Just be the Church. . .

So a news release from the Vatican says:

Vatican Launches Education Collaboration with UN to Promote Sustainability and Gender Equality

Former United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, the economist Jeffrey Sachs, and the director general of UNESCO are among those speaking at the little-publicized launch of a Vatican-U.N. collaboration aimed at educating the world in sustainable lifestyles, gender equality and a culture of peace and nonviolence.

The Dec. 16-17 Vatican Youth Symposium, hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, is serving as the launch for a collaboration between Pope Francis’ Global Compact on Education initiative, which invites a new humanism based on a global change of mentality, and Mission 4.7, a U.N.-backed advisory group of civil and political leaders aiming to meet the educational target (numbered 4.7) of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The Vatican said the symposium is focusing in particular on the need to promote a new kind of education, “one that will overcome the current globalization of indifference and the culture of waste.”

And in that gobblygook lies what is at the heart of Christianity's decline.  Churches that are doing just about everything but being the Church.  Now this happened Dec. 16-17 -- and a week later the Pope led Christmas masses from an empty St. Peter's.  Apparently it is too dangerous to be in person for worship but not so dangerous that the mission of Christ cannot be blurred and confused with a collaborative effort toward the current sacred cows of gender fluidity, climate change, anti-capitalism, and all the other related paraphernalia.  Wow.  It is no wonder that people are confounded about what Christianity is and what the Church is!

Even conservative churches are tempted by the desire to dabble in the politics of race, gender, sexuality, climate change, economic justice, and a host of other causes -- not all of them bad, mind you, but none of them what the Gospel is about.  What kind of Church is willing to lose its soul to gain a few better moments on an earth that God has already consigned to destruction?  Now, I am not at all suggesting that we should rape creation or ignore our responsibility as stewards of God's gifts or be indifferent to the plight of the suffering.  But I am saying that there a plenty of well funded (usually liberal) foundations who can carry the weight here.  The Church does not need to dip its fingers in the water of relevance.  As long as people sin and die we have the ultimate relevance.  But we seem to have forgotten that.

Honestly, Rome and Francis seem to have taken their direction from liberal Protestantism and the future they have chosen will probably end up where the progressive and liberal Christians are -- empty churches and a betrayal of the Gospel.  It is as if Rome is good if they have the mass and nobody came but everybody knows where the Pope stands on social justice and climate and gender issues.  What kind of church is that?  Not the Church established by Jesus Christ for His purpose.  So wake up and smell the roses folks.  The Church can be political and faithful but she cannot be both.  Whatever happened to in but not of the world?