Homily
for August 12, 2007
Liturgical Year C - Cycle I
19th Sunday in Ordinary Time
By Dcn. Bob Villarreal Topic:
Faith, hope and reason
+ + +
In today’s Gospel reading from Luke, Jesus
said to his
disciples, “Do not be afraid any longer, little flock, for your Father
is
pleased to give you the kingdom.” Today’s second reading from the Letter
to the Hebrews
states the only explicit definition of faith in the entire Bible as
“Faith is
the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not
seen.” We read that by
faith Abraham obeyed when
called, by faith he
sojourned to a foreign country, by faith he received power
to generate, by faith
Abraham was put to the test and offered up Isaac. Abraham reasoned that God was able
to raise
people even from the dead and he received Isaac back as a symbol. We have from the very beginning, this
dynamic of Faith,
Hope, and Reason. How do we deal with
this dynamic in our lives today? When I was just a young lad from the
Gila River in
southwest New Mexico, we would worship at the small parish of San
Isidro in
Gila. Somehow, everybody was immersed in
church activities in some way. I
remember one occasion that led me to think about “what do I have faith
in?” What does anybody have faith in? There were several fiestas that we
celebrated in the
parish, and at least two of these involved luminarias. There
happened to be someone who seemed to
appear from nowhere and bring wood that had been precisely cut and
stacked into
three stacks about 4 feet high for the nighttime Mass that was to
happen. At some point during the Mass, someone
must have given
the signal to light the wood stacks and they were lit. During one
night of each year, the fire
lighter would light up what seemed to me to be dynamite sticks and
throw them
as far as he could, and they would explode with a large bang and would
rattle
the walls of the church and resound throughout the valley. The
next morning, the Protestant kids would
ask me what we were doing last night and I really didn’t know. I
would ask the grown ups and they would just
shrug their shoulders as if this was not for kids to know. So,
the Protestant kids explained it to me
like if they were the experts. They said
that Catholics believe in warding off evil spirits and that’s the way
we would
blow the hell out of things. (I learned
that if you don’t explain things, someone else will explain them for
you.) To this day, I don’t know what fiesta this
was and what it all meant. If some old
timer from this congregation could tell me, I would be very glad. The one who was in charge of the wood
and lighting the
fire was a man by the name of Jose Gonzales y Gonzales. He owned a
small house
in a distant canyon and did not get that involved with Church things
other than
he was the wood and fire man. This was
his niche in life. One year, he became
sick and was not able to do the traditional task, Juan Pastores
was asked
to handle the job, and he did. There
came a time when Jose wanted to re-assume his previous duty and Juan
said, no,
no, this was his job now. Jose said that
God had chosen him to do this job and therefore he added a spiritual
and
supernatural quality that no one else could fulfill. As you can
see, he was appealing from a
mystical point of view. Juan countered
that God had called him to do this job and he was just obeying God’s
command. They argued for quite a spell
and Jose quit the church and became a recluse.
When he was near death, he called a priest to reconcile him to the
community so he could have salvation. On one hand, we have Jose who had a
great, extraordinary
faith, hope for the kingdom, and had reasoned this all in his own head.
But so had Juan. They both maintained that no one else could
understand their special calling. A child can have a very profound faith
based on a child’s
simple knowledge and reasoning. An
adult’s faith cannot survive on childish knowledge and that is why we
strive to
continue the growth of our knowledge – so that it is on an adult level
and can
support an adult faith. We must
recognize that there are many who are all too ready to tell us what we,
as
Catholics, really believe. A few weeks ago, there was a short but
intense furor over
an Associated Press article that stated that Pope Benedict had said
that only
Catholics could achieve salvation. Too
bad for the rest of you. (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,288841,00.html) I received a lot of inquiries about
this statement and
was caught off guard or as in today’s Gospel, I was not watchful,
because I
didn’t know what the statement actually said and in what context.
I eventually found the actual statement which
was issued by Cardinal Levada (formerly from Santa Fe), Prefect of
the
Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith.
The statement was issued to clarify expressions used by the Magisterium
which could lead to misunderstanding.
The clarifying statement was entitled, “Responses to Some Questions
Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church.”
(http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20070629_responsa-quaestiones_en.html) This document responded to five
questions. One of the questions read: “What is the meaning
of the affirmation that
the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church?” The
response was: Christ “established here on earth” only one
Church and instituted it as a “visible and spiritual community…this one
Church
of Christ we confess in the Creed as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic
church.” … It is possible, according to
Catholic doctrine, to affirm correctly that the Church of Christ is
present and
operative in the churches and ecclesial Communities not yet fully in
communion
with the Catholic Church…. Nevertheless,
the word “subsists” can only be attributed to the Catholic Church alone
precisely because it refers to the mark of unity that we profess in
symbols of
the faith (as in the Profession of Faith, “I believe in one, holy,
catholic,
and apostolic church…”) and this “one” church subsists in the Catholic
Church. It follows that these separated
churches and Communities,
though we believe they suffer from defects, are deprived neither of
significance nor importance in the mystery of salvation. In fact,
the Spirit of Christ has not
refrained from using them as instruments of salvation…. In these clarification statements,
what was available to
the responders and responses was that we do have a “Profession of
Faith” that
we proclaim at every Mass. This is what
we believe and what some Protestant churches recite word for word.
The document in no way said salvation was to
be found only in the Roman Catholic Church; in fact, what was written
said just
the opposite, but at the same time Cardinal Levada and the Pope wanted
to
assure Catholics that there are great reasons to be Catholic. We
are the Mother Church, we have the deposit
of faith from the time of the Apostles and maintained that through
Apostolic
Succession. In the Letter to the Hebrews, Moses
never saw the
promised land and the Temple he built was only a shadow of the real in
heaven. It all pointed to Jesus. Jesus is the Son of God
and what we worship
is the real and not a shadow. We need
not be ashamed of our rich heritage. We
need not to apologize for being Catholic, and what and how we worship
is the
reality of Jesus and we will not trade that for a shadow. This is
what we have faith in and it is our
hope. God is our reason. The Father was pleased to give us the
kingdom. We receive the Body of Christ at each Mass
and as the Body of Christ, we live as part of the Kingdom of God.
Happy are those who are called to this
banquet! Amen!