Make Straight the Way

It is so much easier to destroy than to build. It takes barely a second and hardly any effort to tear something down; it requires no imagination, dedication, or moral perseverance. 

Watch a young child carefully build a crenellated castle out of blocks, an all-day labor of love, then proudly display his work to his parents. Watch another child eye the enjoyment and casually kick the castle down in an instant. The ratio of time and energy is 100 to 1.

A man can start his own business with a product he invented, building up something useful to the community—and a destroyer can come along with no expertise at all and burn the business down, physically or through commercial dirty tricks. 

A parent pours all of his or her heart and life into raising a child, but a malefactor can come along and damage or destroy that child in a single moment. The ratio is incalculable. 

It’s so easy to destroy. 

It requires character, vision, and energy to build something, but absolutely anyone can destroy. The ratio is so overwhelming in favor of destruction that it’s a wonder we build anything at all. It’s all so fragile. 

Pope Francis destroyed. I don’t speak to his intention, only his actions. 

The destruction is not irrevocable, but there are a lot of gaping bomb craters and tumbled walls in the structure that took thousands of years to build. And it will require people with intelligence, virtue, and especially unshakable faith to rebuild what we have just witnessed being so cruelly and systematically destroyed. 

When the surviving remnant of Judah came back to Jerusalem from Babylon, around 540 B.C., the Holy City was in tumbled ruins, a blackened, rotting, boneyard of shattered memories. It wasn’t just brick and mortar that had to be relaid; it was the moral capacity of the people to be willing to invest themselves all over again. How could they sink themselves into the work of rebuilding when the memory of what was once glorious was still a stinging sorrow in their souls? 

It required constant encouragement from the leaders to put steel into the backbone of the returned exiles. They’d made the journey, they had permission, the materials lay ready, but the people were easily frightened into abandoning the work. It could be destroyed all over again, after all.

Will we have the heart and courage to rebuild the Church after the devastation of the recent past? 

Perhaps the most grievous and insidious destruction, besides the people, communities, dioceses, and institutes, is a great intangible: the honor of Christ’s Church. After the twelve-year pontificate of Pope Francis, the Church is not taken seriously any more.  Perhaps the most grievous and insidious destruction, besides the people, communities, dioceses, and institutes, is a great intangible: the honor of Christ’s Church. Tweet This

Christ’s own Church. Not taken seriously. That is damage of cosmic proportions.

Does the Church still teach that homosexual acts are a grave evil? Most of the world no longer knows. Can women be priests? The Synod on Synodality managed to convey a hopeful uncertainty. Does the Church even believe that Sacred Scripture is divinely inspired and inerrant? The rot has eaten away to the very foundations.

The Church was once perceived to have definitive teachings about certain things, flowing from the deposit of faith left by Jesus through the apostles. Those teachings may not have been universally popular, but they were clear. Now all we have is a shrug and a weaselly, “Who am I to say?” about critical, life-altering, eternal questions. 

I remember leading a group of young adults to World Youth Day 2011 in Madrid. They were twitterpated, as any youth would be, at the prospect of an overseas trip to see one of the most recognized and significant men in the world. I was slightly concerned about how they would react to Pope Benedict’s soft-spoken, scholarly demeanor. Pope John Paul II had a rockstar persona that shone brilliantly at World Youth Days, but Benedict? I was afraid he’d bomb. 

As pope, Benedict would never take the chance of accidentally misstating some article of faith or morals by speaking off the cuff, so he read his remarks. And the kids hung on his words like puppies begging for a Snausage. It didn’t matter that reading gave him a somewhat monotonous delivery; they wanted to hear every word he dropped, like baby birds in the nest. They jostled (mostly politely) to get closer to him. That is the power of the deposit of faith. It calls to the heart and mind, no matter how it is delivered. 

Pope Benedict’s serious delivery was received in a serious manner. A person speaking casually is received in a casual manner. 

Abusers (abusers, for goodness’ sake) have enjoyed papal protection and promotion under Pope Francis. Agreements that concern millions of Catholics have been negotiated by scurrilous, defiled men. We saw a convicted embezzler requesting to be allowed to vote in the conclave, when the ungodly tangle of Vatican finances has not even begun to be unsnarled. Could the image of our beautiful Church be any more sullied? (A risky thing to say, since Satan takes it as a challenge.)

The last dozen years have been tragic, especially after the death of Pope Benedict. Now we have work ahead of us. We have to rebuild the walls of the Holy City, consecrate what has been desacralized, and bring back the hope that comes with Truth—and only with Truth. 

I only see one way to rebuild the city of God, and that is to follow the template given to us in the book of Nehemiah, who heartened the discouraged people of Israel to rebuild Jerusalem. 

When the walls of Jerusalem were complete, Ezra the scribe assembled the people and read the whole Book of the Law to them, out loud, from dawn to noon (Nehemiah 8). All the people wept when they heard the words of the Law, in repentance and regret, surely, but perhaps also in relief. They were lost sheep, their dearest and holiest things taken from them, exiled to a foreign country only to return home and find their once-glorious city, the dwelling place of the Lord, desolate. 

Yet the words of the Law were the same. With all the upheaval, the Lord God was unchanged. The prescriptions of the Law gave structure to the chaos and a home for their hearts that could never be mowed down by enemies.

In the same way, we must once again hear the full deposit of faith proclaimed. We have to encounter our Lord once again—and find Him the same, no matter that the institutional Church seems to have lost its mind the last twelve years. We may weep for what has been lost, but we can’t neglect to rejoice that we may rebuild—and better than before. 

The razing of Jerusalem was only possible when the people of Israel turned from God. The destruction in our generation was only possible because we turned lukewarm. We allowed clerics and theologians to convince us that the exterior trappings of the Faith were no longer meritorious or useful. That was the easiest place to start; and once the adornments were jettisoned, the core of the Faith could be eroded. 

So maybe the easiest place for us to start is with the trappings. Get the nonessentials back in place as a flagstone pathway for the essentials to be processed back in with all due ceremony and reverence. 

Let us embrace all the signs of our religion, large and small, always looking to their deeper meaning. Venerate relics; fast before Mass; eat fish on Fridays; cross yourself when you pass a Catholic church with Jesus inside; confess regularly; pray the Rosary; talk about Jesus in ordinary conversation; study the Bible; wear veils, cassocks, and birettas as appropriate; build home altars; bow your head whenever the name of Jesus is spoken; sign papers with the monogram JMJ; hang crucifixes in every room of the house; make a pilgrimage; pray the Angelus at 6 a.m., noon, and 6 p.m. These are all bodily signs, which remind us constantly of our Faith, and they evangelize in the process. 

In these small ways, every individual can participate in the restoration of the Church. The big decisions are not ours to make, but when we build the joy of the Lord into every place and time of our lives, we make straight His way. 

A voice cries, “Prepare in the desert a way for Yahweh. Make a straight highway for our God across the wastelands. Let every valley be filled in, every mountain and hill be levelled, every cliff become a plateau, every escarpment a plain; then the glory of Yahweh will be revealed and all humanity will see it together.” (Isaiah 40:3-5)