The Thermometer that Gauges the Temperature of the Body of Christ

The pursuit of God is flagging. Fewer and fewer of the children of Adam and Eve are going to Mass. Nobody goes to Confession. Vocations are drying up. Marriages are crumbling. Churches are withering and dying. The only sacrament holding its own is the sacrament of extreme unction and this is so only because the dead do not have much of a choice. The trend is downward and accelerating. The thermometer that gauges the temperature of the body of Christ is the practice of Christianity. By this measure, the patient is moribund - a few breaths away from death.

Why?

The engine of Christianity is the prodigious love of God as demonstrated by Jesus in his battle with the monster of the Crucifixion. From his scabbard of prodigious love, Jesus drew the sharp sword of sweet forgiveness to slay the monster. Forgiveness killed the monster dead. The engine energizes the pursuit of God. But, the engine room of Christianity is empty. Nobody is working in the engine room. Nobody is tending to the engine. Is it any wonder that the engine is sputtering and stalling?

Why the decline?

THE CHURCH HAS STOPPED STIMULATING OUR CURIOSITY IN THE PRODIGIOUS LOVE OF GOD. Jesus put into the hands of the Church a blockbuster to propagate from the point and place of its obscure origin then and there, across space and time, to us here and now. "Let us test him with insult and torture, that we may find out how gentle he is and make trial of his forbearance" (Wisdom 2: 19). The test was done yet the leadership of the Church says nothing about the test or its results. Instead of propagating the blockbuster, the Church detoured onto other, less important, disenchanting Christian tangents. The tangents are boring us. THE CHILDREN OF ADAM AND EVE HAVE LOST INTEREST. Our Church has murdered our curiosity in God.

Pope Francis declared: "Brothers and sisters, Christendom no longer exists!" (Pope Francis Saturday, 21 December 2019). The Church is rapidly plummeting down the tubes into irrelevancy. THE VALLEY OF TEARS, HOWEVER, CANNOT AFFORD AN IRRELEVANT CHURCH (Matthew 16:17-19).

The New York City Police Department runs a program of self-criticism called CompStat by which it uses crime statistics to evaluate the job performance of its bosses. Given the deplorable Catholic statistics, if such a program were applied to the bosses of the Catholic Church, how many heads would roll? Shall we wait until the number for Mass attendance falls into the single digits before the leadership of the Catholic Church is fired for incompetency?