Modernize the Church?

If there is one phrase you hear endlessly among non-practicing Catholics, it is this: “The Church has to modernize; it has to adapt to the times we live in.”

And I ask you something: did you know that when Jesus Christ founded His Church more than 2,000 years ago, the world was more “modernized,” or rather more corrupt, than it is now? Sexual promiscuity was terrible; anyone who wanted an abortion had one wherever they pleased; anyone tired of living took poison and that was that. Envy, greed, corruption, incest, orgies, homosexuality, murders and so on and so on marked that era and its rulers (I advise you to read a book about the lives of terrible Roman emperors such as Tiberius, Caligula and Nero, for example).

Yes, the times in which Christianity was born were terrible. You only have to read Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (a city sadly famous for its moral degradation) to realize this.

One might then ask: how could Jesus Christ have come up with the idea of founding a Church with commandments that went completely against what people liked to do at that time? Precisely because Jesus Christ came to save us from sin and founded a Church suited not to man’s convenience or whims but to the dignity of the human being, to social justice and to the new commandment of Love.

Because God, our creator, loves us more than any earthly father and wants what is best for us. In short, he wants us to be happy. And the only way to be happy on earth is to follow the path He left us, even if it seems very hard to walk.

Those first Christians, among them apostles such as Peter and Paul, many women such as Mary Magdalene, and married couples such as Aquila and Priscilla, lived in a world worse than this one, and they managed to change it in about 280 years, when the Edict of Milan was issued and Christianity was legalized. With their apostolic zeal and their love of God, after terrible persecutions, many martyrdoms and so on, they managed to change a completely corrupt world into a more just and humane world for everyone.

The Edict of Milan (in Latin, Edictum Mediolanense), also known as the toleration of Christianity, was proclaimed in Milan in the year 313. It established freedom of religion in the Roman Empire, putting an end to the persecutions the authorities had directed against certain religious groups, particularly Christians. It was signed by Constantine the Great and Licinius, rulers of the Western and Eastern Roman Empires respectively.

When the edict was proclaimed, there were about 1,500 episcopal sees in the Empire, and at least 5 to 7 million of the Empire’s 50 million inhabitants professed Christianity. After its approval began the period Christian historians call the Peace of the Church.

Sadly, the world has once again tried to remove God from its life and has gone on relativizing everything, so that now, for many, divorce, sexual promiscuity, infidelity, abortion, euthanasia, and the worship of the gods of money, power, magic, astrology and so on are normal or modern, and that is why (some say) the Church has to adapt to the new times and modernize. Usually those who say this have moral problems in their own lives and want the Church to adapt to what cannot be adapted.

But those who say this do not understand that the Catholic Church was founded by God (and not by men). If it had been founded by men (like many other churches out there), we would have created one that accepted the weaknesses, whims and fancies of us humans. But the Church is divine.

Those who try to live their faith as God commands know very well that taking the narrow way is costly, but not impossible, and that the happiness and fulfillment of living along the narrow way is so great that nothing in this world can compare with it. Besides, one knows that each of those commandments, though hard to keep, can be kept with our will and with God’s help, and that in the end they are the only ones that can lead us to live in a just and fulfilling society for all people.

I will never forget when Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist who was a communist and an atheist in her youth, drew close to Catholicism. When she was asked why, she answered that after interviewing so many religious leaders she had realized that Christianity was the religion that came closest to social justice and the defense of human dignity.

But those of us who have faith understand perfectly that a Church founded by God cannot have defects in its teaching, and does not have to adapt to any era, because what is good will always be good and what is evil will always be evil, whatever era we live in.