick around. Hedonism is much more attractive than an asceticism that even Christians ignore or have abandoned. Most young people have never witnessed the Christian life being lived in a raw, dramatic, and life-changing way. Instead, they grew up checking Sunday Mass off their list and then living a secular life the rest of the week. Nobody—not family, parishioners, or clergy—demonstrated the radicality of the Gospel to them and instead gave them a mediocre, counterfeit, or a relativistic lie.
This is why our programs fail. The Church abandoned its supernatural identity and instead turned itself into a global corporation that treats its members like consumers. We have plenty of never-ending committee meetings to prove it. We treat human beings as numbers and faceless sheep who we simply need to “sell” our message to. The committees never stop to examine how their own members are failing to live out the Gospel or to confront how the countless people they are trying to reach have lived their lives like “sheep without a shepherd.”
The only thing that will convince the people of our age that the Good News is in fact everything the Lord meant it to be, is if we start examining our own failings and hypocrisy. People know when their priests and bishops are preaching one thing from the pulpit while living another the rest of the week. Children know when their parents are being hypocrites when they are lectured on doing something their parents themselves do. Hypocrisy is easy to spot. It is only our own self-deception that leads us to think otherwise. Our starving culture sees the inauthenticity of our living of the Catholic Faith, yet they seek out saints. They seek out saints but can’t see them in the lukewarmness we give them.
This has been one of the most painful wake-up calls the Lord has put on my heart in recent years. I spent years serving in ministry. I went from all in on programs and for the Church to complete disillusionment with the state of the Church and the repeated abandonment of suffering and wounded souls that I witnessed and even experienced myself. The Lord let me see the wizard behind the curtain, and it tried my faith in ways I never knew possible. There were days I wanted to go back to my ignorant idealism rather than the red pill I had been given. In my weakness, I wanted to turn and go back, but the Lord kept pointing me to the Cross and how writhing on it with Him is necessary to grow in holiness and love.
Then the Lord pulled the much-needed rug out from under me and started to reveal the rampant hypocrisy in my own life. He showed me how much ground I lost after I experienced first fervor a few years ago. He showed me the festering wounds and sins deep within my soul that poured resentment, anger, bitterness, and pride out of my soul like a geyser of black tar. He showed me the people I had let down in my life despite my passionate service.
Then, He showed me that although my desire for good, holy, and saintly leaders is a natural one, it does not exonerate me of my obligation to trudge forward on the path to holiness even if those saintly guides don’t materialize as much as I would like. To my fellow brothers and sisters who are in this same boat, the answer to the pain and anger is to seek holiness ourselves. To look painfully inward at the sins still gripping our own hearts. We must find the courage to look our own hypocrisy square in the eyes. It is there in all of us. It is brutal when we see it, and only Christ can give us the strength to withstand it.
The only way things will change is if we as a Church stop pretending like everything is “fine.” We operate with a veneer of order and holiness when the countless news stories and our own personal experiences within the Church reveal that there is a very deep rot and corruption. Part of that corruption is our own sinful hypocrisy. We focus on everyone else’s sins while ignoring our own. We pretend that we can lead people to Christ when we ourselves have not fully embraced discipleship, which includes the non-negotiable reality of the Cross in our own lives.
The only way we will be able to witness to our dying culture is by becoming authentic witnesses of the Gospel. To be a people who has the courage to be raw and vulnerable about our sinfulness and brokenness and how Christ heals us one step at a time. We must beg the Lord to close the gap between our words and our actions so we are no longer hypocrites who cannot give authentic witness to searching souls.
The beginning of renewal is always conversion. “Repent and believe the Good News.” All of us need to repent repeatedly of our own hypocrisy. We need to repent of our lack of charity in the ways we have hurt, abandoned, and demeaned others through that hypocrisy. Often our own plans and programs have been a way of covering up that hypocrisy, which is why they fail.
We are not trying to reach faceless masses with bureaucratic policies, we are trying to encounter the one lost soul Christ puts in our midst in each moment. We don’t need committees and programs to save souls. We need authentic witnesses of the Gospel. We need a Church that is on fire with the love of the Holy Spirit and who live lives of radical discipleship that stand as a beacon of hope in the destruction wrought through secularism. We need to stop pretending that simply being teachers in word is enough. Only authentic witnesses will reach the lost souls of our age.
Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash
