THE CHURCH'S FRUITFULNESS

Fr Billy Swan

Just before Christmas last year, Pope Leo XIV published an Apostolic Letter on the priesthood entitled ‘A Fidelity that Generates the Future’. Towards the end of the letter, the Holy Father addresses the shortage of vocations in certain regions of the world. Faced with this crisis, Leo urges everyone “to examine the fruitfulness of the Church’s pastoral practises…We must have the courage to make strong and liberating proposals to young people…Let us remember: there is no future without nurturing all vocations!” (para. 28).

These strong words ought to make every parish and diocese pause to consider how fruitful our communities are. Are they generating new members? Are we retaining new members? Are there signs of new life and hope for the future? Are the vocations of all the baptised being sufficiently nurtured? The second and related question is one that we also must face. If our parishes, dioceses and communities are not generating new life and if this essential fruitfulness is absent, what are the reasons for this and how can we respond?

As I write these words, I am aware that the answers to these questions are complex. Yet we must grapple with them as Pope Leo encourages us to do. In parishes for example, we have structures and systems around the preparation for First Holy Communion and Confirmation that have remained in place for decades. Yet, we seldom pause and reflect on the challenging question of the fruitfulness of these programmes. Are they producing committed Christians who stay within the community and are sustained within it? I suspect that the answer of many would include that of disappointment, seeing how few remain with us after great efforts made in preparing people for these sacramental occasions.

But rather than being depressed or saddened by the reality, a more responsible approach is to sit down together - parents, catechists, teachers and priests to pray about and discuss this lack of fruitfulness and ways that it can improve. After all, this is the whole spirit of the synodal process; namely that we are to face the future together and no one ought to feel they are carrying a burden on their own.

Perhaps a good place to start these discussions is to prayerfully consider the theme of fruitfulness and fertility that appears in the Bible. It is everywhere, beginning in Genesis where God creates land with the capacity to produce plants and trees which bear fruit and who calls on human beings created in his image to be fruitful and increase in number (Cf. Gen. 1:26-28). In the Old Testament, the community of Israel is the bride of God who is her husband. This is a union that is fruitful as long as Israel remains faithful. Then, in the New Testament, Gospel texts like the wedding feast of Cana, reveal how Jesus appears as the bridegroom of Israel (John 2:1ff).

The setting of a wedding is deliberate and the flowing of new wine is a sign of the fruitfulness of the marriage between God and his people. This marriage is consummated on the cross where the Church is born from his side from which blood and water flowed and where only a faithful remnant were present. Finally, this union of Christ and his Church is again described in the book of Revelation as “the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband” (Rev. 21:2-5).

Could this Scriptural teaching on fruitfulness, be the interpretative key to the reform and renewal of the Church at every level? Could this concept of fruitfulness and fertility be the primary reason why we continue to do things a certain way rather than the determining principle being: ‘this is what we have always did and it is what people expect?’ The opposite of fruitfulness is sterility. Are there traditions and ways of doing things that have become sterile, producing little fruit? And if so, is it time to change them and to do things differently? The litmus test for all our pastoral practises is their fruitfulness. It’s time to re-evaluate them in this light.