It strikes a nerve. The popular YouTube video “Why I love Jesus but hate religion” http://youtu.be/1IAhDGYlpqY hits home with some painfully accurate accusations against organized religion. The young rapper finds it easy to love Jesus Christ and claim him as his Lord and Saviour while firmly criticizing and rejecting the Church that bears Christ’s name.
I identify easily with the anger and disillusionment expressed in the video. A realistic and honest look at the organized religion called Christianity has to acknowledge the sins and failures perpetrated in its name throughout history and even sadly, still today. But I can’t agree with his conclusions: unlike our young rapper, such sin in the Church does not cause me to reject it.
Instead, I feel more like Father Pontifex who responds to the video with his own rapping: ‘Why I love Jesus and love religion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru_tC4fv6FE. The sins and faults of the people IN the Church do not express the true reality of who and what the Church is. The Church is so much more than that.
In the poetic imagery of Oblate founder Eugene de Mazenod, the Church is the ‘glorious inheritance which Christ, the Saviour, purchased at the cost of his own blood [Preface]. As such, it is infinitely precious: “How is it possible to separate our love for Jesus Christ from our love for His Church? The two loves are inseparable: to love the Church is to love Jesus Christ and vice versa.” {Pastoral Lenten letter, 1860}.
Even so, the young rapper and Eugene would find some common ground. Eugene is not blind to the sins and faults of the Church. In the wake of the French Revolution, Eugene acknowledges: “Such is the state of things brought about by the malice and corruption of present-day Christians that it can truly be said that the greater number of them are worse off now than was the gentile world before its idols were destroyed by the Cross” [Preface to the Constitutions and Rules]. Violence, apostasy, heresy, corruption, hypocrisy, greed, scandal: the Church of Eugene’s time was guilty of all the vices which so disillusion us today.
Yet Eugene’s response was not to abandon organized religion or the Church. Instead, Eugene was fired up to reform it. Inviting others of zeal and fire to join him, his desire was to ‘rekindle the flame of faith’ across the French countryside, and eventually the world. And so the Oblates were born.
So where are you? Disillusioned and rejecting or forgiving and reforming? They are good questions. . .
Sandy Prather, HOMI


