So you think Church is unnecessary? Fr. Lemieux begs to differ:
There is a strong idea, common really, that we can love Jesus and love God while completely distancing ourselves from the Church and having nothing to do with Her. To which we say, ‘not so fast, slick.’ To live one’s faith as an individual, a little person on his own, or a little group of people on their own, is not sustainable really. Faith comes from hearing, and bears fruitin proclamation. Faith is inherently public, in the Christian sense of the affair. A faith that is not publicly professed is not a full and genuine faith, and this is strictly scriptural (Rom 10:10). Furthermore, a faith that is separated from the faith of the Church is a faith that is precisely measured by the individual’s own level, his or her own possession of truth, of goodness, of beauty. And this is not how God designed the human race to be, not His providential plan at all. We are meant to find a genuine personal faith, a genuine following of Jesus, within the larger faith of the billions of Catholics who share it with us, and in union with the many millions of Catholics who have gone before us and who have passed it on to us. My personal faith—that frail plant prone to blight and frostbite at any moment—is upheld and strengthened, preserved and fostered in the giant greenhouse of the Church, in which the light and warmth of Christ is held and amplified in the sacramental flow of life. It would be a matter of extreme ingratitude and churlish ill-temper on my part to receive all this sacramental grace and evangelical proclamation from the Church, to have received the Christian faith in the first place from the Church and have had it nurtured and fed by the Church, and then just turn around and walk away from it because I don’t like this priest or that bishop or I think the Pope should do x, y, or z and he’s not listening to me or whatever.
in proclamation. Faith is inherently public, in the Christian sense of the affair. A faith that is not publicly professed is not a full and genuine faith, and this is strictly scriptural (Rom 10:10).
Furthermore, a faith that is separated from the faith of the Church is a faith that is precisely measured by the individual’s own level, his or her own possession of truth, of goodness, of beauty. And this is not how God designed the human race to be, not His providential plan at all. We are meant to find a genuine personal faith, a genuine following of Jesus, within the larger faith of the billions of Catholics who share it with us, and in union with the many millions of Catholics who have gone before us and who have passed it on to us.
My personal faith—that frail plant prone to blight and frostbite at any moment—is upheld and strengthened, preserved and fostered in the giant greenhouse of the Church, in which the light and warmth of Christ is held and amplified in the sacramental flow of life. It would be a matter of extreme ingratitude and churlish ill-temper on my part to receive all this sacramental grace and evangelical proclamation from the Church, to have received the Christian faith in the first place from the Church and have had it nurtured and fed by the Church, and then just turn around and walk away from it because I don’t like this priest or that bishop or I think the Pope should do x, y, or z and he’s not listening to me or whatever.
Finish with the good Father. Well worth your time.
