st john chrysostom on wealth and poverty

Attending to that need is the modest objective of this essay. Is the Church a building, an arena or auditorium where magic and miracle do not appear to be different? Is the Church just any group of people who call themselves Christians praying? Is it an NGO run along ideological lines? Are her ministers prophets in the sense of fortune-tellers of diviners in African traditional religions? In the proliferation of 'healing' and 'deliverance' ministries, have we not become a Church where sacramentals have replaced sacraments, where water and oil manufactured and blessed by this particular priest are believed to be more efficacious than the water and oil of baptism? In the fashionable and extravagant religiosity of our time, is the Church not a 'fellowship' without breaking of bread, parishes where attendance at prayer meetings is larger than Mass attendance? What, in the consciousness of contemporary Catholics in Nigeria, is the value of the sacrifice of thanksgiving that the eucharist is when, in our liturgies, right after communion, the priest and the assembly are invited to go to the back of the Church and dance to the altar for 'special thanksgiving'? Does this 'special thanksgiving-a practice which saw the light of day during the structural adjustment programme of the Babangida era-not suggest that there is a contradiction between what is taught in eucharistic doctrine and what is practiced in the liturgy? Is there any 'special thanksgiving' greater than the eucharistic sacrifice, what Catholic theology calls the Church's greatest act of thanksgiving? Are we a healthy Church because of multiplication of religious communities whose members are dressed in exotic habits of many colours? Is our Church rightly described as vibrant simply because of enthusiastic but disfigured liturgies, liturgies disfigured by fundraising and entertainment, where dance and donation appear to be the two things that matter? The questions raised here underscore the compelling need for a renewed understanding of what it means to be Church.

Yet, many indices of monstrous misconceptions abound, indices of a crisis of ecclesiology in an era of strange religiosity.

What does it mean to be Church?2 The question is, prima facie, easy to answer.

St john chrysostom on wealth and poverty