Sowers Of Hope In A Vulnerable World
(Adapted from Bishop David’s homily for the closing Mass of National Synodal Consultation of the Philippine Church)
“The Church is called to come out of herself and to go to the peripheries not only in the geographic sense but also the existential peripheries… When the Church does not come out of herself to evangelize, she becomes self-referential and then she gets sick.”Pope Francis has been consistent in challenging Christians to outgrow the tendency to develop that personalistic me-and-my-Jesus kind of spirituality. Christ is making us part of his life and mission, part of his body, the Church, by the grace of baptism. The shift from the individual Christ to the Body of Christ (what St Augustine once called the totus Christus) calls for a total change of paradigm, which metanoia means—a call to conversion. It is a call to communion with Christ, our Shepherd, so that we are empowered to participate in his life and mission. And so, evangelization becomes a common aspiration, not just of the ordained or consecrated religious, but of the whole Church, the lay faithful included.
As Sisters of St. Charles Borromeo we are called to facilitate communion that alone can empower the whole body of the faithful, the laity, for participation in the life of the Church, and represent him in our shared mission to witness to the liberating good news of the kingdom of God. This will never be realized if our laity are conditioned to think of themselves permanently as followers, or worse, as onlookers. They will never take part in the Church’s mission of shepherding the last, least and lost in this world.
The laity ought to think of themselves as part of a Church that evangelizes, saves, and leads, a Church that is S.C.B. Associates as Sowers of Hope In A Vulnerable world gifted to give, blessed to be a blessing, a community of disciples in mission, like “salt of the earth and light of the world”, or like a little yeast in a mass of dough. In short, to proclaim good news that empowers and gives hope. It is what it means to evangelize, but all in the name of Jesus, and always consciously prioritizing the ones Jesus himself would prioritize. When our lay Catholics volunteer for ministries in the Church, it is presupposed that they had been guided to discern the gifts that the spirit has bestowed on the community through them. They serve the Church/Congregation in various capacities—in worship, in formation, in social action, etc.
But they do so only so that, as members of a servant Church, they will serve society, they will work for the renewal of the face of the earth. Only when they go out to the world does the mission begin. If every ministry has no other purpose than for the Church to build herself up, then the Church becomes self-serving and does not become missionary.
So why do we count as ministries only the tasks of lectoring, altar serving, catechizing, choir singing, etc? We have so parochialized ministries; we have forgotten that these are supposed to be charisms concretized into forms of service or ministries, bestowed by the Spirit precisely to realize the mission of the Church. We often get volunteers and assign them to “ministries” they are not fitted to. We fill up ministries like empty boxes in an organizational structure, not knowing that some of them have become totally irrelevant.
How can a pandemic strike the whole world and not force the Church to come up with ministries aimed at addressing the physical and mental health issues of people? Where there is a need and the ministries do not exist, surely the Holy Spirit will give us the audacity to invent them. There are Catholic lay people deployed in secular society and all over the world as service-providers, as professionals, as artists, as educators, as scientists, etc. Can we not organize and form them to consciously carry out their professions as their vocation to participate in the Church’s evangelizing mission in the world? Suppose you imagine if all our Catholic laity became conscious participants in the Church’s mission to make a little difference in society through the forms of service that they can do best— as farmers, laborers, caregivers, social communicators, businessmen, so on and so forth. And as members of the Body of Christ animated by the same spirit, we also become the food that we eat. We become ourselves a body broken for broken people, taken and blessed, broken and shared in order to heal, to give life, to cleanse and to liberate. We are to learn generosity from him who has revealed to us the face of a God who cannot be outdone in generosity.
Dear S.C.B. Associates you are hereby being sent to represent the Synodal God in the Body of Christ, taken, blessed, broken and shared in a healing, life-giving, cleansing and liberating kind of communion, participation and mission.
Sr. Sheila Corda c
Province Coordinator for SCBA