Should Catholics View the Church Like the Post Office

Ahh with the New York Times on the attack this week I was thinking of the great faith of all those Catholic ancestors of ours.

In Apologetics we talk about and deal with the cases where there was a "bad" Pope. Oh we say yes we have had "bad" Popes but Christ's promise protected even evil Pope's(which there were few) from teaching error.

Well all that is correct of course and true. However it is largely a academic exercise for many of us. Back then to the faithful Catholics in some eras it was not just theory but they kept believing.
We have not had a "bad" Pope in some time. In fact the Popes from the time of our foundation of our little Republic here in the USA have all been pretty decent Holy men. We can thank God for the Holy Spirit of giving that in these times.

I am convert and I love Jesus and his instrument on Earth the Church. The Church from the Pope, to the religious, to the Clerics, and to all her members (us lay folks).

I was thinking of a interesting post Rod Dreher made some time back that deal with Chesterton and one of his critics. Rod also gave some of his thoughts.

In taking stock of Chesterton's Catholic apologetics, though, Gopnik finds the great man to have been not much more than a hack. Again, Gopnik:

In these books, Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis's intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas's pedantic religiosity, as Chesterton seems to. His writing suffers from conversion sickness. Converts tend to see the faith they were raised in as an exasperatingly makeshift and jury-rigged system: Anglican converts of Catholicism are relived not to have to defend Henry VIII's divorces; Jewish converts to Christianity are relieved to get out from under the weight of all those strange Levitical laws on animal hooves. The newly adopted faith, they imagine, is a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time and the cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday. An outsider sees the Church as a dreamy compound of incense and impossibility, and, overglamorizing its pretensions, underrates its adaptability.

A Frenchman or an Italian, even a devout one, can see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human institution, the way patriotic Americans see the post office, recognizing the frailty and even the occasional psychosis of its employees without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver the message. Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who has just made his first trip to the post office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will send it anywhere, literally anywhere you like, across a continent and an ocean, in any weather! The fact that the post office attracts time-servers, or has produced an occasional gun massacre, is only proof of the mystical enthusiasm that the post office alone provides! Glorifying the postman beyond what the postman can bear is what you do only if you're new to mail.

Boy, does this feel familiar to me, and I can see now (from my own experience) why converts tend to wear on cradle believers (and vice versa: little exasperates a convert more than a cradle believer's apparent inability to get excited about the Amazing Wonderful Church). Again, I can't discern the justice of Gopnik's judgment re: Chesterton's writing, because I've never read enough of his apologetics to know. But this feels right to me. It also gives me insight into why I don't have and never had that convert's glow about Orthodoxy. I didn't believe when I left it that Catholicism was a jury-rigged makeshift system, nor did I believe that Orthodoxy was a uniquely fabulous thing. I'm glad not to have those illusions about either faith, but it does take some of the romance out of the thing.

In other words to many Catholics and converts what makes this Church so wonderful is a observation I saw made recently. That is in comparing Catholic Church and the U.S. Navy: "It's a machine built by geniuses so it can be operated safely by idiots." Now of course those geniuses were the Saints that were aided in all things by the grace of Christ.

Well I am not saying the Post Office is run by idiots nor the Navy but you get the point. It is quite remarkable that often it can operate this way. However at times we do see a epic system failure.

Now of course I still have what Rod calls that "Romance". Converts generally come in with their eyes wide open and accept the Church with all her failings.

There is, and is difficult to explain, a connection for many Catholics (and I would say for a lot of non Catholic Christians) when we see the Pope. There is something spiritual that has little to do with the "man". This can be seen in the repeated reactions to how crowds react on Papal visits. In the same way I get that feeling when I see the Bishop.

One reason the Church has vestments , and elaborate ones at that, for Priests and Bishops is to hide their personality. To make it less about Bishop X and all his pluses and failings but to represent something greater than the man. There is something often profoundly important going on there.

Now I heard people go if you Catholics just worried about Jesus and not all these men and Church stuff all would be better. Of course there is wisdom to that and of course that was got Catholics of old when they had to deal with bad Pope's through it. Plus perhaps a healthy Post Office mentality.

However of course that is not how it really works. Christianity is not ONLY just a Jesus and I thing .It is a intensely communal and relational thing with our fellow Christians.

The hurts , the loss of faith, etc often comes from when we fail in each other. That can occur in politics, in the Church, in friendship , and indeed most often the family. This is what makes things like this so dramatic. For some reason since the beginning God has used human beings to set out his plan of salvation with all their weakness and failings. That can be annoying at times but that is how it is set up it appears.

However if the Church is the Post Office it is a Post Office set up by Christ. The attacks we are enduring ( and endure on multiple fronts and issues) is I think a recognition in some way by even non believers they sense something is going on in that Post Office.

I think the Archbishop of Toronto this past Monday said it well. You can see the full text here.

People expect that one who is consecrated with the holy oil of Chrism, will act in an exemplary manner, and never betray the trust which people know they should be able to place in a Catholic priest. At his ordination we pray: Bless this chosen man, and set him apart for his sacred duties.

And yet to our shame some have used the awesome gift of the holy priesthood for base personal gratification, betraying the innocent and devastating their lives. When that happens, our first concern must be for those innocent young people who have been abused, to help them overcome their suffering, and to resolve to take whatever steps are needed to be as sure as is possible that this does not happen again.

We have all had to learn through failures and mistakes and that is especially true of bishops, who have sometimes failed in their responsibility to act effectively.For this diocese, anyone who looks at our website can see the policies that are in place to help us to act rightly, but we must never be satisfied.

We cannot escape the horror of this by pointing out that almost all priests serve faithfully, though that fact is a grace that gives joy to the Catholic people, whose love and prayerful support sustains us all. But even one priest gone wrong causes immense harm, and throughout the world priests have done unspeakable evil.

We should be grateful for the attention which the media devotes to the sins of Catholic clergy, even if constant repetition may give the false impression that Catholic clergy are particularly sinful. That attention is a profound tribute to the priesthood which we celebrate at this Mass of the Chrism. People instinctively expect holiness in a Catholic priest, and are especially appalled when he does evil.

As we look to the continuing painful purification of the Church, we all need in a particular way to give thanks to God for the leadership of Joseph Ratzinger, as Cardinal and Pope, who has acted decisively, fairly, consistently, and courageously to purify the priesthood and to make the Church a safe place for everyone. Anyone with any knowledge of this terrible reality realizes that Pope Benedict has led the way in confronting this evil.