One of the most memorable exclamations I’ve ever heard in a homily was made by a passionate young priest. Gesturing to the half-filled pews, he asked, “Why is this church empty!”
Why Indeed?
We can blame the sexual and financial scandals. Similarly, the silence from Rome to the dubia asking for clarification of Amoris Laetitia, has not helped. Beyond that, one could cite Cardinal Cupich’s ever-anodyne statements and the seeming inability, at times, of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops to even get out of its own way.
But the decay in Mass attendance began long before these problems. Moreover, to limit ourselves to issues with the episcopacy takes us off the hook too easily. If we are praying for Church renewal, then what about us individually?
Read Ezekiel chapters 8 and 9, but particularly Ezekiel 9:6. Are we willing to say with the Lord not only “Begin at my sanctuary,” but “Begin with me”?
A Muscular Christianity
James V. Schall, S.J.’s † fine short book, Another Sort of Learning, points in chapter 12 to Hilaire Belloc’s Catholic exuberance. “Belloc was much more than a folk hero. [He was] a man who made us think our faith was in fact thinkable.”
Fr. Schall’s writings are one of my touchstones for many things Catholic. That said, even he sells Belloc short here. Consider Belloc’s own words, i.e., that he believed in:
Not a hypothetical God, but a real God full of beef, creator of Heaven and Earth et omnium visibilium et invisibilium.¹
A real God full of beef, creator of Heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible! Good heavens. What a statement. How very much we need this certainty, this muscular Catholicism today—as opposed to equivocation and vagueries. Yet one almost dares not say such a thing for fear of being thought “traditionalist,” “dogmatic,” or even sacrilegious.
Empty Pews — Why?
“A real God full of beef” is the reality to which the young priest was pointing, even summonsing, from Heaven (Psalm 144:5). If we truly believed Christ is present in the Eucharist, and that the God of Heaven speaks through Word and Sacrament, then how could even one empty seat in our parishes be empty?
Lest we think Belloc exaggerates, or has engaged in sacrilege, consider this from Paul Claudel’s A Poet Before the Cross, a book that should be revered by every Catholic Christian:
The God we worship is not only standing, He is raised, all His body stretched, an active power visible in each fiber! He is above everything and holds on to nothing. But it is He who holds us, and we who depend on Him, the two of us indissoluble. He is here forever between Heaven and Earth, suspended, intermediary. He is a God fully functioning.²
Fully functioning, indeed! A real God, full of beef. Belloc again:
The Catholic Church is the exponent of Reality. It is true. Its doctrines in matters large and small are statement of what is. This is that which the ultimate act of the intelligence accepts. This is that which the will deliberately confirms.
As Belloc biographer A.N. Wilson concludes:
The Mass [for Belloc] was a daily chance to be present at the material and true miracle of Christ’s incarnation . . . As often as he knelt [at the altar] . . . Belloc renewed his intellectual appreciation of the fact that he belonged to the one institution on earth founded, guided, and daily visited by Almighty God.³
If this is true, then Christ is always present in the tabernacle of even the most modest parish church as well as the grandest cathedral. If this is true, then the Catholic Church is the clearest mirror of Reality. If this is true, then the Mass opens a door into Heaven.
If we believe this — then “why is this Church empty?!”
¹ A.N. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc: A Biography (New York: Atheneum, 1984), p. 361.
² Paul Claudel, A Poet Before the Cross (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1958), p. 225.
³ Wilson, pp. 250-253.
Christianity Richly 
[…] Responses from Rome often seem veiled in silence and ambiguity (see Why is This Church Empty?). […]