We celebrate today the feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul—celebrating these two great apostles, their Christian witness and preaching, their martyrdoms, and what God built for us through them. And further, we celebrate, in celebrating them, the Catholic Church, the grace and grit of the Church, the sacrifice and glory of it—in that first age and in all ages, even our own.
Now there are two lessons I want us to take from this celebration, two enduring truths. The first truth is about the apostolic foundation of the Catholic Church, that the Church’s one foundation in Christ is built upon the ministry of the apostles and their successors. The second truth is about sacrifice, about the sacrifices that are always necessary to the building up of God’s Church—both my sacrifices and yours, those who came before us and those who will come after.
But first about the apostolic Church. That is what the Lord’s words to Peter are all about, that upon the rock that is Peter, Jesus will build his Church.[1] It’s also what those words in John’s Gospel are all about, when Jesus commanded Peter to feed and tend his sheep.[2] These are the promises, the calls, the commands that created the Church. These are the divine words underneath “the apostles’ teaching and fellowship” that Luke wrote about in Acts of the Apostles; these are Christ’s words underneath what Paul called “the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets.”[3] This is behind what Saint Irenaeus called, toward the end of the second century, the “more excellent origin” of the Church of Rome.[4]
That is what the Catholic Church is: it is that enduring thing built by God’s grace given to the apostles. It is first a spiritual thing—a koinonia, the adelphoi, a communion, a brotherhood, sisterhood too—all in Christ. It is the body of Christ, the bride of Christ, the people of God; it is a spiritual organism into which you are brought by means of the spiritual birth that is baptism and in which you are sustained by the other sacraments, confession and the Eucharist foremost.
To be a Christian is not merely to assent to a disembodied set of teachings, but it is more fundamentally to belong to Christ in “a communion of life, charity and truth.”[5] That is, what I’m trying to say is that actually belonging to the Church matters, even that your spiritual existence depends on it, that being in communion with the Church is as important as knowing the Church’s truth—that in fact, they are the same thing. It matters so much in fact that Saint Cyprian even said that “there is no salvation outside the Church,” a controversial and nuanced thing to have said, for certain, demanding much qualification—and not something we can unpack in a homily; my only point in bringing it up is to underline the religious and spiritual fact that belonging to the Church really does matter.[6] It’s something you should think about.
The Church is a visible thing, a “complex reality” composed a of a “divine and human element.” That is, the Church is tangible, touchable, both a spiritual and a material thing; the analogy here is the incarnation, the Word made flesh.[7] The spiritual-material reality that is the Church is akin to that; the Church is a spiritual something you can see, something that has a footprint, something that exists in space and time throughout history. That is, the Church is not just an idea.
Which means that the Church is an actor within human history just like other nations and peoples. The Church is a society among societies, however not bound by anything like race or ethnicity but instead by a common faith and one Holy Spirit—a society in whom is neither Jew nor Greek, etcetera.[8]
This is where we come to what I guess you’d call the political reality of the Church. Since the ancient Greeks, the temple has played a role in society. For Aristotle, for instance, the “temple of the Graces” served the as sort of a symbol, a reminder, a teacher of the kind of graciousness necessary to a just city.[9] Saint Augustine, of course, talked about the “city of God,” a spiritual, sacramental, moral and pilgrim city that exists among the “earthly city,” abiding by the laws of God and the just laws of man, practicing the virtues of Christ sometimes in peace, sometimes in tension, and sometimes in conflict with the earthly city.[10] This, of course, is why the Church sometimes cooperates and then sometimes resists human governments; because, as Paul said, our citizenship is ultimately in heaven.[11]
Which brings us to the second truth I wanted to underline—the necessity of sacrifice. Jesus himself prophesied Peter’s martyrdom.[12] Both Peter and Paul died in Rome; you can visit their tombs even today. Each gave himself to God as a sacrifice, fulling Christ’s own Gospel command.[13] Sacrifice is simply what happens to the Christian who follows Christ; it’s what happens to the Church that follows Christ. Not always death, not always torture or even ridicule; rather, what sacrifice is for most of us is simply the genuine offering ourselves to God’s will, sacrificing what we want for what God wants, sacrificing our kingdom for God’s kingdom—no matter our baser desires, no matter what cultural or political pressures exist.
So, what does all this mean? All this talk of the Church and sacrifice? Practically? In this parish? In Catholic America? You’ve heard me talk about our capital campaign, all the money we’re trying to raise. You know I’ve been begging you for help; many, beautifully, have helped. It is what it is; I will keep begging. But my point is that this is why we are undertaking this campaign—in unabashed terms, asking you for money—because we are trying to do our part to build up the apostolic Church in this place, to care for it, to strengthen it. I’m trying to get across the truth that there is a generationally spiritual and human good behind our asking you for help; we’re trying to build up a part of the Catholic Church for the salvation of souls and so that this part of the world may know something of the light of Christ. Anyway, all I can say is that I’m telling you the truth; I’m not selling anything; I am simply calling upon you, the saints of God, to do your part in this place.
When I think of Catholic America, I think of all those parishes and orphanages and schools and universities the Church built in this country in the 19th and early 20th centuries, that Catholic infrastructure that made many of you, that educated many of you, and that made our country in large part stronger and more moral. That was a Catholic America built mostly by working class immigrants who gave sacrificially—“until it hurts,” it was often said.[14] They are the sacrifices that made us what we are today.
But the reality is that today we do not give to the Church as faithfully as our ancestors did; as we entered the middle class, got wealthier, our giving declined. Now there are all sorts of reasons for that—old-fashioned avarice, modern fundraising techniques—but I really need to sit down now; I will talk more about this later. It’s just I want to say that if there is to be genuine Catholic witness in America in the 21st century, we Catholics are going to have to recover and revive our earlier understanding of the nature of the Church and recover our earlier willingness to give sacrificially. We will need to continue to build churches and schools, not just digital platforms but real places for real people. And that’ll take work and giving and everybody.
Again, I am, of course, begging on behalf our parish’s capital campaign; but clearly, I am also talking about something bigger—about the Catholic Church and about what you think of her and about whether you think sacrifice is still something real, or at least something real for you. Which I hope you do, daring to stand here as you will do before the altar of sacrifice, open hopefully to a sacrifice of your own. Amen.
[1] Matthew 16:18
[2] John 21:15-19
[3] Acts 2:42; Ephesians 2:19-20
[4] Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 3.3.2
[5] Lumen Gentium 2.9
[6] Cyprian of Carthage, Letter 72.21
[7] Lumen Gentium 2.8
[8] Galatians 3:28
[9] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1132b33-1133a7
[10] Augustine, City of God 14.28, 19.17
[11] Philippians 3:20
[12] John 21:18-19
[13] Luke 9:24
[14] Mary J. Oates, The Catholic Philanthropic Tradition in America, 108
