Something more is going on here than human reckoning allows.
Master we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing … their nets were tearing (Lk 5: 5-6).
As I read the Gospel for the 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time (February 9), the “futile fishing” turning at once to superabundant bounty caught my eye. It is crucial for all people of faith and good will to take this Gospel to heart in this year 2025. I believe it is a vital word for our time.
I was born in 1966. By the time I was old enough to be aware of and care about the state of the Church and its mission, it was the mid-1980s. By then, the massive cultural shifts of the 1960s and 70s had hardened. Wide-scale abandonment of the Church and of faith practice was the dominant story, at least in North America and Western Europe.
In subsequent decades, not much has changed, at least to my immediate observation. I have lived my entire life as a Catholic, as a member of Madonna House, and now as a priest of MH, very much living with Simon the experience of Luke 5:5, Master, we have worked all night and caught nothing.
I am aware that countless books have been written diagnosing and prescribing remedies for the woes of the Church in these last hundred years. I am aware that everyone has an opinion on just what the Church is doing wrong and just what the Church needs to do to reverse the numerical decline we all live with in this contemporary age.
“We need women priests! We need to restore the Latin Mass! We need to jettison our teachings on sex! We need Eucharistic adoration everywhere! Pray the rosary! Marry gay people!”… and so forth. These are all very familiar conversations to those of us paying attention to Church affairs. (I am not implying that all these suggestions have the same level of legitimacy or value.)
Yes, yes, yes. Even when I thoroughly disagree with specific ideas and suggestions, by all means let us all talk it out thoroughly. Let’s have a good old “donnybrook” about every single thing. Even if it gets really messy, this is better than NOT talking about things, in my view.
But that’s not what I’m addressing in this article. I am talking about living life under the constant burden of the “futile fishing”, feeling as if no matter what we do we just can’t seem to reverse the tides of secularism which continually erode the institutional solidity of the Church and wash millions upon millions of former believers out into the sea of irreligion.
It seems to me that we can all relate to that experience of discouragement which Simon and the other fishermen had at that Luke 5 moment. I have certainly had people in my life whom I have loved dearly, and done my best as a priest to shepherd and counsel and guide, just up and walk away from the Catholic faith, seemingly without a backward glance.
Very disheartening, very sorrowful. I know it is a sadness shared by many Catholic parents who did their very best to raise children in the faith only to see their adult children leave the Church with dispatch.
So yes, being disheartened and feeling discouragement are very real and understandable. But then … lower the nets. The command of Jesus. The nets full to bursting, the miraculous catch. The reality is that something more is going on here than human reckoning allows.
It is not this or that pastoral strategy, this or that tweaking of parish programs or diocesan initiatives, this or that introduction or re-introduction of some good and praiseworthy devotion or some excellent approach to catechesis and evangelization, this “How to Raise your Children to have Faith” manual or that parish renewal project that will really make the difference.
What does make the difference? It is the Lord, the Lord, the Lord. The Lord Jesus alone.
We have to be clear about this. If the Lord does not build the house in vain do the builders labor (Ps 127).
It is not that we are to sit around idly, waiting for Jesus to do something to change things. The men on the boat still had to lower the nets, lift them up, and haul them to shore. Backbreaking hard work, all of it.
But it was hard work done at Jesus’ command and under his direction. And there is a mysterious, unaccountable reality to it. We may feel quite discouraged and helpless at times. But Jesus is alive. Jesus is acting. Jesus is on the move. The Spirit is stirring in the world. The Lord is not giving up on humanity and neither must we.
Perhaps this verse leapt out at me because of an experience I had recently. At MH in Salem, Missouri, I have made myself available to help pastors in the diocese for occasional weekend Masses. I was out at a cluster of parishes about two hours away from here.
One of them was in a small Ozark town in the very heart of the Bible Belt. The town itself is small and the Catholic population a tiny percentage. So I was expecting a pretty small crowd at Mass.
Surprisingly, it was almost full of young families; lots of children, with a vibrant, energetic feeling. Afterwards I chatted with an elderly parishioner who told me that just a few years ago, the parish was exclusively older people, to the point where it didn’t look like there was much future for it. Then … well, you tell me (she couldn’t!).
The disciples had worked all night and caught nothing, and now their nets are full to breaking point.
I don’t know the answers. I don’t know how and when and what it is that makes the Holy Spirit descend here or there, how in some places the faith seems to die out, while in others it doesn’t, and in yet others it seems to die and then suddenly Jesus acts, and something else happens again.
I do know that this Luke 5 story of futility, failure, and flourishing speaks deeply to me at this time in our Church history.
And I do know, above all, that Jesus Christ is alive. He is walking along the shores of our world, bidding us to keep putting those nets down, keep breaking our backs and our hearts, throwing out Gospel truth and Gospel love into our world.
He tells us to never give up on his limitless power to make faith, hope, and love come alive again in any human heart, and to draw anew all men and women to himself, into the nets of the fishermen, to be borne upward into that new life without end.
The miraculous catch of fish, Jan van’t Hoff, Netherlands
