A Sound of Sheer Silence

I was home in Florida for Christmas with the entirety of my family.  On Christmas morning, I went to the 10 a.m. Mass with my parents at the the Catholic parish I had grown up in and was confirmed in, San Jose.  San Jose had been through a lot since I left home twenty years ago.  The guy who was the pastor during the end of my time there (and who, parenthetically but importantly, had been the assistant to the bishop prior to his arrival) had stayed on for years and slowly but surely ran the place into the ground.  This culminated in the pastor literally running off with the music director, with whom he had been apparently having an long-term affair. My parents left San Jose several years before the final collapse, in favor of Holy Family, led at the time by Fr. Fay.  Fr. Fay had, and has, the reputation as the "turn around" guy in the diocese; the person who is sent to troubled parishes to fix them up and make them strong.  And he had done that in spade...

"The church is in need of reform."  This is one of those statements that is true, but obviously true in such a way as to have limited value.  The church is always in need of reform with regard to something,   Augustine went so far as to say that " ecclesia semper reformanda est "--the church is always to be reformed. But "reform" is not a specific enough concept to be useful.  Before you can reform something, you must figure out what needs to be reformed.  This is always a tricky and controversial bit, and often reform agendas never get off the ground as a result of fights over what to change and what to keep.  But even if you were to get consensus on what to do, there is the other tricky question of how to go about accomplishing these reforms.  Because, of course, reforms are not self-executing, and many a reform movement has sputtered and died as a result of execution problems.  The Catholic Church spent the better part of the Middle Ages...