June 2019 Philadelphia Chapter of Pax Christi U.S.A.

A Church?

Scott Fina

On April 15, 2019, a fire damaged the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, destroying its spire, two-thirds of its roof, and main altar area (sanctuary). The event captured attention and inspired grief worldwide. Almost immediately after the fire had been extinguished, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a national goal of restoring the cathedral within five years and called for public and private assistance. By April 17-only two days after the fire- commitments of funding for the repairs of the cathedral totaled 845 million euros ($950 million U.S. dollars).

Like millions of people, I perceive the Cathedral of Notre Dame as a genuine treasure and remarkable human achievement. The cathedral was constructed over the 12th and 13th centuries. It has awed countless people for centuries. The art and towering structure of the cathedral have given people a sense of divine transcendence, great human capability, and promoted popular love for the mother of Jesus. So the fire struck me as a genuine tragedy.

But the response to the fire in the cathedral also raised conflicting feelings in me. A majority of French people mourned the damage of their “precious” church, but relatively few were attending religious services there, or at any Catholic Church. A paper published by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University found that while 77% of French people had been baptized in the Catholic Church, only 8% of French Catholics regularly attended mass (Emily Liner on the Dwindling Numbers of Practicing Catholics in France, March, 2007).

Then there was the quick and loud response of the “gilets jaunes” (yellow vests) protestors to the announcement of President Macron and outflowing of contributions for the repairs to the cathedral. Since November of 2017, the gilets jaunes have been protesting in Paris against tax and labor policies promulgated by Macron, that are seen as favoring the wealthy and hurting the middle and working class and impoverished people of France. The protestors, who at times have numbered in the hundreds of thousands in Paris, expressed outrage that so much money could be raised so quickly for a church building and such extensive concern given for its reconstruction, while so many French people struggle economically.

The mixed response to the fire at Notre Dame by the French people and my own muddled feelings around it, have made me question what the true essence and purpose of a “church” are, and what importance we should give to church edifices. The stories of the rebuilding of two other churches personally speak to my questioning.

I was recently involved with another Catholic church that, similarly to the Cathedral of Notre Dame, lost two-thirds of its roof which collapsed and damaged its sanctuary. The church was part of the Jubaguda Mission in a remote, mountainous region of Odisha State in northeastern India. In 2013, lightning struck a large tree adjacent to one of the church walls, and sent it crashing down onto the roof. The collapsing roof inured 62 children who were attending a service inside it. Thankfully, no children were killed and all those who were harmed fully recovered.

The church, however, was damaged beyond repair.

I assisted with the effort to rebuild the church through my work in the international development office of the Vincentian Fathers and Brothers. The Vincentians in India established and operate the Jubaguda Mission. The mission is mostly populated by the Khond tribal people, who up until four decades ago, were unschooled and survived by living off the forest, and practiced an indigenous religion. The Khond people have been exploited and oppressed by more established people in the region. Although they have made substantial social and economic gains, they continue to live simple lives and are heavily dependent on subsistence farming and working as laborers to survive.

The infrastructure in the Jubaguda Mission area remains underdeveloped. Electricity is limited (the mission compound depends on a diesel generator for power); housing is substandard; roads are unpaved and at times washed out; and many people in the more remote villages lack access to schools and health care.

Given these more fundamental and competing human needs, I found myself somewhat unmotivated to raise the funding the mission people needed to rebuild their church. And I must confess, I carried this attitude (hierarchy of concern) throughout my tenure of working on projects in developing regions for the Vincentians.

But then I visited the Jubaguda Mission in 2017. In spite of a lack of a church, I found a vibrant faith community in the mission constituted by gracious, industrious and loving people. Lay folks play a key role in the mission leadership, and conduct a plethora of pastoral and social services, including outreach to the poorest residents in the most distant villages. Nonetheless, on my short visit I sensed an aching in the people of the mission: a collective poverty in missing a deeply valued worship space.

India is an incredibly diverse country with numerous spoken dialects, subcultures, and very different looking peoples. Yet, there are some striking commonalities among its 1.3 billion people, a large portion of whom are radically poor. One is the highly ornamental aspect of Indian worship places, universally characteristic of Hindu, Islamic, and Christian temples and churches, and even shrines used for indigenous spiritual practices.

Interestingly, a common practice by Indians, is to respectfully remove their shoes before entering worship places (including Catholic churches): an expectation held for even people having wealth, influence, and/or authority. In this regard, worship places in India - a country whose society still suffers from stubborn caste customs - are leveling places where all people entering them are mutually dignified by occupying and belonging to a special space.

So I was won over by the importance of a Jubaguda Mission people to have a church - and a beautiful one. Unfortunately, I faced a difficult challenge in selling this idea to Catholic funding agencies in Europe and the United States, even though the costs of the new church planned for the Jubaguda Mission totaled a modest

$160,000 U.S. dollars. Eventually, working with Indian Vincentians, we were able to obtain funding commitments from four agencies to finance the construction of the new church—but only after one of them required that the original design of the church be simplified (lowering its costs to $140,000), because it believed the church building should be “more standard and simple.”

The new church at Jubaguda Mission is under construction as I write this article (and am now retired from my work with the Vincentians). The lesson of this story for me, is that churches may be less important as places providing space for people to worship God—i.e., trying paradoxically to experience the transcendental within the confines of walls and a roof—and more important as places that can raise people up and help them see their own human value, heightened by their membership in a spiritually based community. In other words, no church can box in God; God arises within a church when two or three (or more) people are gathered inside it in God’s name.

The second story of the rebuilding a church brings me back to my youth, when I read my first spiritual book, a biography, St. Francis of Assisi by G.K. Chesterton (Image Books, 1957). Francis lived in Italy in the 12th and 13th centuries, during the time when the Cathedral of Notre Dame was under construction in Paris. I was especially struck by the Fourth Chapter in the book, which recounted the story of Francis hearing what he believed to be God telling him to restore the Church of St. Damian, which was in ruins. Francis’s efforts to rebuild the small church would lead to the culmination of his conversion into a radical follower of Christ.

At the time, Francis was well on his way to becoming a mystic and an increasingly bizarre figure in the eyes of the people of Assisi. He had also become an embarrassment and disappointment to his father, Pietro Bernardone, a successful merchant in the region. Francis began selling his father’s cloth goods without his permission to raise monies for the restoration of St. Damian. His enraged father brought Francis before the local bishop to adjudicate the matter. The bishop directed Francis to return the monies he had obtained in selling the cloth goods, to his father.

What followed was the famous scene of Francis not only returning the monies, but de-possessing himself of any inheritance and all he owned, including the very clothes he was wearing, and then walking away naked into the world (on a cold winter day), to commence living a life of poverty and humble service. Francis continued to rebuild St. Damian (stone by stone), and was soon joined by villagers in the task whom increasingly became inspired by him.

Francis went on to rebuild a second little church in the area, St. Mary of the Angels, and was joined by other men who would eventually form the Franciscan order.

In Chesterton’s words, “The adoration of Christ had been a part of the man's passionate nature for a long time past. But the imitation of Christ, as a sort of plan or ordered scheme of life, in that sense may be said to begin here.” (Page 59)

So the lesson here again for the meaning of a church, is that it is a place not so much for inspiring worship of Christ, but imitation of Christ. And whatever happens inside a church is of limited value, unless it happens communally among people occupying it and can be carried outside to be shared with others.

And of course, the church that Francis had really been called to rebuild was the broader institutional Church, including the errant and harmful spiritual constructs it had been imposing on its people. That’s the same church we, and every generation seeking Christ in its own time, are called to constantly rebuild and renew.

Scott and Family are CPF West

Epilogue: Readers interested in learning more about the meaning of a church should read The History of Saint Mala chy’s by Eileen Troxell (Dufour Editions, Inc., 2007): a wonderfully and passionately written, rigorously researched, scholarly ethnographic study of both a Catholic city parish and the City of Philadelphia.