Most sermons in Catholic Churches today, wherever they might be preached, will probably include the phrase: what we celebrate today is the birthday of the Church. I have certainly used this phrase quite often myself! But the more I think about it the more I realise that this a phrase that ought to require a good deal of qualification before it slips off our tongue.
By using the words-the birthday of the Church-we tend to imply that the Church sprang fully formed into being. Sure the Church had to grow up, but the implication is that all the essentials were there from the start. It tends towards the assumption that Peter was swiftly acclaimed as the first Pope and the ten remaining apostles were soon regarded as bishops and everything went smoothly after that.
But this is far from the case. There are hundreds of issues and assumptions that would have to be quietly glossed over if we were to fall in with such a scenario.
If the apostles are the bishops, then who are the priests? And why is the word priest never even mentioned in the New Testament? And how come there is no reference to any ritual of ordination of anyone in the scriptures? And where do the Cardinals fit in? One could go on and on asking similar tricky questions, as indeed over the centuries many have.
Christ bequeathed his followers the Holy Spirit to inspire and guide the Church. At the Feast of Pentecost the Holy Spirit came down upon those gathered in that locked room and filled them with the earnest desire to go out and proclaim the Gospel to each person in his or her own language.
The first impulse of the Spirit is therefore a missionary impulse. The task given is to open the hearts and minds of the people of the world to the Good News. And the disciples certainly took up this task there and then and in due time travelled the length and breadth of the known world to bring the message to as many as they could.
It is only later that the organisational questions come in. It is only as a result of the expansion through the world and the resulting growth in the number of believers that it becomes necessary to answer questions such as: What does baptism consist in? Who is authorised to preside at the Eucharist? What does authority in the Church mean?
These, and a myriad of similar questions, are still being worked out today. Indeed it was only finally agreed that marriage was one of the seven sacraments as late as the year 1215. And astonishingly, 2000 years after the first Pentecost, the precise role of the laity is still not clear.
The tolerance of Christianity in the Roman Empire declared by Constantine in the Edict of Milan in the year 313 was clearly an important turning point in the history of the Church. For it was then that Christianity became not merely a tolerated religion but the de facto established religion of the whole Roman Empire.
Before then you couldn’t be an army officer if you openly professed Christianity, after that point, with a few exceptions, you couldn’t be an army officer unless you openly professed Christianity.
And, for good or ill, with establishment comes institutionalisation. In the space of a very few years we moved from a loose arrangement of house churches to one with a centralised bureaucracy and a system of governance not dissimilar to the structure of the Roman Empire itself.
My task here is not to undermine your faith in the Church; my purpose is exactly the opposite, it is to strengthen your faith but to do so in the light of the facts so far as we can ascertain them.
The point is that the work of the Holy Spirit did not begin and end on the day of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit is alive and well and is working in the Church right down to the present day and he will continue his work until the very end of time.
It is precisely through the guidance of the Holy Spirit that all our institutions and structures came into being. But what we have to be careful about is whether these are fixed in stone for all time. We have as a Church to keep things under review and to be open to the promptings of the Spirit the whole time.
I once heard a priest in Knock preaching on Good Shepherd Sunday who said: You would have to have your head in a bucket of sand not to realise that there was a crisis in the priesthood!
We are certainly in the West undergoing a time of transition. The collapse in Church attendance is one symptom; another is the crisis in vocations to the priesthood and to the religious orders. However much we want things to stay the same the Church is certainly going to look very different in ten or more years time.
We have to have confidence and realise that, whatever transitions we are going through, this is not because the Holy Spirit has gone away. He is still with us and will undoubtedly guide us through the difficulties ahead.
And he is not only with the Church as a whole; he is with each individual member of the Church-that is what the Sacrament of Confirmation is all about. And the Holy Spirit accompanies us in our pilgrimage through life, guiding us through life’s transitions and the many vicissitudes we experience.
The Church did not spring into being with all its structures and doctrines in finished form. Neither did we understand all the implications of our faith at the moment of our Baptism or even our Confirmation. No, we gradually grow in understanding; we develop and deepen our faith on our journey through life.
It is at the moments when our faith is challenged and tested that we most need to turn to the Holy Spirit and pray for his guidance and ask for the gift of discernment to help us make the right choices; choices that will lead us forward, choices that will bring us closer to God, choices that will bring our human potential to its fulfilment.
The Feast of Pentecost is indeed the birthday of the Church but there are many more birthdays ahead for the Church, many more challenges to face, many more opportunities for the Church to deepen and strengthen fidelity to the Divine Saviour, its founder and sole reason for existence.