archives

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.

In the media and popular culture, World Youth Day is often dubbed the “Catholic Woodstock,” or the “Olympic Games” of world religion. Among Catholic insiders, however, the preferred argot is “pilgrimage,” and the youth who take part are described as “pilgrims.”

Yet if Geoffrey Chaucer somehow were to drop in on Sydney, Australia, this week, it’s not at all clear he would be reminded of the kind of spiritual journey he described in The Canterbury Tales.

The church world got a really good piece of advice this week. The pope, we're told, warned the Anglicans not to split over their internal controversies about homosexuality and the ordination of women bishops. He warned, quite wisely, about the dangers and the destructiveness of schism. (See Pope rides to Rowan's rescue) As easy as it sounds to simply go away and play in your own ecclesiastical sandbox, the fact is that divisions are never neat -- if for no other reason than that they not only fail to resolve the present problem but they model how not to resolve the next problem, too. After all, if we can fix one issue by simply leaving it, we can do the same with the next one -- and there will be a next one -- until what was intended to be a nice, clean division becomes one fracture after another, more a splintering and a slivering, than a surgically healing separation of unlike tissues.

Not many Sundays ago, as we began the ordinary time of the year, the gospel writers, Matthew and Mark especially, showed us Jesus beginning his public life. We heard Jesus proclaim, "The reign of God is at hand. Change your lives." The reign of God is ready to break forth -- that's what Jesus was proclaiming -- a message of good news.

Now as we continue our reading of the Gospel of Matthew this year, we come to a part where Jesus begins to explain for us what the reign of God is, how we enter in to it, how we must live, how we must change our lives, if we really are going to enter in to the reign of God and be able to experience that reign come to its fullness within ourselves and ultimately at some point, the reign of God breaking forth and transforming our whole world, our whole universe.