SAN ANTONIO, August 09, 2013 (Zenit.org) - Here is the keynote address delivered by
Cardinal Seán O’Malley, Archbishop of Boston at the 131st Annual Convention of
the Knights of Columbus, held in San Antonio, Texas
* * *
The New Evangelization in the Pontificate of
Pope Francis
Brothers and sisters in the Lord: it is a joy
and an honor to be invited to address you at this extraordinary gathering. I am
so grateful to God for my forty year friendship with Carl Anderson, whose life
and vocation have been such a blessing for the Church. I am grateful to God for
all that the Knights of Columbus does to spread the faith, promote the Gospel
of Life and build a civilization of love.
Some of us had the privilege of accompanying
our young people on the World Youth Day Pilgrimage with Pope Francis in Rio de
Janeiro. Cardinal Dolan and I were so blessed to be able to give the catecheses
at the Rio Viro Center sponsored by the Knights of Columbus and where thousands
of young Catholics from the US, Canada, Australia and other English speaking
communities gathered for prayer, fellowship and catechesis.
We were all overwhelmed by the Mass on the
beach at Copacabana where a throng of young Catholics that equaled the entire
population of Ireland gathered around the successor of Saint Peter, our new
Holy Father Pope Francis, the first Pope from the Americas, whose spirit of
compassion and love is touching people’s hearts all over the world.
Following Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict,
Pope Francis is challenging us to embrace the New Evangelization with new
ardor, with new boldness and with great love for all those who God places in
our path.
I spent twenty years in Washington, D.C., it
was there that I came to know Carl Anderson. In those days there was a curious
incident that I will always remember.
Wilbur Mills was a long-time speaker in the
House and a one-time presidential candidate. Mills was involved in a traffic
incident in Washington, DC in 1974 when I was a young priest working there. His
car was stopped by US Park Police late at night because the driver turned out
the lights. Mills was intoxicated and his face was injured from a scuffle with
Annabella Battistella, professionally known as Fannie Fox, the Argentine
firecracker. In an attempt to escape, they leapt from the car and jumped into
the nearby Tidal Basin. One month later, Mills was to be on the ballot in his
home state of Arkansas for re-election to the Congress. While his office denied
that he had a drinking problem, Jack Anderson reported that if his staff said,
“He can’t speak with you now, he’s on the floor”, it was never clear if Mills
was on the floor of the House or the floor of his office. In the election, a
month after the scandal, Mills’ challenger used the slogan: “If you like
liquor, sex and thrills, cast your vote for Wilbur Mills.” Mills won handily
with 60% of the votes. He had asked for forgiveness from his constituencies and
explained to them that his problems were a result of cavorting with foreigners.
For 20 years I was in Washington cavorting
with foreigners working at the Centro Catolico, the Spanish Catholic Center. I
did not find this to be a corrupting influence on my life, but rather an
uplifting experience and indeed a great privilege. Coming from a lace curtain
Irish community in the Midwest, being thrust into the challenges and sufferings
of the immigrant community was truly an eye-opener.
Shortly after arriving at the Centro Catolico,
I was visited by a man who was obviously a campesino from El Salvador who sat
across from me at my desk and broke down and wept bitterly. He was so overcome
with grief that he could not speak, he simply handed me a letter from his wife
back in El Salvador who took him to task for having abandoned her and their six
children to poverty and starvation. When the man was able to compose himself,
he explained to me that he came to Washington, like so many, because with the
war raging in his country it was impossible to sustain his family by farming.
So he found a coyote who brought him to Washington where he shared a room with
several other men in similar circumstances. He washed dishes in two
restaurants, one at lunchtime and one at dinnertime. He ate the leftover food
on the dirty plates so as to save money. He walked to work so as not to spend
any money on transportation, so that he could send all the money he earned back
to his family. He said he sent money each week, but now after six months, his
wife had not received a single letter from him and accused him of abandoning
her and the children. I asked him if he sent check or money orders. He told me
that he sent cash. He said: “Each week I put all the money I earn into an
envelope with the amount of stamps that I was told and I put it in that blue
mailbox on the corner.” I looked out the window and I could see the blue
mailbox, the problem was it was not a mailbox at all, but a fancy trash bin.
That encounter certainly brought home to me
how difficult it is to be an immigrant, to be a stranger in a strange land and
experience countless humiliations and deprivations as one struggled to make
enough money to feed one’s children.
The immigrants turn to the Church as their
spiritual family, and for their part have contributed so much joy and vitality.
In Washington they have doubled the Catholic population in forty years.
The irony is that I went to the monastery to
become a missionary, expecting to be sent to Papua New Guinea or the Easter
Islands, and I spent twenty years in Washington, D.C. working with Central
American refugees. When I was in the seminary, our Provincial, Father Victor,
wrote a letter to Rome in which he said that our vice-province in Puerto Rico
was flourishing and that our Province was prepared to take on a new mission. He
said that he wanted the most difficult mission in the world. The response was
lightening quick, saying that we should open a mission in the Highlands of
Papua New Guinea. The Guardian, Father Fermin Schmidt, from the Capuchin
College in Washington, was named the first Bishop and friars were sent.
Eventually, three of my classmates went. It was reported back to us that when the
friars landed in a field, the natives who had never seen Europeans or an
airplane were curious. They asked if the plane was male or female. They said if
it was a female they wanted an egg.
Many years later, a young friar I ordained who
was working in Papua New Guinea came to see me on his home visit. He had
glorious pictures of smiling natives, with bones in their noses, feathers in
their hair and little else in the way of clothing. He announced proudly, “This
is my parish council.” I was particularly intrigued because one of my own
pastors had just told me that his parishioners were not ready for a parish
council. If Fr. Provincial wrote today asking for the most difficult mission,
we might have been sent not to Papua, New Guinea, but to the US, England,
France or Canada. This is true for so many places in the Western World where
secularism and dechristianization are gaining ground. This is the challenge of
the New Evangelization. It is much harder to preach the Gospel in a culture
that seems to be vaccinated against the Faith, in our own country where so many
Catholics have stormed off, dozed off or simply drifted away from the Church.
Pope Francis is calling on all of us to be
missionaries in our own communities. In this new millennium, business as usual
is not enough. We must be a team of missionaries, moving from a maintenance
mode to a missionary one. We must ask ourselves, “What does it mean to live in
a culture of unbelief; a culture which does not even know it does not believe
because it still lives on the residue of Christian civilization?” As Hauerwas
has expressed it so well: “The Church exists today as resident aliens, an
adventurous colony in a society of unbelief. As a society of unbelief, Western
culture is devoid of the sense of journey, of adventure, because it lacks
belief in much more that the cultivation of an ever shrinking horizon of
self-preservation and self-expression.” Pope Francis is ever warning against a
self-referential Church turned in on itself. He tells us to open the doors, to
invite other in and so that we can go out and invite.
To be a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ in
the Catholic Church is much more than a head trip. It is a way of life
together; the whole person is engaged in the process.
Education for this journey must therefore be
experiential, personal, engaging and life-giving. We learn discipleship the way
we learn a language, by being part of a community that speaks that language.
Our young Catholics must be mentored in the faith by others, either peers or
older Catholics who are walking the walk. A writing from the early life of the
Church that has always fascinated me is the Letter to Diognetus, where the
author is describing to his friend what Christians are like. He says that they
live in the same neighborhoods, speak the same language, dress like everybody
else; but they do not kill their babies and they respect the marriage bond.
Very quaint indeed. It is a little scary to think that the Diognetus letter
could have been written last week.
In today’s world we must promote the Catholic
way of life which is increasingly alien in the secular world, where our concern
about unborn children or the sacredness of marriage makes us appear quaint and
even nettlesome. We need mentors: parents, grandparents, Godparents, teachers,
youth ministers, neighbors, who are ready to pass on the faith.
Pope Francis is calling on us to embrace the
vision of reality that is the Church’s faith and that values each and every
human being, and stresses our responsibility to love and serve each other,
especially the most vulnerable in our midst. The word that Pope Francis repeats
over and over is “tenerezza”, tenderness. On the Feast of St. Joseph, in his
inaugural Mass he speaks to us about protecting people, showing loving concern
for each and every person, especially children, the elderly, those in need, who
are often the last we think about. He says: “We must not be afraid of goodness
or tenderness.” He points to the heart of Joseph, his tenderness which is not
the virtue of the weak but a sign of strength of spirit and a capacity for
concern and compassion, for genuine openness to others, for love.
Some people think that the Holy Father should
talk more about abortion. I think he speaks of love and mercy to give people
the context for the Church’s teaching on abortion. We oppose abortion, not
because we are mean or old fashioned, but because we love people. And that is
what we must show the world. Recently I read about an American relief worker in
Africa, who reported on being at a camp for a food distribution line, it was
very chaotic, even scary. He could see that they were running out of food and
that these starving people were desperate. At the end of the line, the last
person was a little nine year old girl. All that was left was one banana. They
handed it to her. She peeled the banana and gave half each to her younger
brother and sister. Then she licked the banana peel. The relief worker said at
that moment he began to believe in God.
We must be better people; we must love all
people, even those who advocate abortion. It is only if we love them that we
will be able to help them discover the sacredness of the life of an unborn
child. Only love and mercy will open hearts that have been hardened by the
individualism of our age.
In the United States we are an immigrant
Church. It is very significant that the Holy Father’s very first trip as Pope
was to Lampedusa, to underscore his concern for the plight of immigrants. As
the Archbishop pointed out so eloquently in his homily, this is an issue that
it is great importance to us as American Catholics.
When the Holy Father went to the island of
Lampedusa he threw a wreath of flowers into the sea where thousands of refugees
have perished in the modern day coffin ships the bring refugees from North
Africa. The Holy Father talked about the globalization of indifference –
indifference to the suffering of others, to the fate of the unborn, the
elderly, the handicapped, the mentally ill and the immigrants.
We must overcome this indifference in our own
lives and help people to see that the Church’s teaching is about loving and
caring for everyone. In his talk to the Brazilian bishops last week, Pope
Francis said: “We need a Church capable of rediscovering the maternal womb of
mercy. Without mercy we have little chance nowadays of entering the world of
wounded persons in need of understanding, forgiveness and love.” The Holy
Father alludes to Cardinal Kasper’s work on mercy when he says that mercy
without truth would be consolation without honesty and is empty chatter.
On the other hand, however, the truth without
mercy would be cold, offputting and ready to wound. The truth isn’t a wet rag
that you throw in someone’s face, but a warm cape that you wrap around a
person, to protect and strengthen them.
Project Rachel has been just that kind of a
combination of mercy and truth that the Church’s pro-life efforts need to be
about.
Our efforts to heal the wounds of society will
depend on our capacity to love and to be faithful to our mission. The Holy
Father is showing us very clearly that our struggle is not just a political
battle or a legal problem, but that we must evangelize and humanize the
culture, then the world will be safe for the unborn, the elderly and the
unproductive. The Gospel of Life is a Gospel of Mercy. If we are going to get a
hearing in today’s world, it will be because people recognize that authenticity
of our lives and our dedication to building a civilization of love. We are
called to live our lives as a service to others and commit our lives to give
witness to the presence of God’s love and mercy in our midst. It’s like the
story – if we do not go the extra mile, give our cloak along with our tunic,
turn the other cheek – then the patient will die.
As Saint Augustine said, “Without God we can
do nothing, without us God will do nothing.”
Pope Francis said it in Rio, “Jesus Christ is
counting on you! The Church is counting on you! The Pope is counting on you!
May Mary, the Mother of Jesus and our Mother, always accompany you with her
tenderness. Go and make disciples of all nations. Amen.”
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