Why I won't budge

Catholic New Times, Nov 16, 2003 by James Loney

Sometimes I'd like to shred my baptismal certificate and mail it to John Paul II in an envelope without a return address. I almost did it this summer when the Vatican released Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's "Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons." To a gay man, its language was almost too much to bear: "grave detriment to the common good ... serious depravity ... deviant behaviour ... this anomaly ... intrinsically disordered."

The narrow, reactionary brand of Catholicism that is currently being forced on the faithful has led many to re-think their commitment to the church. Whether because of dismay, fatigue or outrage, many have voted with their feet. Some have opted for an altogether different spiritual path. Some are taking a spiritual leave of absence, and some are seeking ecclesial refuge elsewhere. I don't blame them. As for me, despite my misgivings and disaffections, I'm not budging.

Dorothy Day once wrote, "We cannot go to heaven alone. Otherwise ... God will say, 'Where are the others?'"

It is a reality we can't escape. We all must breathe the same air and share the same blue planet. Everything we do affects everything and everyone else.

The church, as the Mystical Body of Christ, is a corporeal sacrament of this solidarity, a living embodiment of the fact that we are all members of one another, that we are saved together or not at all.

The church gives us a language to describe this reality, and a way to live its implications. It instructs that the struggle for salvation is everywhere and begins right where I am, . in my own household. As difficult as it is for me to accept, and despite our antithetical differences, the church insists that Joseph and I are members of each other. Our salvation involves, penetrates and depends on both of us. This is what communion is all about: struggling together for salvation. Leaving the church does not change this fact. Like it or not, somehow or other, Joseph and I and the old Italian woman clicking her beads in the pew must find our way together.

This is where the church helps us to know each other together in God. It gives us a common language, songs to sing and a path to walk together. It offers us a way to experience ourselves as a people and a deep soil in which the wildly diverse seeds of our spiritual lives can take root in the sunshine of God's love. It is the house of all those who have gone before us, the help and strength of the communion of saints: Oscar Romero, Mother Teresa, Jean Donovan, Cesar Chavez. It is a vast treasury of every prayer, every struggle, and every sacrifice ever offered by a sincere heart.

At the same time, the church is also a repository of genocide, inquisition, crusade and holocaust. It has, at every turn, betrayed the hope it was given to proclaim and incarnate, and it has been so since the very beginning. Judas sold Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, Peter betrayed him in the courtyard, and the rest of the disciples (at least the men) ran for cover.

We are the church, and this is who we are: Judas and Peter; the good, the bad and the ugly; a communion of sinners in need of forgiveness and healing. Where the church is responsible for atrocity and horror, I am too. Dorothy Day liked to quote Romano Guardini, who said the church is the cross on which Christ was crucified. To that she added, "One could not separate Christ from His Cross, and one must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the Church."

I am a part of all that is the church, and it is a part of me. In the end, I suppose that's why I can't budge. I hate to break it to you, John Paul and Joseph: the church is much bigger than what any one person, authority or historical period can imagine, understand or represent. And that's why it isn't possible for you to define me out of the church.

James Loney is a member of the Catholic Worker community in Toronto.