For the Culture to Be Healthy the Church Must Be the Church

blog10-20This week I have been writing about the problems of our culture. Today I continue in that vein with a short reflection on the Church’s role, based on the animated short below. For indeed, the darkness and dysfunction of our times cannot be simply blamed on the world, the Church, too, bears a large share of the responsibility.

The video features a woman in a clock tower; it is she who keeps the clock running. As the video progresses, we see that the clock itself plays a pivotal role in keeping the world around it alive and colorful. Consider the woman as an image for the Church, and the clock as an image for our culture (note that “culture” also refers to the times in which we live).

The woman grows bored with sustaining the clock, longing to go out and see the world outside—and so she leaves the clock tower. But because she is the central cog of the entire clock, it grinds to a halt without her. As she emerges into the world, suddenly all goes gray and comes to a stop. Through her attempt to become part of the world she so desires, that very world loses its beauty and is no longer desirable.

This is the tale of the Church these past hundred years. The Church is a central part of the functioning of our times, our culture. But her role is not to become the same as the culture, but to inspire and to be a conduit of blessing that lights up the culture and helps it to move in productive directions. Instead, too many in the Church have joined the culture, becoming indistinguishable from it. In so doing we stop being a conduit of God’s grace; things grind to a halt and become bland, colorless, and dysfunctional.

For the culture to be truly what it is called to be, the Church must be what she is called to be. She is called to love the people of the world, to love the culture (but not be enamored of it). The Church must in a sense be above the culture and beneath the authority of God; she must be the conduit of God’s graces and act as a bridge between God and man.

When the Church leaves her place and shirks her role, the culture winds down and loses its color and life. When the Church is the Church, through her preaching and sacramental life, the culture is so much more alive with goodness, beauty, and truth.

Enjoy this beautiful video and consider its message for us.

5 Replies to “For the Culture to Be Healthy the Church Must Be the Church”

  1. Father, It seems so few priests are able to articulate the primacy of the spiritual over the temporal. They preach on the importance of being nice but so few point to our eternal destinies. Add to this, the problem of widespread contraception in the Church and very little recourse to confession. For these and other reasons it seems little sacramental grace is coming into the lives of a now much smaller group of believers.

  2. I have a slightly unrelated question to the article. I go to a Catholic high school and we have been studying our civic responsibility to vote as catholics. In the pastoral letter and various blogs like this one, we read that abortion is a non-negotiable but the death penalty is okay to support. How can you say you preach for the preservation of life but then support the taking of one?

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