Love is who?

This year the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus falls on June 27, much later than usual because of the late Easter.  But all of June is the Month of the Sacred Heart, and we should focus on this theological and cultural gift we have as Catholics to remind ourselves that we know what  -- and Who – love is.  I found some words of Pope Saint John Paul II from 1999 to share on the subject.

Monsignor Smith

"The Church seems in a particular way to profess the mercy of God and to venerate it when she directs herself to the Heart of Christ. In fact, it is precisely this drawing close to Christ in the mystery of his Heart which enables us to dwell on this point - a point in a sense central and also most accessible on the human level - of the revelation of the merciful love of the Father, a revelation which constituted the central content of the messianic mission of the Son of Man" (n. 13). 

On the occasion of the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart and the month of June, I have often urged the faithful to persevere in the practice of this devotion, which "contains a message which in our day has an extraordinary timeliness", because "an unending spring of life, giving hope to every person, has streamed precisely from the Heart of God's Son, who died on the Cross.  From the Heart of Christ crucified is born the new humanity redeemed from sin. The man of the year 2000 needs Christ's Heart to know God and to know himself; he needs it to build the civilization of love" (8 June 1994; L'Osservatore Romano English edition, 15 June 1994, p. 3).

The faithful still need to be guided to contemplate adoringly the mystery of Christ, the God-Man, in order to become men and women of interior life, people who feel and live the call to new life, to holiness, to reparation which is apostolic cooperation in the salvation of the world, people who prepare themselves for the new evangelization, recognizing the Heart of Christ as the heart of the Church: it is urgent for the world to understand that Christianity is the religion of love. 

The Savior's Heart invites us to return to the Father's love, which is the source of every authentic love: "In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins" (1 Jn 4:10). Jesus ceaselessly receives from the Father, rich in mercy and compassion, the love which he lavishes upon human beings (cf. Eph 2:4; Jas 5:11). His Heart particularly reveals the generosity of God towards sinners. God's reaction to sin is not to lessen his love, but to expand it into a flow of mercy which becomes the initiative of the Redemption. 

Contemplation of the Heart of Jesus in the Eucharist will spur the faithful to seek in that Heart the inexhaustible mystery of the priesthood of Christ and of the Church. It will enable them to taste, in communion with their brothers and sisters, the spiritual sweetness of charity at its very source. By helping all to rediscover their own Baptism, it will make them more aware of having to live their apostolic dimension by spreading love and participating in the mission of evangelization. Each person needs to be more committed to praying the Lord of the harvest (cf. Mt 9:38) to grant the Church "shepherds after his own heart" (Jer 3:15) who, in love with Christ the Good Shepherd, will pattern their own hearts on his and be ready to go out into the highways of the world to proclaim to all that he is the Way, the Truth and the Life (cf. Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Pastores dabo vobis, n. 82). To this we must add effective action so that many of today's young people, docile to the voice of the Holy Spirit, may be taught to let the great expectations of the Church and of humanity resonate in the depths of their hearts and to respond to Christ's invitation to consecrate themselves enthusiastically and joyously with him "for the life of the world" (Jn 6:51).

Call to mind, call to glory

Not everyone gets a monument
but every one is worth remembering.

Memorial Day sneaks up on us this year, too soon after a late Easter and before we even realize that May is almost over.  Was it early like this before?  I don’t remember.

A day for keeping memorial turns our eyes toward memory.   It is important, it is laudable and encouraged, to remember the many souls who have served and sacrificed even their own lives for our good.  If we cannot call to mind family members or friends we know by name or story or portrait, we can wander amidst stone memorials that spread across green hills nearby, and spring up where roads meet for the traffic to circle with drivers unaware.  Open a book, go for a stroll, inquire with an elderly neighbor; you will find a life to remember.

Is it possible to remember someone you never knew?  Not only is it possible but even necessary, would be my assessment.  Equally vivid in my mind are the contours and characters of lives about whom I simply read, even decades or already half a century ago; and lives about whom I heard from friends who knew them, loved them, and lost them, for whom memory is not an option, but an obligation and an honor.

Memory, then, is where we may keep and cherish what is no more, treasuring intact, that is, re-membering what is dissolved or shattered to pieces.  Memory then can be swathed in sadness for what or who is lost to us in any other way.  

But memory’s most practical aspect, where resides our faculties of learning and knowing and understanding, reveals that memory is in fact rooted in the past but oriented toward tomorrow.  We remember how to find our way, where we left some item we need, or how to reach a friend.  We remember what works and what fails to work to achieve a desired goal.  We remember an insight, idea, or concept that when applied in the moment will transform our dilemma into opportunity.  What resides in memory is far from being lost!

As creatures we are distinguished to have intellect and will.  So also in having memory are we in the image and likeness of God, whose memory is the model of ours but more powerful and perfect.  God calls us into being by calling us to His mind.  When He re-members, He calls into being once again; or rather, He continues to hold in being for eternity.  

When we pray for God to remember, we are asking of Him something both similar to and different from what we ourselves do.  Remember your compassion and your mercy, O Lord, for they are ages old.  Remember no more the sins of my youth; remember me according to your mercy, because of your goodness, Lord.  (Psalm 25:6–7) His compassion and mercy never went away, never dissolved, but calling on Him to re-member them and re-member us in accord with them is to beg to be re-made according to the glory for which He called us to His mind in the beginning.

Memory, then is a light to our steps, not a dark path.  The Advocate, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name -- he will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you.  (Jn 14:26)  The God who gave us the ability to recognize and remember is the God Who reveals His promise as a memory and fulfills it daily in His memorial.  Do this in memory of me.  (Lk 22:19)  To remember both what God has already done and what He has promised to do makes our memory the ground of faith, the seat of hope.  To remember is thus the work of love.

It is good that our nation give a day to Memorial.  Not only monuments and mementoes, but doing the good work for one another that is calling to mind the good they have done for us.  Let our memories re-member their good work, and let their good deeds go with them. (cf. Rev. 14:13)  The mercy we re-member is God’s own; the good work of memory is ours to share.

Monsignor Smith

He knows

What did I know?  I was convinced and insisted that it would be a long conclave, likely four days at least.  When the white smoke came on the fourth ballot – my own mom was the first to alert me – I uttered the first of many weary words that day.  

It was the worst possible time.  I was doubly and triply obligated that day.  I was in a noisy room and had to put my phone to my ear to hear Cardinal Mamberti announce the Gaudium magnum from the loggia.  Robertum gave me pause, and Franciscum clinched it.  Hoo boy.  I was not encouraged.  

What did I know?  Not much, clearly.  Since that moment, every word and action by our new Holy Father Pope Leo XIV has shown the world something that Cardinal Mamberti said but, in our haste to know something else, most of us skipped over:  We have a Pope!

Now everybody knows he is an Augustinian who served as a missionary in Peru, became a diocesan bishop there, and was called by Pope Francis to high office in the Vatican.  Most shocking is that he is from here, the United States, the south side of Chicago, with garrulous brothers still there eager to assert his credentials, nay identity, as a White Sox fan.  I am not sure about other US priests, but this gives me pause – he will be unimpressed by our American “magic.”  Words he has uttered in the past have come out in snippets and clips, audio and video.  Factions and partisans have claimed him as their own and rejected him as from the other side.  All of this has been fascinating even as it has faded into irrelevance.  

What I have seen since last Thursday is the highest office in the Church be inhabited by a priest who has a reverence for that office and a love for that Church.  And while I have snarfed up every snippet and story I could find, one line has claimed my heart.  Our fellow countryman has declared, I must make myself small.

Yes, the brother of those Chicago Prevosts, former neighbor and close or distant relative of many now rising for recognition, and grade school through seminary classmate of untold number of Americans, is already fading from view, so that the Successor of Peter be seen and at work in the Church and the world.  Not only does he know it is not about him, he also is demonstrating to anyone with eyes to see that it is not about him.  Didn’t somebody close to Jesus say, He must increase, I must decrease?

To take up the mantle of the prophet is not to change its color or cut.  This is no time for individuality, much less idiosyncrasy.  The burden is enormous, larger than any human capacity or talent.  In time the personality of Leo XIV will be better known, but first the presence of Christ in His Church and the work of His Vicar on earth will be undertaken.   His doing papal things in papal ways for papal reasons is soft breeze of refreshment.  That this continue to be done with humility and in earnest is my fondest hope, nurtured by what I have seen and by contrary clues not seen.  

Whether he himself be strong enough, savvy enough, and well-served enough to bring right and good order to the household of the Church cannot now be known.  In my own lifetime a warmly welcomed Pope lived only 33 days.   Good men have stepped into these shoes only to be thwarted by malice and machinations, for Our Lord Himself warned us that there is an enemy, and he sows his choking weeds.  

For us to know now is not whether he be one of us or one of them, but that he is ours, and we are his.   Whatever we thought we knew, now we know that our obligation is to give him our prayer as if his life depend upon it, because our life depends upon him.  Praised be Jesus Christ!  We have a Pope.  

Monsignor Smith

So you want to be an apostle?

Nice chair you got there;
shame it's empty...

Who would want to be an apostle, anyway?

These days after Easter we walk through the beginnings of the Church, as the silly, selfish, and unaware group of disciples Jesus specifically chose for the work are transformed into Apostles.  Peter and Thomas are singled out so that everyone know of their betrayal of the Lord and rejection of the testimony of their friends.  

Then the Word begins to work and the Church begins to grow as souls are drawn to ‘the Way,’ as simultaneously comes the persecution.  Dragged from their homes and put in prison, beaten, and even killed, the believers do not turn away, but persist and draw yet more souls to join them.  James, the ‘brother of the Lord’ and first bishop of the church in Jerusalem, is beheaded by the king, who is delighted by this gruesome act and starts the hunt for his next victims.

So, really, who would want that job?  Part of their credibility is their testimony of their own foolishness and infidelity, for it is precisely there that the power of the Risen Lord reveals itself in His merciful forgiveness and insistence, Follow me.  Follow me, clearly, to the cross; follow me, insistently, to your own suffering and death.  Quite the recruitment slogan, that.

In our own time, all eyes turn to the Vatican Hill where a small group of men strangely dressed in a small but splendid chapel wrestle with this divine imperative and their own responsibility to respond with neither a king nor a counselor but rather another sheep for the slaughter.  Who will follow Peter whose following of Jesus led him to his own cross on this very hill?

Yes, wherever two or three are gathered, there is politics.  Yes, the will to power is strong even in the hearts of men consecrated to the Lord.  Yes, tribal allegiances and ideological blinders bend souls to grasping.  But look closely and you will also see souls aware of the deep reality to which they have been called and in which they must act.  

One of the greatest works of human genius and artistic expression is in the room for the very purpose of reminding these men of what is at stake for themselves and all who depend on them.  Michelangelo’s Last Judgment is beautiful and terrible all at once, and ‘in your face’ when as a cardinal elector you are forced to do what no tourist is ever permitted, to sit and stare and search it, fully illuminated, for untold hours.  Dated in both style and theology, as so much of greatness is, still it conveys truth in a way impossible to misunderstand.

They are all selfish fools slow to understand and quick to exempt themselves from pain and penalty, as the very words of Scripture have been reminding them for days and weeks.  Those same scriptures also point out that this is precisely the qualification that Peter, James, John, James, Philip, Bartholomew and the others brought to the recruiter who chose, called, taught, and sent them to extend His own risen life to the end of every road.  Therefore, among them is the one whose loins they must gird for him, and take where he does not want to go -- not if he is honest about himself and the call, anyway. 

The longer they sit there under the eyes of that recruiter who is also their judge, the more they recognize the selfishness and striving of some of their own companions, the longer they have to marinate in both their own embarrassing qualifications and their merited obligation, the more compelling His call.  In this condition, they deliver their charge to compel one of their own number to respond to that terrifying Follow me.

Because really, who would want to be this apostle, anyway?

Monsignor Smith