To Make All Things New

Ecclesia semper reformanda est: the Church is always in need of reform. Few phrases have been invoked more often since the Second Vatican Council, and few have been asked to carry so many contradictory agendas. For some, it is a license to rethink everything: doctrine, morality, the very shape of the Church. For others, it is a summons to march backward into an imagined golden age. Both camps say “reform.” They mean very different things.

The question is not whether the Church needs reform. She does. Anyone who has worked inside her institutional structures, as I did for much of my career, knows this well. Huge swaths of Americans and Europeans are former Catholics. Catholic schools close on a regular basis, and even those that stay open often fail to produce churchgoing adults. The abuse crisis remains a fresh wound, and the liturgy has become an ideological battleground. The real question is what kind of reform, and toward what end.

We now face two very different strategies. The first is to conform to the culture in a way that makes the faith appealingly “relevant.” The second is to go deeper into the faith, accepting that the Church will always be a sign of contradiction to the wisdom of a worldly age. I am convinced, and I think the experience of the past sixty years bears this out, that only the second path leads anywhere.

Authentic reform changes how a thing functions, not what the thing is. Pope Saint Paul VI put it plainly: “There can be no question of reforming the essential nature of the Church or its basic and necessary structure. To use the word reform in that context would be to misuse it completely.”¹ Joseph Ratzinger made the same point decades later: “We cannot simply rethink the Church whenever we like; she stands rather in an unbroken relationship with her origins, in constant continuity with them.”²

Saint Benedict preserved the life of the Church through his monasteries. Saint Francis “rebuilt” the Church not by drafting a new constitution for her or a series of meetings but by calling her back to poverty and purity of intention. Mother Teresa renewed the Church’s witness through radical charity. None of them created something new. They brought fresh life to what was already there.

Set this against the false reform on offer today. Germany’s Synodal Way has pressed for changes in Church teaching on women’s ordination, the blessing of same-sex unions, and the indissolubility of marriage. The justification is always the same: the Church must change if she is to speak to modern man. But a Church that rebuilds her foundations to suit the age is no longer the Church of the Apostles. Pope Francis himself, speaking of the German experiment, observed: “In Germany there is a very good Evangelical Church. We don’t need two.”³

The opposite error is real, too. Some on the ecclesial right argue that renewal simply means going back to a smaller, purer Church and the confident days before the Second Vatican Council. But time moves on, and the Church moves through history toward the Christ who will return. We look back to recover the permanent truths of the faith, not to retreat into a nostalgia that is, in the end, a failure of trust in the Holy Spirit.

Both errors share a root. They make the Church in our image rather than conforming ourselves to hers. Disputes about the Church become a kind of Rorschach test onto which we project our own preferences. This is why Ratzinger saw the postconciliar divisions as divisions ultimately of ecclesiology, and why he called the crisis of ecclesiology a crisis of faith in God.

If genuine reform is not reinvention, what is it? It is conversion. It begins with individuals, with you and me, and radiates outward through personal witness. It is a work of grace, not committees.

This is why the saints matter so much—they are the Church’s true reformers. As Ratzinger told Vittorio Messori in The Ratzinger Report, “Saints, in fact, reformed the Church in depth, not by working up plans for new structures, but by reforming themselves. What the Church needs in order to respond to the needs of man in every age is holiness, not management.”⁴ Pius XI said the same nearly a century ago: “Every true and lasting reform in the last analysis had its point of departure in holiness.”⁵

Too many Catholics assume that what happens in Rome matters more than what happens in the hearts of the people around them. I am guilty of that myself. An excessive focus on Vatican affairs, however, can actually obstruct renewal. The health of the Church flows from the people in the pews. Structures have their place, but they mean nothing without spiritual renewal. In Pope Leo XIV’s memorable words, “If we do not give Christ in his entirety, we will always be giving extremely little.”⁶

Opportunities for Renewal

Nowhere is the tension between false reform and authentic renewal clearer than in the recent push for synodality. If synodality means greater participation by all the faithful in the life of the Church, it is plainly good. If it means opening the Church’s governance to anyone, including those who reject her teaching, in order to rethink that teaching, it should be rejected. Over three years of synodal meetings, the final 2024 document used the word “structures” 22 times and “process” or “processes” 88 times. On their own, those words are empty vessels that can be filled with any agenda unless they are first tied to Jesus Christ and the salvation of souls.

The deeper confusion concerns the sensus fidelium, the instinct for the faith that the whole body of believers holds together. Some treat it as a kind of opinion poll: find out what self-identified Catholics think and teach accordingly. But that would make the Church just another civic club with a religious veneer. In 2014 the International Theological Commission named the marks of authentic participation in the sense of the faith: participation in the life of the Church, listening to the Word of God, openness to reason, adherence to the Magisterium, holiness, and seeking the edification of the Church.⁷ Calling oneself Catholic is not enough. Someone who knows little to nothing about baseball cannot be a serious player, coach, or umpire.

Ratzinger said it best: “It is not the occasional majorities that form here and there in the Church who decide her path and ours. The saints are the true determining majority according to which we orient ourselves.”⁸ The faithful who believe and live the faith, past and present, are the path to true synodality. Nothing less will succeed.

If holiness is the engine of renewal, the liturgy is where it is fueled. Lex orandi, lex credendi: how we pray shapes what we believe, and what we believe shapes how we live. Ratzinger insisted that the Church stands or falls with the liturgy. When only 31 percent of self-identified Catholics believe in the Real Presence,⁹ something has gone badly wrong, and much of it has gone wrong at Mass.

For decades, many argued that the Church should match the rhythms of the culture: contemporary music, entertaining youth programs, conversational homilies, relatable priests. We now have the evidence. When the Church prioritizes the culture’s shifting tastes, she becomes less herself and loses people anyway. She cannot out-entertain a consumer culture.

I learned this early. As a seminarian, I sat in an RCIA class where the director told the catechumens that the best reason to believe was that faith is good for your physical and mental health. I raised my hand and said I doubted the martyrs saw it that way, and that the greatest reason for our faith is that it is true. I was not invited back.

The truth is that our culture’s very superficiality has become an opening. As in the martial arts, where you turn an attacker’s force against him, the Church can meet a generation starved by distraction with what it cannot find anywhere else: truth, goodness, and beauty, the transcendentals that serve as natural doors to God.

I know the power of that door firsthand. As an eighth-grade altar server, I was trained by an old-school, habited nun to take my role seriously. One day, genuflecting before the large crucifix above the tabernacle, I suddenly wondered why I genuflected here and not before other crucifixes. It occurred to me that Something much greater might be in the tabernacle. That moment changed my life. It came not from a religion class (those consisted mostly of art projects) but from the reverent gestures of worship itself. Mystery taught me what catechesis had not.

The Mass is not entertainment. But it should lift the soul. Reverence and beauty are not matters of taste. They are how the faith is handed on.

Most Catholics never experience the Vatican or even the chancery. They experience the parish. The future of the Church hinges on the state of parish life, and no part of the Church has more unrealized potential.

The practical steps are not complicated. One pastor I know, serving a famously unchurched downtown neighborhood, began offering confession every day before the noon Mass and before and after every Sunday Mass. Within two years, Mass attendance had more than doubled, three men had entered the seminary, two women had entered religious life, and sacramental marriages were up. Call it supply-side Catholicism: make grace more available, and demand follows. The far too common thirty-minute Saturday confession window simply is not enough.

Imagine if we added to that small “faith cells” of a few families who meet regularly to pray and share a meal, reading groups, men’s formation, beautiful liturgy, and parish feasts to match the fasts. There are roughly seventeen thousand parishes in the United States. If half of them did these things well, the Church in this country would be on fire within a generation.

Priests need us, too. We tend to get the bishops and priests we deserve. Too many priests live alone, without real fraternity, and lay Catholics bear a share of responsibility for their well-being. That means praying and fasting for them, and it means simple things: an open invitation to Sunday dinner or to watch the game. Bishops, for their part, need to put the spiritual governance of their dioceses ahead of the administrative and legal pressures that consume so much of their time, and they need the courage of a John Fisher when the truth is unpopular.

The same logic applies to Catholic education. Roughly 43 percent of those raised Catholic eventually leave the faith or stop practicing it, ¹⁰ most of them during high school or college.¹¹ Catholic schools that function as private academies with a religious veneer are not enough. Catholic education exists to help form sons and daughters of God; in short, to make saints. Schools that radiate the joy of the gospel, supported by parents who see themselves as the first educators of their children, are the schools that will shape the Church’s future.

Renewal Begins With Us

The great Dominican theologian Yves Congar observed that reform movements in the Western Church have generally been inspired by an Augustinian spirit: renewal always comes down to a personal encounter with Christ and the conversion that flows from it.¹² It may be providential, then, that our new pope is an Augustinian. Saint Augustine’s way offers a ready program: a rich interior life, a relentless love of truth, the strength of community, and charity above all. “Charity is the key to everything,” Paul VI wrote. “There is nothing which charity cannot achieve and renew.”¹³

For all her troubles, the Church is far from dead. Younger priests are well-formed and faithful, Eucharistic devotion is rising, and new apostolates abound. The Holy Spirit has not left the Church, and he never will. But she needs our fidelity, our generosity, and our renewed personal commitment.

The work of reform will never be finished, because the Church is always made up of sinners in need of conversion. Asked what was wrong with the world, Chesterton answered, “I am.” That is where renewal begins: not with a new structure or a better process, but with each of us choosing holiness. Christ came to make all things new. The Church, ever ancient and ever new, invites us to let him begin with us. This is what we need now: holiness that fuels authentic renewal.

(Editor’s note: This essay was posted originally on the “What We Need Now” site and is published here with kind permission.)

Endnotes:

¹ Pope Paul VI, Ecclesiam Suam, August 6, 1964, no. 46.

² Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, God and the World: A Conversation with Peter Seewald (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), p. 350.

³ Antonio Spadaro, S.J., “Pope Francis in Conversation with the Editors of European Jesuit Journals,” La Civiltà Cattolica, June 14, 2022.

⁴ Joseph Ratzinger with Vittorio Messori, The Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985), p. 53.

⁵ Quoted in Yves Congar, True and False Reform in the Church, trans. Paul Philibert (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2011), p. 219.

⁶ Pope Leo XIV, Address to the Participants in the Social Week of Peru, August 4, 2025.

⁷ See International Theological Commission, Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church, 2014, ch. 4 §1.

⁸ Joseph Ratzinger, “Authentic Renewal Must Be Rooted in Christ,” address at the Rimini Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples (September 1, 1990), CCRN News, March 13, 2024.

⁹ Gregory A. Smith, “Just One-­Third of U.S. Catholics Agree with Their Church That Eucharist Is Body, Blood of Christ,” Pew Research Center, August 5, 2019. Thankfully, this number is much higher for regular Mass-­going Catholics.

¹⁰ Based on Pew Research Center’s 53 percent retention rate for those raised Catholic. See Becka A. Alper, Patricia Tevington, Asta Kallo, and Jeff Diamant, “Why Do Some Americans Leave Their Religion While Others Stay?” Pew Research Center, December 15, 2025.

¹¹ Though not a nationally representative sample, one study by CARA and St. Mary’s Press found that 74 percent of former Catholics left between the ages of ten and twenty. See Robert J. McCarty and John M. Vitek, “Going, Going, Gone: The Dynamics of Disaffiliation in Young Catholics” (Winona, MN: St. Mary’s Press, 2017), p. 6.

¹² See Congar, True and False Reform in the Church, p. 193.

¹³ Pope Paul VI, Ecclesiam Suam, no. 56.

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