To HIS ACCUSERS' questions, our Lord Jesus Christ gave only the answer of his withering silence. From a worldly point of view, he did the foolish thing. What would you think of someone before a court who might clear himself of a charge by a word, or a show of power, and yet refuses to do so? Well, here is our Lord going to the Cross and to death, simply because he will not do the worldly thing. That was foolishness. The folly of Omnipotence!

And from that day to this, the Church has been robed in the garment of a fool, because she never does the worldly thing. Her saints are fools, because they plunge after poverty like others dig after gold, tear at their body while others pamper theirs, and dare even to swing the world a trinket at their wrist, in order that they might gain an everlasting crown. Her devout nuns are fools who leave the lights and glamours of the world for the shades and shadows of the Cross, where saints are made; her priests are fools because they practice celibacy in a world that has gone crazy about sex.

The Vicar, the Pontiff, is a fool, for refusing to relax the teachings of Christ. Yes, the Church is a fool, and all her loyal members are fools, but they are fools only from the world's point of view, not from God's point of view. For with the foolish things of the world God has chosen to confound the wise, and with the weak things of the world to confound the strong.

The Church must always bear the taunt of being not modern and unworldly, as our Lord Jesus had to bear it before Herod. And our Lord warned us that it would be the mark of the divinity of the Church: "If you had been of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you... If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before you." In other words: "If you ever want to discover my religion on the face of the earth, look for the Church that does not get along with the world." The religion that gets on with the world, and is accepted by it, is worldly; the religion that does not get on with the world is other-worldly, which is another way of saying that it is divine.

The Church is very modern, if modern means that her members should change their hats with the seasons, and even with the styles, but she is not modern if it means that every time someone changes his hat, he should also change his head, or in an applied sense, that she should change her idea of God every time psychology puts on a new shirt, or physics a new coat.

The Church is modern, if modern means incorporating the new found wisdom of the present with the heritage of the centuries, but she is not modern if it means sneering at the past as one might sneer at someone's age. She is modern, if modern means a passionate desire to know the truth, but she is not modern if it means that truth changes with the calender, and that what is true on Tuesday is false on Wednesday. The Church is modern, if modern means progress toward a fixed ideal, but she is not modern if it means changing the ideal instead of attaining it.

The Church is like an old schoolmaster - the schoolmaster of the centuries - and as such she has seen so many students pass before her, cultivate the same poses, and fall into the same errors, that she merely smiles at those who believe that they have discovered a new truth; for in her superior wisdom and experience, she knows that many a so-called new truth is only a new label for an old error.

It is about time that the modern world gave up expecting the Church to die because she is "behind the times." Really she is behind the scenes, and knows just when the curtain will fall on each new fad and fancy. If an announcement had been made a thousand times about a death, and the funeral never took place, people would soon begin to take the announced funeral as a joke. And so it is with the Church. She is always supposed to be behind the times, and yet it is she who lives beyond the times.

At least a hundred voices in every century since her birth have tolled the bells for her funeral, but the corpse never appeared. They are always buying coffins for her, but it is they who use the coffins. They are always assisting at her apparently last breath, and yet she moves. They are always digging her grave, and it is a grave into which the diggers fall, The taunt that she is "behind the times" and "out of touch with the world" will never annoy her, for she knows that it is easy to be in the swim, in the sense of being "up to the times" for even a dead body can float downstream.

                               It takes a live Body to resist the current.

THE CHURCH IS THE BODY of Christ, composed of the many millions or billions of individuals who have been incorporated to it by Baptism, and governed by the invisible head, Christ, and the visible head, the Vicar of Christ on earth. But a body and a head are not sufficient to constitute the Mystical Christ as the Church. The Church must also have a soul as the principle of its life and its unity. That soul is the Holy Spirit.

In order that we may properly understand the role of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Blessed Trinity, try to picture the apostles and the faithful on earth during the ten days after the Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ into heaven. The Church then existed in its raw material - its great arteries had been formed, its head had been named, its members were called, but it still lacked a soul.

The apostles and disciples and the faithful were still separate individuals; they needed a soul to make them one. The condition of the Church can be represented better by the analogy of life. Its members were like the elements in a chemical laboratory, capable of being part of the body, and yet not a body because lacking a soul. We know up to one hundred percent the chemicals that enter into the constitution of a human body, and yet with all our superior knowledge of chemistry, we cannot make a body in our laboratories. Why? Because we lack the power to give a unifying principle, a soul, to those chemicals which will make them mutually coalesce into that new emergent we call life.

Now the apostles were like the chemicals in a laboratory; they were individuals, each with his own outlook on life, each with his doubts, his uncertainties, his point of view. They could not give themselves unity anymore than chemicals alone can make life. The permanent union of their minds was impossible without a certitude from on high, for life is not a push from below, but a gift from above. They needed a soul, a spirit - a vivifying, unifying principle which would make the cells of the Mystical Body cohere in the unity of a headship under Christ. And this vivifying, unifying spirit did not come until the day of Pentecost.

Organization has nothing to do with the marvelous vitality of the Church, nor is there any other human explanation. If the Church were left to its human elements it would have perished long ago. The secret of her immortal life is her Eternal Spirit. which cannot be destroyed by the world anymore than the soul of an infant can be destroyed. Hence in the face of the force of violence the Spirit manifests the immortality of her being; against the force of ideas the Spirit shows the immortality of her ideas; and against the force of passion the Spirit shows the immortality of her love.

If there is any picture that adequately describes the Church in time, it is that of a person living throughout the cataclysms and revolutions, the progress and the unfolding of the centuries. A person who is fifty today is the same identical person as always, despite the changes in his bodily life and the historical upheavals of our time. He can say, "I saw mankind exalt itself to a god in the prewar period; I saw that same humanity prove it was not a god but only a beast in the battlefields of the World War[s]; I saw it settle down to a false peace without ever learning the lesson that it cannot survive without God." In like manner, the Church is an abiding Person through all centuries. The only difference between her now and then is the difference between the acorn and the oak, the mustard seed and the great tree. The Church members have come and gone, like the cells in a human body, but her Spirit has remained one and the same.

And since it is the Spirit that makes the Body, the Church which is the Mystical Body of Christ has been contemporaneous with the centuries. When, therefore, we in the twenty-first century wish to know about Jesus Christ, about his early Church, about history, or know Him and His Church, we go not only to the dusty records but to the living Church.

BY ARCHBISHOP FULTON J. SHEEN  ( 1895 to 1979 )

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Sunday, May 24, 2009

I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!

I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.

HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -