A reflection for the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A.
Ezekiel’s image of the watchman is usually read as a call to courage: if we see danger, we must speak. Silence can become complicity.
The Church has often understood itself in this way. It teaches, warns, corrects, and calls people to conversion. At its best, this is an act of love. A Church that never challenges us would have little to say to a wounded world.
But Psalm 95 places another command beside Ezekiel’s: “Harden not your hearts.”
That warning belongs to the Church too.
It is easy for an institution that believes it has a responsibility to teach to become less practiced at listening. It is easy to assume that correction moves in only one direction: from hierarchy to laity, from clergy to parishioners, from institution to individual. But what happens when the warning comes from below? What happens when women, survivors of abuse, grieving families, immigrants, LGBTQ Catholics, theologians, religious sisters, parents, or young people say, “Something here is causing harm”?
Does the Church hear a prophetic voice, or merely a challenge to authority?
That question matters.
Love for the Church cannot require silence about the places where the Church has failed to listen. We have seen the terrible consequences of protecting reputation over people, authority over truth, and institutional stability over the dignity of those who were wounded. There have been moments when people spoke clearly and courageously, and the Church’s response was defensiveness, delay, or disbelief.
A hardened heart is not only an individual spiritual problem. Institutions can harden too.
They harden when questions are treated as disloyalty. They harden when women’s experience is welcomed only as long as it does not challenge established structures. They harden when suffering people are spoken about more than listened to. They harden when preserving authority becomes more important than examining whether that authority has been used justly.
The difficult truth is that the Church cannot credibly call the world to repentance if it resists repentance itself.
And repentance requires more than apology. It requires conversion.
That means asking not only, “What did we do wrong?” but also, “What in our structures, habits, theology, or culture made this harm easier to ignore?” It means being willing to hear uncomfortable testimony without immediately defending the institution. It means recognizing that conscience is not a nuisance to be managed, but a place where God may be speaking.
None of this means abandoning the teaching Church. It means becoming more fully the listening Church.
Ezekiel reminds us that there are moments when we must speak. Psalm 95 reminds us that there are also moments when we must receive the warning.
The Church needs watchmen. But it also needs the humility to admit that sometimes the watchman is a woman in the pew, a survivor at the door, a parent asking a painful question, or a young Catholic wondering whether there is room for them to remain.
The question is not whether the Church will continue to speak.
The deeper question is whether it can still be changed by what it hears.
Prayer
God of truth, keep your Church from confusing authority with immunity from correction. Give us courage to speak when silence causes harm, and humility to listen when the truth comes from unexpected voices. Soften what has become defensive in us, and lead your Church toward deeper honesty, justice, and faithfulness. Amen.