Brothers and Sisters,

I am speaking today from my heart to each of you. You know the Church is the home of my soul, the place where I have received the mercy of Jesus Christ and have tried to bring that mercy to others. So when I speak about what troubles me, please hear the affection beneath the grief. I am speaking about my mother, the Church. I am speaking about the faith I have promised to serve.

Recently I heard a song that put words and images to something I have been carrying for a long time. It was sharp. It was painful. It did not sound like a committee statement, and I did not receive it as one. I heard in it the cry of people who look at the life of the Church and wonder whether we still have the courage to say plainly what we believe. 

That cry felt familiar to me. The song mirrored how I feel.

I want to tell you what lies behind that feeling. I want to do so as a bishop who loves Christ, loves His Church, and loves the people who are often caught in the middle of our arguments. Some of you may share every concern I raise. Others may not. I ask only that you listen to my heart as I try to speak honestly.

I think first of the Church herself. When I enter a Catholic church, I want to know where I am. I want the building, the altar, the silence, the crucifix, and everything there to turn my attention toward God. A church is where a person can kneel without performing for anyone. It is where a sinner can ask for mercy. It is where the poor can pray beside the wealthy and neither has a better place before the Lord. It is where the children learn, even before they can explain it, that God is holy and that they are loved.

When a church begins to feel like a stage for whatever message is fashionable outside its doors, something in me recoils. You may have felt that too. The particular banner or event may catch our eye, but my deeper concern is about the purpose of sacred space. What are we asking people to look at? Whose words are they hearing? Is the altar still teaching us that Jesus Christ is Lord?

The Church must speak to the world, they say. Of course she must. We are sent into the world. But the Church has something to give to the world precisely because she has first received something from Christ. We cannot offer Him faithfully if we are embarrassed by what He taught. We cannot bring people to the living water if we keep changing the sign on the well so that no one recognizes what is there.

There is another reason the song struck me. Its images of slogans in a sacred place made me think of the quiet pressure to make the Church sound more acceptable. Sometimes that pressure is open and loud. Sometimes it comes dressed in gentle words. I know that many people using those words are trying to be kind. I do not question every person’s motives. Still, I worry when kindness is made to mean that we should stop saying what we believe about sin, repentance, grace, and the life to which Christ calls us.

We have to be able to speak about love without losing the truth. And we have to be able to speak the truth without losing love. Those two duties belong together because the Lord who calls us to conversion is the Lord who loves us enough to call.

I want to say something plainly here. Every person who comes through the doors of a church is a person for whom Christ died. Every person has a name, a history, wounds we may not see, and a need for God that we share. No one should be met with contempt. No one should be made into a symbol that saves us the trouble of seeing a human being.

But I also believe we fail people if we act as though welcome is the end of the Christian message. Jesus welcomed sinners, and He loved them. He also called them to a new life. That call applies to me. It applies to you. It applies to every person, whatever particular struggle or attachment that person brings. The Church’s moral teaching is demanding because discipleship is demanding. None of us gets to stand outside that demand and point at the others.

That is the part of this conversation I fear we are losing. People hear the word love and understandably want to know that they are not being turned away. I want them to know it. Then they must be allowed to hear that God’s love can change a life. Mercy is more than a warm greeting. It is forgiveness, healing, and the strength to follow Christ when following Him costs us something.

When those who speak for the Church seem to blur that call, I feel sorrow. I think about a young person trying to understand the faith. I think about parents who have taught their children one thing and then hear a very different message at a public event. I think about a priest trying patiently to explain a hard teaching while public gestures seem to leave the opposite impression. He may spend weeks answering questions that a few confusing moments created.

Gestures matter. Invitations matter. What is said matters, and what is left unsaid can matter too. A photograph cannot tell us everything in a person’s heart, and I do not pretend it can. Yet public actions carry a meaning for the people who see them. Pastors have to think about that meaning. We owe the faithful enough clarity that they do not have to guess whether the Church still believes what she taught them yesterday.

There is another feeling beneath my grief: bewilderment at what can look like an uneven measure. The song I have been listening to talks about turning toward Écône, toward Catholics attached to the traditional liturgy and the faith as they have received it. I know there are serious questions about authority, obedience, and communion in these matters. 

But I understand why many faithful Catholics look at the welcome extended to one group and the suspicion directed toward another and ask, “What is being measured here?” They see people who love the Mass, teach their children the catechism, pray for the pope, and try to preserve what they were handed. They hear those people spoken of as a problem. Then they see other public gestures that appear to place less weight on the Church’s moral teaching. The contrast troubles them. It troubles me.

I want unity in the Church. I want it deeply. However, unity cannot mean silence about the faith, and fidelity cannot mean indifference to communion. We have to speak about both honestly. If we are going to ask anyone to trust the Church’s authority, we must show that authority serving the truth with patience and fairness. If we are going to ask the faithful to remain close to one another, we must listen when they say they feel pushed away.

I am not asking you to choose a team and harden your heart against everyone else. That temptation is real, especially when we are hurt. I am asking you to take seriously the wound that makes these questions so urgent. For some Catholics, the ancient liturgy is where they learned to adore. For some families, it is where their children discovered that God deserves the best they can give. They are not abstractions. They are souls. Whatever judgments must be made, those souls deserve pastoral care. 

And the same is true of the people on the other side of a dispute. They are souls too. We gain nothing by denying that. I can speak firmly about an idea or an action while still praying for the person involved. In fact, I must.

Some of you may be wondering why I am willing to say any of this aloud. Would it be easier to keep quiet? In one sense, yes. Silence avoids a difficult conversation for a little while. But I think of the faithful who already talk about these things at their kitchen tables, in the car after Mass, or quietly with a priest they trust. They are trying to make sense of what they see. They deserve to know that their concerns have been heard.

I also know that my words carry a responsibility. I must take care with them. Anger can make a speaker careless. A striking image can outrun the facts. When a song expresses my feelings, that does not turn every image into a complete account of an event. It tells you why the song reached me. I want to be fair to people, including people whose decisions I question. I want to correct an error if I make one. Those duties are part of speaking as a Christian. 

Fairness, though, does not require me to pretend I am at ease. I am not. I worry about confusion in the Church. I worry that in our effort to be heard by the modern world, we sometimes make it harder for the world to hear Christ. I worry that Catholics who hold to what they were taught have begun to wonder whether there is room for them in their own home.

Perhaps you hear the strain in my voice. This is not an argument I enjoy. I did not become a bishop because I wanted to spend my days reacting to headlines. I wanted to preach the Gospel, celebrate the sacraments, visit the sick, encourage priests, and help families grow in holiness. 

But if our public language becomes so uncertain that we cannot answer simple questions, we have made the path for everyone harder. I do not want to make their path harder.

I have been asking myself what faithfulness looks like now. I do not have a clever formula. I return to what Christians have always done when they are afraid for the Church: pray, repent, worship, teach, and love the people placed before them.

Prayer comes first because the Church belongs to Christ. When I am troubled by a decision in Rome, by an event in a parish, or by a conversation that seems to go nowhere, I can carry that trouble into prayer. I can pray for the Holy Father. I can pray for bishops and priests. I can pray for the people whose actions distress me and for the people who feel distressed by mine. Prayer keeps me from imagining that I can save the Church by winning an argument.

Repentance comes next, and it starts close to home. It is easy to list the failures we see elsewhere. It is harder to ask where we have been proud, impatient, cowardly, or unkind. I ask myself that question. Have I spoken when I should have spoken? Have I listened when I should have listened? Have I let frustration make me less charitable? If I ask the Church to be clear about conversion, I must be willing to be converted myself.

Then there is worship. Go to Mass. Adore the Lord. Bring your family if you can. Let sacred silence have a place in your week. When the Church is noisy with controversy, the tabernacle is still there. Christ has not abandoned His people. We need to spend time with Him before deciding what we must say to anyone else. 

Teach the faith patiently. A child who asks a difficult question needs more than a slogan. A friend who feels rejected may need someone to sit with him before he can hear an answer. A person who has heard conflicting messages deserves an explanation given with care. Read the Gospel. Learn the Church’s teaching. Ask a trustworthy priest for help when you need it. Pass on the faith as a gift you have received with confidence and humility.

And love the people in front of you. Visit someone who is lonely. Help a family under strain. Call the friend who has been away from church and ask how he is. Do the works of mercy. If our concern for the Church never becomes care for a particular person, something has gone wrong in us. The truth we defend should be visible in the way we treat our neighbors. 

I know that none of these ordinary acts settles the difficult questions I have raised. They are how we remain faithful while we face those questions. They keep our hearts open to grace. They remind us that our first loyalty is to Jesus Christ, whose Church this is.

There is reason for grief in that loyalty. The Psalms give us words for it. The saints knew it. Loving the Church does not mean that every moment in her life feels reassuring. Sometimes love makes the pain sharper, because we know how precious the gift is. If you have felt sorrow about the Church, I do not need you to hide it from me. I ask you to bring it to God and let it deepen your fidelity rather than consume your hope.

There is room for honest speech, too. I want the faithful to be able to ask serious questions without being treated as troublemakers. I want pastors to be able to answer without rehearsing safe phrases that leave everyone more confused. We should be able to speak plainly and still be kind. 

The answer is not to surrender the concern. We can name what troubles us, ask for clarity, defend what the Church has handed down, and refuse contempt. Those things belong together. If we break them apart, even a true concern can damage the soul that carries it. 

I return in my mind to the song. Its force comes from the sense that the Church’s doors seem to open easily for some messages while those who cling to tradition feel the weight of every lock. That image captures a real sorrow for me. It raises questions I cannot simply put aside. Yet I do not want to leave you standing at a locked door in your imagination. Christ is present to His people. He is present in the Eucharist. He hears your prayer. He sees the parents trying to teach their children, the priest trying to be faithful, the convert trying to understand, and the person struggling to begin again. 

I want every one of them to hear the fullness of His invitation. This invitation is for all of us, and it is the reason I cannot be indifferent when the Church’s message sounds unclear.

There is one final important thing I must tell you before closing today. There are moments when the Lord calls us to step over a threshold. St. Francis had such a moment before the crucifix in the little church of San Damiano when he heard the Lord say, “Francis, go repair my house which, as you see, is falling into ruin.” Francis did not yet know all that those words would ask of him. He saw the broken church before him, and he began there. He picked up stones. He repaired what he could reach.

I think many of us can see what is broken in the Church today. We speak of it. We grieve over it. We pray about it, as we must. But the Lord’s words to Francis call us to ask what we will do when we rise from prayer.

I think, too, of Mother Mariana in Quito. In the accounts of Our Lady of Good Success, she was told that those called to take part in the Church’s restoration would need perseverance, courage, and confidence in God. Those words do not promise an easy task. They remind us where to seek the strength to carry it out.

So where do we begin? We begin where Francis began, with what has been placed before us. Teach the faith clearly to a child. Help a family hold fast to it. Support a faithful priest. Speak the truth with charity when silence would be easier. Give your time and your hands to the work your parish needs. 

And for the bishops? We must do more. We must actually pick up stones and replace them. That will also take perseverance, courage, and confidence in God.

None of us can see the whole work ahead. Francis could not see it when he lifted that first stone. But he heard Christ, trusted Him, and began.

My friends, it is time for us to begin. Let us pray with all our hearts. Then let us rise from prayer and do what Christ asks of us. Stone by stone, with courage and confidence in God, LET US REPAIR HIS CHURCH.

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

Amen.

Bishop Joseph E. Strickland

Bishop Emeritus