There’s No Need to Give Up On the Church

First of all, welcome back home! 

Second, I can absolutely understand that “sinking ship” feeling you’re describing, and I think you’re right in some ways about “the infusion of progressivism and modernism” being worse now than thirty years ago. In other ways, though, I think that the opposite is true: for instance, the younger generation of priests seems (on the whole) to be orthodox and serious about pursuing holiness. There were a lot of bad things going on in the Church thirty years ago (some of which we just didn’t know about at the time), so I’m not convinced the Church is in a worse place now than in 1993. 

But whatever the case, it’s clear that the Church is facing major problems, and that many people are leaving the Catholic Church right now. So why stay? Let me offer two reasons: 

1. I believe that Jesus really is the Son of God, and the Catholic Church really is the Church he founded, as he promised he would in Matthew 16:17–19. With St. Peter, I can say, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6:68–69).
2. When Jesus founded the Church, he promised that “the powers of death shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). As bad as the modern situation is in the Church, there have actually been many dark moments in the Church’s history, in which it appeared that the Church might just collapse. G.K. Chesterton, in his 1925 book The Everlasting Man, looks at five such moments, and observes: “At least five times, therefore, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died” (chap. 6). In other words, each of these crises was followed by an unexpected resurgence of the Church, “like a river turning backwards from the sea and trying to climb back into the mountains” (chap. 6).

People have been claiming that the Church was a sinking ship for the last seventeen hundred years, and yet the Church is now the oldest government on earth, and (depending on how you define it) arguably the oldest human institution on earth. Despite all of the trial and tribulations, heresies, and scandals of two thousand years, the Church has always come out stronger than it went in. We don’t know what that will look like this time around, but both history and Christ’s promise tell us that we will come out of this one stronger someday, too.