Pope Benedict XVI

The pope gave us a beautiful example of humility in his resignation today, just before we begin the season of Lent.

It was a conscious decision, “before God” he makes it, not simply on his own.

It was a brave decision. No pope in recent times has resigned. He was not afraid of going out into uncharted waters.

It was not his own good he looked out for, but the good of the church. The office of the papacy is demanding and he saw it beyond his strength.

I think he leaves a powerful legacy that will be more appreciated in time. His books on Jesus of Nazareth are treasures that will last. His homilies and letters will be mined for years to come. He’s a beautiful writer and religious thinker.

God bless him.

Father Theodore Foley, CP

Today’s gospel from Mark speaks about the return of Jesus to his home in Nazareth. It reminded me of the great spiritual figures I’ve lived with, one of whom is Father Theodore Foley, CP, whom I appreciate more and more. Here’s a summary of his life.

He was born in 1919 in Springfield, Massachusetts into a devout Catholic family.  He went to Catholic schools and experienced a vibrant Catholic life in Sacred Heart parish in the north end of Springfield.

As a young boy of 14 he was attracted to the missionary spirit and spirituality of the Passionist community. Entering the Passionists, he was ordained a priest in 1940 and became one of its best spiritual guides and teachers of theology.

In 1958 Father Theodore went to Rome to be a general consultor for the worldwide Passionist community. In 1964 he became its superior general. He led his community through the turbulent decades of the 1960s and 70s when social unrest, political confrontations, assassinations, anti-establishment and anti-war demonstrations began shaking the western world and the Catholic Church.

As traditional values came into question and church membership (including membership in his own community) began to decline, he was a rock of hope to those shaken by the times.

A participant in the Second Vatican Council, Father Theodore took up its challenge and worked tirelessly to bring the message of Jesus Christ to the world. Seeking new opportunities to do God’s will, he traveled to Asia and Africa to extend the missionary outreach of his community. He also promoted the study of the Passion of Jesus as a remedy for a world in danger of forgetting God.

For him a perilous time like ours was not a reason to do nothing. It’s a time for “God’s purification in our lives and we have to accept it and do our best for the future of the congregation and our church.”

While furthering new ventures in Africa, he contracted a deadly virus which on his return to Rome caused his death on October 9, 1974.

A gentle man, faithful to prayer and unfailingly kind to others, Father Theodore believed that God is always at work in our world, even in bad times. The mystery of the passion of Jesus, which he kept constantly before his eyes, nourished in him a steady hope that God leads us on, no matter how dark life seems to be.

A hope like his is a hope to pray for today. Father Theodore is a candidate for canonization, and here’s a prayer that his cause succeeds:

Prayer for the Beatification of Fr. Theodore Foley, CP

 

Lord Jesus Christ,

You called Theodore Foley to follow you to Calvary’s heights as a Passionist priest and through your Immaculate and Sorrowful Mother taught him to fulfill your Father’s will by loving God and neighbor.

Let his life inspire us to a life of deeper virtue.

We humbly ask you to glorify your servant Father Theodore according to the designs of your holy will and through his intercession, grant the request I now present to you. (here mention  your request). Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

 

 

Keeping Heroes in Mind

 

We’re reading the Letter to the Hebrews at length these days in our liturgy. Why was this written? When and to whom was it written? Interpreters of the Letter to the Hebrews ask these questions because they help us understand this writing better.

Obviously Hebrews is written to Jewish-Christians. Some interpreters think they live in Rome, which had a substantial Jewish-Christian population in the 1st century. Today’s reading indicates it was written after a time of persecution, perhaps when the Emperor Claudius banished Jewish Christians from the city in 49 AD because they were causing riots in Rome’s synagogues over Jesus Christ.

Did that stir cause the followers of Jesus there to tamper down their efforts and embrace their faith less fully? Perhaps. The writer of Hebrews warns his hearers against “drawing back” and “losing confidence” in the faith they profess. Were they losing their enthusiasm?

Keep before you the heroes of faith, beginning with Jesus, he says as he draws up for them a lengthy list of inspiring believers.

“For, after just a brief moment,

he who is to come shall come;

he shall not delay.

But my just one shall live by faith,

and if he draws back I take no pleasure in him.”

 

That list, along with more recent heroes of faith, can inspire us too.

The First Martyrs of Rome

On June 30^th, the day after the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, we remember the Christians of Rome martyred with them in the persecution under the Emperor Nero in the mid 60s, a persecution that shook the early Christian church.

It began with an early morning fire that broke out on July 19, 64 in a small shop by the Circus Maximus and spread rapidly to other parts of Rome, raging nine days through the city’s narrow street and alleyways where more than a million people lived in apartment blocks of flimsy wooden construction.

Only two areas escaped the fire; one of them, Trastevere, across the Tiber River, had a large Jewish population.

Nero, at his seaside villa in Anzio when the blaze began, delayed returning to the city. Not a good move for a politician, even an emperor. The people, angered by his absence, began to believe that he had set the fire himself so he could rebuild the city on grand plans of his own.

To stop the rumors, Nero looked for someone to blame. He chose a group of renegade Jews called Christians, whose reputation was tarnished by incidents years earlier when the Emperor Claudius banished some of them from Rome after rioting occurred in the synagogues over Jesus Christ.

“Nero was the first to rage with Caesar’s sword against this sect,” the early-Christian writer Tertullian wrote. “To suppress the rumor,” the Roman historian Tacitus says, “Nero created scapegoats. He punished with every kind of cruelty the notoriously depraved group known as Christians.”

We don’t know their names. Just how long the process went on or how many were killed, the Roman historians do not say.

There were possibly about 60,000 Jewish merchants and slaves living in the Rome then; some followed Jesus, even before Peter and Paul arrived in the city. At the time of the great fire these Christians had broken with the Jewish community.

Where they lived and met was well known. The Roman authorities, following usual procedure, seized some of them and forced them by torture to give the names of others.

“First, Nero had some of the members of this sect arrested. Then, on their information, large numbers were condemned — not so much for arson, but for their hatred of the human race. Their deaths were made a farce.” (Tacitus)

The Christians were killed with exceptional cruelty in Nero’s gardens and in public places like the race course on Vatican Hill. “Mockery of every sort accompanied their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.” (Tacitus)

Nero went too far, even for Romans used to barbaric cruelty. “There arose in the people a sense of pity. For it was felt that they (the Christians) were being sacrificed for one man’s brutality rather than to the public interest.” (Tacitus)

How did those Roman Christians react as victims of this absurd, unjust tragedy? Did they ask where God was, why did this happen, why didn’t God stop it?  Some believers even turned them in.

Could the Gospel of Mark, which experts say was written shortly after this tragedy in Rome, be an attempt to answer these questions? Jesus, innocent and good, experienced death at the hands of wicked men, the gospel says. He suffered a brutal, absurd death. It gives no answer to the question of suffering except to say that God saved his Son from death.

The Gospel of Mark also presents Peter’s denial of Jesus in his Passion in unsparing terms, without excusing words. Is it calling the Roman church experiencing betrayals to forgive as God forgave his fallen apostle?

Finally, the Christians of Rome would surely ask whether they should stay in this city, this Babylon, a city that meted out so much evil to them. Should we go to a safer, better place?

They stayed in the city to work for its good. God strengthen us through the prayers of the martyrs of Rome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Birth of John the Baptist

If you ever go to Rome and want to take an interesting walk, I’d recommend you go to the city gate at the Porta di San Sebastiano and walk south along one of the oldest roads in the world, the Via Appia, to the catacombs and church of San Sebastiano.

Once outside the city gates, you find yourself in what the ancient Romans called the “limes,” the limits, the world beyond the walls and the protection of the city. A different world altogether.

I remember walking that road years ago; no cars and hardly any people on it,  deserted fields all around. The only sound to hear was the sound of your own breathing and your footsteps.

The deserted area beyond the city, the “limes,” meant many things to the ancient Romans. Civilized, reasonable life stopped there. Not a place to live, they believed.  Stay on the road and go to the next town. By the way, the word “limes” gets into our own phrase “speed limit;” beyond this speed you could lose your life.

A good walk on the Via Appia brings you to the catacombs, the great underground tunnels where the early Christians buried their dead. They buried them there, I think, not to hide them, but because they saw it as an appropriate place. On their journey to a new unknown world, the dead no longer belonged in the city; they were on their way to a new city. The “limes,” a mysterious place that marked the end of civilized life, also foreshadowed a new life beyond this one.

The “limes” was a place where God alone had you in his hands.

The last line of our gospel from Luke for the Feast of the Birth of  John the Baptist says:

“ The child grew and became strong in spirit,

and he was in the desert until the day

of his manifestation to Israel.”

From birth, John took a different path than his family had taken, the gospels indicate.  They argue over his name when he’s born.  He wasn’t going to take  his father Zachariah’s name, or follow him in the temple as priest or a scholar of the law. Leaving what was familiar and secure, John went into the desert– the Jewish equivalent of the “limes.” There he was solely in God’s hands, who readied him to welcome the Messiah.

Centuries before, God led the Jews from Egypt through the desert for a new birth in a new land. Leaving the world they knew they traveled without a map a world  unknown. Later, they remembered this time they often cursed then, as a blessed time.  They were in God’s hands. He alone was their strength.

Can we learn anything from this? Most of us don’t go to live in physical deserts and we stay within our limits, but we do face deserts, limits anyway. Life is never without limits, where we face things we didn’t expect, like sickness, or death, or separation, or divorce, or the loss of a job, or lost friends or places we know and love. The desert’s never far from any of us.

But there are blessings to be had there, as John the Baptist points out in the beautiful readings applied to him from Isaiah:

“Though I thought I had toiled in vain,

and for nothing, uselessly, spent my strength,

yet my reward is with the LORD,

my recompense is with my God.”

Yes, there are doubts, fears,  uncertainty. But we don’t face limits or experience the desert alone.  God promises to be there. Find his loving presence. God is there.

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Stations of the Cross

We’re reflecting on the Passion of the Lord today at our mission. I mentioned that the early persecution of the church in Rome during Nero’s reign may have influenced the composition of the Gospel of Mark. Is Mark’s passion narrative a response to a church reeling from  Nero’s absurd persecution?”My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus cries from the Cross. His only words.

Probably some of those early Christians were put to death in Nero’s gardens, which now are the gardens of the Passionist Monastery of Saints John and Paul in Rome.

Here are the Stations of the Cross in that garden. 

The Woman who touched Jesus’ Garments

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mark 5, 21-43

We read this story today at Mass. Why does Mark insert the story of the woman who touched Jesus’ garments into the story of the dead girl brought back to life? Was it simply that she happened to meet him on his way to the girl’s house? Maybe there’s another reason.

A picture of the woman touching the garments of Jesus is one of the oldest pictures  found in the catacombs of Rome, where early Christians buried their dead. Is it there  to remind them that those who died had also touched the garments of Jesus? They didn’t see him, but he met them in signs.

Those buried there believed in him and were baptized with water; they received his life through that sign and entered into the mystery of his death and resurrection. They received his body and blood in the signs of bread and wine, and so like the woman they touched his garments.  His power and life went out to them.

The Gospel of Mark was written in Rome, most scholars say. Is Mark’s arrangement of the  stories of Jesus raising the dead girl to life and the woman touching his garments a way of teaching Roman Christians about the mystery of death? Jesus was with them on their last journey.

In preparing the Catechism of the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council the Roman authorities responsible for the catechism instructed publishers to put the picture from the catacombs of the woman touching the garments of Jesus at the beginning of the section on the sacraments.

She’s an example, an image of the present church which knows Jesus through sacraments.  She helps us believe in the power of simple signs.

I spoke today at the mission about seeing Jesus through the sacraments.

St. John Lateran

Today, is the feast of the Dedication of Church of St. John Lateran in Rome. I wrote about this ancient 4th century church, the “mother of all churches” elsewhere. I think you can trace much of the history of the Roman Catholic Church in this building, which is one of the great pilgrim churches of Rome.

In his homily chosen to be read on this feast, St. Caesarius of Arles says that this church, and all our churches, for that matter, remind us that we have become temples of God. “And if we think more carefully about the meaning of our salvation, we shall realize that we are indeed living and true temples of God. God does not dwell only in things made by human hands, nor in homes of wood and stone, but rather he dwells principally in the soul made according to his own image and fashioned by his own hand. Therefore, the apostle Paul says: The temple of God is holy, and you are that temple.”

The ancient baptistery at the Lateran church (picture above)  is one of the oldest in Christendom. As you enter many Catholic Churches like this one, the first thing you usually see is the baptistery, where Baptism is conferred. You belong to a great church that has as its Lord, Jesus Christ, it seems to say. The sacraments you receive here are his promise to be with you as you live day by day.

The beauty of this church calls for beauty of soul, Caesarius says: “Whenever we come to church, we must prepare our hearts to be as beautiful as we expect this church to be… Just as you enter this church building, so God wishes to enter into your soul, for he promised: I shall live in them, I shall walk through their hearts.”

Fighting in Church

Today’s Office of Readings has the letter to the Corinthians by Pope St. Clement 1, written about 95 AD,  just after the last of the New Testament writings were written.

Fighting erupted among the members of the church in Corinth, once cared for by Paul the Apostle, who scolded them for the same thing. There’s slander and backbiting and complaining going on; people like to hear themselves talk, Clement remarks, quoting scripture: If you talk a lot you only hear yourself. A big talker thinks he’s always right.

The Corinthians were a scrappy bunch, it seems.

Clement tells them that their fighting makes the church look bad among their unbelieving neighbors. Who wants to belong to a community like that? Paul wrote to the Romans; I guess Clement thought he should write to the Corinthians.

Stop fighting among yourselves and do some good, the pope says. Obey your leaders, but above all, obey God. Bow down in respect before God and be silent before his holy will, as the Prophet Isaiah bowed silently  before the overwhelming presence of God in the temple.

“Our boasting and our confidence must rest on him. Let us be subject to his will. Look carefully at the whole host of his angels; they stand ready and serve his will. Scripture says: Ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him, and a thousand thousand served him, and cried out: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole creation is full of his glory.”

“Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of hosts…” We say at Mass. We bow down before God; our thoughts, our judgments, our plans are nothing before God’s thoughts, judgments and plans. We know so little. Be humble before your God, Clement says, then you’ll get along with your neighbor.

Good advice for all of us.

Clement’s letter also gives the earliest testimony to the deaths of Peter and Paul at Rome.

June 30th

June 30th, following the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, we celebrate the early Christian martyrs put to death by Nero after the disastrous fire that burned down much of the city July 19, 64 AD. If I were in Rome today I would go to the church of Saint Peter in Chains or to the gardens of Saints John and Paul on the Celian Hiill to remember them.

The two apostles were put to death around this time and many (we don’t know how many) followed them.

There’s a blog and a video on the church of St. Peter in Chains here and here.And a video on the Stations of the Cross in the gardens of Saints John and Paul here. There’s also a video on the Quo Vadis story here.

The persecution and martyrdom  in 64 throws light on the creation of the Gospel of Mark, which many think was written in Rome afterwards.

One thing I think this feast and the Gospel of Mark suggests: the Church of Rome did not flee from the uncertainty and persecution it faced then. I think the Quo Vadis story indicates that. It didn’t give up.

We pray today:

Father,

you sanctified the Church of Rome

with the blood of its first martyrs.

May we find strength from their courage

and rejoice in their triumph.

We ask this through our Lord, Jesus Christ, your Son.