My dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

St. Francis of Assisi was praying before the crucifix of the little church of San Damiano when he heard the Lord say, “Francis, go, repair my house.”

Francis could see that the little church building needed repair, and he began there. In time, he came to understand that Christ was calling him to something far greater. The Lord was asking him to help renew His Church.

I have been thinking about that call because many Catholics today can see that something needs repair. We see people leaving the Church. We see others who remain but feel confused or discouraged. We see people who have been wounded by those they trusted. We see arguments about worship and teaching, and we see a distance between what the Church professes and what she sometimes does.

It is right to name these things. We cannot repair what we refuse to face. 

But Francis heard a command to repair. At some point, talking about what is wrong must lead us to ask what went wrong, where it went wrong, who made the decisions, and what we are prepared to do about it.

That is difficult work. It will cost something. And I have come to believe that the Church cannot be renewed unless her people are willing to give their lives for the faith again.

I mean that seriously. The Church has always been renewed through the witness of people who loved Jesus Christ more than their own safety. Some gave that witness by dying rather than denying Him. Others gave themselves over many years of costly service. We need to remember the martyrs because their lives expose how easily we have come to expect a faith that asks very little of us.

Are we willing to suffer for what we believe? Are we willing to lose the approval of others? Are we willing to tell the truth when doing so is difficult? Would we remain faithful to Christ if the cost were our lives?

I ask those questions because the witness of the martyrs requires us to examine the kind of faith we are living now.

Think of St. Ignatius of Antioch. He was an early bishop of the Church, taken as a prisoner toward Rome, where he would be killed. During that journey, he wrote to Christians along the way. He knew what awaited him. Yet his concern was for the Church: that her people hold fast to Christ, remain united, and keep the faith they had received.

Think of St. Thomas More. He was a husband and father, a lawyer, and a man who held high public office. When the king demanded what More could not give without betraying his conscience and the Church’s teaching, More refused. He lost his position, his freedom, and finally his life.

Think of Blessed Stanley Rother, an American priest serving in Guatemala. He knew he was in danger. He had the opportunity to remain away from the people he served, but he returned to them. He was killed there.

These men lived in different times. They faced different forms of power and different threats. They did not seek death. They stayed faithful to Christ and to the people entrusted to them when fidelity became dangerous.

We honor them, but do we allow them to challenge us?

We can celebrate the martyrs on their feast days and still live as though our first duty is to protect our comfort. We can admire St. Thomas More and then stay silent because we might offend someone. We can admire Blessed Stanley Rother and then walk away from people who need us because their needs are inconvenient. We can speak of the courage of the early Church while becoming anxious at the thought that someone might disapprove of us. 

And bishops and priests have no right to preach courage as a duty for the laity while arranging our own lives around avoiding difficult decisions.

The martyrs believed that Jesus Christ is Lord. They believed His promises. They believed that death would not have the final word. Their faith was strong enough to govern their actions when everything else was at stake.

What governs our actions? That is the question their lives put before us.

Some may hear this and think I am asking people to look for persecution or to welcome dying. I am not. Human life is a gift from God, and we have a duty to protect it. A martyr does not love death. A martyr loves Christ and refuses to abandon Him when someone else makes death the price of fidelity.

We should also be careful about calling every inconvenience a kind of martyrdom. Losing an argument is not the same as being killed for the faith. Having someone disagree with us is not the same as persecution.

Still, the smaller choices of our lives matter. They form us. A person who repeatedly sacrifices the truth to be liked should ask whether he is growing in the courage he would need for a greater trial. A leader who repeatedly avoids responsibility because it will be painful should ask whether he is serving Christ or protecting himself. 

That brings us back to St. Francis before the crucifix.

Francis did not receive a plan that explained every step of the Church’s renewal. He heard Christ call him to repair, and he began to obey. But the work did not stop with stones and mortar. Francis himself had to change. The Gospel reshaped his ambitions, his way of living, and his understanding of what was worth having.

We need that conversion. Yet personal conversion cannot become an excuse for those in authority to avoid correcting real wrongs. If a decision has harmed people, we must examine the decision. If someone has been abused, we must listen, protect, investigate, and act. If the way we worship has lost something precious, we need the courage to ask how that happened. 

Renewal calls for both: people who will let Christ change them and people willing to do the work of repair.

This is why our reading of the documents of the Second Vatican Council matters. We need to know what those documents actually say. We need to read them in continuity with Sacred Scripture, tradition, and the Church’s teaching.

But I want to say clearly that reading the documents is not enough.

We also need an honest examination of what happened after the Council. What was decided in its name? Who made those decisions? How were they carried out? What have been the fruits? Where did we fail to preserve or pass on what the Church had entrusted to us?

Consider the sacred liturgy.

The Council’s constitution, Sacrosanctum Concilium called for liturgical reform. It also called for care and restraint. It said that proposed changes should be investigated from theological, historical, and pastoral perspectives. It said that innovations should be made only when the good of the Church genuinely and certainly required them, and that new forms should grow organically from forms already existing.

The Council said that Latin was to be preserved in the Latin rites, while also making room for the use of the people’s own languages. It said that Gregorian chant was especially suited to the Roman liturgy and should have pride of place.

These statements are in the document. They are part of what we need to read and understand.

After the Council, the work of implementing the liturgical reform was entrusted in significant part to a commission called the Consilium. Archbishop Annibale Bugnini served as its secretary. Pope Paul VI approved and promulgated the revised Roman Missal. 

So an honest discussion of the liturgical reform must name the Consilium. It must name Bugnini. It must name Pope Paul VI. The reform did not simply appear on its own. People with authority made decisions. Others made decisions about how those changes would be introduced and carried out.

We need to distinguish the text of the Council, the reform that followed, and the practices that developed in parishes. Then we need the courage to examine each of them.

Why, after a Council that spoke of preserving Latin, did it become unfamiliar to so many Catholics? Why did chant, given pride of place in the Council’s document, nearly disappear from the experience of many parishes? Why were some people taught, in effect, that affection for the Church’s inherited worship belonged to a past they needed to leave behind?

We should ask what was gained. We should also ask what was lost. And if something was lost that ought to have been preserved, we should say so and work to restore it.

Catholics may reach different judgments about particular decisions. They may have different liturgical experiences. Those differences make a careful account more necessary, not less. We will not get anywhere by telling people that everything done after the Council must be accepted as though the Council itself had specified every choice. Nor will we get anywhere by refusing to read what the Council actually taught.

I want these readings to help us do more than win an argument about the past. I want them to help us tell the truth about the Church’s life now.

That includes the way Catholics who love the traditional Roman Mass are being treated. 

Pope Benedict XVI made broader provision for celebration according to the 1962 Missal. Traditionis custodes later placed substantial restrictions on that celebration. Those restrictions have consequences for priests, families, and communities. 

I know that concerns have been raised about division and about people who use attachment to the older liturgy as a reason to reject the Church’s authority. But we must not treat every Catholic who attends the traditional Mass as though he or she has done that. 

Some families go because they are drawn by reverence and beauty. Some young people encounter it and find themselves wanting to learn more about the faith. Some Catholics have worshiped this way for many years and are distressed to see access to it restricted. These are people entrusted to the Church’s care.

For them, the restrictions can feel like a campaign against the traditional Mass. We need to hear them when they say that. We need to ask whether our decisions help these Catholics grow in faith and communion, or leave them feeling that their devotion has made them suspect.

A Church that speaks of accompaniment should know how to accompany them. A Church that speaks of tradition should be able to receive and teach her own liturgical inheritance. We cannot repair division by refusing to listen to the people affected by our decisions.

There is another question we must face if we want to speak credibly about renewal. It concerns what happens when people report abuse.

Father Marko Rupnik, whose mosaics are found in sacred places, has been accused by women, including religious sisters, of grave sexual, psychological, and spiritual abuse. His canonical case is being heard.

But we do not need to wait for that outcome to acknowledge that the Church has already identified serious problems in how the case was handled, including a failure to reach out to those who came forward.

We have to face what that means.

What does a woman who has reported abuse experience when she enters a place of prayer and encounters work associated with the man she has accused? We cannot decide her answer for her. We have to listen. We have to recognize that a sacred space speaks to people through what we choose to place there and what we choose to leave there.

At Lourdes, the bishop decided to cover Rupnik’s mosaics on the basilica doors. Works remain in other places. Artistic prestige, expense, and embarrassment to the institution cannot come first.

I know these are different issues, but I ask you to consider what our actions communicate. When restrictions on an older form of the Mass are readily imposed, while people who report grave abuse struggle to be heard and must see an accused man’s work honored in sacred spaces, they will ask what the Church is protecting. It is a painful question. It deserves an answer in actions, not merely in statements.

If renewal means anything, it has to include a willingness to examine the decisions still being made – especially when the people most affected have the least power.

We might ask what any of this has to do with martyrdom. I believe it has everything to do with the kind of faith the martyrs show us.

St. Thomas More would not surrender the truth to remain in favor with those in power. Blessed Stanley Rother would not leave his people in order to secure his own safety. Their circumstances were extraordinary. But their witness asks something of everyone given responsibility in the Church.

Will we tell the truth when it puts our position at risk? Will we stay with people who have been wounded, even when their questions are difficult? Will we admit a wrong judgment? Will we correct a decision when doing so means acknowledging that we, or people we respect, made a mistake?

These questions apply to bishops in a particular way.  We have been entrusted with authority for the sake of Christ’s people. That authority is a responsibility before God, not a shield against examination. It must be used to teach the faith, guard worship, protect the vulnerable, and care for those who have been placed at the margins of the Church’s life.

I cannot speak to you about repair as though all the work belongs to someone else.

Neither can any of us end with criticism. We may be right about a particular failure and still do nothing to put it right. We may spend hours discussing the liturgy but give little time to learning to pray it. We may ask for better teaching and then decline to help teach. We may speak of those who have left without ever asking what happened to the person who once sat beside us at Mass.

The work has to become concrete.

It may mean a bishop examining a policy and listening again to the people it affects. It may mean a priest teaching the faith clearly, offering the sacraments reverently, and making time for someone who has been hurt. It may mean a parish recovering sacred music it has forgotten. It may mean forming young people in the Scriptures, the Catechism, and the history of the Church so that they can understand the faith they are being asked to live.

It may mean opening the door to a person who expects to be dismissed. It may mean telling the truth about abuse, following through on an investigation, and putting protection ahead of reputation.

It may mean that you or I need to go to confession. We cannot call the whole Church to repentance while carefully avoiding our own.

None of us can do every part of this work. But every one of us can ask Christ what responsibility He has placed before us. Francis began where he stood. We can begin there, too. 

I do not want to suggest that repairing the Church will be quick. Trust that has been broken takes time to rebuild. Good decisions may face resistance. Some work will be quiet and may never receive thanks.

That is another reason we need the martyrs’ witness. They did not measure fidelity by whether it brought an immediate success they could see. They gave themselves to Christ.

The Church’s hope has always rested in Him. Jesus did not promise that following Him would spare us the Cross. He gave Himself upon it and rose from the dead. That is why we can look truthfully at what is damaged without concluding that repair is impossible. 

The crucifix before Francis was a reminder of both the cost and the source of renewal. Christ did not call Francis from a place of comfort. He called him from the Cross. Francis answered, and his life changed.

We need men and women willing to answer that call now. We need Catholics who know what the Church teaches and love it enough to live it. We need shepherds who will accept the cost of their responsibilities. We need people who will listen to those who have suffered, pursue the truth, and stay for the long work of setting things right. 

We need to ask the martyrs to pray for us because, if we are honest, many of us are far from their courage. I know I must ask for it. The grace that sustained them came from Christ. It is to Him that we must turn.

So let us keep reading the Council’s documents – but let us also examine the history that followed and the decisions still being made. Let us read in the light of Scripture and tradition. Let us ask what must be recovered, what must be corrected, and what must be done for those who have been harmed.

Above all, let us refuse to settle for a faith that costs us nothing.

The Lord’s words to Francis remain a call to us: “Go, repair my house.”

May St. Francis pray for us. May St. Ignatius, St. Thomas More, Blessed Stanley Rother, and all the holy martyrs pray for us. And may Jesus Christ give us a faith strong enough to live for, to suffer for, and, if He asks it of us, to die for. 

And may Almighty God bless you, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Bishop Joseph E. Strickland

Bishop Emeritus