The Assurance Of Things Hoped For

Every minute of every day, through every experience and encounter that we have, God invites us into His company. In order to believe, our hearts must be ready to listen and respond to God’s invitation.

This response is faith, and it involves completely submitting our intellect and our will to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). It is a free abandonment to the truth, “by trust in the person who bears witness to it” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 177). Faith stakes everything on a relationship with this person, Jesus Christ, accepting Him as revelation of the one, all-merciful and all-powerful God.

The Youth Catechism of the Catholic Church (YOUCAT) lays out the qualities of faith in bullet points:

Faith is knowledge and trust. It has seven characteristics:

• Faith is a sheer gift of God, which we receive when we fervently ask for it.
• Faith is the supernatural power that is absolutely necessary if we are to attain salvation.
• Faith requires the free will and clear understanding of a person when he accepts the divine invitation.
• Faith is absolutely certain, because Jesus guarantees it.
• Faith is incomplete unless it leads to active love.
• Faith grows when we listen more and more carefully to God’s Word and enter a lively exchange with him in prayer.
• Faith gives us even now a foretaste of the joy of heaven (21).

Faith is an authentically human act, in which our “intellect and will cooperate with divine grace” (CCC, 155). God does give us “motives of credibility,” in the miracles of Christ, the witness of saints, true prophecies, and in the fruitfulness of the Church (CCC, 156). Still faith “seeks understanding,” calling the believer to dive deeper into “a more penetrating knowledge,” which “will in turn call forth a greater faith, increasingly set afire by love” (CCC, 158).

Sunday’s Worldwide Adoration

This Sunday, the Church will celebrate the Year of Faith with an historic event: Worldwide Eucharistic Adoration. The theme is “One Lord, One Faith,” and so cathedrals throughout the world will synchronize with St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and expose the Blessed Sacrament for Adoration at the same time. This way, all of the faithful can be in communion with Pope Francis in Eucharistic Adoration.

On Sunday June 2, from 5:00pm-6:00pm in Rome, Pope Francis will kneel before the Eucharistic Lord. Dioceses around the world will join at exactly this time, which conveniently lands at 11:00am D.C. time, but occurs in the wee hours of the morning for others. People are very enthusiastic, though, and honored to pray with the Church for the Pope’s intentions. These are:

For the Church spread throughout the world and united today in the adoration of the Most Holy Eucharist as a sign of unity. May the Lord make her ever more obedient to hearing his Word in order to stand before the world ‘ever more beautiful, without stain or blemish, but holy and blameless.’ That through her faithful announcement, the Word that saves may still resonate as the bearer of mercy and may increase love to give full meaning to pain and suffering, giving back joy and serenity.

For those around the world who still suffer slavery and who are victims of war, human trafficking, drug running, and slave labor. For the children and women who are suffering from every type of violence. May their silent scream for help be heard by a vigilant Church so that, gazing upon the crucified Christ, she may not forget the many brothers and sisters who are left at the mercy of violence. Also, for all those who find themselves in economically precarious situations, above all for the unemployed, the elderly, migrants, the homeless, prisoners, and those who experience marginalization. That the Church’s prayer and its active nearness give them comfort and assistance in hope and strength and courage in defending human dignity.

It is no coincidence that this event is planned for the Feast of Corpus Christi, a day that the Church sets aside to celebrate devotion to the body and blood of Christ. This day was very special for Blessed John Paul II, which is something we will touch on later this week.

A Leper With The Lepers

Jozef De Veuster received the name of Damien in the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. When he was 23 years old, in 1863, he left Flanders, the land of his birth, to proclaim the Gospel on the other side of the world in the Hawaiian Islands. His missionary activity, which gave him such joy, reached its peak in charity. Not without fear and repugnance, he chose to go to the Island of Molokai to serve the lepers who lived there, abandoned by all. Thus he was exposed to the disease from which they suffered. He felt at home with them. The servant of the Word consequently became a suffering servant, a leper with the lepers, for the last four years of his life. In order to follow Christ, Fr. Damien not only left his homeland but also risked his health: therefore as the word of Jesus proclaimed to us in today's Gospel says he received eternal life…Let us remember before this noble figure that it is charity which makes unity, brings it forth and makes it desirable. Following in St. Paul's footsteps, St. Damien prompts us to choose the good warfare, not the kind that brings division but the kind that gathers people together. He invites us to open our eyes to the forms of leprosy that disfigure the humanity of our brethren and still today call for the charity of our presence as servants, beyond that of our generosity.

-Pope Benedict XVI, October 11 2009

Oh St. Damien Molokai, beatified by our patron Blessed John Paul II, you built the Church above on the abandoned island of Molokai. From your place in heaven, please pray for us sinners on this day of your feast, that we may imitate your example in bringing the Church to those who are far away, especially the poor and the marginalized. 

We Simply Need To Be Real Christians

On April 25 our Chaplain here at the Blessed John Paul II Shrine, Fr. Gregory Gresko, gave a retreat reflection for a gathering of Church leaders involved in the pro-life and pro-family movements. His words capture the heart of what it means to be a Christian in the age of the New Evangelization, so we thought we would share parts of his reflection here on OpenWide the Doors.

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To be the most effective agents of the New Evangelization, Christians are called to become what they are!   As we have heard many times already and rightly from our American bishops, the New Evangelization is not a project, but instead a living of the Christian life genuinely, in authenticity, to be bearers of Jesus Christ in our own particular witness, day in and day out.  We need not become stressed or lose our peace over having to accomplish something big, even of surmounting what seems to be insurmountable darkness.  Rather, we are to submit ourselves humbly, daily before the Lord in prayer and in living the sacramental life of the Church in its fullness, bearing Christ Jesus in our daily witness of the Faith wherever we are called to testify to the Faith at any given moment. 

The New Evangelization is the genuine presentation of Christ’s Light incarnated in you and me -- and in our fellow Christians -- placed as His Light within a world darkened by sin and evil.  The light doesn’t worry about offending the darkness … It simply, humbly enters the room and greets the darkness with its brightness, its peace, its joy, its faith, its hope, and its love.  Christians are to live their earthly pilgrimage through the world of darkness toward heaven, to which they belong already as citizens through a baptismal consecration authentically lived, espousing the same humble attitude of being loving, peaceful, joy-filled Christians who shine the Light of Christ wherever they go.  And in doing so, God Himself demonstrates through our Christian testimony that Jesus Christ already has conquered sin and death through the power of His Cross and Resurrection.  We are to bring the Light of Christ to the world peacefully, without any compromise of His Truth, confident that it is the full, integrated Truth that is the Way to real freedom and not libertinism … to real selfless, self-offering, self-giving love instead of a disordered, self-centered lust or egoism, which tries to impose itself in totalitarian fashion upon the world as being some kind of “new truth” but which, in reality, is an ancient lie from the father of lies.

In The Bosom Of Holy Mother Church

In his homily for the Feast of St. George this past Tuesday, Pope Francis reflected on the first reading from Acts of the Apostles, emphasizing the importance of moving forward for our Mother the Church:

Think of this Mother Church that grows, grows with new children to whom She gives the identity of the faith, because you cannot believe in Jesus without the Church. Jesus Himself says in the Gospel: "But you do not believe, because you are not among my sheep." If we are not "sheep of Jesus," faith does not come to us. It is a rosewater faith, a faith without substance. And let us think of the consolation that Barnabas felt, which is "the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing." And let us ask the Lord for this "parresia," this apostolic fervor that impels us to move forward, as brothers, all of us forward! Forward, bringing the name of Jesus in the bosom of Holy Mother Church, and, as St. Ignatius said, "hierarchical and Catholic." So be it. 

For the full text, go here.