The Church is often described
as a house of worship where
believers gather to offer their
sacrifice of common faith.
For the sake of effective management,
and dissemination of the good news,
the entire body of the faithful is divid-
ed into different pious groups called
societies, where the gospel values are
shared in smaller communities of per-
sons who are brought together by the
particular spirituality of the founder
of such society or the patron of such
society. However, the different socie-
ties make up the one body known as
the Church, to which all of them pay
and owe allegiance. Consequently any
spirituality or societal activity, which in
any form stands parallel to the gener-
al good of the Church, is a barrier that
needs to be watched before it grows out
of hand
As we know, the Church is not con-
stituted by a particular group of people,
even if it exists in a particular locality.
Rather, the Church is a community of
people from different cultural, tradi-
tional and national backgrounds. This
explains why a Catholic can feel com-
fortable to attend Mass in any part of
the world and still communicate during
prayer, even when he or she is not able
to speak the local dialet. The one and
only string that binds them together is
the Church (as a family of Christ) and
the gospel of Christ that she teaches
and bears witness to. Under no cir-
cumstances shall any Church society
claim autonomy from the body of the
Church except one that has prepared
for a break up from the body of the
whole Church. More often than not,
the thought of such cessation is borne
out of the inability to properly com-
municate with the Church and by so
doing a gradual degradation comes
into any form of understanding that
may have earlier on existed.
Let us see some notable areas of con-
cern, which have turned into barriers
in communication in the Church and
Church societies:
a) Old and new ways of doing
things:-Many Church members, fol-
lowing the trend of time have cate-
gorized the Church as old fashioned
especially compared to the new wave
of technological advancement. Many
would rather want to talk of minis-
try rather than the Mass, and most of
these ministries are run, if not prop-
erly checked, almost contrary to the
values that the Church teaches and
impacts at every Mass she celebrates.
b) A Church in a Church:- The
magisterium (the teaching author-
ity of the Church) is the sole of the
Catholic faithful. By this I mean that
every member of the faithful relies on
the teaching authority of the Church
in matters of faith and morals. Unfor-
tunately, certain outspoken individu-
als have used the platform provided by
the existence of the individual Church
societies to challenge and publicly
deny the revealed truth of the gospel
as taught by the Church. They garner
followers around them who may be ill
informed and make them members
of their erroneous teachings so as to
stand against revealed truth. What
a great gully on the smooth path of
truth!
c) Culture vs. Scripture:- It is
no longer uncommon today to have
Church societies in the Church whose
members are bound by cultural ties.
Although the Church allows the peo-
ple to exercise their right of associa-
tion, this has unfortunately pitched
itself as a parallel body to the consti-
tution of the Church in some cases,
causing unhealthy rivalry among the
faithful. In some cases, the gospel
values are challenged by the contents
of the culture which makes evangeli-
zation a more difficult task, hence the
conflict between culture and scripture.
This has become a serious risk to the
effective communication of the gospel
values to members of such societies
who have come together on the basis
of their right of association on cultural
grounds based on language bound-
aries, rather than allow the waters of
baptism which made them members
of the Church to see them through.
The above enumerated barriers be-
tween the Church and the Church
societies awaken in us the reality that
even within the body of the Church,
there may be active elements that al-
most constantly cause a slow progress
in the evangelization of the world or
the environ in which the Church is
built. As scripture says: “Every king-
dom divided against itself is brought
to desolation and every city or
house divided against itself cannot
stand.”Matt 12:25. The task before us
therefore is how to break these barri-
ers so as to ensure that the Church is
one, practices oneness and preaches
one true gospel.
