“Young Life has always defined itself by its center and not
by its boundaries.” The words registered in my mind but their full impact would
continue to unfold for days. “Defined by the center, not the boundaries.” These
words came up in a recent conversation I had with a friend and senior
Young Life staff member concerning the intricate relationship between Young
Life (an interdenominational Christian mission to adolescents) and the Catholic
Church.
I’ve encountered some in the Catholic Church that would
define Catholicism according to everything that Protestantism is not – Mary, the saints, confession, Mary,
the papacy, Eucharistic adoration, Mary (did I mention Mary?) – but this
position is hardly tenable. As Thomas Merton once quipped (painting in admittedly broader, interreligious strokes):
If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely
by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in
the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic:
and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it.[1]
As Thomas Groome reminds us, “the foundation of what makes us Catholic is the shared
faith of the whole Body of Christ; it is certainly not unique to Catholicism.”[2]
What makes us most Christian (both Protestant and Catholic varieties) is what
we share, the overwhelming majority of faith that grounds our
common religious heritage:
·
One God, triune in being, united in an eternal
relationship of self-gift
·
One Lord, Jesus Christ, who revealed the
fullness of God’s love, whose life, death and resurrection offer salvation,
truth and life
·
One baptism by which we are initiated into the
family of God
·
One universal call to holiness
·
One mission to proclaim the reign of Christ to
all
·
One body with which to accomplish that mission
Pope Francis began his recent apostolic exhortation by
asserting, “The JOY OF THE GOSPEL fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus.”[3]
Not just Catholics or Protestants but ALL who encounter Christ. The pope goes
on to say:
Pastoral ministry in a missionary style
is not obsessed with the disjointed transmission of a multitude of doctrines. .
. the message has to concentrate on the essentials, on what is most beautiful,
most grand, most appealing and at the same time most necessary.[4]
So what is the essential, the most beautiful, most grand,
most appealing, most essential? In other words, what is the “center” by which
both Young Life and the Catholic Church are defined? I think Cardinal Timothy
Dolan says it beautifully:
We are all about a
person.
We are all about a
relationship of faith, hope and love with a person,
Who happens to be the
greatest person who ever lived,
Who also happens to be
my best friend,
Who knows me and calls
me by name,
Who looks me in the
eyes and invites me to spend eternity with him,
and that person is
JESUS![5]
[1]
Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty
Bystander (NY: DoubleDay, 1965/66), 141.
[2]
Thomas Groome, What Makes Us Catholic
(NY: HarperCollins, 2002), 31.
[3] Pope
Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 1.
[4] Ibid,
35.
[5]
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, taken from an address given at the Evangelical Catholic
Institute, Madison, WI, 2006.
