During the 131st Supreme Convention, hosted by the Knights of Columbus in San Antonio, Texas this past week, His Eminence, Sean Cardinal O'Malley, OFM Cap., Archbishop of Boston was invited to give the keynote address.
The
New Evangelization
in the Pontificate of Pope Francis
Brothers and sisters in the Lord: it is a joy and an
honor to be invited to address you at this extraordinary gathering. I am so
grateful to God for my forty year friendship with Carl Anderson, whose life and
vocation have been such a blessing for the Church. I am grateful to God for all
that the Knights of Columbus does to spread the faith, promote the Gospel of
Life and build a civilization of love.
Some of us had the privilege of accompanying our young
people on the World Youth Day Pilgrimage with Pope Francis in Rio de Janeiro.
Cardinal Dolan and I were so blessed to be able to give the catecheses at the
Rio Vivo Centre, sponsored by the Knights of Columbus, where thousands of young
Catholics from the US, Canada, Australia and other English speaking communities
gathered for prayer, fellowship and catechesis.
We were all overwhelmed by the Mass on the beach at
Copacabana where a throng of young Catholics that equaled the entire population
of Ireland gathered around the successor of Saint Peter, our new Holy Father
Pope Francis, the first Pope from the Americas, whose spirit of compassion and
love is touching people’s hearts all over the world.
Following Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict, Pope Francis
is challenging us to embrace the New Evangelization with new ardor, with new
boldness and with great love for all those who God places in our path.
I spent twenty years in Washington, D.C., it was there
that I came to know Carl Anderson. In those days there was a curious incident
that I will always remember.
Wilbur Mills was a long-time speaker in the House and a
one-time presidential candidate. Mills was involved in a traffic incident in
Washington, DC in 1974 when I was a young priest working there. His car was
stopped by US Park Police late at night because the driver turned out the
lights. Mills was intoxicated and his face was injured from a scuffle with
Annabella Battistella, professionally known as Fannie Fox, the Argentine
firecracker. In an attempt to escape, they leapt from the car and jumped into
the nearby Tidal Basin. One month later, Mills was to be on the ballot in his
home state of Arkansas for re-election to the Congress. While his office denied
that he had a drinking problem, Jack Anderson reported that if his staff said, He can’t speak with you now, he’s on the
floor, it was never clear if Mills was on the floor of the House or the
floor of his office. In the election, a month after the scandal, Mills’
challenger used the slogan: If you like
liquor, sex and thrills, cast your vote for Wilbur Mills. Mills won handily
with 60% of the votes. He had asked for forgiveness from his constituencies and
explained to them that his problems were a result of cavorting with foreigners.
For 20 years I was in Washington cavorting with
foreigners working at the Centro Catolico,
the Spanish Catholic Centre. I did not find this to be a corrupting influence
on my life, but rather an uplifting experience and indeed a great privilege.
Coming from a lace curtain Irish community in the Midwest, being thrust into
the challenges and sufferings of the immigrant community was truly an
eye-opener.
Shortly after arriving at the Centro Catolico, I was visited by a man who was obviously a campesino from El Salvador who sat
across from me at my desk and broke down and wept bitterly. He was so overcome
with grief that he could not speak, he simply handed me a letter from his wife
back in El Salvador who took him to task for having abandoned her and their six
children to poverty and starvation. When the man was able to compose himself,
he explained to me that he came to Washington, like so many, because with the
war raging in his country it was impossible to sustain his family by farming.
So he found a coyote who brought him to Washington where he shared a room with
several other men in similar circumstances. He washed dishes in two restaurants,
one at lunchtime and one at dinnertime. He ate the leftover food on the dirty
plates so as to save money. He walked to work so as not to spend any money on
transportation, so that he could send all the money he earned back to his
family. He said he sent money each week, but now after six months, his wife had
not received a single letter from him and accused him of abandoning her and the
children. I asked him if he sent cheques or money orders. He told me that he
sent cash. He said: Each week I put all
the money I earn into an envelope with the amount of stamps that I was told and
I put it in that blue mailbox on the corner. I looked out the window and I
could see the blue mailbox, the problem was it was not a mailbox at all, but a
fancy trash bin.
That encounter certainly brought home to me how difficult
it is to be an immigrant, to be a stranger in a strange land and experience
countless humiliations and deprivations as one struggled to make enough money
to feed one’s children.
The immigrants turn to the Church as their spiritual
family, and for their part have contributed so much joy and vitality. In
Washington they have doubled the Catholic population in forty years.
The irony is that I went to the monastery to become a
missionary, expecting to be sent to Papua New Guinea or the Easter Islands, and
I spent twenty years in Washington, D.C. working with Central American
refugees. When I was in the seminary, our Provincial, Father Victor, wrote a
letter to Rome in which he said that our vice-province in Puerto Rico was
flourishing and that our Province was prepared to take on a new mission. He
said that he wanted the most difficult mission in the world. The response was
lightning quick, saying that we should open a mission in the Highlands of Papua
New Guinea. The Guardian, Father Fermin Schmidt, from the Capuchin College in
Washington, was named the first Bishop and friars were sent. Eventually, three
of my classmates went. It was reported back to us that when the friars landed in
a field, the natives who had never seen Europeans or an airplane were curious.
They asked if the plane was male or female. They said if it was a female they
wanted an egg.
Many years later, a young friar I ordained who was
working in Papua New Guinea came to see me on his home visit. He had glorious
pictures of smiling natives, with bones in their noses, feathers in their hair
and little else in the way of clothing. He announced proudly, This is my parish council. I was
particularly intrigued because one of my own pastors had just told me that his
parishioners were not ready for a parish council. If Fr. Provincial wrote today
asking for the most difficult mission, we might have been sent not to Papua,
New Guinea, but to the US, England, France or Canada. This is true for so many
places in the Western World where secularism and de-Christianization are
gaining ground. This is the challenge of the New Evangelization. It is much
harder to preach the Gospel in a culture that seems to be vaccinated against
the Faith, in our own country where so many Catholics have stormed off, dozed
off or simply drifted away from the Church.
Pope Francis is calling on all of us to be missionaries
in our own communities. In this new millennium, business as usual is not
enough. We must be a team of missionaries, moving from a maintenance mode to a
missionary one. We must ask ourselves, What
does it mean to live in a culture of unbelief; a culture which does not even
know it does not believe because it still lives on the residue of Christian
civilization? As Hauerwas has expressed it so well: The Church exists today as resident aliens, an adventurous colony in a
society of unbelief. As a society of unbelief, Western culture is devoid of the
sense of journey, of adventure, because it lacks belief in much more that the
cultivation of an ever shrinking horizon of self-preservation and
self-expression. Pope Francis is ever warning against a self-referential
Church turned in on itself. He tells us to open the doors, to invite others in so
that we can go out and invite.
To be a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ in the Catholic
Church is much more than a head trip. It is a way of life together; the whole
person is engaged in the process.
Education for this journey must therefore be experiential,
personal, engaging and life-giving. We learn discipleship the way we learn a
language, by being part of a community that speaks that language. Our young
Catholics must be mentored in the faith by others, either peers or older
Catholics who are walking the walk. A writing from the early life of the Church
that has always fascinated me is the Letter to Diognetus, where the author is
describing to his friend what Christians are like. He says that they live in
the same neighborhoods, speak the same language, dress like everybody else; but
they do not kill their babies and they respect the marriage bond. Very quaint
indeed. It is a little scary to think that the Diognetus letter could have been
written last week.
In today’s world we must promote the Catholic way of life
which is increasingly alien in the secular world, where our concern about
unborn children or the sacredness of marriage makes us appear quaint and even
nettlesome. We need mentors: parents, grandparents, Godparents, teachers, youth
ministers, neighbors, who are ready to pass on the faith.
Pope Francis is calling on us to embrace the vision of
reality that is the Church’s faith and that values each and every human being,
and stresses our responsibility to love and serve each other, especially the
most vulnerable in our midst. The word that Pope Francis repeats over and over
is tenerezza - tenderness. On the
Feast of St. Joseph, in his inaugural Mass he spoke to us about protecting
people, showing loving concern for each and every person, especially children,
the elderly, those in need, who are often the last we think about. He says: We must not be afraid of goodness or
tenderness. He points to the heart of Joseph, his tenderness which is not
the virtue of the weak but a sign of strength of spirit and a capacity for
concern and compassion, for genuine openness to others, for love.
Some people think that the Holy Father should talk more
about abortion. I think he speaks of love and mercy to give people the context
for the Church’s teaching on abortion. We oppose abortion, not because we are
mean or old fashioned, but because we love people. And that is what we must
show the world. Recently I read about an American relief worker in Africa, who
reported on being at a camp for a food distribution line, it was very chaotic,
even scary. He could see that they were running out of food and that these
starving people were desperate. At the end of the line, the last person was a
little nine year old girl. All that was left was one banana. They handed it to
her. She peeled the banana and gave half each to her younger brother and
sister. Then she licked the banana peel. The relief worker said at that moment
he began to believe in God.
We must be better people; we must love all people, even
those who advocate abortion. It is only if we love them that we will be able to
help them discover the sacredness of the life of an unborn child. Only love and
mercy will open hearts that have been hardened by the individualism of our age.
In the United States we are an immigrant Church. It is
very significant that the Holy Father’s very first trip as Pope was to
Lampedusa, to underscore his concern for the plight of immigrants. As the
Archbishop pointed out so eloquently in his homily, this is an issue that it is
great importance to us as American Catholics.
When the Holy Father went to the island of Lampedusa he
threw a wreath of flowers into the sea where thousands of refugees have
perished in the modern day coffin ships that bring refugees from North Africa.
The Holy Father talked about the globalization of indifference – indifference
to the suffering of others, to the fate of the unborn, the elderly, the
handicapped, the mentally ill and the immigrants.
We must overcome this indifference in our own lives and
help people to see that the Church’s teaching is about loving and caring for
everyone. In his talk to the Brazilian bishops last week, Pope Francis said: We need a Church capable of rediscovering
the maternal womb of mercy. Without mercy we have little chance nowadays of
entering the world of wounded persons in need of understanding, forgiveness and
love. The Holy Father alludes to Cardinal Kasper’s work on mercy when he
says that mercy without truth would be consolation without honesty and is empty
chatter.
On the other hand, however, the truth without mercy would
be cold, off-putting and ready to wound. The truth isn’t a wet rag that you
throw in someone’s face, but a warm cape that you wrap around a person, to
protect and strengthen them.
Project Rachel (a ministry of outreach to those grieving
pregnancy loss) has been just that kind of a combination of mercy and truth
that the Church’s pro-life efforts need to be about.
Our efforts to heal the wounds of society will depend on
our capacity to love and to be faithful to our mission. The Holy Father is
showing us very clearly that our struggle is not just a political battle or a
legal problem, but that we must evangelize and humanize the culture, then the
world will be safe for the unborn, the elderly and the unproductive. The Gospel
of Life is a Gospel of Mercy. If we are going to get a hearing in today’s
world, it will be because people recognize that authenticity of our lives and
our dedication to building a civilization of love. We are called to live our
lives as a service to others and commit our lives to give witness to the
presence of God’s love and mercy in our midst. It’s like the story – if we do
not go the extra mile, give our cloak along with our tunic, turn the other
cheek – then the patient will die.
As Saint Augustine said, Without God we can do nothing, without us God will do nothing.
Pope Francis said it in Rio, Jesus Christ is counting on you! The Church is counting on you! The
Pope is counting on you! May Mary, the Mother of Jesus and our Mother, always
accompany you with her tenderness. Go and make disciples of all nations. Amen.
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