Remarks at Joint Catholic-Lutheran observance of the anniversary of the Reformation

The following are Homily notations I used during the joint Catholic-Lutheran prayer service in observance of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Notations like these are used by me to guide the discourse, though I occasionally elaborate extemporaneously on particular points. 

The service was held at St John the Baptist Catholic Church in San Juan, Texas on October 29, 2017; it had both a penitential and a hopeful character. Obviously, Catholics and Lutherans look on the Reformation through different eyes. This does not, however, preclude our speaking to each other about it in amicable ways. That is part of the way forward.

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The vine is Christ. 

The Baptismal creed we will commonly recite shortly witnesses to our common faith in the saving work of God. By baptism into this faith we are inserted into Christ, the firstborn of all creation. We have been grafted onto the Vine by the grace of faith, as St Paul so clearly teaches. 

1. The primacy of Grace

Years of ecumenical dialogue have clarified some misconceptions. Among them, I think, our mutual acknowledgment that we both profess the primacy of grace ranks as the most significant. The primacy of grace means that we profess that we are saved by the free gift of Christ, the WORD whose coming into the world is the primordial gift. Our response to him in faith is also a grace.

The Catholic Church has reason to lament that this primacy of grace has not always been transparently evident in all places and times in our 2000 year history; this lack was partially responsible for the divisions that the years since the Reformation have brought.

Catholics hold that the Church was promised the grace that she would not err in matters of faith and morals; but this does not mean that she will always and in every place be transparent to the faith she professes. In this sense, for Catholics to recall the Reformation is to hear a call for continual examination of conscience. 

Yet, it is also true that how we Catholics and Lutherans live this primacy of grace differs in significant ways. The practice of the Catholic Church is not always the expression of a shortfall; in certain matters it is a manifestation of the gift that is the faith of the Church.

Catholic practice, for example, with regard to the Eucharistic Mystery differs from that of the Lutheran confession. These differences are reflections of a difference in what we believe about what Christ has given us, and they are too important for all of us to seek facile, nominal solutions.

It is mutual respect and not recrimination that bids us, purified, to recognize the differences that remain, and how these differences at times touch on deep matters. We still have a way to go before full reconciliation. Better to say this at the outset.

Indeed, we both share responsibility for the fact that after 500 years of argument, the culture we live in tends to equate faith with strongly held opinion. Our Western culture largely thinks that there is no sure way to support a claim on behalf of truth by either Catholics or Protestants. 

Yet, faith for Luther or Zwingli or Calvin, as much as for Pope Leo X or for Erasmus or for Cardinal Cajetan, was not simply a matter of opinion. It is a graced adherence to Christ. It is more certain than anything known by the natural sciences. What we believe mattered to them as it should to us. One of the things the current moment calls for is a common witness to the importance of truth, and its proper expression. We do this by embracing the grace that will sustain the hard work ahead. We still have a ways to go. 

The grace of this time is present in the fact that we move forward with realism, amicably, in a recognition of what we profess in common.

2. The faith we live and pray together.

Our common and deepest tradition is rooted in faith as adherence to a person, namely Christ Jesus, in whom, by the Spirit, the Father has revealed his love. We believe that God speaks through the Word that is his Son.

Our common faith flows from the love shown by Christ on the Cross:  it is not that we have first loved God, but rather, as St John says, it is that “God has first loved us”. In this we believe. We must not lose sight of the importance of witnessing together to this truth in the midst of the world today. For we are in a time when it is not simply that many young people do not believe in God, but, perhaps more radically, they are losing faith in love. 

We have lost much in the last 500 years. And the culture bears witness that we lost it together. Part of what has been lost in the West is the conviction that grace and truth are words that mean something; they are not place-holders in a nominalist lexicon. They are realities that flow powerfully to us through the Word Incarnate and by his Spirit.

This is part of the witness our age needs: Grace is the gift of Christ Jesus himself; his unmerited coming changes the life of anyone who by faith accepts his coming as the gift of the Father. We have much to offer by giving this common witness.

During these days my mind has turned spontaneously to two witnesses who are signs for us as we move forward: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and St Maximilian Kolbe. One a Lutheran Pastor, the other a Franciscan evangelizer. Both Bonhoeffer and Maximilian Kolbe gave witness in the darkest hours of World War II. Bonhoeffer would recognize no party or führer as absolute ruler. In his own way he witnessed to Christ the King. He was killed in 1945. Kolbe died in Auschwitz, some short time before Bonhoeffer, having given his life, in a supreme act of charity, so as to die in place of another condemned man. 

They both testify to something we hardly knew but which we have always known. That our common fidelity to Christ is yet a powerful sign and carries with it a merciful grace. In this windswept house, where the thought of God is banished and human dignity forgotten both Bonhoeffer and Kolbe made their profession of faith.

In this our time, their common witness to Christ was inseparable from their unshakable conviction that the assaults on human dignity represented by Auschwitz and the other human atrocities unleashed at that time was an assault on the Christ himself: “What you did for the least of mine, you did for me..”

The Ecumenism of blood is not about us, it is, rather, about Christ and the world he desires to save from itself. Without him, we are lost.

The Sacrifice of Christ founds the Church. Bonhoeffer and Kolbe show us that our common sacrifice for Christ will guide us to a fuller reconciliation. Their sacrifice points forward to a reconciled horizon, which when it comes, will be a work of grace because it will be a fruit of the Sacrifice of Christ.

3. The eschatological horizon of the baptismal creed:

The Apostles Creed we will shortly profess concludes, as do all the ancient creedal expressions, with a view toward eschatological finality, the hope of the Church. 

We believe in a world that will be reconciled by grace offered and accepted, and we acknowledge that we have a duty to reconcile and be reconciled in this grace. Not simply for our own sakes, but really for the sake of Christ.

But, like a mother and daughter who have not spoken in a while, the way back to each other is also a way forward together. It involves acknowledging our common source of life in grace and our call in grace to witness to his presence in even the darkest moments and places our world constructs.

There is still a ways to go, but how we must go should be clearer to us. Bonhoeffer and Kolbe show us that the path to reconciliation lies within the eschatological horizon of our common witness to Christ. The more we try to be transparent to the God who gives all for the sake of the world, the more clear will be our path forward.

Fidelity to Christ in this way of common and eschatological witness opens a way that is unclear beyond our immediate next steps: but we pray “Lead kindly light.” When full reconciliation comes it will be by way of grace, by way of the person of our Christ Jesus our Lord.

May the truth that is Christ in person, come and set us free.

Amen.

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Red Mass, Archdiocese of St Louis: The Advocate Will Remind You

Red Mass, Archdiocese of St Louis, Oct 1, 2017

 

John 14: 15-16, 23-26:

Jesus said to his disciples:  "If you love me, you will keep my commandments.

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always. [...]”

“Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him.

Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; yet the word you hear is not mine but that of the Father who sent me.

"I have told you this while I am with you. The Advocate, the holy Spirit that the Father will send in my name - he will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you."

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I am grateful to the Archbishop for the invitation to preach this year's Red Mass in the Archdiocese of St Louis. I am from the Diocese of Brownsville, Texas, at the border with Mexico, where the Rio Grande River pours its life into the Gulf of Mexico. As I am sure they are here, our people are generous and kind. Most everyone in my Diocese, to one degree or another, speaks or understands both English and Spanish.

It is good to be here, because it witnesses to the fact that every place is different yet not so much as we might think. And though we might speak different languages at times, we rejoice to be able to pursue a common language of justice.

The human drama of a people who desire what is just and right for our children and for those who come after us is lived with great intensity in my diocese, as I am sure it is here.

And as believers we pray for our judges and lawyers and all who work in our justice system, that they be given light and good judgment. The Red Mass here, as in Brownsville, is an expression of that prayer. To pray for the judiciary is to pray for the good of the nation and a renewal of justice.

1.  The question of Justice does not arise in the abstract. One probably first thinks of it after an experience of having been wronged.

Long before Plato, in the Odyssey, Homer described Odysseus faced with the injustice of Penelope's suitors. He built his epic narrative around restoring the right order of the human relation in that place. We cannot really speak of Justice without speaking of relation and right order.

Often the sense of injustice is pre-reflective, that is to say. It strikes the gut before the mind has time to think about why. But sooner or later a judgment is needed, an act of the mind that reflects on the "Justice of the matter". Because experience shows that our gut is not infallible, and in many instances must itself be judged and purified by reason.

From Aristotle to Shakespeare, the humane tradition has seen the intimate relation between how we judge the things outside ourselves and the relational order inside ourselves: passion and reason, will and intellect, appetite and right judgment. Odysseus had to in some sense be just in order to judge justly.

For a Christian believer, relation and right order are not only things to be observed outside ourselves but are also realities within ourselves.  And so the first reason that brings us together this morning: a believer prays for an interior rectitude, a good ordering of mind and heart. And a believer involved with the legal profession, with argument and judgment, prays with particular fervor, knowing that his or her judgments can affect for good or ill the lives of many.

2. The ancients knew there are a couple of major problems afflicting human judgment: First, ignorance of the human good and secondly, self interest.

Odysseus' family life and possessions were threatened by the unruly suitors, and thus a human good was at stake. Homer and history seem to judge that Odysseus had reason on his side. There is self-interest in protecting one's own human good, ultimately related to the principle of self-preservation. For preservation of family and property are understandable goods only in relation self-preservation, the first principle of the natural law.

A 16 year old who flees drug gangs in Honduras knows this principle of the natural law, as does a premature child struggling to breathe. Both witness to us that it is good to live; we know this even before we know how to articulate it as a principle.

But the self-interest of the suitors shows a side of self-interest that is at times unbridled. They knew what they wanted, and they wanted it intensely. Homer and the philosophers after him saw this as a great threat to justice. For not everything that a man says he needs or deserves can stand as an absolute. Circumstances must be weighed in the light of principles in relation.

And thus the arduous task of those who serve the court system. You must use your wits, as St Thomas More described, to weigh principles and pursue just human relations. You must be passionate about justice even as you use your mind and will to help enact it.

3. The short answer to the question "why have the Red Mass?" is that we still struggle to discern rightly the true human good, and we still need to be on guard against the corrupting influence of unbridled self-interest.

We can be sure that many people wonder nowadays why lawyers and judges and indeed so many public servants come to Mass on a given day to pray for a good judicial Year. Some may shy away from such a gathering, thinking this a medieval trapping that the Church unfairly and surreptitiously uses to influence civil servants, who after all, should not let personal religious views interfere with justice and judgment.

Maybe some are afraid that if given the opportunity, the Church would put Crucifixes in all the court rooms and impose dogmatic teaching on litigants. Such fears have a long history here and elsewhere, and this pulpit is not the place to argue a case for Catholic participation in public life.

But what if a judge or lawyer has a crucifix in their office? Or around their neck? Is this not also a sign that religion is trying to creep into civil matters by a back window? Well, the question itself is a sign of our times.

In an age that seeks to privatize religion, the more pressing concern is that believers themselves doubt the place of their faith in their lives as public servants. The greatest danger in disputes about the place of religion in public life results when we as practicing Christians and Catholics are confused about how our faith appropriately impacts our life of public service.

4. What if every human being were viewed in the courts as worthy of a hearing and worthy of as good a judgment as is humanly possible? A judgment that respects their voice and their concerns? One that hears the opposing argument as an appeal to reason and not as a reflection of the status of the side arguing? No one would object to that.

But what if every judge and lawyer had uppermost in their mind the truth that he or she too will be judged on the fairness of their judgments? That the eternal God is both the source of goodness and justice and expects us to see beyond today into eternal consequences. Does this hinder the civil proceeding? In no way. On the contrary, it would seem to put it on a more solid ground, and in the believer, at least, provide a good incentive to frequent examination of conscience. 

The Red Mass is so named because of the Red Vestment that is used in Masses of the Holy Spirit. And today Jesus calls him by the name Advocate, one who pleads in favor of another. We ask him to advocate for us, for we are all too aware of our weakness. We do not see the human good as clearly as we ought, nor are we always conscious of how our likes and dislikes can camouflage as right reason.

5. And what if every judge and lawyer thought that in the most powerless, voiceless individual that seeks a hearing, one perhaps marred with spit and blood, we have before us one with whom God in the WORD made flesh consciously and personally identified? Would Justice be disturbed? In no way, rather it would give judgment a guide against the prejudice of the powerful and would give to the poor and voiceless reason to hope: "What you do to the least of mine you do to me."

The Advocate's mission is to remind us of all Jesus told us. His telling is more than his words, it encompasses also, as St Thomas Aquinas teaches, the whole mystery of who he is and why he came, what he did and what he suffered.

It is this reminding that we need also from the Advocate. There are many in this world who are invisible, powerless, and subject to manipulation. With just such as these the Lord identified, for he was judged in a foreign court by an administrator who could barely hide his disdain.

Some of our people do not even have standing in our courts: The comatose, the elderly, the homeless, the multitudes whose documentary status is as complex as the laws we have written to describe them, and the little ones, minutes before or minutes after birth.

We need to be reminded that the Advocate pleads on their behalf, and face the sobering truth that these will be the ones who judge us on judgment day.

6. None of these things I mention cause injury to the pursuit of justice. They do call us to keep good custody of ourselves and our consciences. Our nation is better for it if we heed the truths that put our interior life in good order.

You must work to interpret and apply the law, and we pray for you. But as citizens we must all try to make the laws we write more just.

There is a potential conflict, however, in that the Gospel account of the human good, elaborated by 2000 years of Christian preaching, living and teaching, is at times at severe variance with what the popular will or what the legislated order of law currently commands.

We cannot ignore this, for the variance will intensify in our foreseeable future. Most of you will not be called upon by providence to judge cases that place your conscience in dire dilemma. But some of you might, if not now, in some future.

There is a reason St Thomas More, family man, advisor to the king, jurist, and ultimately martyr, is the patron of the legal professions. A good conscience that knows it will be judged by a just God cannot lightly acquiesce to what expediency dictates. Fidelity may require a sacrifice.

May God spare you an hour of trial as severe as Thomas More faced, but if He does not, may He grant you the grace to bear faithful witness to the truth that the justice of God is no threat to men, and the suffering of Christ is at work in the world even now.

7. And so we offer the Mass to ask for the grace of the Advocate, the Spirit that makes us more humane in our judgments, "For the law was made for man, not man for the law."

To be a Catholic of good conscience does not separate us from those who seek justice in our court system, it draws us closer to them. It does not prejudice our judgment it frees it to serve. "You shall know the truth and it will set you free."

May the Father who judges hearts keep you mindful of eternity as cases come before you.

 

The Derision of Christ

Jan Gossaert, 1527

May the Son who took our humanity in its most wretched state remind you of the dignity of every one who comes before you

And may the Spirit enlighten your mind and strengthen your soul to give faithful witness to the truth that the justice of God is not our enemy but rather, most assuredly, our best Advocate.

Amen.

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