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Saturday 19 September 2015

"To Teach Who Christ Is"

Last week a "guest" celebrant, who to all intents and purposes works in mission territory, preached on the gospel at our Mass.
Brilliantly, I might add - insisting that we answered that question by learning who we were, who we were meant to be.
But that first question, the one Christ asked his disciples...
That is the central question for us in our mission, isn't it? the one each of us answers through our mission, whatever it might be, Who do you say that I AM?

Today, I received in snail mail a letter from a parish I have a connection to back in Chicagoland, giving a heads up on a campaign that is being kicked off, "To Teach Who Christ Is."
I must admit, I would react with less ambivalence if the Cardinal whose idea this initially was. were still in charge.
I have been unkind in my reactions to a number of events recently, and to the people whose actions and attitudes drove those events.
I don't want to turn into one of those bitter people whose every reaction in such cases is negative, guided less by the actual merits of something than by preconceived notions of the people involved.

I am certainly as gung ho as possible about actual Catholic eduction, I support it.

But does the fact that I have doubts about the Catholicity of what some people call "Catholic" education say more about their failings or my own?

Yet I feel strongly that if the foundation of all attempts to spread the Faith, (even, yes, by the "solemn nonsense" of "proselytising,") if the foundation of our efforts is not the Source and Summit of our Faith, and if we don't employ the evangelical and catechetical power of the Holy Sacrifice of the Eucharistic Celebration that is the Mass, what hope have we?
Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.
And we encounter that Person, Jesus Christ, the Only-begotten, the Son of the Living God, most thoroughly, most completely in the Eucharist, and we bring others  most closely to Him in the same, life altering event.

Why do I not trust the intentions of some of my co-religionists?

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