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.
Continue reading at Padre Peregrino