Editor’s note: We are pleased to reprint this essay from Fr. David Nix’s Padre Peregrino blog. Click here to follow him on X.
“Who is going to save our Church? Not our bishops, not our priests and religious. It is up to you, the people. You have the minds, the eyes and the ears to save the Church. Your mission is to see that your priests act like priests, your bishops act like bishops and your religious act like religious.” — Archbishop Fulton Sheen.
Let’s dissect the quote above.
First, Bishop Sheen was wrong to insist any man on earth will “save” Christ’s Church. He was wrong because only Christ will save His Church from the current madness. Of course, I’m the last priest on Earth to say this will be done in some magical way without the cooperation of men. Obviously, what Our Lady of Good Success predicted, namely, the complete restoration of the Catholic Church, will require a tremendous amount of cooperation with grace to get us out of this mess.
But Our Lady of Fatima tells us that the Triumph of Her Immaculate Heart will only begin when a pope (with all the bishops of the world) accurately consecrates Russia (and Russia alone) to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. This is how Christ will begin to save the Church — yes, with real people on Earth — but only when the hierarchy is obedient to His Mother’s request.
Second, for Bishop Sheen to insist that lay people will save the Church is like saying the patients are going to save the hospital. We’ll circle back to this one in a moment.
Third, to tell lay Catholics that their “mission is to see that your priests act like priests” is peak-level Stockholm Syndrome after all of the priest-on-child scandals in the Church over the last 50 years. That’s almost like saying, “It’s your fault if you left your child with a pervert-priest who hurt your eleven year old son.” I know Bishop Sheen did not mean it like this, but there are a lot of hurting families out there that could take his shifting of responsibility to lay people to mean something like this.
Fourth, to tell laity it is their “mission to see that … your bishops act like bishops” is like telling children it is their responsibility to monitor their parents’ teaching and governance. Such a notion is highly disordered and has absolutely no basis in tradition. God established a hierarchy in the Church entirely based on order. To say that lay people must babysit the moral life or teaching life of bishops goes against the entire Apostolic Order established by Christ from the very first century of Catholicism onwards.
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Now, I am not promoting clericalism, nor am I defending the modernist hierarchy. But I am saying that Bishop Sheen was wrong to imply (notice my word there — imply) that a renewal in the Catholic Church can start with the laity while nearly ignoring the hierarchy. Or worse, implying that it is the responsibility of lay people to get heretics and child-abusers to become Catholic again. The renewal has never flowed upwards in all of Church history.
Of course, the current crisis in the Church is more the fault of the hierarchy than the lay people. And, yes, laity who “pinch hit” for the lack in teaching of us priests (and bishops) are doing something heroic online. You are also doing a great spiritual work of mercy if you catechize your parish or even teach your children Apostolic Catholicism. I’m not overturning any of my past assertions in this article.
Clearly, you should keep teaching your children traditional Catholicism even when we priests do not. I am not saying you should have an attitude that goes: “Well, if the priests and bishops won’t teach my children traditional Catholicism, then I am off the hook.” Obviously, such an attitude will endanger the souls of your entire family. So, yes, please keep teaching the true and real Catholic faith, regardless of what we priests do.
But to insist that patients are going to save the entire hospital without the doctors knowing the basics of their medicine is insane.
The Dispatch
Governance in the Church is divinely ordered
Because priests no longer know their traditional catechisms, the distribution of the sacraments has become like Burger King in the Catholic Church — that is, “you can have it your way.” In other words, many lay modernists believe that priests are nothing more than sacramental ATMs who dispense what they want, when they want it, and how they want it. And if they don’t get it “their way,” then the priest’s bishop will get a letter in the mail from an angry woman who was denied absolution for not first getting off contraception.
Laity must understand that priests (and especially the bishops above them) have been given three gifts or munera of Holy Orders: 1) To teach 2) to sanctify and 3) to govern. The second (to sanctify) specifically applies to the sacraments. It is also inexorably linked to the first and the third.
To teach the Catholic faith is primarily the job of the bishops and the priests. I know this seems very foreign to most Catholics because social media helps expose the bad teaching of one bishop or another — as lay people should keep doing! Again, I support lay people being that “collateral circulation” of teaching when the main artery (Holy Orders) is clogged in a manner worse than what we saw in the Arian Crisis.
But realize that it was not always like this. For most of Church history, the pope, bishops, and priests were the most trusted sources of teaching. In fact, lay people needed special mandates from the bishop to say anything publicly because it is such a danger to the soul to claim to teach in the name of the Catholic Church. As St. James says, not many of you should be teachers.
Bishops and priests are also called to govern. That doesn’t mean we simply decide which company gets hired for mowing the lawn of the rectory or chancery. Traditionally, the Church claimed authority in matters spiritual and ecclesial. But she also claimed an extremely high level of influence in civil matters of the state.
The traditional teaching of Catholic bishops having governance even at a civil level obviously flies in the face of the American notion of separation of Church and State (as well as every American bishop who constantly tells you how much he believes in “religious liberty.”) This is also why traditionalists rightly spend so much time teaching the Social Reign of Christ the King. That is, that Christ is King not only of our hearts, but King of each city, state and country on Earth. And we in the Catholic Church hierarchy are called to be His ambassadors for that. (Thus, “religious liberty” is an error, since error has no rights.)
So, when Bishop Sheen says “Lay people will save the Church,” I want to respectfully say to the late bishop who I have admired so much in my past … from whom?
Some of his more courageous fans today would surely boldly reply: “From the wicked hierarchy!” Alright, I agree with that. But where these fervent lay people are mistaken is that they do not know that this renewal can’t take place without the priesthood … that is, unless you are going to have a Protestant revolt.
Again, to claim lay people are going to save the Church is to suggest sick patients at a hospital are going to save the hospital by going around the doctors who are constantly committing malpractice. That is a Protestant notion. It doesn’t work that way if we really believe Christ established bishops to rule and serve His Church. The restoration (for better or for worse) must start at the top.
Finally, the strongest opposition to Bishop Sheen’s claim comes from the famous Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard in Soul of the Apostolate. In his book, he describes how the sanctity of the laity depends on the holiness of their priest at the parish level. His insight could also be applied to the Church at-large:
“If the priest is a saint, the people will be fervent; if the priest is fervent, the people will be pious; if the priest is pious, the people will at least be decent; if the priest is only decent, the people will be godless. The spiritual generation is always one-degree less intense in its life than the one who begets it in Christ.”
