Abba, Father

Father Bill Burton, one of our professional scripture scholars with a real gift for making scripture intelligible to people, used to get indignant: “’Abba’ does not mean ‘Daddy!’”

He didn’t say what it meant, but it clearly means someone Personal. And that is the crux of the issue.

The world can be divided into two classes of people: those who see the Source of All Being as personal, and those who don’t. The second class includes all those thoughtless folks around us who just don’t get around to thinking about God.

St. Paul says we cannot say “Abba, Father” unless we are helped by the Spirit. Being able to see God as Personal is not something that can be engineered by creative catechesis. Being able to see God as Personal is a gift, a gift of the Spirit.

This week the bishop of our diocese, Thomas John Paprocki, wrote in his diocesan magazine that the Second Vatican Council has destroyed the Church. He cites all the statistics: numbers of Catholics in church on Sunday, numbers of priests and nuns—all down, drastically. He has an engineering solution: go back to the way things were before Vatican II. He now presides at the Eucharist in his cathedral at least once every Sunday with his back to the people (“ad orientem”). Recently he forbade Eucharistic ministers, whether ordained or not, to bless children and non-Catholics at Communion. They are not even to touch the people, even after Covid is gone. There is only one blessing at Mass, and the priest is the one who gives it, and he gives it at the end of Mass and nowhere else. People who are not authorized to receive Communion should not even be in the Communion procession—they should stay in their pews. Mothers of small children raised so much objection to this that he backed down. They can bring their children with them, but the children are not to be blessed.

I am reminded of a joke I heard years ago. “What is the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist? You can negotiate with a terrorist.”

But Bishop Paprocki is not so different from the way most of us have thought about the Church. I too have crowed about how Catholics outstrip other groups in church attendance. We Catholics are the best in everything. We have the best athletes (Notre Dame of course), the best entertainers, and now even the president and six of the Supreme Court justices, though the president’s credentials are suspect to the Republican half of the faithful.

Into the mix is another recent episcopal decree: Confirmation is to be celebrated along with First Communion. Confirmation is not a rite of passage to Catholic adulthood, which is how much of our catechesis has presented it.

Religious ed teachers use Confirmation preparation as a valiant effort to get young people to see their faith in a more adult way. Every year classes of such young folks come to our friary to get an informal lecture on what a friary and its inhabitants look like. I admire the effort, but I wonder how much impact that has on the faith of these young faithful.

Because adult faith, which I think means seeing God as Personal, and as Personal in a way that really impacts one’s life, cannot be engineered. We need to admit that, and accept the fact that the majority of people baptized and growing up Catholic, even if they attend Catholic schools, are likely to be indifferent saints. In this view I am not so different from Pope Benedict when he observes that the Church is likely to be smaller, more like a faithful remnant in a hostile world, than a world religion calling the shots to secular politicians.  

We need to quit wringing our hands at numbers. What is important is when each individual, young or old, opens his or her heart to the Lord. That is going to happen at all kinds of moments in our life cycles, maybe at the birth of a child, maybe at the loss of a child, maybe only when we are in hospice. All we can do as religious grocery clerks is to keep the shelves stocked, the doors open, and someone at the checkout counter to speak in person when we are approached. And then ask the Lord to send the Spirit to help each of the people we meet to be able to say “Abba, Father.”