not isolated islands but Ekklesia - 23rd Sunday A 2014

In a survey by SWS in 2013 only 37 percent of Catholics go to mass weekly.  Fr. John Carrol translated this mathematically saying that each priest in the Philippines would at the very least say mass to 3,280 mass goers.  That’s a lot of people and I believe I have not said mass to that many on a given Sunday.  Now for example I am celebrating mass to 20 people and I need to say another mass to 3,260 in order to complete my quota in the 37 percent.  What is however disheartening in the survey is the fact that in 1991 64 percent of the catholic population go to mass weekly.  Of course the population then was somewhere in the 50 million mark while now we are in the hundred million.  But the fact is the drop is steep – from 64 percent to 37 percent.  And yet in a recent international survey the Philippines ranked the highest in terms of people believing in God – 94 percent of Filipinos believe in God.

I am not a sociologist so what follows are mere conjectures, just guess work.  I believe this is part of the many reasons, probably just one of a thousand reasons, and maybe a teeny, tiny part of the overriding reasons why catholics don’t go to mass on a weekly basis.  And what is that reason?  I believe some people feel more at ease relating the way they want to relate with God on their own terms, at their own convenience, individually and in private.  This is just my feeling, my guess or my observation.  I am not sure.  But I believe there is too nowadays a tendency in many of us to want to relate to God individually rather than in community.  Even in our belief in God and in fulfilling our duties to him there is slowly creeping in us the attitude of individualism.

But can we do this?

Last week in our gospel Jesus says that he is going to build his church on the foundation rock which is Peter.  Today, in an advice for conflict resolution, Jesus tells the disciples as a matter of last recourse, to present their conflicts for settlement in the church, the same church which is to be built on the foundation rock which is Peter.

The word Church is a translation of the Latin Ecclesia;  Ecclesia is a translation of the Greek Ekklesia; and Ekklesia is a translation of the Hebrew word Qahal, which is literally translated in English as the assembly, a people assembled and gathered together in the Lord.

Our gospel talks about fraternal correction, our first reading talks about the responsibility of the prophet to the other, specifically to the wayward.  These commands presuppose that we are interacting with one another, these commands presuppose we are relating with one another, that we are rubbing elbows with each other, we are associating with other another, we are in many ways affecting each other and we are permitting others to affect us; these commands presuppose that we are therefore a qahal Yahweh, we are an assembly, we are a community, we are a church, we are a parish and we cannot be otherwise.

Just an added note.  In the gospels only Jesus calls God “My Father,” and he taught us his disciples to call God, “Our Father.”  Not my but our, as if to instil in our consciousness that before God we are a church, to be always conscious that before God we are community.

So why should we feel responsible for each other, why should I care about you, why should you care about me?  Because in Christianity we can never be isolated islands.  We are always part of the main.