You Do Not Belong to Paul or Apollos or to Me

Thoughts on tithing and community

My childhood pastor died when I was in fourth grade. He took his own life. We did not know much at the time, but in subsequent weeks discovered that he had been credibly accused of abuse, and so for whatever reasons, he made the choice to end his life. Our young associate pastor stayed with our parish as long as he could, but the situation was hard for him. Before long, he was moved to another parish. Over the next several years, a pattern formed: the Archdiocese would send one of its youngest, shiniest priests to the parish in the hope of providing some stability, some encouragement, but before long that priest would leave the parish and, eventually, the priesthood.  For most of a decade, our parish struggled to hold onto good priests. 

Maybe that sounds to you like the kind of tragic situation that would make for a bad parish for young Catholics, or Catholics of any age, really. But my parish was a remarkable place to grow up. Years later, when my faith waivered and my interest in the life of the Church was lukewarm, at best, it was my memory of that parish and its deep goodness that made a claim on me, reminding me of a very essential truth about who I am and from where I come. What I discovered was a rootedness in me that came from belonging to a parish in my childhood, and that rootedness, without a doubt, has changed my life. 

How is it possible for a parish to have been such a remarkable place for a young person to grow up when there was so much instability and tragedy and scandal with its priests for so many years? The answer is simple enough: a parish is built of its parishioners, families, generations of families who themselves have set down roots in a community. My childhood parish was that kind of a community. The families there, generations of them, were committed to the parish and its school, and if you belonged to the parish, then your life revolved around the parish. For years, I was probably at that parish seven days a week between classes and soccer and scouting and one parish event after another. 

That kind of life, that kind of childhood, I think, is remarkable, and increasingly rare in the Church today. 

For some years, probably for decades, and maybe for over a century, we have struggled with community and parish identity in the life of the Church. There are many reasons for those struggles, and we do not now have the time to talk about them. But the response to instability, division, and corruption for many Catholics, maybe most Catholics, has been an inversion of how our lives ought to be ordered in the Church. A parish struggles, the Church struggles, and we set out to build a life for ourselves where it is safe. A dangerous way of thinking takes control of us: a parish depends on its priest, a diocese depends on its bishop, and a universal Church depends on its pope. We start to think that what matters most for our lives happens in a chancery office downtown or in Rome.  We start to build our lives around a person, a personality. 

And what happens? A priest leaves a parish, a new bishop comes to a diocese, a new pope is elected in Rome, and now our lives lack stability once again. Life in the Church becomes very hard for us. Eventually, we move on to someplace new. The one human reality that would sustain the Church—stable, inter-generational communities of the faithful—becomes a victim of our search for security. I know more Catholics that you might think who have moved from one diocese to another chasing after a bishop who meets their expectations about how to get the job done right. 

Let me be clear: we need good priests and bishops and popes. But the living cells of the Church are its parishes. Most of St. Paul’s letters are directed to communities, to parishes, and not to priests or bishops. In fact, St. Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians is deeply critical of anyone who places belonging to a person or a personality above belonging to a community. You do not belong to Paul, or Apollos, he says. You belong to Christ. We are co-workers in God’s service, St. Paul tells those first Christians, but you, the Christian community, are God’s field, God’s building.

There can be no health in the Church without strong and vibrant parishes, and parishes cannot become strong and vibrant communities unless its families and its members set down roots and get invested. The worst kind of instability and division in the life of the Church, to my mind, is not hierarchical or institutional—it is parochial. A Church that is not built of rooted, settled parishes, is a Church that cannot flourish. 

There is nothing that I would want more for any parish than for it to become the kind of rooted, grounded community that sets a seal upon the life of its members, the kind of place where a child can grow up and priests can come and go with however much frequency and for whatever reasons and yet still that child comes to love the life of the Church. That kind of parish life is a gift to future generations of the faithful.

There is nothing I would want more for this Basilica parish than for it to become that kind of rooted, grounded community. But that kind of parish can only form when its members are invested and set down roots. There is a core group of those who belong to this parish who have set down roots, who are invested. Some have been here for years, maybe decades, and some have come to belong to this parish much more recently. We owe a debt to these parishioners because these are the men and women and families who keep our parish alive through their witness and their service and, yes, by way of their financial support. 

What I want is for more of those who come to the Basilica to follow their example and become rooted members of the parish who are invested—yes, financially invested—in the life of the Basilica. We need to do better. You can look at our Annual Report and see that our numbers look alright, but we are not in a stable or sustainable financial position. For the last few years, most of the income generated to support the parish has come from outside of the Basilica—mostly from those in other parishes around the Archdiocese who support our Source of All Hope missionary program. That continued generosity astounds me, and we owe these folks a debt of gratitude. But that kind of financial model is not sustainable. We need more financial investment from our parishioners. 

What does real financial investment in the life of a parish look like? Let me give you two models. 

Here is the first: when I was in seminary, one day on a retreat, a priest told us all to immediately start giving 10% of our income to our home parish. He challenged us to make the kind of investment in a parish that forces us to live differently, to make different choices because of investment in the living cells of the Church. I thought he was crazy. “I am a charity case,” I told myself. I have no income. So, I didn’t listen to him. A few years later, ordained and with a salary for the first time in years, I was eager to give to the Church. But I wanted to give in my own way. Old-fashioned tithing to the parish did not excite me, and I didn’t know where my money would really be going. So, for two years I supported missionaries with FOCUS and Vagabond, but not my parish. 

There is a disorder in that kind of giving, but I did not realize it at the time. We need to give first to our parishes, to the living cells of the Church, and that kind of giving ought to be a real sacrifice. And then, if there is more to give, we can talk about supporting not the living cells of the Church but the work of some extremity of the body of Christ serving somewhere else in the world. 

Here is the second model: the widow in Mark’s Gospel who gives of her substance, not her surplus. Those two coins is all she has, but they go to the temple without any thought of what the money will support or how it will be used. We can’t know her mind, but my guess is that the woman gave because she belonged to the community there, and nothing else mattered. 

Whether you decide to give 10% of your income to your parish or your two coins (whatever sum that might be), I am asking you to make an investment in our parish. Yes, a financial investment. It matters. But also, of course, a continued investment of your life, your time, your prayer, your worship. We are a small, small community at the Basilica but there is so much goodness and truth and beauty here. 

What I want for our parish, all I would want for any parish, is for that goodness and truth and beauty to take deeper root through the investment of its members, its families, for the parish to become a gift to future generations of the faithful. We are talking about more than tithing and giving and paying bills. We are talking about a small, young community making the kinds of investments that change the lives of those who will come to our parish, be born into our parish, years, decades, maybe centuries in the future. That sounds to me an awful lot like the small communities in the New Testament who served as those first living cells that gave life to the Church. And nothing has changed in the last 2,000 years. You do not belong to Paul or Apollos or to me. You are the field of God, the building of God. But a field cannot flourish without good soil and a building cannot stand without a strong foundation. 

Homily preached October 29th, 2023 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary