The auxiliary bishop of ‘s-Hertogenbosch (Netherlands), Mons. Rob Mutsaerts, has published a new reflection on the crisis of the Church in which he questions the constant urge to adapt ecclesial life to contemporary standards and calls for recovering certainty about what the Church has received from Christ and, therefore, is not in its power to change.
In the text published on his blog, the Dutch prelate maintains that the gravity of the current crisis does not primarily lie in the Church having lost popularity, influence or “market share,” but in the fact that within it questions are being debated on which it should precisely offer certainties.
“What is truth? What is sin? What is marriage? What is priesthood? What is liturgy? What is obedience? What does mercy mean?”, the bishop asks before taking the problem to an even deeper question:
“Do we really believe that the Church has received something from Christ that she herself cannot change?”.
“Revelation is not an iPhone”
Mons. Mutsaerts questions the contemporary mindset that almost automatically identifies any change with an improvement and that, when transferred to the Church, ends up treating received doctrine as if it also needed successive updates.
“A 2019 phone is old. A 2012 computer is ancient. And that is why we sometimes unconsciously think that a doctrine of faith from the year 325 urgently needs a software update,” the bishop ironizes. But “Revelation is not an iPhone” and Christianity is not “a product that must release a new model every year.”
The prelate does not deny that certain elements of the Church’s life can change. Pastoral methods, some canonical disciplines, forms of governance or certain liturgical disciplines may be modified. What he rejects is that this logic can be transferred to revealed truth, because “truth cannot be true today and false tomorrow.”
That is why he considers that the criterion for judging an ecclesial renewal should not be its novelty, its capacity to accommodate the language of the moment or its cultural acceptance, but whether what is proposed really helps its faithful to become holier and draws them closer to Christ, to the sacraments and to eternal life.
Synodality and the “spirit of the age”
The auxiliary bishop of ‘s-Hertogenbosch also returns to synodality, one of the issues on which he has been most critical in his interventions in recent years. Mutsaerts does not question synods as such, which he recalls are part of the Church’s history, but the risk of turning synodality, from a working method, into “an almost autonomous theological ideal.”
The Apostles, he points out, first received a faith that was entrusted to them and then were able to deliberate on it. “That order is important.” Hence listening cannot become an end separated from the truth that the Church has the obligation to safeguard.
“Listening to whom? To culture? To opinion polls? To interest groups? To ourselves? Or to Christ?” When conclusions end up coinciding predictably with “the desires of modern secular culture,” the bishop considers it legitimate to ask “whether we have really listened to the Holy Spirit or perhaps mainly to the spirit of the age”.
Likewise, he asks his brothers in the episcopate not to renounce the authority proper to their ministry to become “permanent facilitators of group processes.” Being a successor of the Apostles implies teaching, sanctifying and governing and, when necessary, simply affirming that certain things cannot be modified.
“Use synodality, but be bishops,” writes Mutsaerts. And he even reclaims a word little appreciated in some pastoral circles: “No. This we cannot change”.
What do young people find in tradition?
Mutsaerts also dwells on a phenomenon that questions some of the assumptions of pastoral care in recent decades. Against the idea that young people need few demands, brief celebrations, simplified texts and few obligations, he observes that many of those discovering the faith are seeking precisely “truth, order, asceticism, identity, confession, adoration, sacraments, intellectual depth and a community that demands something of them”.
“We have underestimated young people,” he acknowledges. The answer, in his view, does not consist in offering them a watered-down Christianity, but in teaching them the Catechism, prayer, fasting and the reasons why the Church upholds what it teaches. “No one has ever been martyred for a vague sense of belonging”, he ironizes.
This phenomenon also extends to the liturgy when he expressly asks bishops not to automatically interpret adherence to the traditional liturgy as a problem that must be corrected.
“Not every young Catholic who likes Latin is a secret agent from 1957”, he writes. If some young people feel attracted to Gregorian chant, silence, incense, kneeling, the celebration ad orientem or classical spirituality, he considers it more useful to ask “what are they looking for here that they do not find elsewhere?” than to react with suspicion to their preferences.
The warning also reaches traditionalists themselves. The ancient liturgy can sanctify, but it does not automatically make holy those who attend it. One can participate in “the most reverent Mass” and then go out to “curse three bishops and the entire Vatican” in the parking lot.
“Tradition without charity becomes archaeology with temperament”.
Less management and more priesthood
The recovery of Catholic identity that Mutsaerts proposes also passes through the priesthood and vocations. Faced with the lack of priests, he observes that a large part of the ecclesial conversation ends up focusing on parish mergers, administrative models, reorganizations or celibacy, while an elementary question remains in the background: why would a young person want to give his life to the priesthood.
Presenting it as the future administrator of eight parishes, loaded with meetings and strategic plans, can hardly awaken a vocation. Very different is the proposal to give one’s life to Christ, to celebrate the sacrifice of the Mass daily, to forgive sins, to baptize children, to accompany the dying, to proclaim the Gospel and to become a spiritual father.
That is also why he asks bishops, when discerning vocations, not to seek primarily good managers, but men who pray. “A mediocre administrator can receive help from a good bursar. A priest who does not pray cannot be saved by any management course.”
The same logic applies to the general renewal of the Church. Mutsaerts calls for more confession, eucharistic adoration, catechesis, preaching on sin and grace, solid priestly formation, families that transmit the faith and bishops willing to teach even when doctrine proves unpopular.
At the same time, he warns the traditionalist world that the defense of orthodoxy can also degenerate into ideology when the ecclesial battle ends up taking the place of spiritual life. “We can be right and lack charity; be orthodox and proud; liturgically correct and spiritually cold; theologically sharp and humanly unbearable.”
For Mutsaerts, the fruitfulness of a Catholic renewal must be measured by the holiness it produces, by families, vocations, intellectual life, beauty, charity, joy and missionary strength. The Church, he maintains, does not need to be reinvented or “saved” as if Christ had ceased to sustain it after the Ascension.
The task of Catholics is far less novel and much more demanding: to preserve the faith, to transmit it to their children, to receive the sacraments, to form priests, to foster vocations, to serve the poor and to celebrate the liturgy worthily. Because, as the bishop concludes, “in the end there are no traditional saints and progressive saints. There are only saints”.