Who is going to save our Church? Not our bishops, not our priests and religious. It is up to you, the people. You have the minds, the eyes and the ears to save the Church. Your mission is to see that your priests act like priests, your bishops act like bishops and your religious act like religious.—Archbishop Fulton Sheen.
Let’s dissect the quote above a bit.
Firstly, Bishop Sheen was wrong to insist any man on earth will “save” Christ’s Church. He was wrong since only Christ will save His Church from the current madness. Now, of course, I’m the last priest on earth to say this will be done in some magical way without cooperation of real people on earth. Obviously, what Our Lady of Good Success predicted, namely, the complete restoration of the Catholic Church, will require a tremendous amount of cooperation with grace to get us out of this mess.
But from Our Lady of Fatima, we know that the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary will only begin when a Pope (with all the bishops of the world) accurately consecrates Russia (and Russia alone) to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. This is how Christ will begin to save the Church—yes with real people on earth—but only when the hierarchy is obedient. This is Our Lady’s words—not mine—that the “era of peace” will only arrive when a Pope consecrates Russia to Her Heart.
Secondly, for Archbishop Sheen to insist that lay people will save the Church is like saying the patients are going to save the hospital. We’ll get to this one later.
Thirdly, to tell lay people their “mission is to see that your priests act like priests” is peak-level Stockholm Syndrome after all the priest-on-child scandals in the Catholic Church of the last 50 years. That’s almost like saying “It’s your fault if you left your child with a pervert-priest who hurt your eleven year old son.” I know Bishop Sheen did not mean it like this, but there’s a lot of hurting families out there that could take his shifting of responsibility to lay people to mean something like this.
Fourthly, to tell lay people it’s their “mission to see that… your bishops act like bishops” is like telling children it is their responsibility to monitor their parents’ teaching and governance. Such a notion is highly disordered and has absolutely no basis in tradition. God set up a hierarchy in the Church which is entirely based on order. To say lay people must babysit the moral life or teaching life of bishops goes against the entire Apostolic Order established by Christ from the very first century of Catholicism onwards.
I’m not promoting clericalism, nor am I defending the modernist hierarchy. But I am saying Bishop Fulton Sheen was wrong to imply (notice my word there—imply) that a renewal in the Catholic Church can start with the laity while nearly ignoring the hierarchy. Or worse, implying it’s the responsibility of the lay people to get heretics and child-abusers to become Catholic again. The renewal has never flowed up in all of Church history.
Of course, the current crisis in the Church is more the fault of the hierarchy than the lay people. Yes, the lay people who “pinch hit” for the lacking teaching of us priests (and bishops) are doing something heroic online. You are doing a great spiritual work of mercy if you catechize your parish or even teach your children Apostolic Catholicism. I’m not overturning any of my past assertions in this article.
Clearly, you should keep teaching your children traditional Catholicism even when we priests do not. I am not saying you should have an attitude that goes like this: “Well, if the priests and bishops won’t teach my children traditional Catholicism, then I am off the hook.” Obviously, such an attitude will eternally endanger the souls of your entire family. So, yes, please keep teaching the true and real Catholic Faith, regardless of what we priests do.
But to insist the patients are going to save the entire hospital without the doctors knowing the basics of their medicine is insane.
You see, because priests no longer know their traditional catechisms, the distribution of the sacraments has become the Burger King of the Catholic Church, that is, “You can have it your way.” In other words, many modernists among the laity believe their priest is nothing more than a sacramental ATM who dispenses what they need, when they want it, and how they want it. And if they don’t get it “their way” then the priest’s bishop will get a letter in the mail from the angry lady who got denied absolution for not getting off contraception first.
You must understand that we priests (and especially the bishops above us) have been given three gifts or munera of Holy Orders: 1) Teach 2) Sanctify and 3) Govern. The second one (sanctify) specifically applies to the sacraments. But the second one is inexorably linked to the first and the third.
To teach the Catholic faith is primarily the job of the bishops and the priests. I know this seems very foreign to most Catholics since social media is usually exposing the bad teaching of one bishop or another—as well you lay people should keep doing! Again, I support lay people being that “collateral circulation” of teaching when the main artery (Holy Orders) is clogged in a manner worse than what we saw in the Arian Crisis.
But realize it was not always like this. For most of Church history, the Pope, bishops and priests were the most trusted sources of teaching. In fact, lay people needed special mandates from the bishop to say anything publicly because it is such a danger to the soul to claim to teach in the name of the Catholic Church. As St. James says, not many of you should be teachers.
Bishops and priests are also called to govern. That doesn’t mean we simply decide which company gets hired for mowing the lawn of the rectory or chancery. Traditionally, the Church claimed authority in matters spiritual and ecclesial. But she also claimed an extremely high level of influence in civil matters of the state.
This traditional teaching of the Catholic bishops having governance even at a civil level obviously flies in the face of the American notion of separation of Church and State (as well as every American bishop who constantly tells you how much he believes in “religious liberty.”) And this is also why every traditionalist rightly spends a lot of time teaching the Social Reign of Christ the King. That is, Christ is King not only of our hearts, but He is King of each city, state and country on planet earth. And we in the Catholic Church hierarchy are called to be His ambassadors for that. (Thus, “religious liberty” is an error, since error has no rights.)
So, when Bishop Sheen that says “Lay people will save the Church,” I want to respectfully say to the late bishop who I have admired so much in my past….From whom?
Some of his more courageous fans today would boldly reply: “From the wicked hierarchy!” Ok, I agree with that answer… but where such fervent lay people are mistaken is that they do not know that this renewal can’t take place without the priesthood… unless you’re going to have a protestant revolt.
Again, for Bishop Sheen to say “Lay People are going to save the Church” is like the sick patients at the hospital saying they are going to save the hospital around the doctors of constant malpractice. That’s a Protestant notion. It doesn’t work that way if we really believe Christ established bishops to rule and serve His Bride, the Catholic Church. The restoration (for better or for worse) must start at the top.
Finally, the strongest opposition to Bp. Sheen’s strange line about the laity saving the Church comes from the famous Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard in Soul of the Apostolate. Below, he describes parish-life, but it could also be applied to the Church at-large:
If the priest is a saint, the people will be fervent;
if the priest is fervent, the people will be pious;
if the priest is pious, the people will at least be decent;
if the priest is only decent, the people will be godless.
The spiritual generation is always one-degree less intense in its life than the one who begets it in Christ.