Editorial

The Glass is Half Full

Finding vitality in the Catholic Church is often a matter of looking in the right direction.

If secular journalists generally look upon the Catholic Church as an institution in terminal decline--and they do--perhaps their attitude can be attributed in part to the fact that they look for news about the faith in all the wrong places. Trained to think in political or economic terms, they tend to measure the health of an institution on the basis of some standard index or official policy--as they might assess a country by its per-capita income, or a corporation by the sales of its latest new product. When applied to the Church that approach is bound by be misleading, because the work of the Holy Spirit does not conform to human designs.

To be sure, there are some useful indices against which we can test the vitality of a particular Church. Over the course of time the number of baptisms performed each year will tell us something, as will the number of marriages (and, if it is available, the number of divorces). We can certainly keep an eye on Mass attendance, and the trends in vocations to the priesthood and religious life. Regrettably, for the Church as a whole, all of these measurements yield discouraging results. So the news looks unrelievedly bleak.

Without a doubt these are difficult times for the Catholic Church, and even in this issue, as we sought to accentuate the positive, we could not avoid including a few sad stories. The latest developments on the ecumenical front can only be termed disastrous, and the future lookf precarious for our brothers in Hong Kong.

Nevertheless the unquenchable vigor of the true faith can always be seen, often in the places where it is least expected. Who would have thought to look for a flourishing American diocese on the barren plains of North Dakota? Who would have expected a Catholic revival in a decaying Caribbean dictatorship? Who would have guessed that the pastor of one of Boston's most renowned Episcopalian parishes would abandoned everything--except his flock--to seek true communion with the universal Church?

The Spirit works in mysterious ways. When we look for his handiwork in the grand schemes put forward by ecclesiastical bureaucracies, we are almost invariably disappointed. But then we see those tell-tale signs of spiritual energy and apostolic zeal in precisely the last places we might ordinarily have looked.

Critics sometimes complain that Catholic World Report is "too negative." But if we are critical it is because we love the Church. We believe (and we have ample scriptural warrant for our belief) that unhealthy branches must be pruned in order for the vine to flourish.

And by the way, if it is possible to be "too negative," is it not also possible to err in the opposite direction? What about a diocesan newspapers which carefully skirt every controversy, ignore every failure, and extol the (often imaginary) virtues of every chancery policy? Is it not fair to say that editorial approach is "too positive"--since it leaves readers, at best, uninformed?

In Orthodoxy, Chesterton neatly summarized the companion dangers of looking upon the world too critically on one hand, or too blithely on the other--of being an optimist or a pessimist:

The purpose of journalism is to foster neither optimism nor pessimism, but realism: to help readers grasp both positive and negative stories, and distinguish one from the other. For Catholic journalists writing in 1997 that is a special challenge, because the predictable news is so often bad, and the good news is so often unpredictable.