Closing Out the Fiscal Year

Getting ready to close the fiscal year here. FY 2018-19 ends in four days.

Thanks be to God, and to the goodness of people’s hearts, we have solid and healthy books in our two parishes here. We hope for better years, to be sure—years of expansion and building and new evangelical initiatives. But FY 2018-19 has been solid for us, financially. Thank you, kind Lord above.

What about FY 2018-19 for the larger Church? How do those books look? Not just financials, but how about the all-around viability of the institution?

Since we have eyes to see and ears to hear, we know that the Catholic Church, governed by Pope Francis and the bishops in communion with him, closes FY 2018-19 with a catastrophic deficit. A credibility bankruptcy.

The institution that commanded universal respect, that steadied the stormy tumult of antagonisms in this world; Holy Mother Church, governed by wise, honest, kindly grandfathers, whom we can trust to teach us the right principles—that institution vanished from the face of the earth during FY 2018-2019.

We could see it coming a year ago. The Pope and the Cardinals of Washington, New York, and Newark, NJ, announced at the end of June last year that some New-Jersey dioceses had secretly settled claims of sexual abuse against Theodore McCarrick.

It was an amazing admission–an inadvertent acknowledgement of utter hypocrisy, of a fundamental contradiction of all the stated promises of the past twenty years. They made the announcement only because they had to, because two lawyers working in New York uncovered an accusation against McCarrick that no one could hide.

The world needed a good, extensive, honest explanation of what happened. A year has passed now. And we have gotten the opposite of a good, honest explanation.

Not easy to deal with. It’s like one of those dystopia novels or movies coming true. A nuclear bomb went off, the electric grid went down, and now we have to find a way to survive in the Catholic wilderness. A band of people who still believe in Christ and His mysteries, wandering around like the Israelites in the desert.

Now, the Lord promised Abraham descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky. Because of Abraham’s righteous faith. Abraham rolled from one fiscal year into the next without worrying about anything other than: Let me obey God more faithfully.

Abraham was old and sterile, with no earthly prospects of a future. Time would seem to have foreclosed on him. But he believed anyway. We can, too.