Apparently Napoleon threatened a Cardinal of the Church. “Your eminence, are you not aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church?” According to tradition, the cardinal was sanguine in his reply. “Your Majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the Church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you”.
“I will be with you always, until the end of time” is the explanation for Cardinal’s response. Christ promised just before He was taken up from the view of the Apostles that He would be with His Church until the end of time. No power on earth will prevail against her.
Christ has kept this promise. He may have ascended but we have never been alone. Sometimes we hear or read this, “He has left us the Church”. The fact is, He did not “leave the Church with us”. Instead, He has been present in His Church. At each Mass, He is present in the people gathered. He is present in His word proclaimed. He is present in the priest who acts alter Christus. Finally, He is present in the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine after consecration. This intense and abiding Presence is felt in tabernacles across cathedrals, churches, chapels or oratories that many choose to spend time in.
Either we forget this truth or Jesus has been ignored.
In these last few decades we have witnessed the explosion of news and commentaries that are very much in our faces. Politics is beamed directly into our living rooms. Even this statement sounds outdated. Events are streamed onto our devices so much so that we are experiencing an immediacy which has never been felt before. But this proximity is not entirely positive or life-giving. Given that information is power, the flow and dissemination of news and the prevailing narrative is dependent on who is in control. You may have heard of brain-washing, green-washing and now gas-lighting. More than proximity, the result is actually an increase in anxiety. A good example of an anxiety-inducing news or information is climate change. Any inclement weather is now attributed to global warming.
Whether or not global warming is real is debatable because our prevailing social or cultural narrative is dependent on who or which group holds power. The masses are just caught in the swirling eddies of prevailing political winds. How not to be depressed?
In an age of information and disinformation, a lie told one time too many becomes the “truth” and people stake their lives on whatever they want to believe. Depending on your philosophical persuasion, the Church is this or the Church is that. For some, this is a time of great trial or tribulation because their ideas are not embraced by the majority whereas those who are enjoying power believe that whatever is developing is all part of God’s will. Either way, we fail to recognise that the Church is not ours. We belong to the Church and the Church belongs to Christ.
Here we come back to the story Napoleon and his quarrel with the Church. On the side of the Church, we had Pope Pius VII who resolutely refused to submit to Napoleon’s demands. Resigned to the inevitable conflict with Napoleon, Pius VII wrote: “If our words fail to touch Your Majesty’s heart, we will suffer with a resignation conformable to the Gospel. We will accept every kind of calamity as coming from God.”
So, Pius spent 5 years in captivity until Napoleon’s final defeat and imprisonment in St Helena. There Napoleon complained to the now freed Pope of his ill-treatment and he asked Pius VII for the assistance of a chaplain. Napoleon wrote: “I was born in the Catholic religion. I wish to fulfil the duties it imposes and receive the succour it administers”. In the end, when Napoleon died, the first line of his will declared, “I die in the apostolical Roman religion, in the bosom of which I was born more than fifty years since”.
Politics will always be with us. In ecclesial context, politics reveals the human side of the Church. We can be distracted by the power changing hands failing to recognise that compassion makes the Church feel more divine. The Church as adivine institution is very much the presence of Christ in the world. Even if there are actors or players trying to destroy or annihilate Church within or without, our faith is in Christ who leads and guides His Church. The entire Sacramental economy manifests His compassion, mercy, redemption and salvation. While the Church may be powerful as an institution, she is animated not by might but by mercy.
Funny that we judge the Church through contemporary lens meaning that we tend to view the present as the worst of times. Noticed how no leader today is ever free from the inescapable phenomenon of their every word and action analysed, interpreted and explained. Everyone is an expert and everyone is a critic. For Catholics, the Pope is not immune to criticisms but we are assured that the Church has been preserved from error by the promise of Christ and despite bad popes in the past, the Church continues to survive as only a divine institution can. In her human side, she is slow and sometimes clumsy but she has never been defeated. Experiencing the human side of the Church, we can easily confuse and conflate it with temporal society and when there is failure, we also slip into despair. There is an important distinction that can prevent us from despair. The Church is not just the Body of Christ; she is forever the pure and immaculate Bride of Christ. Only we, the sons and daughters, are the sinners.
In conclusion, the Ascension signals Christ forging the path ahead for us. Through His Spirit present in the Church, we are guided to arrive where He is. Mary our Mother was the first to have reached where He is. The martyrs and the saints have followed behind. Nothing can separate us from this destiny. The Ascension is not a description of absence but a promise of Christ’s perpetual presence—a promise fulfilled at Pentecost. Hence, even if the Church weretested severely, we are not afraid but with the strength of the Holy Spirit, we fix our eyes upon Jesus so that we can run the race in which we have entered.
