God asks big things of those He loves!
He asked Abraham and Sarah to leave everything they knew, travel to a distant land, and become parents in their old age. God commanded Moses to lead the Chosen People for decades through the desert to freedom in the Promised Land. The Lord chose Mary to be the Mother of His beloved Son and called the Apostles to evangelize the world.
Given the fact that these tasks embodied God’s plan of salvation for the world, none of them were easy or insignificant in their completion or scope, yet the Lord provided all that was necessary for their fulfillment.
Those chosen simply needed to cooperate, trust, and work with God’s plan.
Transforming our diocese
Like the heroic figures in the Bible, we too have received a magnificent call from the Lord to accomplish great deeds in His Name!
I am convinced that this current time, in all of its challenge and difficulty, contains remarkable opportunities to serve the Lord, spread the Faith, and grow the Church!
We are facing extraordinary changes in our society and the world, in communication, work, the practice of religion, moral norms, and even a commonly accepted worldview.
These fundamental, cultural shifts can easily disorient, overwhelm, and frighten us, as we face an uncertain future. Yet, God remains faithful to us; Jesus Christ is our Lord and Redeemer; the Gospel is our North Star of salvation and the Church’s teachings remain perennially true.
If we seize the divine graces offered to us in this moment, I am convinced God will do mighty deeds of healing, conversion, and hope in our midst. Indeed, He already is!
In 2020, the Diocese of Madison launched the Go Make Disciples evangelizing initiative, as we sought to immerse ourselves in the Holy Spirit, with priests praying and sharing faith with their staff and evangelization teams, offering opportunities of prayer, formation, and study in the parishes, all in order to equip our people to be missionary disciples. In these past four years, we have seen remarkable graces of inner conversion of heart, public witness to Christ, and a growth in Mass attendance and Confession.
Coupled with Go Make Disciples, Into the Deep is our strategic plan of restructuring the diocese, realigning our leadership and resources to better serve the mission of evangelization.
This month of July marks the one year anniversary of the reassignment of most of the priests and the beginning movement towards the merging of parishes. I am profoundly grateful to our priests, lay leadership, diocesan staff, and the lay faithful for embracing these profound changes.
The movement of a favorite priest, the loss of a convenient Mass time, the need to travel to another parish for an event are all changes not readily embraced.
Each pastorate presents its own unique challenges which Into the Deep has shed even greater light on. The lack of lay parish staff, especially school teachers and catechists, the financial and administrative difficulties of many parishes, and the novelty of our priests working together as unified teams are some of the works in progress as we go further into the deep.
Let’s also celebrate the successes!
Mass attendance is up four percent across the diocese, as is the opportunity for Confession, to which many people are flocking.
A significantly higher number of people entered the Church this year at Easter, including 65 college students at Saint Paul’s Catholic Student Center in Madison and 20 students in Platteville.
Many people enjoy the variety of priests in their pastorate and the broader offering of parochial events, formation classes, and spiritual enrichment available at other parishes within the pastorate.
The diocese has a clearer understanding of the human, financial, and physical resources of our parishes and can more readily improve the quality of service and the accuracy of reports.
We are remodeling St. Bernard Church, so that, after 20 years, the diocese will have a cathedral again.
In all of these efforts, we are moving from maintenance to mission. Go Make Disciples is the proclamation of the Gospel; Into the Deep is how we are aligning all of our resources, so that we can fulfill the mission we have received from Jesus with greater fruitfulness and effectiveness.
Looking ahead
Go Make Disciples has no ending point because the Great Commission to form others in Christ will go on until the end of the world. Into the Deep will take years and effort to fully take root. This timeline should not dishearten us. We are not looking for a quick cosmetic fix. The disturbing downward trend in sacramental practice and Church membership which we explored and publicized at the beginning of this process will not reverse overnight.
We are planting seeds, laying foundations, building structures, and forming a vision which will serve us well for many decades to come, a new configuration of the diocese which will be both sustainable and fruitful.
What the ensuing years hold for us, we of course do not know. We do know by faith that the Lord is with us always until the end of time, and if we are faithful to His call to live the Gospel, seek holiness, and bring others to Him, we will one day shine like the sun in the Kingdom of God. That vision of Heaven is the glory that sustains us in this earthly pilgrimage!