Lesson 2: The Church's Relationship to the World is Missionary in

Character

At the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

1. explain the relationship between the Church and society in general;
2. discuss how involvement in the affairs of the community can be a missionary
activity;
3. form insights about how the Church can be of service to the world; and
4. identify and describe an important event in your community or society, in
general, that has changed the way people behave or think, or live. Describe
also the change brought about by the event.

CONTEXT
We know that the different Churches contribute one way or another to the life of
society. They do many things following the teachings and practice of their faith that
make life in the community more meaningful and difficulties more bearable. One way or
another, they help the civil government develop productive and law-abiding citizens.
This is part of the missionary spirit that pervades every authentic follower of Jesus - to do
acts of service to society, humanity, and the whole of creation.

Enumerate and describe three of the most important things your church is doing
for society. Be specific with the activities. The activities are only meant to be pondered.

Although Christianity is steeped in religious character it cannot detach itself

from secular realities. These realities are natural elements present in the wider
public domain. Following Jesus as example, who was very much a part or active
in the socio-political, economic and religious conditions of his own society and
time, we are also challenged to do the same.

INSPIRED WORD OF GOD

The missionary spirit in the Church is inspired by the call to humble service that the
Gospels talk about. Read this story from the Gospel of Matthew guided by the following:

1. What were Jesus’ disciples arguing about?

2. How did Jesus respond to the issue his disciples' issue discussing?
3. How different was Jesus’ understanding of greatness from that of his disciples?
4. What is the implication of the text to the Church’s relationship to the world?
 True Greatness (Mt. 18:1-5)

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked,

‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’
He called a child, whom he put among them, and
said, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and
become like children, you will never enter the
kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humblelike
this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
Whoever welcomes one such child in my name
welcomes me.

The Gospel presents the first part of Matthew’s discussion on the community (Mt
18:1-14), which has “child” (“little ones” in other translations) as the key word. The children
referred to in the text are the children literally and the poor, those who are not necessary
for society and the community, like the little children. Jesus asks that these little ones
should always be the center of the concern of the communities because “The Father in
Heaven does not will that one of these little ones should be lost” (Mt 18:14).

What is the question of the disciples which provokes the teaching of Jesus? The
disciples want to know who is more significant in the Kingdom. The simple fact of this
question reveals that they have not understood anything or very little of the message of
Jesus. The whole discourse on the community is given to make them understand that
among the followers of Jesus, the spirit of service should prevail, the gift of self, of pardon,
of reconciliation, and gratuitous love, without seeking one’s interest and one’s
advancement.

The disciples ask for a criterion to be able to measure the importance of the
people in the community: “Who is the greater in the Kingdom of Heaven?” Jesus answers
that it is the children or the little ones! The children are not socially significant; they do not
belong to the world of the powerful. The disciples have to become children. Instead of
growing up to the heights, they must grow down and toward the
periphery, where the poor and the little ones live. In this way, they will
be more significant in the Kingdom! The reason is the following:
“Anyone who receives one of these children receives Me.” Jesus
identifies Himself with them. The love of Jesus for the little ones cannot
be explained. Children have no merit. It is the complete gratuity of
the love of God which manifests itself and asks to be imitated in the
community of those who call themselves disciples of Jesus.

To care for the little ones, the oppressed and the marginalized,
in humility and without condescension is the mark of true greatness. In
other words, power is service. With great power comes the great
responsibility to use it for the common good.

If we continue reading up to the following verses of Chapter 18

of Matthew, we hear Jesus’ command: Do not scandalize the
children. These verses concerning the scandal to little ones are very
significant. We give a brief commentary on them. To scandalize the
little ones means this: to be the cause for them to lose their faith in
God, to lose faith in the goodness of humanity, and to abandon the
community. Matthew keeps a short saying of Jesus: “Anyone who
scandalizes even one of these little ones whobelieve in Me, it would
be better for him to have a millstone tied around his neck and then
be thrown into the sea.” It is a sign that many little ones no longer
identified themselves with the community and sought another refuge.

Are we, in our Churches or communities, driving away others

because they are not welcomed in our midst? Do we look down on
people because we feel they are below us in social standing,
possession, education, and even looks? It is a scandal when, in our
Churches, people do not feel they belong. What is lacking in us? What
is the cause of thisscandal to the little ones? To avoid the scandal,
Jesus orders the causes of the scandal to cut off their foot or take out
their eye. This sentence cannot be taken literally, of course.It means
that we should be very firm, strict in fighting against any scandal
which draws the little ones away. In any way, we cannot allow the
little ones to feel marginalized in our community because the
community would not be a sign of the Kingdom of God in this case.

The Biblical text about the temptation to sin says that the
angels of the little ones see the face of the Father. Jesus recalls Psalm
91. The little ones take Yahweh as their refuge and make the Highest
their fortress (Ps 91:9), and because of this, “No disaster canovertake
you, no plague come near your tent; He has given angels orders
about you toguard you wherever you go. They will carry you in their
arms in case you trip over a stone”(Ps 91:10,12)

In many countries, including the Philippines, there are many

“little ones.” Think about who these people are and how you, in your
way, can contribute to making them a little “bigger.” This is your
mission and the mission of the whole Church, which does notexist for
itself but in the service of others.

CHURCH TEACHING

The Gospel presents the first part of Matthew’s discussion on

the community (Mt 18:1-14), which has “child” (“little ones” in other
translations) as the key word. The childrenreferred to in the text are the
children literally and the poor, those who are not necessaryfor society
and the community, like the little children. Jesus asks that these little
ones should always be the center of the concern of the communities
because “The Father in Heaven does not will that one of these little
ones should be lost” (Mt 18:14).

What is the question of the disciples which provokes the

teaching of Jesus? The disciples want to know who is more significant
in the Kingdom. The simple fact of this question reveals that they have
not understood anything or very little of the message of Jesus. The
whole discourse on the community is given to make them understand
that among the followers of Jesus, the spirit of service should prevail,
the gift of self, of pardon,of reconciliation, and gratuitous love, without
seeking one’s interest and one’s advancement.

The disciples ask for a criterion to be able to measure the

importance of the people in the community: “Who is the greater in the
Kingdom of Heaven?” Jesus answersthat it is the children or the little
ones! The children are not socially significant; they do notbelong to the
world of the powerful. The disciples have to become children. Instead
of growing up to the heights, they must grow down and toward the
periphery, where the poor and the little ones live. In this way, they will
be more significant in the Kingdom! The reason is the following:
“Anyone who receives one of these children receives Me.” Jesus
identifies Himself with them. The love of Jesus for the little ones cannot
be explained. Children have no merit. It is the complete gratuity of
the love of God which manifests itself and asks to be imitated in the
community of those who call themselves disciples of Jesus.

To care for the little ones, the oppressed and the marginalized,
in humility and without condescension is the mark of true greatness. In
other words, power is service. With great power comes the great
responsibility to use it for the common good.

Gaudium et Spes, a Vatican II document on the Church,

pronounces the following statements concerning our present
discussion on Matthew. Here are orienting questions to guide you as
your read:

1. How are these statements from Gaudium et Spes

related to Mathew 18:1-5?
2. What challenges do they pose to Christians today?

3. Though humanity is stricken with wonder at its discoveries and its

power, it often raisesanxious questions about the current trend of the
world, about the place and role of man in the universe, about the
meaning of its individual and collective strivings, and the ultimate
destiny of reality and humanity. Hence, giving witness and voice to
the faith of the whole people of God gathered together by Christ, this
council can provide no moreeloquent proof of its solidarity with, as
well as its respect and love for the entire human family with which it is
bound up, than by engaging with it in conversation about these
various problems. The council brings to humanity light kindled from the
Gospel and puts at its disposal those saving resources which the
Church herself, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, receives from
her Founder. For the human person deserves to be preserved; human
society deserves to be renewed. Hence the focal point of our entire
presentation will be the man himself, whole, body and soul, heart and
conscience, mindand will.

Therefore, this sacred synod, proclaiming the noble destiny of man and
championing the Godlike seed which has been sown in him, offers
humanity the direct assistance of the Church in fostering that
brotherhood of all men which corresponds to this destiny of theirs.
Inspired by no earthly ambition, the Church seeks but a solitary goal:
to carry forward thework of Christ under the lead of the befriending
Spirit. And Christ entered this world to give witness to the truth, to
rescue and not to sit in judgment, to serve and not to be served.

23. One of the salient features of the modern world is the growing
interdependence of men one on the other, a development promoted
chiefly by modern technical advances. Nevertheless, brotherly
dialogue among men does not reach perfection on technical
progress but the deeper interpersonal relationships. This demands
mutual respect for the full spiritual dignity of the person. Christian
revelation contributes significantly to the promotion of this
communion between persons. At the same time leads us to a deeper
understanding of the laws of social life that the Creator has written into
man's moral andspiritual nature.

Lord's saying: "by this will all men know that you are my disciples, if you
have a love for one another" (John 13:35), Christians cannot yearn for
anything more ardently than to serve the men of the modern world
with mounting generosity and success. Therefore, by holding faithfully
to the Gospel and benefiting from its resources, by joining with every
man who loves and practices justice, Christians have shouldered a
gigantic task for fulfillment in this world, a task concerning which they
must give a reckoning to Him who will judge every man on the last of
days.

Not everyone who cries, "Lord, Lord," will enter into the kingdom
of heaven, but those who do the Father's will by taking a solid grip on
the work at hand. Now, the Fatherwills that in all men we recognize
Christ, our brother, and love Him effectively, in word and indeed. By
thus giving witness to the truth, we will share the mystery of the
heavenly Father's love with others. As a consequence, men
throughout the world will be aroused to a lively hope—the gift of the
Holy Spirit—that someday, at last, they will be caught up in peace and
utter happiness in that fatherland radiant with the glory of the Lord.

If the Church is described as People of God in the writings of

Paul, in Gaudium et Spes, the Church is described as Servant. These
two descriptions or images do not exclude each other, but they
emphasize two aspects of the reality of the Church. Whatis significant
with the image of the Church as the servant is that it stresses the
dimension of service to others other than to itself. We do not live only
for ourselves and our fellow believers, but we are called to serve the
world, to reach out to those different from us, even to those who hate
us. This is precisely Vatican II’s reason for dialoguing with the world,
society, and different cultures and religions. As an instrument of the
kingdom of God, the Church exists to serve and not to be served.

The world is where God is at work. And it is in the world that God
sends us to do hiswork. The words of Gaudium et Spes are clear: “The
Church seeks a solitary goal: to carryforward the work of Christ himself
under the lead of the befriending Spirit. And Christ entered this world
to give witness to the truth, to rescue and not to sit in judgment, to
serve and not to be served.”

What is an essential implication of this understanding of the

Church as a servant?Since the world is the place for God’s saving
actions, we should not shrink from our responsibilities towards society
and the social order. For example, some people think thatChristians
should stay away from politics because it is dirty. But politics is the
distribution and use of power among members of society. If this power
is misused, then many peoplesuffer. It is a Christian duty, indeed a duty
of all people of goodwill, to see that power is used correctly for
society's welfare. This is an excellent service to humanity. What is true
in politics when it comes to Christian intervention is also true in the
economic and other dimensions of life in society.

The Church must act as a leaven for society. Jesus’ actions and
teaching make that clear. To act as a leaven, the Church must “read
the signs of the times” (Gaudium et Spes 40). It must understand the
situation of society to be more effective in helping findsolutions to the
ills of society. This implies that it must be a learning Church, open to
the human, social, and natural sciences developments. It has to
acknowledge the contributions of the other areas of human
knowledge and engage in critical and constructive dialogue with
them.

The Church had been serving the needs of human

communities from the beginning of its existence. There had been
societal transformations and growths in history,even in the economic,
political, and social fields, where the Church played essential roles.
One example is the setting up of schools by religious congregations
that helped inthe education of many people. Monasteries were the
beginnings of today’s universities. No wonder that in many places
around the world, and that is true of the Philippines, manyof the oldest
and most prominent universities were started by religious
congregations. Ourschool is one such university founded by a religious
congregation. Here is a historian’s take on some examples of the
contribution of the Catholic Church to society.

TOPEKA, Kan. — About a minor fashionable thing one can do

these days is utter akind word about the Catholic Church. The idea
that the church has been an obstacle to human progress has been
elevated to the level of something everybody thinks he knows.But to
the contrary, it is to the Catholic Church more than to any other
institution that weowe so many of the treasures of Western civilization.
Knowingly or not, scholars operated for two centuries under an
Enlightenment prejudice that assumes all progress to come from
religious skeptics and that whatever the church touches is backward,
superstitious,even barbaric (Deseret News, 2011).

Since the mid-20th century, this unscholarly prejudice has

thankfully begun to melt away, and professors of various religious
backgrounds, or none at all, increasinglyacknowledge the church's
contributions.

Nowhere has the revision of what we thought we knew been

more dramatic thanstudying the history of science. We all remember
what we learned in fourth grade: Whilescientists were bravely trying to
uncover truths about the universe and improve our quality of life, stupid
churchmen who hated reason and wanted the faithful to shut up and
obeyplaced a ceaseless stream of obstacles in their path.

That was where the conventional wisdom stood just over a

century ago, with the publication of Andrew Dickson White's book, "A
History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom," in
1896. And that's where most Americans (and Europeans, for that
matter) believe it still stands.

But there is scarcely a historian of science in America who

would endorse this comic-book version of events today. On the
contrary, modern historians of science freely acknowledge the
church's contributions — both theoretical and material — to the
Scientific Revolution. The church's worldview insisted the universe was
orderly and operated according to specific fixed laws. Only buoyed
with that confidence would it have made sense to bother
investigating the physical world in the first place or even to develop
the scientific method (which can work only in an orderly world). It's
likewise a little tricky to claim the church has been an implacable foe
of the sciences when so manypriests were accomplished, scientists.

The first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely

falling body was Father Giambattista Riccioli. The man who has been
called the father of Egyptology wasFather Athanasius Kircher. Father
Roger Boscovich, described as "the greatest genius that Yugoslavia
ever produced," has often been called the father of modern atomic
theory. In the sciences, the Jesuits in particular distinguished
themselves; some 35 craters on the moon are named after Jesuit
scientists and mathematicians.

By the 18th century, writes historian Jonathan Wright, the Jesuits

"had contributed to developing pendulum clocks, pantographs,
barometers, reflecting telescopes, and microscopes, to scientific
fields as various as magnetism, optics, and electricity. They observed,
in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter's
surface, the Andromeda nebula, and Saturn's rings. They theorized
about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the
theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon affected the tides,
and the wave-like nature of light."

Their achievements likewise included "star maps of the

southern hemisphere, symbolic logic, flood-control measures on the
Po and Adige rivers, introducing plus and minus signs into Italian
mathematics."

These were the great opponents of human progress?

Seismology, the study of earthquakes, has been so dominated

by Jesuits that it has become known as "the Jesuit science." It was a
Jesuit, Father J.B. Macelwane, who wrote the first seismology textbook
in America in 1936. To this day, the American Geophysical Union,
which Macelwane once headed, gives an annual medal named
after this brilliant priest to a promising young geophysicist.

The Jesuits were also the first to introduce Western science into
far-off places suchas China and India. In 17th-century China, Jesuits
introduced a substantial body of scientific knowledge and a vast
array of mental tools for understanding the physical universe,
including the Euclidean geometry that made planetary motion
comprehensible.

Jesuits made essential contributions to other less developed

nations' scientific knowledge and infrastructure in Asia and Africa and
Central and South America. Beginning in the 19th century, these
continents saw the opening of Jesuit observatories that studied such
fields as astronomy, geomagnetism, meteorology, seismology, and
solar physics. Such observatories provided these places with accurate
timekeeping, weather forecasts (critical in hurricanes and typhoons),
earthquake risk assessments, andcartography.

The early church also institutionalized the care of widows,

orphans, the sick, and the poor in ways unseen in classical Greece or
Rome. Even her harshest critics, from the fourth-century emperor
Julian the Apostate to Martin Luther and Voltaire, conceded the
church's enormous contributions to the relief of human misery.

The spirit of Catholic charity — that we help those in need not

out of any expectation of reciprocity but as a pure gift and even help
those who might not like us
— finds no analog in classical Greece and Rome. Still, it is this idea of
charity that we continue to embrace today.

The university was an utterly new phenomenon in European

history. Nothing like it had existed in ancient Greece or Rome. The
institution that we recognize today, with its faculties, courses of study,
examinations, and degrees, as well as the familiar distinction between
undergraduate and graduate study, come to us directly from the
medieval world.

By the time of the Reformation, no secular government had

chartered more universities than the church. Edward Grant, who
wrote on medieval science for Cambridge University Press, points out
that intellectual life was robust and debate was vigorous at these
universities — the opposite of the widespread presumption.

It is no surprise that the church should have done so much to

foster and protect the developing university system since the church,
according to historian Lowrie Daly, "was the only institution in Europe
that showed consistent interest in the preservation andcultivation of
knowledge."

Until the mid-20th century, the history of economic thought

started, more or less, with the 18th century and Adam Smith. But
beginning with Joseph Schumpeter, the great
economist, and historian of his field, scholars have begun to point
instead to the 16th- century Catholic theologians at the Spain's
University of Salamanca as the originators ofmodern economics.

And the list goes on. I can already hear the complaint: What
about these awful things the church did that I heard about in school?
For one thing, isn't it a little odd that we never heard any of the
material I've presented here in school? Doesn't that seem a trifle
unfair?

But although an episode like the medieval Inquisition has been

dramatically scaled back in scope and cruelty by recent scholarship
— the University of California at Berkeley, not exactly a bastion of
traditional Catholicism, published a book substantially revising popular
view — it is not my subject here. My aim is to point out, as I do in my
book "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization," how
indebted we are, without realizing it, to an institution popular culture
teaches us to despise.