Question 4.89

4.89 The Church is always reforming herself: Ecclesia semper reformanda, according to the adage. But what should we understand by reform? Is reform necessarily a sort of progress or is it instead a hope?

Reform is an ongoing necessity. We are the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. Saint Paul called all baptized persons “the saints”. If we really read the Gospel, we find that one saying recurs constantly: “Convert and believe the Good News!” It is also the first thing that Jesus calls for in the Gospel of Mark. Reform, therefore, is this interior work that everyone must accomplish, at both the personal level and the ecclesial level, in order to correspond better to what Christ expects of us. It is not just a matter of reorganizing structures, because organizations may be perfect, but if the persons who run them are bad, the work will be vain and illusory. We all must march to the same drum as Christ. The Church is reformed when the baptized march more resolutely toward holiness, allowing themselves to be recreated in the likeness of God by the power of the Holy Spirit. Only the contagion of sanctity can transform the Church from within. From the earliest Christian times, there has always been a call to reform, understood as a greater closeness to God. Reform is a way of corresponding more perfectly to the absolute demands of the Christian vocation. Christ gives us just what we need for this reform, through his Word and prayer, which are the core of all regeneration; the Gospel brings God’s life and grace to our souls. The sacraments are the means of constant healing, reform, and renewal.

Nostalgia and the search for God have never been so insistent, because our world is going through an unprecedented moral crisis. At the same time, the forces that want to reject God are so powerful that the Church has difficulty responding to this search. The great challenge lies in this unquenchable thirst for the beyond.

I often think of the Greeks who came to Jerusalem and said to Philip: “We want to see Jesus.” Indeed, the world has not changed; our contemporaries still expect Christians to show them Christ. And so the baptized ought to live out their faith joyfully. The times of great troubles for the Church are precisely the eras in which Christians live in a way contrary to Gospel principles. I think that I am not too far from the truth in saying that both the clergy and the laity today are in urgent need of conversion. I know that many are not living the Gospel message. This is why the most ambitious reform is the one that leads the Church to be more fiercely determined in her march toward sanctity and her proclamation of the Good News. The world’s pleas, as feeble as they may be, to go beyond false materialistic and ideological values are opportunities that the Church cannot afford to miss. Through these opportunities, men are turning their attention toward God. In this busy world, in which there is no time for family or for oneself, much less for God, true reform consists of rediscovering the meaning of prayer, the meaning of silence, the meaning of eternity.

Prayer is the greatest need of the contemporary world; it remains the tool with which to reform the world. In an age that no longer prays, time is, so to speak, abolished, and life turns into a rat race. This is why prayer gives man the measure of himself and of the invisible world. I wish that we would not forget the path that Benedict XVI decided to take for the Church on the day of his resignation from the See of Peter. He chose a way dedicated exclusively to prayer, contemplation, and listening to God. This is the most important route, because it grasps the meaning of God’s glory. Finally, Francis’ plan to reform the Roman Curia consists of putting it face to face with God. …