Homily of Pope Francis at Mass of Canonisations, 14 October 2018
HOMILY OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS
St Peter’s Square
Sunday, 14 October 2018
The second reading tells us that “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword (Heb 4:12). It really is: God’s word is not merely a set of truths or an edifying spiritual account; no – it is a living word that touches our lives, that transforms our lives. There, Jesus in person, the living Word of God, speaks to our hearts.
The Gospel, in particular, invites us to an encounter with the Lord, after the example of the “man” who “ran up to him” (cf. Mk10:17). We can recognize ourselves in that man, whose name the text does not give, as if to suggest that he could represent each one of us. He asks Jesus how “to inherit eternal life” (v. 17). He is seeking life without end, life in its fullness: who of us would not want this? Yet we notice that he asks for it as an inheritance, as a good to be obtained, to be won by his own efforts. In fact, in order to possess this good, he has observed the commandments from his youth and to achieve this he is prepared to follow others; and so he asks: “What must I do to have eternal life?”
Jesus’s answer catches him off guard. The Lord looks upon him and loves him (cf. v. 21). Jesus changes the perspective: from commandments observed in order to obtain a reward, to a free and total love. That man was speaking in terms of supply and demand, Jesus proposes to him a story of love. He asks him to pass from the observance of laws to the gift of self, from doing for oneself to being with God. And the Lord suggests to the man a life that cuts to the quick: “Sell what you have and give to the poor…and come, follow me” (v. 21). To you, too, Jesus says: “Come, follow me!” Come: do not stand still, because it is not enough not to do evil in order to be with Jesus. Follow me: do not walk behind Jesus only when you want to, but seek him out every day; do not be content to keep the commandments, to give a little alms and say a few prayers: find in Him the God who always loves you; seek in Jesus the God who is the meaning of your life, the God who gives you the strength to give of yourself.
Again Jesus says: “Sell what you have and give to the poor.” The Lord does not discuss theories of poverty and wealth, but goes directly to life. He asks you to leave behind what weighs down your heart, to empty yourself of goods in order to make room for him, the only good. We cannot truly follow Jesus when we are laden down with things. Because if our hearts are crowded with goods, there will not be room for the Lord, who will become just one thing among the others. For this reason, wealth is dangerous and – says Jesus – even makes one’s salvation difficult. Not because God is stern, no! The problem is on our part: our having too much, our wanting too much suffocates us, suffocates our hearts and makes us incapable of loving. Therefore, Saint Paul writes that “the love of money is the root of all evils” (1 Tim 6:10). We see this where money is at the centre, there is no room for God nor for man.
Jesus is radical. He gives all and he asks all: he gives a love that is total and asks for an undivided heart. Even today he gives himself to us as the living bread; can we give him crumbs in exchange? We cannot respond to him, who made himself our servant even going to the cross for us, only by observing some of the commandments. We cannot give him, who offers us eternal life, some odd moment of time. Jesus is not content with a “percentage of love”: we cannot love him twenty or fifty or sixty percent. It is either all or nothing.
Dear brothers and sisters, our heart is like a magnet: it lets itself be attracted by love, but it can cling to one master only and it must choose: either it will love God or it will love the world’s treasure (cf. Mt 6:24); either it will live for love or it will live for itself (cf. Mk 8:35).
Let us ask ourselves where we are in our story of love with God. Do we content ourselves with a fewcommandments or do we follow Jesus as lovers, really prepared to leave behind something for him? Jesus asks each of us and all of us as the Church journeying forward: are we a Church that only preaches good commandments or a Church that is a spouse, that launches herself forward in love for her Lord? Do we truly follow him or do we revert to the ways of the world, like that man in the Gospel? In a word, is Jesus enough for us or do we look for many worldly securities?
Let us ask for the grace always to leave things behind for love of the Lord: to leave behind wealth, leave behind the yearning for status and power, leave behind structures that are no longer adequate for proclaiming the Gospel, those weights that slow down our mission, the strings that tie us to the world. Without a leap forward in love, our life and our Church become sick from “complacency and self-indulgence” (Evangelii Gaudium, 95): we find joy in some fleeting pleasure, we close ourselves off in useless gossip, we settle into the monotony of a Christian life without momentum, where a little narcissism covers over the sadness of remaining unfulfilled.
This is how it was for the man, who – the Gospel tells us – “went away sorrowful” (v. 22). He was tied down to regulations of the law and to his many possessions; he had not given over his heart. Even though he had encountered Jesus and received his loving gaze, the man went away sad. Sadness is the proof of unfulfilled love, the sign of a lukewarm heart. On the other hand, a heart unburdened by possessions, that freely loves the Lord, always spreads joy, that joy for which there is so much need today. Pope Saint Paul VI wrote: “It is indeed in the midst of their distress that our fellow men need to know joy, to hear its song” (Gaudete in Domino, I). Today Jesus invites us to return to the source of joy, which is the encounter with him, the courageous choice to risk everything to follow him, the satisfaction of leaving something behind in order to embrace his way. The saints have travelled this path.
Paul VI did too, after the example of the Apostle whose name he took. Like him, Paul VI spent his life for Christ’s Gospel, crossing new boundaries and becoming its witness in proclamation and in dialogue, a prophet of a Church turned outwards, looking to those far away and taking care of the poor. Even in the midst of tiredness and misunderstanding, Paul VI bore witness in a passionate way to the beauty and the joy of following Christ totally. Today he still urges us, together with the Council whose wise helmsman he was, to live our common vocation: the universal call to holiness. Not to half measures, but to holiness.
It is wonderful that together with him and the other new saints today, there is Archbishop Romero, who left the security of the world, even his own safety, in order to give his life according to the Gospel, close to the poor and to his people, with a heart drawn to Jesus and his brothers and sisters. We can say the same about Francesco Spinelli, Vincenzo Romano, Maria Caterina Kasper, Nazaria Ignazia of Saint Teresa of Jesus, and also our Abruzzese-Neapolitan young man, Nunzio Sulprizio: the saintly, courageous, humble young man who encountered Jesus in his suffering, in silence and in the offering of himself. All these saints, in different contexts, put today’s word into practice in their lives, without lukewarmness, without calculation, with the passion to risk everything and to leave it all behind. Brothers and sisters, may the Lord help us to imitate their example.
Today here in Rome there was wonderful joy among Salvadoreans who had somehow saved their spare money to finance their trip to Rome to celebrate the recognition by the official Church of the prophetic witness of Monsenor Romero as he is still called by the pueblo.
The total ceremony would have gone over their heads with the gospel read out not alone in Latin but also in Greek . However, last night in Saint Peter’s Square Salvadorans celebrated the memory of their heroic martyr in their own unique style with great gusto in song. They were well aware of the Irish Franciscan presence in their country since the late sixies worhing with Romero on the side of the magiinalised.
Tomorrow morning all 4,000 Salvadorans have a special audience with Pope Francis. Hopefully we might get a chance to ask about the progress of the commission into the ordination of women deacons.
See comment on the Scripture readings for 14 October at
https://www.associationofcatholicpriests.ie/2018/10/14-october-28th-sunday/#comment-95604
While front-running papabili in conclave do not have to convince their electorate that, if elected, they will serve only one papal term, perhaps, before the winner is asked whether he accepts his election or by what name he wishes to be known, an oath should be administered: “I, N.N., do solemnly swear that I have no ambition to be a Canonised Saint and I forbid the introduction of any Cause on my behalf or the seeking of miracles through my intercession for at least two centuries after my death. So help me, God.” #SantoSubito is a supposedly spontaneous hashtag we could well do without.
We have had a glut of canonised popes and causes for canonisation of popes in recent decades, so the ordinary lay man or woman doing ordinary stuff extraordinarily well tends to get overshadowed or derailed in the sidings of lost causes. Also, in an age of ever advancing medical science, the scramble for miraculous cures, often of the ante-natal variety, becomes ever more dubious. Strangely nowadays, we don’t come across many raising-from-the-dead type of miracles in the annals of accelerated papal canonisation. Maybe we need the return of the ‘Diaboli Advocatus’ to decelerate the papal saint escalator.
Ironically, the great good that Giovanni Battista Montini as Cardinal Ab of Milan did among workers and trades unions, in his development-oriented visits to countries of Africa, Latin America and Asia both as Cardinal and Pope Paul VI, in his 1965 address to the UN, in his welcoming approval of the Latin American church’s ‘preferential option for the poor’ at Medellin in 1968, in his ‘Populorum Progressio’/Development of Peoples encyclical of the previous year, and in his pulling together and giving shape to the Vatican Council that John XXIII had only set in motion – all these are airbrushed by both secular and Catholic media because of his Humanae Vitae in 1968 and of his batched canonisation with six others half a century later – inevitably overshadowed by the Martyr Oscar Romero who, for the thirty-five year stretch from his ordination until his social justice ‘awakening’ in 1977 on the murder of his activist friend, Fr Rutilio Grande SJ, was more scrupulously conservative than either Msgr/Ab/Cardinal Montini/Paul VI or his own predecessor in San Salvador, Ab. Luis Chávez y González. In Paul’s case, the good that he did is interred with his bones, the perhaps not-so-good lives after him.
Finally, just to judge from Pope Francis’s 49 canonisations of the past five years, to be in with a chance of official sainthood you would have to be one of 813 men, women or children who failed to escape from the Ottoman Siege of Otranto in 1480, or one of 30 Brazilian Catholics killed by Dutch Calvinists in the 16th century, or one of the three child martyrs of Tlaxcala in Mexico killed also in the 16th century by some of your own people who didn’t take so readily to the Conquistadores’ new religion. Failing that, to get on the escalator you could try to be one of six 19th-21st century popes, or a martyred archbishop to whom the #SantoSubito hashtag curiously did not apply three or four decades earlier. Alternatively, as one of three young siblings a century ago, you could have had visions and been entrusted with heavenly secrets. If you were one of a 20th century married couple such as Louis & Marie Martin, your best chance would be to produce at least five Religious Sisters including The Little Flower. There were a couple of lay exceptions: young Sulprizio the 19th century Italian blacksmith apprentice who fell foul of his own extended family, and the young Mexican José Sanchez del Rio, martyred in the 1920’s anti-clerical war. But by far the most popular way to reach canonisation between 2013 and 2018 was to be a bishop, priest, religious brother or sister who founded or co-founded a successful society of priests, brothers or sisters over the past five or six centuries – better known examples being Peter Faber SJ and St Teresa of Calcutta/Kolkata. If you can’t rely on your well-connected followers to further your cause, who can you depend upon?
All in all, it seems that clericalism or quasi-clericalism is alive and well among the canonised but even more so among those who get them there. What chance has the ordinary “five-eighths”, man or woman, got with this saint-making racket stacked against us?
wow. question: why would a child of God serving unselfishly even bring this nasty comment to the light of day? You seem to think God, our all-knowing, all loving, all powerful God, would value the “Saint” title we poor humans give each other. Shame. We should lead each other to a deeper relationship where we give all that we own away and follow God’s call. Pride should be the first thing we let go. I pray for you and all who value this tribalism.