By our baptism, we are all called to share in Jesus’s offices of prophet, priest, and king. It is impossible to talk about the office of priest without a conversation about sacrifice. Almost all ancient societies had a priestly class that offered ritual sacrifice on behalf of the people. In our history, God instituted the Levitical priesthood to offer sacrifices brought by the Israelites. In our Christian tradition, Jesus Christ, our high priest, sacrificed his body for us on the cross, offering salvation through his blood that he shed on our behalf.
So, we laypersons, in exercising our office of priest, must follow his example and offer sacrifice too. But how?
Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church written during Vatican II, says while discussing the nature of laypersons sharing in the priestly function of Jesus, “All their works, prayers and apostolic endeavors, their ordinary married and family life, their daily occupations, their physical and mental relaxation, if carried out in the Spirit, and even the hardships of life, if patiently borne—all these become ‘spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.’”
Rather than offering a ritual sacrifice of something, the New Testament makes clear that, following in the footsteps of the Master, our sacrifice is that of ourselves. St. Peter wrote, “You too must be built up on him, stones that live and breathe, into a spiritual fabric; you must be a holy priesthood, to offer up that spiritual sacrifice which God accepts through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:5). Similarly, St. Paul wrote, “Brethren, I appeal to you by God’s mercies to offer up your bodies as a living sacrifice, consecrated to God and worthy of his acceptance; this is the worship due from you as rational creatures” (Romans 12:1).
So, it is clear that sacrifice isn’t optional for Christians. We are all priests, and our religion is clear that sacrifice should be at the very heart of our lives as followers and imitators of Jesus Christ. Most of us will never be asked to suffer in the way Jesus did, but we all suffer in some way at various times in our lives because of declining health, loss of employment, loss of a loved one, or in myriad other ways. As Pope St. John Paul II wrote in his apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris, “Suffering seems to belong to man’s transcendence: it is one of those points in which man is in a certain sense ‘destined’ to go beyond himself and is called to this in a mysterious way.”
Might we see an even greater increase in deaths of despair as Americans become less religiously affiliated?
Some suffer tremendously. When human suffering is caused or compounded by added factors like loneliness, depression, or anxiety, suffering can deepen to an existential level and become almost impossible to bear. When suffering reaches this level, it is now too easy in some places to choose an end to suffering through the legalization of doctor-assisted suicide.
Our instinct is that our religion should offer protection from that drastic choice, but the recent suicide of a thirty-five-year-old priest, Fr. Matteo Balzano, in Italy is a painful reminder that suicide isn’t only an action of the faithless. The existential pain of loneliness and isolation, often the fate of priests living alone in rectories, is associated with a five-fold increase in risk of death by suicide. I’m sure many of us know Catholics who have chosen to end their lives.
We live in a culture of despair where the parish community should play a critical role in helping alleviate the isolation that can result in such a tragic end. However, the religiously unaffiliated has risen from 17 percent in 2007 to 29 percent according to the latest statistic. Pew Research Center forecasts that the religiously unaffiliated will increase to 42 percent of the population by 2050. Longitudinal studies indicate that religious observance can significantly reduce suicidal ideation, so might we see an even greater increase in deaths of despair as Americans become less religiously affiliated? The need for evangelizing the “nones” is critical. So is applying the antidote—promoting community in our parishes.
ACS Technologies, a company that develops and provides tech solutions to enable faith communities to better serve their people, has published a resource titled Called to Connect: Creating a Welcoming Parish in a Lonely World, which offers practical suggestions for parishes to bring people together to combat the isolation that can lead to such devastating consequences.
In a recent seminar I gave for Word on Fire, I shared two stories that illustrate the stark contrast between how a transcendent view of suffering can shape one’s acceptance of suffering and how an absence of religion can exacerbate it.
In a text exchange with a secular friend in Europe about euthanasia, my acquaintance shared a story of a friend of hers, an eighty-year-old woman suffering from severe multiple sclerosis:
She was once an accomplished writer, speaker, and professor, but now she is in a home for the disabled and cannot so much as roll over in bed without summoning a nurse. She cannot go to the bathroom, wipe her own bottom, budge in any way whatsoever. She also can no longer talk in a way anyone can comprehend. The only thing she can do is type (though she is missing two fingers, which were amputated because they were cancerous). She yearns for death but is unable to effect it. Ironically, besides everything I have listed, she is in “good health.” “This could go on forever!” she cries to me via email. She wishes she had pills, a gun, or the “luxury” of throwing herself out of her fourth-floor window. When I once jokingly said I wanted to “throw myself into the Seine,” she said, “You’re so lucky you can.” An eloquent public speaker, she is now reduced to slurring, stuttering, incomprehensible speech; she essentially can’t move anything but her eight fingers and she is—frankly—waiting and hoping to die.
In what should I tell her to have faith? In a benevolent God who has overseen if not decided her misery? In an afterlife of cherubs and harps where she has her twenty-year-old body back?
In contrast, I shared this story I heard recently. It was told by a man about his brother with severe autism and other disabilities who was raised in a faithful Catholic home with their family. This brother is mostly nonverbal and prone to outbursts where he screams, bites himself, and hits the walls.
During one of his outbursts, I restrained him and held him down. My mom, my sister, and I were praying, and my mom kept saying, “Michael, use your words. Remember what Amy [his speech therapist] taught you. Use your words.”
And as he was screaming, he yelled, “I’m like Jesus!” really loud, then started weeping and softly said, “On the cross, all alone.” The outburst subsided, and he just cried and said, “Sorry,” over and over.
From that point forward, my mom has made sure Michael attends daily Mass, that he goes to confession, to adoration. And it is where Michael has come alive. He still has speech difficulties, but he is a great communicator and he keeps getting better.
This person concluded the story by telling us that since Michael attends Mass each day, he has become well known in his parish. One day at Mass, when the Gospel reading was that of the Presentation, the priest singled Michael out in his homily as being Simeon in their parish—the one who comes to Mass each day and waits patiently on the Lord, and receives him with love and excitement.
These two stories offer a stark contrast between how suffering can cause existential distress and a desire for death and how it can be patiently endured and redeemed by Jesus’s cross. What is it that makes the difference?
Pope St. John Paul II wrote in Salvifici Doloris,
There is a close relationship between Jesus’s Cross—a symbol of supreme suffering and the price of our true freedom—and our pains, sufferings, afflictions, hardships and anguish which can weigh on our souls or take root in our bodies. Suffering is transformed and elevated, when in those moments we become aware of God’s closeness and solidarity. This is the certainty that gives inner peace and spiritual joy to the person who suffers generously and offers his pain “as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Rom. 12:1). The person who suffers in this way is not a burden to others, but by his own suffering contributes to the salvation of all. . . . With Christ, everything has meaning, even suffering and death; without him, nothing can be fully explained, not even the legitimate pleasures God has joined to the various moments of human life.
Many of us struggle to find a response to the challenge of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. By comparison, responding to the evil of abortion seems straightforward. On the purely immanent plane, offering a means of alleviating pain and suffering seems sensible. Killing a baby in the womb as a barbaric act of convenience generates multiple arguments against it.
Our task as followers of Christ, living and worshipping in community and called to serve one another in love, is so simple. It is to extend a proven solution to loneliness, isolation, and any other cause that leads so many into existential despair. The gift of ourselves: that can be our “sacrifice of praise,” and that sacrifice can save lives.