Pope Benedict is resigning. Not the end of the world, nor the end of the Church.

If you find yourself saddened by this news remember: the Church is the bride of Jesus Christ, not the product of human enterprise. The Pope is Christ’s vicar, not successor. The pope is a caretaker and steward, not lord. Continue to love the Church and not any one man. Trust the guidance of the Holy Spirit—that same Holy Spirit who gave us Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger. And especially pray for the cardinal-electors who just started burning up the red phone lines. They are who the Holy Spirit shall work through, pray that they are sensitive to the authentic promptings of the Spirit.

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

If, on the other hand, you find yourself happy with this news because you think “finally, we’ll get a pope who will allow contraception, women priests and [all manner of silliness] to prevail,” prepare yourself for continued frustration. The Church is the creation of God, not to be remade in our own image and likeness. She does not approve these things because they are un-approvable.

The Church is who she is because of Jesus Christ and not because of any individual man. All we weak human persons can contribute is more difficulty through our sinfulness—but even when we screw up, God is capable of bringing great good out of it.

We will hear all manner of silliness and bad advice from many corners about what sort of man (heh… or woman…) the Church ought to elect to show that she is still “relevant.” An actively and activist homosexual man. A non-Catholic. A man who isn’t so hung up on this or that doctrine.

Meh.

That’s like impetuous teens telling their stodgy conservative parents to “get with the times and live a little” in licentious, irresponsible, indulge-your-appetites behavior … except it falls short of the relationship between the Church and the world by orders of magnitude.

Those who would try to remake the Church do not understand her. Pope Benedict’s resignation, though an epochal event in world history, will not rock the Church, but merely confirms the primacy and solidity of the Church over the ever-changing times.

The fundamental truth of the Christian faith that the modern world must destroy. God is a family. God is a community of committed, mutual, radical, self-giving, life-creating love. God is love. God is self-gift. And all that is flows from that radical loving self-gift. Without that radical loving self-gift nothing is or can be.

And in the radical plan of God He created all that is to share mutual, reciprocal, self-gift, in love, and thereby new life would come about. This experience finds its quintessential expression in the human family: mother, father, children, the most basic unit of society, which brings about and animates all other human societies.

This Trinitarian testimony of the Christian faith continuously and fundamentally challenges the modern secular ideologies that hold up individual wants-fulfillment at the expense of radical self-gift. To our own ends we may use others to fulfill our wants—not needs—without commitment. Modern ideologies call for corporate, usually governmental, or at least academic-approved structures that supplant the nuclear family in bringing about new life and in raising children. But love and self-gift are not involved, only theory and scientific approaches to child rearing. Oh, brave new world.

I don’t believe the un-Christian modern ideologies are malicious, because the Trinity is not intuitive. Some individuals who hold to them may be, but not all, and the ideologies themselves do not necessarily arise in malicious minds. We who know the Trinity know it because God has revealed the Trinity to us through Judeo-Christian salvation history. Without the revelation of the Trinity, movements toward personal wants-fulfillment make some sense. If we had not been shown that our Creator is a community of love, that we are most alive when we emulate the amazing committed self-giving love of the Trinity, then we would not know to act accordingly. Those who do not know our Christian faith, or who have rejected it for whatever reason (even if they remain within a nominally “Christian” ecclesial communion), are simply following what their best intuition, even if selfish, dictates is right. There are those who know their judgment to be clouded by pride but who forge ahead with their unGodly designs anyhow. Those people are to be pitied, prayed for, and opposed.

But this Solemnity of the Trinity stands as a reminder of who we are, because it reminds us who our God is. And our trinitarian God challenges us to model His intense, mutual, radical, committed, self-giving, life-creating love for the world to see, that the world might be redeemed, in part by our own witness to what true love is about. In that way we shall make good on the verse in Colossians, and make up for what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ.