The Church is now in the midst of the great annual novena praying for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit this Sunday on Pentecost. It’s become my favorite time of the Liturgical year, when I have a chance to ponder — and try to help other Catholics ponder — the role of the Holy Spirit in our life as Christians and in the mission of the Church.

The most shocking phrase in all of Sacred Scripture, I believe, occurs during the Last Supper when Jesus says, “I tell you the truth. It is better for you that I go. For if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you. But if I go, I will send Him to you.”

Jesus swears an oath basically saying that if we have a choice between keeping Him and going without the Holy Spirit, or letting Jesus depart and receiving the Holy Spirit, it’s better for us to have the Holy Spirit. If Jesus didn’t Himself say it, it would be hard to believe, but He is essentially saying that the Holy Spirit is even more important for us than He is.

Most Catholics, however, don’t treat the Holy Spirit this way. We often treat Him as a lesser-known nobody included in a package deal with God the Father and God the Son.

The Holy Spirit remains for so many — including Confirmation candidates and recipients, priests, religious, and highly dedicated laity — just a strange white bird, or mysterious descending flame, or howling wind of Biblical history. Rather than a personal, vital “helper and guide” — as the Confirmation Rite begs the Father that He will become for us — He remains the great Unknown.

And our Christian life, and the whole mission of the Church, suffers from this remediable ignorance.

There’s a famous scene in the Acts of the Apostles when St. Paul came to Ephesus and met some disciples. He asked, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” They responded, “We have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”

While today, every Catholic has heard of the Holy Spirit as a theological concept, few really know Him intimately. Benedict XVI talked about this ignorance five years ago when he met with the youth of the world in Australia.

“The Holy Spirit has been in some ways the neglected Person of the Blessed Trinity,” he declared, and confessed that he, too, was guilty of this disregard for the first half of his life. It was only as a young priest teaching theology that he began to recognize the importance that the Holy Spirit should play in his life.

“It is not enough to know about the Spirit,” he said at World Youth Day. “We must welcome Him as the guide of our souls, as the ‘Teacher of the interior life’ Who introduces us to the Mystery of the Trinity, because He alone can open us up to faith and allow us to live it each day to the full.”

If we wish to understand the faith, to live it, and to pass it on, we must allow ourselves to be guided by the Holy Spirit, even if we, like Father Joseph Ratzinger, are beginning as adults rather than as children. For us, the “great unknown” must become the “great known,” our Teacher, Leader, Consoler, and Advocate.

Since the Second Vatican Council, there’s been one group that absolutely hasn’t taken the Holy Spirit for granted: the members of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. The whole Church owes them a debt of gratitude. To those who haven’t been part of this renewal, some of its most striking manifestations seemed a little strange — like speaking in undecipherable tongues or being “slain” by the Spirit and collapsing — and the rebirth in awareness and cooperation with the Holy Spirit it was launching remained fundamentally for prayer group members or Life in the Spirit seminar participants.

But glossalia and other such manifestations are not the essence of the renewal the Holy Spirit always wants to bring about in the Church. The true charismatic renewal occurs when individual Christians and the Church as a whole allows the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with faith, enkindling in them the fire of His love. That’s the way we’re renewed and through us the Holy Spirit renews the face of the earth.

As Catholics, we’re all called to be charismatics in this fuller sense, those who receive with faith and respond with fervor to the Holy Spirit’s charisms and interior presence.

During this great novena, it’s a time for us to examine our docility to what the Holy Spirit wants to do in us as our Helper and Guide.

The first thing He wants to do is to help us pray better. St. Paul tells us, “The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought.” The Holy Spirit teaches us how to pray. He does this principally not by putting words on our lips, but changing who we are as we pray, helping us to be conscious of our reality as beloved sons and daughters confidently crying out, “Abba, Father!” Our prayer needs to become more charismatic, guided by the Holy Spirit, not just during this novena, but always.

The second thing the Holy Spirit wants to do is to help us live differently. Through Baptism, we have become the temple of His Holy Presence, and that reality should change us and make us different from the rest. St. Paul calls us to “live according to the Spirit,” which requires setting our hearts on the things of the Spirit and responding to His help to kill in us the things of the flesh, what Pope Francis calls “spiritual worldliness.” We’re called not merely to know the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit but to live by them. Someone who is truly “spiritual” lives a charismatic life according to the Holy Spirit in things big and small.

Third, the Holy Spirit wants to fill us with a fire to light the world ablaze with the Gospel. The Holy Spirit came down on Pentecost as tongues of fire — rather than ice-cold, quivering lips! — for a reason. It was a Sacramental sign effecting what it signified: that those who receive the Holy Spirit are equipped and emboldened to proclaim the Gospel with ardor.

Many Catholics are sadly wrapped in spiritual asbestos. By Baptism and Confirmation, however, we’ve all received the same Holy Spirit that the Apostles received on Pentecost. We just need to cooperate as much as they did and spread the faith more charismatically, as joint witnesses with the Holy Spirit, that Christ is alive and wants to raise not only the dead but the living!

Lastly, the Holy Spirit wants to build up the Church. St. Paul tells us He gives each of us a “manifestation of the Spirit” for the benefit of the whole. The mission of the Church is not just for ordained or consecrated “specialists.” We’re all called to be contributors rather than consumers, givers rather than takers, co-responsible participants rather than seated spectators. Our roles will vary — just as an eye is not the same thing as a foot — but all our roles are important. Each charismatic gift is crucial to accomplish the mission Christ has entrusted to the Church for the salvation of the world. Our parishes, our diocese, and the Church Universal must become more charismatic in our identifying and implementing the particular manifestations of the Spirit each of us has been given.

The Holy Spirit’s mission is to lead the Church and each of us. St. Paul begged the early Christians not to “quench” or “grieve” the Spirit of God. He wanted them — and us — rather to allow the Spirit full reign so that we might “please” Him by allowing Him to work in us the same moral miracles He worked in the Apostles and members of the early Church.

On Sunday, the birthday of the Church, the Holy Spirit wants to lead us, our parishes and the whole Church on a true charismatic renewal from within. He wants to bring about a new and perpetual Pentecost.

Let’s pray — and open up the windows.

During my years at the helm of The Anchor, I always had the half-mischievous, half-evangelical desire to put on the front page above the fold a headline with the biggest font in The Anchor’s history, declaring, “Jesus Christ coming to our diocese!”

I knew that if we had an edition announcing, “Pope coming to our diocese!,” people would be passionately interested in the details of how they would be able to be in the pope’s presence and see, hear, touch and meet him.

I was interested to know whether the headline about Jesus’ coming to the diocese, which obviously would catch readers’ attention, would keep their attention once we described where Jesus would be appearing in the Flesh (and Blood, Soul and Divinity): namely, their own home parish, where they would have the chance to see, hear, touch and meet the eternal Son of God.

The truth is that the most important thing that happens in our diocese on a daily and weekly basis is what Jesus Himself does: teaching us through His word, feeding us with Himself, making us members of His Body, absolving our sins, joining men and women in one flesh, helping us to sanctify our work, moving us to love others as He has loved us, and bringing us into the communion He shares with His Father and the Holy Spirit.

We don’t treat this as “news,” because Jesus’ doing these things has been a constant in these parts for more than a century. But at the same time, we ought to ensure we don’t take Jesus’ activities for granted or them in favor of what’s novel and passing.

The most important news for Catholics to know is the greatest news of all, that the One Whose presence the angels heralded to shepherds is still present, now in even humbler appearances.

This is one of the reasons why I am so happy that, as part of his reform of the Church, Pope Francis is focusing the attention of Catholics throughout the world on the most important event he has on his daily papal calendar: Mass.

In the past, “big” papal Masses would always draw press attention, when the pope would celebrate Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, canonizations, ordinations, World Youth Days or other significant occasions in Rome or elsewhere.

But the daily Mass and even most Sunday Masses of the Holy Father would draw little attention at all.

During the papacy of John Paul II, the morning Masses were celebrated with a group of special visitors who had written for the privilege of attending, but there would be no homily, no press coverage, no news.

During Pope Benedict’s time, he normally celebrated private Masses with just his priest secretaries and the four consecrated women who took care of his apartment.

Pope Francis has taken to celebrating a semi-public daily Mass each morning in the chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae, where he has taken up residence. He has been inviting different groups of Vatican employees or other groups each day to join him for Mass and he prayerfully prepares a homily for them that he preaches a braccio, or “off the cuff.”

These daily Masses, and daily homilies based normally on the readings of the day, are a revolution. They have made many of those who work around the pope — who have the job of worrying, and do it well! — quite nervous because no one knows in advance what the Holy Father will say or how it will come out.

A former professor of mine is now the papal theologian, the one whose task is normally to read in advance all of the pope’s homilies, speeches, talks to ensure that they’re in line with the Catholic faith. Once I had invited him to come have dinner with a group of pilgrims I had brought to Rome and one of them asked him what the papal theologian’s job description was. “My job is to keep the pope infallible!,” he joked in response.

During the Middle Ages, when those elected pope didn’t have anywhere near the formidable theological education of recent successors of St. Peter, making sure the pope didn’t say anything that confused the faith and the faithful was a serious concern.

Even today, however, when there’s not much unease about a brilliant pope’s saying anything contrary to the faith, there’s still a concern that, if the pope says something no one else has reviewed, what comes out might become an unnecessary distraction from the overall message.

That’s what happened to Pope Benedict in Regensburg when his citation of a 13th-century opinion about Muhammad and violence in the midst of a brilliant talk on faith and reason became the sole story. Benedict had been working on the talk the night before it was to be given and no one else had a chance to review it. If someone had, he likely would have suggested editing the remark that some outside of the academic setting interpreted as incendiary.

But there are also concerns about the form that papal teaching takes. Normally popes teach in formal and official ways, through written homilies, allocutions, addresses, messages, encyclicals, exhortations and the like.

When John Paul II did the book length interview “Crossing the Threshold of Hope” in 1994, many theologians didn’t know how to classify it. Were John Paul’s responses to be considered official papal teaching or personal opinion?

When Pope Benedict XVI authored three different volumes of the “Jesus of Nazareth” series, he said in the introduction that he was explicitly writing in a personal capacity and invited scholars and others to disagree with him. But the basically unprecedented distinction between the pope’s “magisterial” thoughts on Jesus from his “personal” thoughts on Jesus continues to give many Vatican officials and Catholic theologians ulcers.

But with both of these innovations, there was at least an opportunity for revisions and editing.

Preaching off the cuff publicly at daily Mass is, in my opinion, a much greater adjustment in the way the pope exercises his teaching office.

At first, the official organs of Vatican News didn’t know what to do with this innovation. They weren’t covering the Masses at all, except for a brief notice of which group of Vatican employees had been invited.

But as Pope Francis has continued to preach each day, the press is now showing up and at least is printing summaries of what he said on Vatican Radio, the L’Osservatore Romano, and in various daily Catholic news services.

There are no uploaded audio or video versions of his homilies or full transcriptions yet — a sign, I think, that those who are more cautious in the Vatican still want a chance to revise or edit something that didn’t come out the right way — but I’m personally hoping that Pope Francis will encourage them to do so.

The main point, however, is that what the pope preaches each morning is now what leads the normal news coverage of the Vatican. And that, I’m convinced, is exactly what our new Holy Father wants.

What the pope’s been doing has changed my habits. Each morning, as I’m in the chapel praying before Mass, I now visit the Vatican Radio website, read the summary of what Pope Francis preached a few hours before, and often incorporate what he said into my own daily Mass homily.

I hope that this reform in the papal ministry will likewise influence your daily habits.

I’d encourage you, first, to visit Vatican radio each day (http://en.radiovaticana.va/index.asp) to see what the pope preached and take it to your prayer. But I’d urge you even more to ponder his sense of priorities and the place of daily Mass in your life.

Pope Francis is intentionally showing all Catholics how important daily Mass is in the life of the Church.

As part of his reform of the Church, he’s trying to bring the whole Church with him each day to Christ in the Mass. That’s where Jesus, through His words and Sacramentally-enfleshed word, will help to bring each of us and the whole Church He founded back into shape.

It’s a set of priorities for reform worthy of a big headline.

Wednesday was the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, instituted by Pope Pius XII to give a Christian response to the communist May Day celebrations. Every year it focuses the attention of the Church and the world on the true meaning of human work, seen in the diligent labor of St. Joseph.

It’s a theme that remains crucial even after the collapse of Soviet communism.

Since we spend so much of our time on earth working, work is central to human life. It is also a crucial part of our vocation to holiness because it is through work that we not only serve others but form our character.

Few, however, look at work in this way: most view it as a necessary evil that they would love to escape altogether, rather than something central to God’s plans for our flourishing.

So this week’s feast provides an opportunity to focus on the true meaning of work.

This is one of the central themes in the thought of the man who became Pope Francis. In “El Jesuita”— the 2010 book-length interview released in English earlier this week under the title “Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words”— he said that one of the greatest gifts his father ever gave him was to tell him at 13 to get a job.

The young Jorge Bergoglio recognized at the time that the reason was not because the family needed the money, but because he needed the experience of hard work for his human and Christian growth.

His father, an accountant, arranged for him to work at a hosiery factory that belonged to one of his clients. For the first couple of summers, Jorge swept the floors and did other types of janitorial services. In the third year, after the factory owners saw his precocious intellectual talents, he began to help out with administrative work. Once he had enrolled as a chemistry student in college, he began to work in the company’s laboratory.

Throughout his university studies, he would work in the lab from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., return home for lunch, and then take classes from 2 to 8 p.m. It was a tough schedule for a young man, but looking back at it many years later, he was so grateful for having learned at a young age the value of hard work.

“I am very grateful to my father who sent me to work,” he said in “El Jesuita.” “Work was one of the things that most formed me in life. Particularly in the laboratory, I learned the good and evil of every human task.”

Referring to that moral formation, he told a story about a chemical analysis he had done. He was proud of how fast he had completed it. His Paraguayan boss asked him whether he had done a particular test as part of the analysis. He replied that he hadn’t, but that it probably was unnecessary because of the other tests he had done. “No, it’s necessary to do things well,” she gently reprimanded him. The lesson, he said, “taught me the seriousness of work,” and he never stopped being grateful for the advice.

Work done well is crucial for our dignity.

Speaking about the unemployed, with whom he has spent much of his life ministering, he said, “They are people who don’t feel that they’re persons. Instead of getting assistance from families and friends, they want to work. They want to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. It’s ultimately work that anoints a person with dignity. This unction of dignity doesn’t come from one’s family name, or home formation or education. Dignity as such comes only through work. We eat what we earn. We provide for our family with what we earn. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a little or a lot. We can have a fortune, but if we are not working, our dignity suffers.”

Our dignity comes from God and we obviously retain human dignity even when we’re incapacitated, but it does suffer when we’re not working. God gave us work to strengthen our dignity. “Work,” Cardinal Bergoglio said, “corresponds to a clear command of God, ‘Increase, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.’” God, in other words, was commanding, “Be stewards of the earth: work!”

After the Fall, man’s work became toilsome but remained fundamentally good and in fact redemptive. That’s because the most important part of work is not the work itself but the way it transforms the worker. Honest work done well gives the human person the opportunity to cultivate all the various physical, intellectual, moral and spiritual potentials God has implanted in him while providing a service to others.

One of the greatest spiritual cancers that can afflict someone, the future pope said, is therefore laziness, when a person either loses the will to work hard or never learns it. Hard-working parents need to be careful lest, after battling so hard to provide for themselves and for their families, they spoil their children and grandchildren by not teaching them how to work hard. Rather than advance in dignity, the next generations will grow in “decadence,” he said.

He told a story of a father from Buenos Aires who was having problems with a son who didn’t want to work but who instead had become a full-time social protestor while living off his parents. This is a phenomenon we saw last year in the United States with the Occupy movement.

A wise old priest met with the two of them to help them resolve their conflict. He told them that their biggest problem is that they had forgotten the “aches and pains.” Neither of them knew what he was talking about.

He told them that they had forgotten the daily soreness of their respective father and grandfather who had to get up in the early hours of the morning every day in order to milk the cows. “Both had forgotten the importance of work,” Cardinal Bergoglio said, and their relationship was suffering the consequences: they were leisurely focusing more on fixing each other or society than starting with fixing themselves through work.

It’s also crucial for societies to remember how crucial a work ethic is. Governments have the duty to foster “a culture of work, not of debt,” and to promote “sources of work” because, he insisted, “work confers dignity.”

If unemployment legislation incentivizes staying home and collecting checks funded by other people’s work, recipients may end up being more harmed spiritually than helped materially. It’s important for their good and the good of society that people are given the opportunity, not to mention the moral and financial incentive, to be contributors rather than consumers of what others have earned. Otherwise all of society will suffer from the corruption of laziness, as people get used to looking for handouts, looking to others to provide, and creating a culture of debt that cannot be sustained long-term.

This culture of work must keep the worker, not profit or capital, at the center, otherwise the work that is meant to confer dignity can become “dehumanizing” for all involved. This dehumanization happens when, for example, workers are forced to work so much because of competition that they have no time with their families. It also happens when there’s no time for a “healthy leisure,” something that used to occur on Sundays. This allowed a “restorative rest” that the future pope said produced not just good spiritual fruits but economic and human ones as well.

“The Church has always underlined that the key to the social question is work. The worker is in the center. Today, in many cases, he’s not,” Cardinal Bergoglio stated. “The worker becomes a thing if he is not treated as a person. The person isn’t for work, but work for the person.”

Work is for the person as a means to sanctify himself, to sanctify others, and to offer to God a sacrifice like that of Abel.

This is a Gospel Pope Francis has learned through a life of hard work — and one that he is now proclaiming to others.

In the 11 days since the Patriots’ Day marathon bombings, the motto “Boston Strong” has become more than words put on professional sports jerseys and blue and yellow ribbons but an apt description of the tenacity, character and courage of the people, police, physicians, press and even politicians of the greater Hub.

But even in the midst of so much inspiring valor, Boston was never stronger than on Thursday morning when we showed the world that the source of our strength doesn’t come from eating Boston-baked beans, drinking magic water from the Quabbin Reservoir, breathing the hard air of the Southeast Expressway, taking specialized phonetics lessons in kindergarten or singing “Sweet Caroline.”

We gave a universal witness that our greatest strength doesn’t come from within but comes from God. That’s why Governor Patrick called Cardinal Sean O’Malley when he was still in the Holy Land and asked the Catholic Church to host an interfaith prayer service at the South End Cathedral dedicated to a cross we call holy, to an instrument of torture we treat as sacred. Christians know that from that worst evil in human history, the murder of Innocence Incarnate on a gibbet, God brought about the greatest good of all.

And so there the President of the United States, the Governor of the Commonwealth, the Mayor of Boston, so many police officers, marathon runners and ordinary citizens convened to ask God to bring good out of the terrorist atrocities.

It’s important to grasp what happened on Thursday and why. We’re living at a time when many of our political, educational and cultural leaders are trying to eliminate God from our public life, such as removing prayer from schools, statues of the Holy Family from public greens at Christmas, “In God we Trust” from our currency and other such evictions.

After the horror, pain and grief that began last Monday at 2:50 p.m., however, we didn’t book Dr. Phil and a thousand counselors for group therapy sessions at the TD North Garden. We didn’t ask the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders to regale us with some sexy, upbeat chants on Boston Common. We didn’t ask Jose Cuervo and Jack Daniels to come to the rescue and drown our sorrows. We didn’t bring in a bunch of clowns and comedians to make us howl and distract us from the pain.

We all knew that we needed something more. We knew that we needed Someone more. And so we turned as a nation to God. And we’re never stronger than when we do.

As St. Paul once said, it’s when we’re weak that we’re strongest, because when we recognize we need God and turn to Him in prayer for help, He strengthens us more than any human means could.

The prayer service was moving, emboldening, and inspiring.

The President of the United States strengthened us all by reminding us that God hasn’t given us a spirit of fear and timidity but of power, love and self-control, the Spirit will give us the strength to run with endurance the race that is set before us, even in the midst of bombs and other struggles, to push on, to persevere, not to grow weary, not to get faint, even when it hurts, even when our heart aches.

He was incredibly eloquent, but his eloquence in the pulpit came not from rhetorical dynamics but from the power of the Word of God. It was eloquent because it was true.

The president also gave one of the most moving descriptions of the true greatness of Boston I had ever heard: “Boston opens its heart to the world,” to immigrants, students, artists, scientists, marathon runners and more, which is one of the reasons why Boston isn’t claimed only by those born in its boroughs, who cheer for its sports teams, or who declare it as their native place when they travel abroad.

“Whether folks come here to Boston for just a day, or they stay here for years,” the president said, “they leave with a piece of this town tucked firmly into their hearts. So Boston is your hometown, but we claim it a little bit, too.” That was eloquent, because it, too, was true.

The governor began his remarks as boldly as anyone ever could, by reminding us of St. Paul’s imperative to the Thessalonians, “In everything, give thanks.” I would encourage you not to use those words to greet a grieving widow or mother in the receiving line at a wake, because they so easily risk being misunderstood.

But with remarkable poise and confidence, the leader of the Commonwealth reminded us that we’re called even in times of disaster to thank God because God always seeks to bring good out of evil, as we saw in the various ways the governor indicated: for the firefighters, state and local police officers, EMTs, medical professionals, hospital workers, FBI and ATF agents, blood donors, contributors to the charitable organizations, and people praying, consoling and sending messages from across the world.

Cardinal O’Malley in his reflection focused on one of those goods for which we need to thank God. He said that the tragedy had “brought us together as a community like nothing else ever could,” shaking us out of our “complacency and indifference … to focus on the task of building a civilization based on love, justice, truth and service.”

Either we build a civilization of love, he stressed, or eventually there will be no civilization at all.

That’s going to require all of us to overcome the temptation to remain a “crowd … of self-absorbed individuals, each one focused on his or her own interests in competition with the conflicting projects of others,” because we cannot “repair our broken world … as a collection of individuals; we can only do it together, as a community, as a family.”

Just like the first patriots on Patriots’ Day in 1775 were willing to lay down their lives for the common good, so, he challenged, all of us are called to lay down our lives to promote a “culture of life, a profound respect for each and every human being made in the image and likeness of God.”

This was far more than a reminder to a pro-abortion president and governor about the root cause of so much of the violence in our world, that when we say certain human beings should have the right to determine whether other innocent human beings should live or die, eventually we can get some disturbed individuals like the Tsarnaev brothers acting on that principle to murder and maim innocents at a marathon finish line.

It was a reminder to everyone that our goal as a civilization cannot be simply to have more Homeland Security Agents checking every barrel and backpack in the country and security cameras on every corner and at every event to spot the bad guys before they do harm.

The goal has got to be to have a culture that can prevent young and old from becoming bad guys in the first place.

For that nearly impossible task, we need God. We need not only God’s help, but we need God in people’s lives.

We need a God Who will help make us all — in the words of St. Francis of Assisi with which Cardinal O’Malley finished his reflection — instruments of His peace, strengthening us to sow love instead of the hatred of terrorism and vengeance, forgiveness instead of injury, hope rather than despair, joy instead of sadness, and faith instead of doubt.

Boston was strongest last week when we came together to pray.

We will become stronger still, if we, with typical Boston hospitality, welcome God into our lives, keep praying, and become those instruments of peace.

Every Easter Week since 2005 I’ve been organizing a Seminar for Priests at the beautiful Arnold Hall Conference and Retreat Center in Pembroke.

It’s a great opportunity for priests to escape after the exhausting and exhilarating work of Holy Week, to rejoice in the Resurrection with brother priests, to review important aspects of priestly life, to rejuvenate, rest, relax and recreate.

Normally I email out fliers in January and over the next couple of months 40 or 50 priests gradually sign up to participate. This year, however, I was in for an enormous surprise.

I sent out the fliers on January 2 and within two weeks we had already exceeded our capacity of 63 and soon had a waiting list of almost 20 others, including not only from the northeast who regularly attend but also many first-timers from Texas, Michigan, Kentucky, and various parts of Canada, including an archbishop. Many of the regulars who were accustomed to inscribe casually in February or March found themselves on the outside looking in.

I would love to say that the draw was the fruit of a growing reputation of the seminar for faith-filled fun and fraternity, but that seemed to play only a minor role. The major reason is something that I think will hearten many lay people: it was the theme of this year’s seminar, “The Ars Praedicandi: Learning from the Masters the Art of Faithfully and Effectively Preaching Christ.”

Priests were coming to try to learn how they could preach better by studying some of the greatest homilists who have ever preached: St. Augustine, Blessed Cardinal Newman, Father Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, Msgr. Ronald Knox, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, and Pope Benedict XVI.

It’s clear that Catholic preaching needs work. A recent survey by the National Opinion Research Center showed that only 18 percent of Catholic lay people rated preaching by Catholic clergy as “excellent,” half the rate at which Protestants evaluate their own ministers.

The Church universal recognizes that there’s a problem. Pope Benedict, in his exhortations on the Eucharist in 2006 and on the Word of God in 2010, wrote, “Given the importance of the word of God, the quality of homilies needs to be improved.” He went on to emphasize, “The art of preaching… needs to be cultivated.”

Benedict’s call for a renewal of Catholic homiletics led the U.S. Bishops to publish last November a document entitled “Preaching the Mystery of Faith,” to try to bring about that improvement in bishops, priests and deacons across the country.

“In survey after survey over the past years,” the bishops wrote, “the People of God have called for more powerful and inspiring preaching. A steady diet of tepid or poorly prepared homilies is often cited as a cause for discouragement on the part of laity and even leading some to turn away from the Church … at a time when living an authentic Christian life leads to complex challenges, people need to be nourished all the more by the truth and guidance of their Catholic faith.”

They emphasized that acquiring the art of good preaching is a “life-long and demanding process,” involving not only the remote preparation of prayer, study of the Scriptures, getting to know the people they serve and the development of good public speaking skills, but also workshops and opportunities for supervised practice and training.

We hoped in the seminar to provide a workshop along the lines of what the bishops were asking. The immediate turnout gave evidence that many priests are hungry to improve.

Most priests admit that we have not received adequate formation in the art of preaching. Many of us were trained in what I’d describe as “most common practices” rather than “best practices.” We were told what most priests do, rather than schooled in what the great preachers do. That has in general led to lower expectations that, even when they’re met, leave people undernourished and uninspired.

One of the most common examples of this confusion between “most common” and “best” practices is about the length of homilies. Catholic priests and deacons in the U.S. have generally been trained to keep a homily to no more than 12 minutes, … or 10, … or seven, … or even shorter — with the supposed justification that that’s the limit of most Americans’ attention span today.

But such advice presumes that Catholic lay people are, well, dumb.

It presumes that they don’t have the intelligence that evangelical Protestants have, who — even though they generally go to many of the same schools growing up, listen to the same music, watch the same television programs as most Catholics —somehow are able to listen to their ministers on Sunday for 45 minutes or more.

It presumes that Catholic lay people today don’t have the same intelligence as Catholics did in the early Church, when they would listen to preachers for more than an hour.

It presumes that typical Catholic lay people today, many of whom have been able to go on to college and have listened to lengthy lectures for years, are not as capable of concentration as recent immigrants who didn’t have the privilege of attending high school but who are nevertheless able to listen to untrained preachers in uncomfortable chairs in store front churches for far longer than a half hour.

I, personally, am convinced that all these presumptions are false. Catholic lay people have a short attention span only for uninspiring, unchallenging, insufficiently prepared homilies that can’t rivet and ignite them the way typical Evangelical, Patristic and Pentecostal homilies have gripped their respective auditors.

There are many other such common practices that aren’t “best” or even good.

The seminar was entitled “The Art of Preaching,” because homiletics is an art — involving some God-given talent, hard work, and inspiration from above — and not merely a method or a technique.

Just as in the training of any other art, like painting or playing the piano, it’s key to learn from the masters.

We won’t learn much about painting if we just study what the other kids are doing in kindergarten finger-painting class. We won’t be booking dates at Symphony Hall if our musical instruction just involves listening to the noise the other students are making on colored xylophones. We need to study Murillo and Mozart.

So to learn the art of preaching, it’s important for homilists to learn from the masters, those who show how this integration of inspiration, hard work and talent ought to work.

We examined St. Augustine, the great classical rhetorician who not only remains one of the greatest ever to enter the pulpit but whose “On Christian Doctrine” trained not just his contemporaries but centuries of preachers on how to preach well.

We studied Newman, because he instructs how to profit from, and incorporate, the wisdom, images and Scriptural insights of the Church Fathers.

We pondered Lacordaire, because his preaching not only packed Notre Dame in Paris and helped to restore the faith throughout France after the terror and programming of the French Revolution, but gives us a paradigm to preach powerfully about sensitive political areas, like religious freedom.

We chose Knox, the famous translator of the Vulgate Bible into English, because he shows all preachers how to translate the Word of God effectively into the lives of their people.

We considered Sheen, the most famous Catholic preacher in U.S. history, both because he models for American bishops, priests and deacons how to integrate the fonts of the faith with the daily newspaper, but shows indisputably the possibility and impact of great Catholic preachers in our country.

And we contemplated Benedict XVI, whose brilliant, deep, and accessible homilies have been justly compared to those of St. Leo the Great and which likely will continue to be read and bear fruit in centuries.

The priest’s fundamental duty, the Second Vatican Council taught, is “to proclaim the Gospel of God to all.” For the renewal of the Church, one of the most important requirements is to improve preachers’ fulfillment of this responsibility.

This is something on which the popes, U.S. bishops, and Catholic laity all strongly agree.

And this is something for which last week’s seminar was hopefully a step in the right direction.

2013, Column, Putting into the Deep, The Anchor

Both before and after the election of Pope Francis, there has been much talk about the reform of the Vatican. Francis gave some witness that reform was on the mind of the cardinals who elected him when he joked with journalists on March 16 that some had suggested he take the name “Adrian” after Adrian VI, a pope who ferociously reformed the Church’s central administration after the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

But the reform that Francis seems intent on carrying out will be much broader than a reform of the Vatican curia. What needs to be fixed in the Vatican, he recognizes, is just one symptom of a much larger problem plaguing the Church as a whole.

To re-form means to bring something back into the shape it ought to have and Francis is already at work, in his words and in his personal witness, at trying to lead that much more important, and widespread, renewal.

Four days before his election, he gave an address in the cardinals’ general congregation meetings that several of them noted totally changed the dynamics of the conclave. It got many of them to think that not only this cardinal “from the end of the earth” diagnosed profoundly the fundamental corruption afflicting the Church but also had the vision and the passion to lead the Church back to shape.

What did he say was the reform the Church most needed? Thanks to the work of Cardinal Jaime Ortega of Havana, we know. The Cuban cardinal was so impressed by what Cardinal Bergoglio had said that he asked if he could have a copy of his address. Cardinal Bergoglio replied that he had spoken without notes and apologized for having nothing to give him.

During the night, however, Cardinal Bergoglio decided to write out for his confrère what he had said earlier — clearly a sign of his charity — and gave the hand-written copy to a grateful Cardinal Ortega when he saw him in the morning. Cardinal Ortega asked if he could have it published, and the Argentine prelate consented. A few days later, after Pope Francis’ election, Cardinal Ortega asked him the same question again, now that they had obviously taken on larger significance. Pope Francis agreed and the handwritten sheets were published in Palabra Nueva, the Catholic magazine of the Archdiocese of Havana.

Cardinal Bergoglio told the cardinals that the Church exists and is impelled by Jesus to evangelize, to come out of herself and go to the ends of the earth — not just geographically but also to those at the periphery of existence, who are alienated from God and others through sin, pain, injustice, ignorance, ideology, material and spiritual poverty, and other types of misery.

When those in the Church lose this “apostolic zeal,” when the Church doesn’t come out of herself to bring Christ to others, she becomes self-referential and sick. “The evils that over the course of time happen in ecclesial institutions,” he said, “have their root in a self-reference and a sort of theological narcissism. The self-referent Church keeps Jesus Christ within herself and does not let Him come out.”

The chief corruption of the Church, he underlined, happens when she becomes narcissistic, when she starts looking at herself rather than looking toward God and toward others Jesus came from Heaven and died to save.

We saw this corruption among the Apostles who on several occasions began to focus on jockeying for position in an earthly kingdom they presumed Jesus had come to inaugurate rather than on denying themselves, picking up their cross and follow Jesus to all those on the periphery.

We’ve seen it throughout Church history when some have fought more for benefices and sinecures than for the towel to wash others’ feet.

We see it in certain segments of the Roman Curia when high-ranking prelates use their positions to try to find spots to advance the career of friends.

And we see it in Church institutions — dioceses, parishes, schools, hospitals, charities — that begin to focus all of their efforts on those who are already coming, rather than getting outside of themselves to serve all those for whom Jesus gave His life.

“When the Church is self-referent without realizing it,” Cardinal Bergoglio went on to say, “she believes she has her own light. She ceases to be the mysterium lunae and gives way to that very great evil which is spiritual worldliness (which according to [the great 20th-century theologian Cardinal Henri] De Lubac, is the worst evil that can come upon the Church). The self-referent Church lives to give glory only to one another.”

Several fathers of the early Church used to refer to the Church as the mysterium lunae, the “mystery of the moon,” because the Church was called to reflect the light of Christ in the same way that the moon is illuminated by reflecting the light of the sun.

Cardinal Bergoglio was saying that when the Church becomes corrupt, spiritually worldly and in need of reform, those in the Church begin to think that the Church gives off her own light, rather than is meant to reflect Christ. The Church ceases to some extent to think, speak, behave and love like Christ, but rather begins to think and speak of herself, as if she is an end in herself. From the parish level to the Vatican Curia, she begins to focus more on her institutional make-up than her Founder, Origin, Guide and Goal.

The fundamental choice that the Church must make, he said, is whether we are going to be an “evangelizing Church that comes out of herself,” hearing the Word of God and faithfully proclaiming it, or a “worldly Church that lives within herself, of herself, for herself.” That distinction — and the importance of choosing the former —“must give light to the possible changes and reforms that must be made for the salvation of souls.”

He then gave what he believed were the essential job qualifications for the next pope, qualities that the other cardinals evidently thought he met: “The next pope,” he declared, must be a man who “from the contemplation of Jesus Christ and from worshiping Jesus Christ will help the Church get out of herself and go to those on the outskirts of existence.”

That is what Pope Francis has been trying to do, going from his intense relationship with Christ out to those on the periphery, kissing children and the handicapped, washing the feet of incarcerated teens, wading into the crowds, paying his own bills, calling the man who used to deliver his newspaper and so many other similar actions.

He’s also been refusing to allow the Church he’s now been summoned to lead to be self-referential and narcissistically boxed in by “small-t” traditions of what clothes and shoes the pope wears, the place where he lives or celebrates Mass, the people whose feet he bathes, the schedule he keeps and the people he meets.

The fundamental corruption of the Vatican curia, where it exists, is not about butlers’ stealing papal documents, questionable financial practices, lavender mafias, or bureaucratic inefficiency. It’s about focusing too much on self-referential institutional concerns and too little on having all parts of the institution participate fully in the Church’s evangelical mission, in reflecting Christ’s light to illumine a world walking in darkness.

Pope Francis is seeking to lead the entire Church — not only priests and curial officials, but the faithful everywhere — on a spiritual exodus.

“It’s key that we Catholics, both clergy and laity, go out to meet the people,” he stressed in the 2010 book-length interview, El Jesuita. This is “not only because the Church’s mission is to announce the Gospel, but because failing to do so harms us. A Church that limits herself to administering parish work, that lives enclosed within a community, experiences what someone in prison does: physical and mental atrophy.” A Church that merely protects its small flock, that gives all or most of its attention to its faithful clientele, he believes, “is a Church that is sick.”

He’s made the diagnosis and given the prescription the Church needs. Now it’s time for the entire Church to take the medicine that will bring us back to health so that we can go out as ministers of the Divine Physician to heal the world.

On Sunday, Pope Francis in his Easter greeting before his solemn blessing for the city and the world (Urbi et Orbi), said that greatest Easter wish would be for “every heart” to recognize that “Jesus is risen, there is hope for you, you are no longer in the power of sin, of evil! Love has triumphed, mercy has been victorious! The mercy of God always triumphs!”

His choice of saying “every heart,” rather than“every mind,” was intentional. Many might recognize this truth intellectually, but they may not yet truly embrace it; and they have to grasp it with their heart to experience the true joy of the resurrection that Jesus wants to give us.

Francis invited everyone to “accept the grace of Christ’s Resurrection,” and then defined that grace as the transformation that occurs when we receive God’s mercy in our hearts so deeply that we begin to share it: “Let us be renewed by God’s mercy, let us be loved by Jesus, let us enable the power of His love to transform our lives, too; and let us become agents of this mercy.”

These are powerful words as we approach Divine Mercy Sunday as the culmination of the Easter Octave on Sunday.

This connection between Easter and the assimilation and sharing of God’s mercy Jesus Himself will underline at Mass on Sunday in the Gospel we’ll hear.

Jesus’ first act upon appearing to His Apostles was to wish them peace and then make them capable of bringing peace between God and human beings out to the world. “Just as the Father sent Me, so I send you,” He declared, and we know that the Father sent Jesus into the world as the Lamb of God to take away the world’s sins. He breathed on them the power of the Holy Spirit — since only God can forgive sins — and said, “Those whose sins you forgive are forgiven; those whose sins you retain are retained,” setting up the essential structure of the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation. The only way the Apostles, their successors and their priest collaborators would know which sins to forgive and retain would be if people told them their sins.

Jesus did this all on Easter Sunday night because the way we experience His Resurrection is through Reconciliation. He emphasized this connection in the Parable of the Prodigal Son when the father said: “My son was dead and has come back to life again.” Every Reconciliation, therefore, is meant to be a resurrection.

That’s why it’s so fitting that Divine Mercy Sunday be the exclamation point on the joy of the Easter Octave.

One of the reasons why, I believe, that Divine Mercy is not just another devotion, is because it is essential for the true joy and reality of Easter to penetrate our hearts and for us to relate to the Lord as He desires and deserves to be loved.

It wasn’t enough in the 12th and 13th centuries, for example, for the truth about the Real Presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist to be grasped intellectually. Jesus desired that this reality pass from our heads, to our hearts to our knees, and through Blessed Juliana of Liège, Father Peter of Prague, St. Thomas Aquinas and other instruments, brought about true Eucharistic piety and appreciation for Christ in what He would later call the “Sacrament of love.” The feast of Corpus Christi, Eucharistic adoration, 40-hour devotions and other practices were all born from this desire of the Lord, not because He was a hypersensitive narcissist who wanted our attention and appreciation — far from it! — but because He wanted to transform and bless us through our taking His real presence seriously.

He did the same thing with His mercy, first through stimulating devotion to His Sacred Heart and then, in the 1930s, through His apparitions to St. Faustina Kowalska, asking her to bring to the world His desire for us to recognize our need for His mercy, come to receive it in the way He established, and, having been transformed by it, begin to share it with others.

In a world with so much unexpiated guilt leading to ceaseless cycles of violence, vengeance, hatred, and interpersonal and international wars, Jesus candidly declared that the world will not have peace until it turns to receive and share His mercy. Jesus established five practices by which we could grow in love of Him as Mercy Incarnate. These are practices that are destined to lead not only to personal renewal, but parochial and ecclesial renewal — and through ecclesial renewal, to bring about the renewal of the world.

The type of renewal by God’s mercy that Pope Francis talked about on Sunday in St. Peter’s Square has been one of the central ideas of his approach to the faith throughout his life.

We examined last week how he discovered his own vocation as a 16-year-old boy through his experience of God’s mercy in the confessional and how, through his motto “Miserando atque Eligendo,” he is announcing to the world that the Lord chooses us to be His disciples precisely through looking at us with a glance of loving mercy.

An authentically Christian discipleship begins with our recognition that we’re sinners in need of salvation and the concomitant experience that that Savior looks on us with merciful love.

“For me, feeling oneself a sinner is one of the most beautiful things that can happen, if it leads to its ultimate consequences” the future Pope Francis said in a 2010 book length interview, “El Jesuita.” At the Easter Vigil, he says, we sing “O Felix culpa,” exulting in the “happy sin” that brought us to experience the love of the Redeemer. “When a person becomes conscious that he is a sinner and is saved by Jesus, he proclaims this truth to himself and discovers the pearl of great price, the treasure buried in the field. He discovers the greatest thing in life: that there is someone Who loves him profoundly, Who gave His life for him.”

Many Catholics have sadly not had this fundamental Christian experience, he lamented. “There are people who believe the right things, who have received catechesis and accepted the Christian faith in some way, but who do not have the experience of having been saved.”

He then gave a powerful metaphor of what the authentic experience of God’s mercy is like. “It’s one thing when people tell us a story about someone risking his life to save a boy drowning in the river. It’s something else when I’m the one drowning and Someone gives His life to save me.”

That’s what Christ did for us to save us from the eternal watery grave of the deluge of sin, a truth we celebrate with jubilation on Divine Mercy Sunday. That’s what we should celebrate every day of our life, just like someone whose life has been saved by a hero would never be able to forget his Savior or thank Him enough.

Unfortunately, he said, “There are people to whom you tell the story who don’t see it, who don’t want to see, who don’t want to know what happened to that boy, who always have escape hatches from the situation of drowning and who therefore lack the experience of who they are. I believe that only we great sinners have this grace.”

The experience of God’s mercy — which the Divine Mercy devotion fosters — helps us to experience who we really are: Unless we see ourselves as great sinners rescued by the merciful, life-giving love of our Savior, we don’t yet grasp who God is, who we are, and how to have life to the full.

The future pope defined himself in “El Jesuita” as a “sinner who has been loved by the mercy of God in a privileged way.” And he’s seeking to help us all to see ourselves through the same lenses.

That’s the path to our living our faith with as much joy and self-giving as we’ve all been marveling to see in Francis.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the biography of our Pope Francis is when and how he discovered his priestly vocation. It’s a mystery worth pondering deeply on this Good Friday.

Jorge Bergoglio was a 16-year-old boy planning to go out to celebrate with friends on Students Day, an Argentine national holiday, which is always held on the first day of spring, September 21, in the southern hemisphere.

In the Church’s liturgical calendar, however, September 21 is the feast of St. Matthew, the once despicable tax collector who was shockingly called by the Lord to become one of His Apostles, and who in response to his own call summoned others who were spiritually sick to experience the same healing from the Divine Physician he himself had received.

Jorge decided to start the holiday by going to pray at his parish Church of St. Joseph. When he arrived, he saw a priest he didn’t know but who gave off a strong impression of holiness. He decided to approach him for the Sacrament of Penance. The need to confess may have been the reason this teen-ager had wanted to go to church that Monday morning in the first place.

We don’t know what he confessed to the priest or what the priest said to him in response. But we do know that that Confession totally changed not only Jorge Bergoglio’s day but the trajectory of his whole existence.

Reminiscing 57 years later in “El Jesuita,” a 2010 book-length interview, the future pope said, “In that Confession, something very rare happened to me. I don’t know what it was, but it changed my life. I would say that I was caught with my guard down. It was a surprise, the astonishment of an encounter. I realized that God was waiting for me. From that moment for me, God has been the One Who acts first. One is searching for Him but He is looking for you first.”

During that Sacramental conversation with the priest, he realized that that the merciful God Who had been waiting for him and Who had come to meet him through the priest’s ministrations was calling him to be a priest. After the profound encounter with the Hound of Heaven — the same One Who had once invaded St. Matthew’s life and called him to leave his ill-gained money on the table and come follow Him — Jorge decided not to go to the train station to meet his friends, but to return home, pondering the mystery and meaning of his call.

The new pope still retains in his breviary a lengthy personal credo he wrote during a spiritually intense moment before his priestly ordination, in one of the articles of which he states, “I believe in my history, which was pierced by the God’s look of love and, on the first day of spring, September 21, He came to meet me and invited me to follow Him.”

While we don’t know for sure any of the details of that conversation between Christ and His future vicar on earth through the in persona Christi ministrations of the confessor, we can deduce a lot from the motto that Jorge Bergoglio chose for his episcopacy and now his papacy: “Miserando atque Eligendo.”

It comes from a commentary by St. Bede the Venerable on Christ’s call of Matthew, which is read by priests across the world every year on September 21 in the Office of Readings. St. Bede wrote, “Vidit publicánum et, quia miserándo atque eligéndo vidit, ait illi: Séquere me,” which is translated, “He saw the tax collector and, because He saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him, He said to him: “Follow Me.’”

It’s quite possible that the priest hearing Jorge Bergoglio’s Confession might have mentioned to him St. Bede’s insight that just as the Lord looked at Matthew with mercy and called him, so He might be looking at Jorge with the same piercing look of merciful love and choosing him in the same way.

It’s quite often that young people think that because they’re sinners, they cannot possibly have the call to be a priest. As we see in the life of SS. Matthew, Peter, Paul, Augustine and so many others, however, the Lord often calls not despite one’s sins but precisely because of them. This is so that, having been transfixed by the Lord’s mercy, they might be capable of ministering that same life-changing merciful glance to others.

It’s certainly possible that during that Confession, after Jorge Bergoglio contritely confessed his sins, the gentle confessor mentioned to him that the whole experience of humbly confessing his sins might be part of God’s larger plan to help form him to be a tender, merciful confessor of others one day.

Regardless, over the years as he looked back at the experience and marked each year the anniversary of his calling, he pondered St. Bede’s insight about the connection between God’s mercy and call. He likely saw an autobiographical application to the seventh-century English saint’s words, “By an invisible, interior impulse flooding his mind with the light of grace, he taught him to walk in His footsteps.”

He also probably discovered the path of his future priestly apostolate in St. Bede’s commentary of how Matthew responded to his vocation. “This conversion of one tax collector gave many men, those from his own profession and other sinners, an example of repentance and pardon. No sooner was he converted than Matthew drew after him a whole crowd of sinners along the same road to salvation.”

On the first Sunday of his papal ministry, Pope Francis called far more people to God’s mercy than any party St. Matthew had ever thrown with Christ as the guest of honor. In his homily at the Vatican’s parish church of St. Anne and in his Angelus meditation from his study window before a crowd of 300,000, he stressed what he discovered back on Sept. 21, 1953.

“The Lord never tires of forgiving: never! It is we who tire of asking for His forgiveness. Let us ask for the grace never to tire of asking for forgiveness, because God never tires of giving His forgiveness,” he said at the end of his homily.

As the exclamation of his Angelus meditation, after repeating those words from his homily, he exhorted us: “Let us never tire, let us never tire! He is the loving Father Who always pardons, Who has that heart of mercy for us all. And let us too learn how to be merciful to everyone.”

On this Good Friday, this theme of mercy ought to be very much before us. The Lamb of God was slain precisely in order to take away the sins of the world, and it’s in this act of receiving this forgiveness that we discover our true vocation, miserando atque eligendo. Christ came to call sinners and our vocation is found in responding to and living in accordance with that offer of mercy.

We see that most powerfully in the story of Dismas, the good thief. He heard the crucified man to his left, as his torturers were hammering his limbs to the cross, cry out not in pain or in complaint but shockingly in prayer for mercy: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do!”

It pierced him to the heart and provided a sort of summons that led him in faith to ask to steal Heaven.

“Jesus,” he said, “Remember me when You come into Your Kingdom.” And Jesus looked at him with a piercing glance of merciful love and revealed to him the most sublime vocation of all: “Truly I tell you today, you will be with Me in Paradise!”

Today is a day in which we all should ask for what the good thief begged.

And helped by our new Holy Father to recognize that the Lord Jesus is always miserando atque eligendo, let us recognize that in dying for us today and crying to the Father for mercy on our behalf, He was likewise calling us to Himself, like Matthew and Francis, to receive that forgiveness and bring others to experience it, too.

Most of us in Rome to cover the papal conclave and inauguration are still getting over the shock at Pope Francis’ election. We thought that it was certainly possible, if the conclave dragged on and a compromise candidate was needed, the very well-respected Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, who seems to have been the runner-up to Pope Benedict in the last conclave, might be chosen.

When the white smoke went up last Tuesday after only five ballots, few of the hundred thousand pilgrims who had assembled in St. Peter’s Square were anticipating that after Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran said the famous words, “Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum, habemus papam!,” he was about to mention, “Reverendissiumum Dominum, Dominum Georgium Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem Bergoglio.”

A stunned silence hit the crowd. Everyone began asking, “Who?” They were expecting to hear “Angelum … Scola” or “Marcum … Ouellette,” and the majority of Italians — not to mention Americans — were hoping for “Joannem … O’Malley” or “Timotheum … Dolan.”

Even though many in the crowd were happy when they heard the new pontiff had taken the name Francis, there was a notable depression among the multitudes. Rather than the excited cheering, singing and rejoicing that awaited Pope Benedict’s coming out on the loggia in 2005, the crowd was subdued, similar to what happens in a football stadium when the home team is losing big in the fourth quarter.

The situation got worse when the new Holy Father finally came out on the balcony. He just stood there, staring downward, saying nothing, almost looking like he was about to cry. One of the Italians behind me blurted, “He looks so sad.” I knew from the homework I had done on all the cardinals for the EWTN broadcasts that some said he seldom smiled. I was afraid that they were right. I was a little worried for the future.

But when they placed a microphone before him, everything changed. He came totally alive. He smiled with a smile as big as Bernini’s colonnade. “Buona Sera!,” he said resoundingly— and it was a “good evening” indeed, one of the most memorable of all our lives.

Like a spiritual father, he then led us in prayer, the simple prayers every Catholic knows: an Our Father, Hail Mary and Glory Be in gratitude to the Lord for the papacy of Pope Benedict. He prayed each of them with such a piety and passion that there wasn’t a dry eye around me.

But then it got even more moving. Before giving us his first solemn “urbi et orbi” blessing — a benediction “for the city and the world” — he asked all of us to do him a favor: to pray to the Lord to bless him first. He asked for silence. Then he bowed down profoundly to receive the blessing of Almighty God.

At first we all looked around at each other incredulous and wondered what was happening. But seeing him bent over on the large screens, all of us just bowed our heads and prayed. At various of the television networks, those who didn’t know what was happening were scrambling, thinking that they had lost their audio feed — for you could have heard a feather drop in a square filled with more than 100,000 people.

And after his blessing, he asked us never to stop praying for him, that the Lord will continue to bless him so that through him the Lord can bless us all.

And it’s obvious to me that those prayers are working.

I hope in subsequent weeks in this column to explore the thought of the man who became Pope Francis. Since his election I’ve been reading his homilies, letters, articles, and a book-length interview with him. It’s a gold mine of spiritual wisdom that has not yet been translated into English that will nourish us all.

Today, however, I’d like to share with you three first impressions.

Above all, the cardinals have elected someone who is pre-eminently a pastor, not a professor. On my first night in Rome, I had dinner with the other members of Raymond Arroyo’s “conclave crew” and “papal panel.” Teammate Robert Royal provocatively asked whether we needed another teaching pope. He was grateful, he said, for the teaching treasure bequeathed to us by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, building on the documents of the Second Vatican Council, but added that he believes that what the Church needs most is a pope who helps us to learn and live that rich teaching.

I think that’s the type of pope God has given us. In his initial days, Pope Francis has been modeling for us — in his homilies without notes, in his departures from his written addresses, in his body language — what the assimilation of that teaching means.

My second impression is that he was elected by the cardinals to reform not just the Vatican but the entire Church. And the ways he’s going to carry out that reform is much more profound than most analysts and perhaps even cardinals foresaw.

When Jesus from the cross of San Damiano summoned St. Francis to rebuild his Church, Francis originally thought that the Lord was requesting the reconstruction of that tiny dilapidated church. Actually, the Lord had a much bigger construction project in mind: rebuilding the Church as a whole, which is made not out of marble, wood, bricks and glass, but men, women, boys and girls — living stones, built on the holy cornerstone of Christ.

Likewise, the reforms the cardinals and Pope Francis are hoping to implement are more than just of the Vatican. Reform means to “bring into shape again” and it’s far more than the papal court that needs to shape up. We all need to convert. We all need to turn with our whole heart to the God Who never tires of giving us His love and mercy.

In his first homily as pope, he called us all to a three-fold renewal. Speaking to the cardinals in the Sistine Chapel from a make-shift pulpit in the colloquial form of parish priests, he said that the Lord is calling us to follow him in a three-fold interior and exterior exodus:

First, to walk by faith in the light of Christ’s presence and teachings. Many who say they believe in Jesus don’t really act on His words. Pope Francis is summoning everyone, beginning with the cardinals, to this Christian integrity.

Second, to build up the Church by becoming strong, consistent, living stones who build their whole lives on Christ. Many erect only sand-castles, the pope said, that can’t resist the tides. Beginning with himself, he was calling all of us to build our lives on rock.

Third, to confess Jesus Christ as our first and supreme act of love toward others. Many view the Church basically as a philanthropic organization that runs schools, hospitals, and pantries. Francis is calling all believers to care for others’ deepest desires, wounds, and hungers by bringing them to Jesus the Teacher, Physician, and Living Bread.

In seven minutes, he proposed a simple three-point plan for the beginning of the renewal and reform of the Church he was elected to carry out — humbly hoping that all members of the Church, from the cardinals to you and me, will walk, build and confess together with him.

My final initial observation is how natural, funny and joyous our Pope Francis is.

Contrary to the reports that he seldom smiles, he almost hasn’t stopped smiling since his election. Not only is he obviously comfortable in his black shoes and white cassock, but he seems to be loving what he’s been asked to do: to guide us all in the joy-filled journey, the beautiful building up of the Church, and the contagious Confession of Christ, which is the path of the Church’s reform.

I was really honored when Raymond Arroyo of EWTN asked me to come to Rome to do television commentary for the papal conclave. The week since I’ve arrived has been one of the most enjoyable and exhilarating experiences of my life.

As a Catholic disciple, it’s a privilege to be in Rome when a new pope comes out on the loggia della benedizione.

As a priest apostle, it’s an even greater joy to make the beautiful teachings of the Church and the intricate procedures of electing a pope intelligible to Catholics and non-Catholics back home. It’s an occasion to synthesize my experience covering Catholic news with all I learned about Church history and the popes during my years as a guide here.

It’s also an opportunity not only to meet cardinals and Church leaders, but also to get to know and befriend members of the media — national, international and local, secular and Catholic — helping them, I hope, to understand better what they’re covering and transmit it with greater accuracy to people who depend on them for the truth.

But by far the greatest experience here — one, frankly, that I wasn’t expecting to be so powerful — has been the opportunity to celebrate Mass each morning in St. Peter’s for whoever the new Holy Father will be.

I’m quite familiar with celebrating Mass at St. Peter’s. During my first year as a priest, when I had returned to Rome to complete graduate studies, I celebrated Mass 106 times at various altars in the basilica. Every time I’ve visited since, leading pilgrimages or participating in Vatican conferences, I have celebrated Mass inside the basilica most days.

It’s always a joy and something to which I really look forward. At seven in the morning when it opens, St. Peter’s Basilica is what it always ought to be, a house of prayer, rather than the holy, beautiful museum into which it gets transformed once the thousands of tourists arrive with their cameras and guides after nine. It’s a beautiful time to pray the Mass, to make my thanksgiving and pray my breviary in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel, and even to walk around the basilica praying the Rosary.

But this time celebrating Mass in the basilica has been different.

The first difference is the sense of Liturgical deprivation when I get to the part of the Mass when we pray in communion with the Church. Beginning March 1 back home, I had already begun to feel like a spiritual orphan when I got to the part of the Mass in which, every day for the previous 2,873 days I had prayed “for Benedict our pope.” But it’s even more magnified here, where the pope is also Bishop of Rome; priests have to omit even prayers for the bishop. There’s a huge hole where two of the most important relationships for a Catholic ought to be accentuated.

At the same, however, because I’ve been celebrating at St. Peter’s, I haven’t felt totally pope-less. St. Peter’s tomb is here. Blessed John Paul II’s tomb is here. In fact, 148 of the 265 popes are buried at St. Peter’s. As I have prayed the Mass Pro Eligendo Pontifice (Mass for Electing the Pope), I have found that my bond with the first pope and all his successors has been growing as I pray with them for whoever will soon become their successor.

It was special for me to celebrate Mass at the altars over the mortal remains of St. Leo the Great (440-461), St. Gregory the Great (590-604) and St. Pius X (1903-1914) as I’ve asked them to do all they can to influence the outcome of the conclave and get us a pope who will share their virtues. I’ve prayed for long periods of time before the altars enclosing the remains of Blessed John Paul II and Blessed John XXIII, that the new Vicar of Christ may have, respectively, their courage and joy.

One morning when the basilica was particularly quiet, I went slowly around the upstairs basilica and downstairs crypt praying at the various altars and sarcophagi where popes are entombed, asking for their intercession for the one who will soon be numbered among them.

I visited and prayed through the intercession of John Paul I and Paul VI; Pius III, VI, VII, VIII, XI and XII; Gregory V, XIII and XIV; Benedict XIV and XV; Innocent VII, VIII, IX and XI; Clement X and XIII; Urban VI and VIII, Paul II and III; Hadrian IV and Marcellus II; Alexander VII and VIII; and Leo XI, Nicholas V, Julius III and Boniface VIII. I also prayed on top of the entrance to the polyandrium underneath the grotto that contains the relics of the vast majority of the other popes who don’t have tombs in the present basilica.

It was a powerful walk through history as I remembered what I had once studied about them and used my “pope app” on my iPhone to recall details I had forgotten. Most of them had been elected in conclaves similar to the one occurring this week and they would all be able to relate to what the cardinals would be feeling as they participated, with the weight of history on their shoulders, but also counting on the help of God.

But it hasn’t just been the popes I have been pondering, but also the teaching of the papacy that has been enshrined in art and architecture within the basilica. I’ll mention two particularly evocative images.

The first is the famous Altar of the Chair at the back of the basilica. Enshrined by Bernini within a bronze sculpture that gave rise to the Baroque era in art is a chair that in the 1600s was believed to have been the very chair on which St. Peter used to sit to teach the Christians of Rome. The chair symbolizes the teaching authority of Peter, where it comes from, what it does, and what the relationship needs to be of all of us with it.

Where it comes from: above the chair hovers the famous alabaster sculpture of the Holy Spirit, indicating that it’s the Holy Spirit Who continues to guide the successor of Peter and the Church united with him to the truth.

What it does: in a bas relief on the front-facing part of the “back” of the chair is depicted Peter feeding Christ’s sheep and lambs, as Jesus commanded Peter to do after the Resurrection as a fruit of Peter’s love for Him. That’s precisely what happens when Peter teaches: he nourishes Christ’s flock.

What the relationship we’re all called to have with the teaching authority of each pope: at the bottom of the chair are four bishop-doctors of the Church, two from the East and two from the West, shown pointing toward the chair in a gesture of upholding it, but without actually touching it. This points to their communion — together with the people entrusted to them — with the papal magisterium and their prayer sustaining it.

The other image is at the front of the basilica.

Immediately over the main entrance, there is a sculpture of the Divine foundation of papacy, Jesus’ handing the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. But in counterpoint on the inside of that same door is the very human reality: a mosaic showing Peter’s sinking in the Sea of Galilee after he took his eyes off of Christ as he was walking on water.

This latter image, the last thing pilgrims would see as they were exiting the basilica, is a forceful reminder to pray for the pope: as long as he keeps his eyes on Christ, he can do great things; but, even though he has the keys of the Kingdom, if he takes his eyes off of Christ and takes account of the winds, he will sink, as some notorious popes have.

That’s a sign for all of us of the need to pray for our new pope, that he may keep his eyes on the Lord and help all of us to do the same.

Just before the Year of Faith began, Benedict XVI, through his Apostolic Penitentiary in the Vatican, published a list of plenary indulgences that Catholics could receive throughout this Holy Year. Plenary indulgences are traditionally given to incentivize actions that will help the faithful grow in faith and love. These indulgences can eliminate the temporal punishment due to sin and can be sought for oneself or for a deceased loved one. Because they are meant to bring someone into total communion with Christ, the indulgenced actions must be united to a good Sacramental Confession with true repentance for all of the sins one had committed, to the worthy reception of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, and to prayers for Christ’s vicar on earth, the pope.

For the Year of Faith, Pope Benedict awarded plenary indulgences for attending three days of a mission, like what is occurring in may of the deaneries and parishes throughout the diocese, or three lectures on the “Catechism” or Vatican II documents; going to pray in specially designated churches or in any church on days specially named by the bishop; and one that captured my imagination and resolve from the first time I read it — on any day throughout the Year of Faith, making a “pious visit to the baptistery, or other place in which they received the Sacrament of Baptism, and there renew their baptismal promises in any legitimate form.”

I thought that there was a particular fittingness to granting a plenary indulgence for making a pilgrimage to the place where one was baptized. Benedict XVI, in his letter announcing the Year of Faith, compared faith to a “door” and a “journey.” Baptism is the first and real door of faith, which is one of the reasons why in ancient churches the baptismal fonts were placed near the doors or in the courtyards before entering the church, to signify that we enter into Christ’s Body the Church through Baptism. Baptism is likewise the place where the pilgrimage of faith begins, for most of us before our legs are strong enough even to walk. Baptism is also the place where all our sins are wiped away for the first time and so there’s a particular fittingness to seeking a plenary indulgence through making a journey back to the door through which one’s pilgrimage of faith began.

I had been looking for an appropriate date to head back to St. Michael’s in Lowell. I had been planning to go on April 19, the 43rd anniversary of my Baptism, but as Lent began — with all its symbolism with regard to the preparation of catechumens for Baptism — I just didn’t want to wait any longer. So I decided to make a pilgrimage on my birthday, to thank God for the gift of my life and especially for the gift of my new life in Him. I called Father Al Capone, the pastor of my home parish who has always been so accommodating to me, and asked him if I could pray for a while in the chapel where all the Baptisms took place back in 1970 as well as before the font, since moved into the church, that made me a child of God. He was happy to welcome me home.

Praying in front of the baptismal font was particularly powerful for me. Over the course of years, I’ve often loved to pray before the baptismal fonts that were the spiritual beginnings of some great saints: the baptismal font in the Cathedral of San Rufino in Assisi where St. Francis and St. Claire were spiritually reborn; the baptismal font in the Sé of Lisbon where St. Anthony of Padua became a child of God; the pia in the parish Church of Wadowice where Blessed John Paul II began his spiritual journey. One of the reasons why I so much favor beautiful stone fonts in beautiful stone churches is because these have the best chance for longevity, for one never knows what will become of those who enter and emerge through the life-giving baptismal waters.

I thought back to the day of my Baptism and began to pray for those who were there. For my parents and my godparents. For my twin brother, who was baptized together with me. He’s often jocularly held his five-minute primogeniture from the womb over me in life, but I’ve always shot back that I was the oldest to be born from the womb of the Church. (I don’t really know who was baptized first — neither my parents nor godparents remember — but I was always pretend as if I was and my name is the first one listed in the baptismal register). I also prayed for the priest who made me a child of God, Father Richard L. Mahoney, OMI, a priest who was very old at the time of the Baptism whom I never had the chance to know, but who gave me the greatest gift of my life.

I also prayed with gratitude to God for the two occasions I have been able to return to that font to baptize my nephew Eddie and my niece and goddaughter Molly.

Baptism was the start of my ongoing pilgrimage of faith and so I reflected on the journey that began there.

It was before the side altar of the Sacred Heart, housing the tabernacle, close now to where the baptismal font is located, where I first became aware, at the age of four, that God had given me an intense desire to be a priest. It happened during daily Mass when I observed elderly Father Jon Cantwell hobble with his bad knees down the marble steps of the sanctuary to give Holy Communion to those old enough and lucky enough to receive Him, and then put Jesus back in the tabernacle right before where we were kneeling in the front row. As he genuflected in excruciating pain before Jesus as he closed the tabernacle door, the realization came to me that the priest must be the luckiest man in the world, capable of holding God in his hands and giving Him to others. It was on that day that I asked God to give me the vocation to be a priest.

It was in that church that I made my first and many other Confessions.

It was there, on May 6, 1978, that I received Jesus in Holy Communion for the first time and so many times thereafter. It was in that beautiful house of God that I became an altar boy, which allowed me to get to know several priests who had a huge impact in fostering my priestly vocation. It was at St. Michael’s that I received the power of Pentecost on May 23, 1986, from the hands of then-Bishop Alfred Hughes, the future Archbishop of New Orleans. It was there that I celebrated my third Mass, on June 29, 1999, and my first wedding — my baby sister Colleen’s — two months later. It was there that I also had the privilege to celebrate several weddings and many funerals of family members and friends in the years since.

My heart began to fill with gratitude for just how many graces God has given me there and how God has been accompanying me ever since throughout the stages of my journey of faith.

Taking in the beauty of that church, which is a tangible sign of the beauty of our faith, I finished my prayer by renewing my baptismal promises and asking God for the grace always to live in accordance with them. I returned to Fall River a new man.

I would encourage everyone to try to make a similar pilgrimage this year. If the church where you were baptized has been closed, please know that you can still receive the indulgence by visiting site of the church where you became a child of God or the font, if it has been relocated to another church. You can also receive a plenary indulgence any year by renewing your baptismal vows at the Easter Vigil and on the anniversary of your Baptism.

In his letter announcing the Year of Faith, Benedict XVI stressed that Catholics need to recover the sense that faith is a pilgrimage. To enter into the life of faith “is to set out on a journey that lasts a lifetime,” he wrote, and he stressed that we all have to “rediscover the journey of faith so as to shed ever clearer light on the joy and renewed enthusiasm of the encounter with Christ.”

To emphasize this understanding of the itinerary of faith, the Vatican, in its list of recommendations to live this holy year well, encouraged the faithful to go on pilgrimage, specifically mentioning faith journeys to Rome, to the Holy Land, and, since Mary is the guide for the pilgrim Church, to famous Marian shrines.

Without a doubt, one of the most enjoyable aspects of the priesthood has been the ability to lead pilgrimages to all these places. And this is not just because I’ve always enjoyed the experience of traveling. It’s mostly because I’ve seen the quantum leaps that a good pilgrimage can have in the life of believing pilgrims, as they continue the journey of life toward the heavenly Jerusalem.

During my time as a seminarian and priest in Rome, I had the privilege to welcome tens of thousands of people on pilgrimage and take them to St. Peter’s tomb, and to the great basilicas, churches, saints and catacombs of the city. Since I returned to the diocese in 2000, I’ve been able to lead many pilgrimages back to the eternal city. It’s exhilarating to be able to help people become aware that they are heirs and heiresses of an enormous spiritual treasure in the city whose soil has been sanctified by the blood of SS. Peter and Paul.

I also treasure the pilgrimages I’ve led elsewhere to the various Marian Shrines, great cathedrals and sanctuaries of Europe, Fatima, Lourdes, Czestochowa, Montserrat, Loreto, Lanciano, Assisi, San Giovanni Rotondo, Padua, Monte Cassino, Santiago de Compostela, Lisieux, as well as to the “living shrine” of the Church, amassed for World Youth Day.

But the most moving experience I’ve had on pilgrimage occurred exactly a year ago, when I was able to bring 52 people — parishioners old and new, family members and friends — to the Holy Land at the beginning of the 40-day pilgrimage of Lent.

Entitled “In the Footsteps of Jesus,” we began in Nazareth where Jesus was conceived and grew up. Along the way we went to Ain Karim where He made John the Baptist leap in the womb; Bethlehem where He was born; the Jordan River where He was baptized and began His public ministry; the Mount of Temptations where He lived the first Lent; Cana where He made Marriage a Sacrament and worked His first miracle; Taghba and Bethany where He multiplied loaves and fish; Capernaum where He revealed Himself as the Eucharistic Bread of Life; the Sea of Galilee on which He walked and stormed the seas; the Mount of the Beatitudes where He gave the Sermon on the Mount; Caesarea Philippi where He pronounced Simon Peter the rock on whom He would build His Church; Mount Tabor where He was transfigured; Nain where He raised a young man from the dead; Bethany where He stayed at the house of Martha and Mary and raised Lazarus from the dead; and of course Jerusalem, where He taught, expunged the money changers, was murdered and rose from the dead.

There’s nothing quite like a pilgrimage to the Holy Land because not only does one have the chance to follow Jesus’ footsteps somewhat literally across the land He made holy, but you’re able to journey through the entire Liturgical year in the span of days. At each of the sacred spots, you celebrate the Mass of the feast or solemnity associated with that spot. So in Nazareth, you celebrate the Mass of the Annunciation; in Bethlehem, the Mass of Christmas; Tabor, the Transfiguration; Calvary, the Exaltation of the Cross (because there is no Mass for Good Friday); and the empty tomb, the Mass of Easter. You’re able to trace all the mysteries of faith that we traverse throughout a year in just a week, which is not only an incredible experience for a priest but also for a faithful pilgrim.

There were so many highlights that I’ve been reliving on the first anniversary of their occurrence. Tomorrow marks one year from the most memorable “Stations of the Cross” I’ve ever done. Because the roads of the Old City of Jerusalem can often be very crowded, we got the whole group up so that we could leave at 3:30 in the morning. I was somewhat concerned that getting them up at that hour — which I didn’t tell them about until the night before at dinner — would lead them to call for my crucifixion rather than recapitulate the call for Jesus’!

As we were heading from our hotel to the place of the first station in silence and total darkness, it began to snow rather hard, the first major snow that Jerusalem had seen in 16 years. It was freezing, wet, and basically miserable. We used Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen’s beautiful Way of the Cross meditations, reading them under huge umbrellas on my iPad. We were using a headset and ear-piece system so that we wouldn’t wake up all of the residents of Jerusalem.

We did the Tenth Station, Jesus is stripped of His garments, right outside the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher, the Eleventh, Twelfth and Thirteenth stations literally right on Calvary where they took place, and for the Fourteenth Station we descended from Calvary to the place where they had anointed Jesus and then to the tomb where His corpse was laid. Immediately after we finished, I went into the Sacristy to vest for Mass, which we would have on Calvary. It was incredibly moving to be able to give Jesus’ Body and Blood to the pilgrims in the very spot where Jesus had offered His Body and Blood for the salvation of the world.

After Mass everyone headed back to the hotel for breakfast. Two of the people who had most complained about the early start were the first to come to me, with tears in their eyes, saying that the Way of the Cross through terrible weather was not just the highlight of the pilgrimage but one of the most moving spiritual experiences of their life. They grasped that even though they didn’t get much sleep the night before, Jesus hadn’t gotten any sleep at all while imprisoned; even though the wet snow was nasty, it wasn’t anything like the nastiness Jesus had to endure along that same route.

I thought that that was a perfect illustration of the type of conversion that happens on pilgrimage, when pilgrims, like the Magi, return home “by a different route,” changed forever.

This year, during the Year of Faith, I’m leading a pilgrimage to the Shrines and Saints of France in September. I chose France in order to be able to take my new parishioners to the sites associated with St. Bernadette, especially Lourdes where the Blessed Mother appeared to her, and Nevers, where St. Bernadette was in the convent and her incorrupt body now rests.

But we’ll also be visiting Lisieux (St. Therese), Paray-le-Monial (the Sacred Heart apparitions); the apparition site of Our Lady of La Salette; Ars (St. John Vianney); Rue du Bac (St. Catherine Labouré, St. Vincent de Paul, St. Louise de Marillac, and the Miraculous Medal); Annecy (St. Francis de Sales and St. Jane de Chantal).

We’ll also be praying in some of the great Churches of the world, like the Cathedrals of Chartres, Notre Dame in Paris, Orleans, Avignon (which the popes used for 70 years), the Basilica of the Sacre Coeur in Paris, and Notre Dame de Fourvière in Lyons, where we’ll see our faith depicted beautifully in art and architecture.

It will be a lifetime’s worth some of the greatest and most famous sanctuaries — and some of the greatest saints — in the history of our faith. If you’d be interested in joining me, I’d love to have you join me. There are still a few spots left. Please send me an email right away and I’ll send you a brochure.

Back in 2008, Pope Benedict said that Lent is “like a great spiritual retreat lasting 40 days.” That’s why last Sunday we heard of the principal inspiration for this holy season, Jesus’ 40-day retreat of prayer and fasting in the Judean desert.

Lent is a time in which Catholics have traditionally sought to take time away from the circus of daily life, filled with a cacophony of entertainers and peddlers vying for our attention and dollars, in order to go away, be with the Lord, and seek to give Him their full attention. The same Holy Spirit Who drove Jesus into the desert wants to impel us to join Him in an undistracted, uninterrupted communion and prayer — which is what we call a retreat. That’s one of the reasons why Pope Benedict and all the members of the Vatican Curia made their annual spiritual exercises this past week.

Not too long ago, such Lenten retreats were very common. Retreat houses couldn’t be built fast enough by dioceses, religious congregations and other Catholic institutions. Cursillos were thriving. Retreat programs for teens, young adults, singles, engaged couples, married couples, businessmen, housewives, divorced-and-separated individuals, seniors and so many other groups were in high demand. People recognized their need, like Jesus’ first disciples, to respond to His invitation to come away with Him for a while and rest with Him.

But that’s not the way it is now. Retreats that used to be held monthly are held yearly. Retreat weekends for those preparing for Confirmation or for engaged couples that used to extend from Friday night through Sunday afternoon have been reduced to one-day sessions, and often half-days at that. This is not because the need for retreats has lessened. Quite the contrary: Pope Benedict said a few years back that “in an age when the influence of secularization is always more powerful” and people, formed by modern culture, are living as if God doesn’t exist, the need is ever greater that there be places and opportunities “for intense listening to [God’s] Word in silence and prayer.” The importance of a retreat, he added, “can never be insisted upon enough.”

But while the need has not at all decreased, the demand certainly has, because many people simply do not prioritize it. Caught up in the hustle, bustle, push and muscle of daily life, enslaved and addicted to instant communications and to the gadgets that were supposed to save time rather than gluttonously swallow it up, few people sense themselves even able to make a holy hour, not to mention escape for a weekend, or a work-week, or longer.

But the holy season of Lent is an opportunity for all Catholics to recognize our need for God and make a commitment to fast from other activities so that the Lord can have true primacy of place. It’s a time we resolve to follow Christ into the desert on retreat, to go away with Him for a period so that He can refresh us and send us back renewed. Especially in this Year of Faith, it’s even more important than ever for us to experience the deep renewal of faith that a good retreat is designed to bring about.

One of the great joys of my priesthood has been making and giving retreats. Priests are required to make an annual five-day retreat and it’s a blessed time to escape from phones, doorbells and the pastoral concerns that weigh on us each day in order to give the Lord our full and undivided attention. It’s a time to enter into more intense prayer than can be done ordinarily in parish life, to examine one’s life, to make the most thorough Confession of the year, and to rest with the Lord. My time of retreat is one of the great highlights of each year.

I also love preaching retreats, which I think is among the most beautiful and fruitful — not to mention demanding — of all priestly work. I’ve had the privilege over the last decade to preach many retreats to priests, seminarians, deacons and religious, those discerning, lay men, lay women, college students, the faculties of colleges, high schools and other Catholic schools, those preparing for Confirmation, and more. The more I’ve preached retreats the more convinced I’ve become of how important they are, as privileged times of conversion, as opportunities to put the Lord first and make resolutions to keep Him first.

I’ve just returned from preaching a retreat in Los Angeles for 92 women. In two days, I heard Confessions for 14 hours, gave six hour-long conferences and three 30-minute homilies, and spent most of the time in between writing the nine talks. As exhausting as retreat work is, it’s also exhilarating, as I get to observe God’s sons and daughters give their undivided attention to Him as God helps some of them turn their lives around and others to grow much more intimately in their relationship with Him.

In this Year of Faith, I would strongly urge you to make the time to make a retreat.

We’re blessed that we have so many good retreat programs and retreat centers within and close to our diocese. The Anchor regularly runs information on retreats for post-Confirmation teens and young adults, like ECHO, YES! and Emmaus. The Sacred Hearts Retreat Center in Wareham and the La Salette Retreat Center in Attleboro offer many retreats throughout the year for people of all ages and walks of life. There are Cursillos offered several times a year at the Holy Cross Retreat House in North Easton, which is one of the most effective retreat experiences for lay people, as thousands of Catholics across the diocese can attest.

Within an hour’s driving distance there are great retreats houses like Arnold Hall in Pembroke run by Opus Dei (arnoldhall.com) where I regularly make my retreats; Miramar Retreat Center in Duxbury, which is often used for the official retreats of the priests of the diocese (miramarretreat.org); and St. Joseph Retreat House in Milton, run by the Oblates of the Blessed Virgin Mary, where many priests and lay people from our diocese go to make retreats according to St. Ignatius’ spiritual exercises (omvretreats.org). Altogether, if my count is accurate, there are 18 different Catholic retreat houses in eastern Massachusetts alone.

If someone genuinely cannot make the time to get away to one of these retreat centers, however, there’s another way to make a retreat. Many of the deaneries in our diocese as well as several parishes take the retreat experience to parishioners in the form of Lenten missions. I’d urge you to try to attend one. The Anchor will be running news about these offerings in upcoming weeks.

And if that’s still not possible, there’s the possibility of purchasing the CDs of retreats given at some of the best retreat centers across the country (like sisterservants.org) and listening to them at home. Just last week I found another resource to help you to do this. Father John Bartunek has begun publishing a series of “Do-It-Yourself Retreat Guides” on the internet (rcspirituality.org). He’s prepared a brief retreat and offers it for free in three forms, a very easy to read booklet, a series of audio files if you prefer to listen to the retreat in a chapel or a quiet place, and videos, so that you can watch him preach it. Each of the three resources are well-produced and the content is rich and solid.

This Lent, as the Lord — retreat Master, mission Preacher and Guide — invites us to come away with Him in prayer for a while, we don’t have to go with Him to the Sahara Desert. He’s given us so many opportunities. Let’s respond to His invitation so that He can do with us what He regularly did with His first followers when He led them on retreat.

In 2010, in the book-length interview “Light of the World,” Pope Benedict told Peter Seewald, “If a pope clearly realizes that he is no longer physically, psychologically, and spiritually capable of handling the duties of his office, then he has a right and, under some circumstances, an obligation to resign.”

It’s clear by his shocking declaration Monday morning that Pope Benedict thinks he has reached that point.

When he was elected on April 19, 2005, he introduced himself to the Church as a “simple and humble worker in the Lord’s vineyard,” and his genuine humility before the duties of his office was on full display in his decision to resign.

While many of us have been more than satisfied at the level with which he was continuing to serve the whole Church at 85, it’s clear that he believes that the ministry of the successor of St. Peter requires more and better than he thinks he is physically capable of giving. Out of love for the Church, he humbly became the first pope in 598 years to step down.

On a physical level, his conclusion is understandable. Very few octogenarians would have the stamina to fulfill the pope’s daily schedule of continuous high-level meetings and speeches, not to mention grueling international travel and a Liturgical schedule awaiting him during Holy Week that has been known to wipe out priests half his age in settings far smaller. If most pastors would be physically challenged to administer a busy parish in their mid-80s, how much more grueling must it be to preside over a Church of one billion people? And, in Pope Benedict, we’re talking about a priest who’s had two strokes, a pacemaker for 20 years, prostate problems and some form of degenerative joint disease.

All the same, even at obviously reduced physical capacity, Pope Benedict was still capable of leading the Church with incredible wisdom because of his unbelievably brilliant and totally undiminished mind. In one of several interviews I gave on Monday, the journalist asked what people would say his legacy would be in 10 years. I responded that it’s more fitting to ask what his legacy will be in 500 years, because having him on the cathedra of Peter was like having another St. Leo the Great, someone whom future generations will likely deem a doctor of the Church.

There are a few things about his decision to resign that are particularly striking to me.

The first is that it seems that it was not his decision, but the Lord’s. He began his shocking statement to the cardinals by declaring, “After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.”

Pope Benedict has long called conscience an “organ of sensitivity” to the voice of God indicating to us what to do or avoid. While the judgments of conscience can always be erroneous, Pope Benedict has been tuning his “organ” for so long and fighting against false ideas of conscience that it is highly unlikely that he would be hearing the Lord say “go” when the Lord was in fact stressing “continue on.” So his decision to resign does not seem to be the “no” of someone who wants to quit the burdens of the papacy but one more “yes” in a lifetime of faithful fiats to what the Lord has asked of him.

Next, by his decision Pope Benedict gave us perhaps his most powerful lesson about the importance of prayer. He finished his statement mentioning that he would “devotedly serve the Holy Church of God in the future through a life dedicated to prayer,” carried out in a monastery on Vatican grounds.

Throughout his papacy in his catecheses on prayer over the last two years as well as in many talks to priests, seminarians, religious and faithful, he has repeatedly stated that the most important thing we do as Christians for God and others is to pray. By resigning the papacy in order to continue to serve the Church devotedly through prayer is to declare that he believes the work of prayer is even more important than the ministry of the papacy. And if prayer is even more important than the work of the successor of St. Peter, then it’s hard to argue that any other ministry in the Church — or any other human work — is more important than prayer either. There’s probably been no greater illustration of the lesson Jesus taught Martha and Mary in Bethany than this.

It was said that perhaps John Paul II’s greatest teaching of all was his proclamation of the Gospel of redemptive suffering over the last years of his life. I anticipate that the primacy of prayer — which means the primacy of God’s action in us — may become the lasting lesson of the final years God grants Pope Benedict.

The last item about his statement that stuck out to me was his reminder to all of us that the “Supreme Pastor” of the Church is Christ, not his earthly vicar. While popes may come and go, the Good Shepherd will never have an interregnum. For Pope Benedict, in his preaching, in his celebration of the Sacraments, and in his bearing, he was always focused on Jesus, not on himself. At World Youth Days, for example, he intentionally took the focus off of the pope and had millions of young people drop to their knees with him in humble adoration of the Lord in the Eucharist.

And that’s a key to understanding his startling resignation.

He seemed to fear that if he remained in office as his physical health gradually worsened, more of the focus would be on him and his frailties than on the Lord and the Lord’s work. The mission that the Lord has entrusted to the Church is too important, he seemed to be saying, to allow that to happen. The Supreme Pastor needs simple and humble laborers in his fields, which are ripe for the harvest. As humble and simple as Pope Benedict remains, he no longer thought he could effectively carry out the work of harvesting, and so he thought it was time for someone more vigorous to take up the work, lest anything perish on the vine. And as Bishop Emeritus of Rome, Pope Benedict seems to want to vigorously to support those efforts by the even more important labor that he still has the strength to do, his prayer.

And so while we remain shocked about his resignation of the papacy — Catholics, after all, will always be better at celebrating a papal funeral than a papal retirement party — I think it’s important for us to move from grief to acceptance and then to two other states.

The first is gratitude for all that Pope Benedict did in his eight years of service. It’s clear by his resignation because of his physical infirmities — which don’t seem to the naked eye to be that much greater than what we’ve observed over the past several years — that he must have been pushing himself to the limit for years out of loving service of Christ and us. And he accomplished so much. On all but five occasions in papal history, such gratitude was only able to be offered posthumously. We have a rare opportunity to thank him and to thank God for him, and doing so will make us more appreciative of our faith.

Second, it’s now the time to begin praying for his successor and for the cardinals who will elect him. Whoever he is, he will have big fisherman’s shoes to fill — and as Pope Benedict has made clear, a heavy burden.

It’s five days from the beginning of the holy season of Lent and time for us to be formulating our Lenten resolutions in conversation with God in prayer. During this Year of Faith, in which everything we do ought to be done with a more conscious and intense faith, it’s a time in which we ought to be especially bold in setting our Lenten commitments.

As we make our Lenten resolutions, we should keep in mind the whole purpose of Lent. Pope Benedict has repeatedly said that it is not about making a small-course correction in our lives, but about experiencing a radical and total conversion. It’s a moral exodus in which we give up the easy superficiality in which we live — lowering ourselves to the habits of those around us and conforming ourselves to the worldly standards of celebrities, athletes, politicians and peers — and resolve to adopt faithfully, step by step, Christ’s own path. It’s meant to be a Passover from mediocrity to sanctity, from being a part-time disciple to inserting ourselves fully into Christ’s paschal mystery, dying to ourselves so that Christ can truly live within us.

Lent is meant to help us recalibrate our entire existence and propel us toward becoming the Christian that our faith calls us to be. Our resolutions need to keep this in mind. Will giving up candy for 40 days really make us holy? How about filling up a rice bowl with loose change or adding three extra Hail Marys at the end of the day? Such resolutions are, I think, equivalent to a professional football player’s thinking he can train for the upcoming season by lifting five-pound barbells and watching Richard Simmons’ videos!

Rather, especially in Lent, we need to put out into the deep.

Many Catholics have become spiritual sissies in their resolutions. And if we’re wimps in the annual spiritual boot camp of Lent, then it’s almost impossible for us to have the spiritual discipline to live by Christ’s high standards throughout the rest of the year.

It’s not enough to give up “something,” or to pray “a little more” or give loose change to those in need. Lent is a time to respond to the offer of the Lord’s help to push ourselves beyond what we think capable, in order to be formed into the person He created us to be, died for us to be, and wants us to be. It’s a time to be formed, precisely, into other Christs.

When Jesus calls us in the Ash Wednesday Gospel to pray, fast, and give alms, He’s not calling us to do anything He Himself didn’t do. In our prayer, self-discipline and self-giving, He summons us to follow and imitate His own bold example. Jesus prayed and fasted in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. He gave Himself to others to the last drop of His Blood. Our praying, fasting and almsgiving are meant to conform us to Christ in His prayer, fasting and total self-giving.

Just as the devil tempted Adam and Eve in the garden and Jesus in the desert, so he seeks to tempt us. He tries to trick us to disorder our relationship ourselves, to others, and to God. Fasting, almsgiving, and prayer are the respective antidotes.

The more we fast and place spiritual nourishment over material food, the less vulnerable we will be to being tempted by bread and other earthly pleasures.

The more we sacrifice ourselves and our belongings for the good of others, the less prone we will be to giving in to the devil’s seductions to seek power or control over others.

The more we pray to God and hunger to know and do His will in our lives the less assailable we will be to the devil’s traps presumptuously to force God’s hand.

These three traditional practices of Lent are a great remedy to the temptations of the evil one, which is why the Church proposes them to us each year. But we’re never going to receive the graces of conversion and holiness if we look at these practices as a multiple-choice test or set such low goals with respect to them that, even if we keep them for 40 days, they’re really not going to help us much on the road to holiness and Heaven.

So I’d like to suggest a few ideas with regard to the three Lenten practices Christ lived and called us to emulate in a particularly audacious way.

First, prayer. Prayer is faith in action. If God is really first in our life, we will make the commitment not merely to say a few prayers, but to make this loving dialogue with God our biggest daily priority. When we pray, we turn our attention to God and turn away from what keeps us from God. We listen to the Good News He whispers to us in mental prayer or through meditation on the Bible or in the Rosary. We receive His healing and strength to realign the direction of our life: rather than fitting Him into our day if we have time, we resolve to center our whole lives on Him. Some Lenten resolutions to do this would be to come to daily Mass, for can there be anything more important than receiving God within?; praying the Stations of the Cross each Friday; making a daily Holy Hour, if possible within Eucharistic Adoration, as we stay vigilant with Him in Gethsemane; and trying to attend a Lenten mission or making a retreat.

Second, fasting. Many of us, even though we say we believe in God, live as materialists. We work so hard to put food in our refrigerator and on our tables, but we don’t work as hard or at all to nourish ourselves spiritually. Fasting precisely helps us to reorder everything, to say no to the devil’s temptations to prioritize our stomach rather than our soul. Fasting allows us to subordinate our bodily desires and needs to those of our soul. It allows us to control our desires rather than let them control us. Fasting only on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday is not enough to accomplish a true conversion from materialistic hyperdependence. The fast I ordinarily recommend is three-fold: drink only water throughout Lent; give up all condiments on food (salt, pepper, sugar, butter, ketchup, salad dressing); and forsake sweets and snacks between meals. That’s a type of fast that not only is healthy but at the end of 40 days will fill you with the discipline that it takes to be a disciple! I’d also encourage you to fast from television and use the time you gain to dedicate to prayer, reading the Bible and learning the “Catechism,” as the Holy Father has asked during this Year of Faith.

Lastly, almsgiving. Very often the sins we commit flow from selfishness or egocentrism, from putting ourselves first. That is why the Lord commands us to give alms, which requires us to look toward others’ needs, not just our own; to love others in deeds and not just wish them well; to take responsibility for the welfare of others, for as often as we fail to do something for them, we fail to care for Christ (Mt 25:45). Jesus, Who gave everything for us, tells us to follow Him in this way, by giving of ourselves, our time and our material resources for others. How charitable should we be? Until it hurts, not giving of our surplus time or resources, but extending ourselves like the widow with her mite. Such a standard of generosity will conform us to Christ’s standard of love, which is the whole point of the Christian moral life.

To become holy is the purpose of the holy season of Lent, but it will achieve its purpose only if we go “all in.”

Back in December, I had dinner with a great Catholic couple who took me and four priest friends to Fernando’s in New Bedford in anticipation of Christmas.

During the course of dinner, Richard asked me to explain to him what the “breviary” — the book of prayers priests pray each day — is. Even though he’s been a close collaborator of priests for years, he had never had explained to him what’s involved in praying the Liturgy of the Hours. So I gave him a three-minute excursus of what’s involved as well as the level of commitment the Church requires priests to make with regard to praying it. He finished the mini-conversation by asking, “Don’t you think it would be good for lay people to know about all these prayers priests pray for them each day?”

This column is a response to that gentle suggestion. I also hope to convey in it the Church’s ardent desire for lay people to join priests and religious in making this beautiful prayer their own.

Priests, on the day they’re ordained transitional deacons, are asked by the ordaining bishop, “Are you resolved to maintain and deepen a spirit of prayer appropriate to your way of life and, in keeping with what is required of you, to celebrate faithfully the Liturgy of the Hours for the Church and for the whole world?” By his “I am,” he commits himself to praying five times a day together with Christ the High Priest for the Church and the world.

Normally the daily prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours begins with the Office of Readings, which includes an invitatory psalm (like Psalm 95) to open one’s heart to prayer, a hymn, three more psalms, a lengthy reading of Sacred Scripture, and an extended commentary from a saint, pope or Church council. This is the longest part of the Liturgy of the Hours. Most priests begin their daily prayer with it, but it can be prayed any time during the day or even the night before.

The two most important moments in the Liturgy of the Hours are Morning Prayer (Lauds) and Evening Prayer (Vespers), which involve a hymn, two psalms, two Scriptural canticles, a short Bible reading, various intercessions for God’s people, the Lord’s Prayer, and a closing prayer.

The other two hours are shorter and are prayed sometime around the middle of the day — the Church gives three options, mid-morning, midday and afternoon, from which a priest must pray one but may pray all three — and then at the end of the day when he prays Night Prayer or Compline, during which he examines his conscience and commends himself and God’s people, as Christ did on the cross, into the Father’s merciful hands.

The Church’s “Code of Canon Law” stresses the importance of the priest’s praying the breviary. In discussing a priest’s duties, it says that the priest is “earnestly invited” to celebrate Mass every day, an invitation to which Pope Benedict continually encourages every priest to respond wholeheartedly, considering that there is nothing greater a priest can do than to offer to the Father His Son’s own sacrifice for the salvation of the world.

When the “Code” turns to praying the Liturgy of the Hours, however, it says that priests are “obliged” to fulfill it daily. The breviary is a “must,” where daily Mass is a strong “should.” Pope Benedict reiterated the seriousness of this duty a few years ago in his 2010 exhortation on the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church (Verbum Domini), saying that all bishops, priests and transitional deacons are “obliged to pray all the Hours daily.” This is because a priest’s prayer is his “office,” his principal work or task, his greatest service for God’s people.

Praying the breviary isn’t always easy. Like the Rosary or any vocal prayer, there’s a danger that it can become routine, that one can finish saying all the words and look back and not remember anything he supposedly had prayed. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen used to talk about these difficulties all the time in his retreats to priests. For me, I’ve tried to defeat this temptation in various ways over the now 20 years I’ve been praying it: by saying it out loud, singing it, praying it in different languages, anything I can do to help my mind and heart align itself to the words being prayed.

There has also been the traditional difficulty of praying the breviary “on time” — for example, praying midday prayer around midday — which in busy priestly life normally means carrying the breviary with you to engagements so that you could pray it in a waiting room, in the car, and elsewhere on the go. Now it’s become much easier through the help of technology. There are great programs for smart phones and tablet devices — like iBreviary, Universalis, RC Calendar and others — that make it much easier to have the breviary with you at all times and pray it on time. These programs are also a great gift to those who are beginning to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, because, rather than having to worry like those in yesteryear about fixing ribbons and flipping sections in a physical book when special feast days are being prayed, it puts everything in one continuous file so that one can pray without distraction.

Technology is also helping in other ways. One of my principal Year of Faith resolutions was to pray the breviary more slowly and with greater faith — and faith, as St. Paul says, comes through hearing. So since October I’ve been using another great smartphone app, Divine Office, to pray several hours of the breviary. This is a recording of all the parts of the Liturgy of the Hours for every day, with sung hymns, great lectors, and more, so that I’m able to listen to a high quality recitation of the breviary and pray and sing along with it. It’s also a huge help on my busiest days because I can also play one of the hours in the car to sanctify a traffic jam!

The Liturgy of the Hours is not supposed to be prayed only by bishops, priests, deacons and Religious communities that feature it as part of their communal prayer. Since the Second Vatican Council, the Church has been calling all of the faithful to take it up and begin to pray it in their churches and in their homes.

The “Catechism” says that the Liturgy of the Hours is “intended to become the prayer of the whole People of God.” It encourages pastors to try to arrange for it to be prayed in church on Sundays and the more solemn feasts and urges the laity to recite it “either with priests, among themselves or even individually” (CCC 1175).

In “Verbum Domini,” Pope Benedict expressed his hope that “this prayer become more widespread among the People of God, particularly the recitation of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer,” sure that this would lead “to greater familiarity with the Word of God on the part of the faithful.” He also recommended that parishes “promote this prayer with the participation of the lay faithful” (62).

Since prayer is faith in action, I would encourage all lay people during this Year of Faith to consider trying to pray the Liturgy of the Hours on their own, with their families, or with others in their parish. An easy start would be to download iBreviary or Divine Office. The door of faith is open and entering through the portal of the Liturgy of the Hours will help them not only sanctify the day but enter into the prayer of the whole Bride of Christ, together with Jesus the Bridegroom, to God the Father.

Other than those of Czech origin, few Catholics know the moving story of St. John Nepomuc.

He was a virtuous and brilliant young priest who, in addition to serving as vicar general of the Archdiocese of Prague toward the end of the 14th century, was appointed a chaplain to the court of Bohemian King Wenceslaus IV. (He’s quite different from the famous “Good King Wenceslaus,” who was martyred in 935). Among those who came to Father John for spiritual direction and Confession was Queen Sophia, who struggled with her husband’s unfounded and all-consuming jealousy.

Knowing that she was going to Confession to the young priest, Wenceslaus invited him to his palace and tried to bribe him to reveal to him the contents of the queen’s Confession, but St. John replied that the Seal of the Sacrament of Confession prevented his disclosing anything. The king then tried torture. He had Father John thrown in prison where he was racked and had his sides burned with torches, but the only thing that he said during his suffering were the names of Jesus and Mary. After one more failed attempt to alter the priest’s resolve, Wenceslaus had him paraded through the city with a block of wood in his mouth, a mockery of the Sacramental seal, to the Charles Bridge, where his hands and feet were bound and he was thrown into the Moldau River where he drowned. Since, he has been considered a martyr to the Seal of Confession and a patron saint of confessors.

I bring his story up because some secularists in our society are trying to make more martyrs to the seal.

Early last month, the leader of Australia, Julia Gillard, threw her weight behind a proposal to eliminate any civil protections to the Seal of the Confessional in order to try to force priests to divulge the contents of what they hear in Confession in the case of the sexual abuse of minors. Australian Senator Nick Xenophon called the government’s recognition of the inviolability of the seal a “medieval law that needs to change.” Even Catholic politicians are joining the chorus, like Parliamentarian and opposition leader Tony Abbott, who said that civil law has to take precedence over Church law and that everyone, including priests, must obey the law.

If an abuser comes to Confession, they argue, the priest must be mandated to break the seal and report the abuser to the civil authorities. The prevention of child abuse must trump any and all other concerns, they say.

Such a push is not unique to Australia. There was a strong legislative effort to do so in Ireland two years ago, which failed. There were legislative attempts to do so in Maryland, New Hampshire and Connecticut during the last decade. As an aggressive form of secularism intolerant of religious freedom and of the sanctity of conscience continues to strengthen and assert itself through governmental structures, we should expect such attacks against the Seal of Confession — and against the priests who keep the seal — to grow, not lessen.

In response to this push for eliminating the sacramental seal, we should understand a few things.

First, we can safely say that calls for eliminating the Seal of Confession are coming from those who don’t appreciate the purpose of the Seal of Confession, very likely because they don’t receive it. If someone considers the Sacrament of Penance itself “medieval,” then it’s somewhat logical that he would think that the sacramental seal is medieval as well. If such public servants were regular recipients of the Sacrament, on the other hand, I don’t think they’d be pushing for priests to be able to reveal the contents of Confession; TMZ and the National Enquirer would probably be willing to build a few posh basilicas in order to get priests to reveal the dirt that politicians and other public figures have confessed. The sacred inviolability of the seal — that priests cannot betray a penitent by word or any other manner for any reason whatsoever — is something that allows everyone to be able to come for spiritual help and mercy, and the more we receive that help and mercy the more we appreciate the importance of the seal.

Second, at a strictly practical level, if abusers knew that priests would be legally obliged to pass on their crimes to police at the risk of fines or imprisonment, do you think they would even go near a confessional? By effectively barring from coming to Confession a child sexual abuser who recognizes that what he’s doing is wrong and needs God’s forgiveness, we would be robbing confessors of the chance to try to persuade abusers to get help and to do justice for those they’ve hurt by turning themselves in — as every good confessor does when a murderer, rapist, abuser or other violent criminal approaches. It’s ludicrous to think confessors would just give them three Our Fathers as a penance and send them on their way with a lollipop, as some of these politicians attacking the seal want to pretend.

Third, priests wouldn’t break the Seal of Confession anyway. This is one of the most beautiful realities of the priesthood that few Catholics appreciate enough. By his ordination, a priest has made the commitment never to reveal what you or anyone else says to him in the Sacrament of Penance, even to save his own life, even if all you confessed were a few venial sins. He can’t break the seal even when someone is calumniously attacking his good name. He can’t break the seal to defend himself against a false accusation, even when the one framing him had confessed, as was powerfully portrayed in Hitchcock’s “I Confess.” He can’t break the seal to save the life of another or to avert a public disaster. He can’t break the seal even to stop the brutal torture of his mother before his eyes. That’s how important the seal is and how committed a priest is to protecting it. And that’s how important the Sacrament of Confession is if it requires that level of commitment and potential sacrifice from those who administer it.

We live in an iconoclastic, consumerist age where, like all public figures, priests are criticized on just about everything. A lot of this criticism is, of course, valid. But I wonder sometimes whether those doing the criticism of a priest’s idiosyncrasies, or accent, or particular pastoral decisions reflect enough on the fact that every priest — including those they don’t like, or even those in most need of God’s mercy themselves — has made a commitment to be imprisoned, tortured or even killed in order to protect what you tell him in Confession. Every priest has made the commitment to allow his reputation to be destroyed to protect even what an eight-year-old tells him in her first Confession. Priests have made a commitment to die for you, in order to make it possible for you to approach without fear the Lamb of God and receive His mercy.

The stopping of the abominable horror of the sexual abuse of minors or any other crime doesn’t require another abuse against faithful priests and the Sacrament of Confession, which are part of the solution, not the problem.

When civil leaders are channeling tyrannical King Wenceslaus and threatening to throw priests in prison or off modern bridges, it’s time for Catholics and all those who respect the legitimate rights of religious freedom to recognize what’s going on and step up in defense, rather than join the politically correct mob.

Every year is meant to be a “year of the Lord” (anno Domini). Since 2013 takes place during the Year of Faith, however, all of us are called to make a special effort to dedicate it to the Lord. It’s a year in which we’re called to grow in faith, walk by faith, and spread the faith with love, so that this year will be the holiest, most faithful and most apostolically fruitful year of our life.

When the Year of Faith began, we looked at how faith is fundamentally a total, loving entrustment of ourselves to God, and on the basis of that commitment, to all that He has revealed. We also examined how in this holy year, Pope Benedict has prayerfully challenged us to grow in both aspects of faith. He hopes that, strengthened by faith, each of us can take up our role in the New Evangelization, the re-proposal of the beauty of the Christian life to those who, for whatever reason, were once exposed to the Gospel but who were never captivated by it or who, through secularization, scandals or other reasons, have lost the fascination and faith they once had.

This New Evangelization has two essential preparatory stages.

First all those who practice the faith need to be more profoundly evangelized. For many Catholics, Christ remains at the level of a doctrinal abstraction, a teacher of moral truths rather than the Truth incarnate, a figure of the past rather than the present, a paramedic for spiritual emergencies rather than the most defining reality and relationship of our life. Many of us have learned the faith as if Christianity were a classroom or a series of religious rituals and moral duties instead of a way of life and love in which each of us is supposed to be able to say progressively with St. Paul, “It is no longer I who live but Christ Who lives in me.” Since we can only give what we have, the first step in the New Evangelization is for the evangelizers to have a real friendship, a true intimate communion, with Christ. That’s what the Year of Faith is meant to enable and enhance.

The second step is that those who have been evangelized must be comfortable and equipped to be able to pass on their faith with sensitivity, patience and fervor as the greatest thing that’s ever happened to them.

Over the years many people have come to speak to me, with tears in their eyes, to describe how their spouse, kids or grandkids, no longer practice the faith and no matter what they try, they can’t persuade them to return. When I ask how they’ve tried to persuade their loved ones, many have replied by telling me that they, somewhat literally, try to scare the hell out of them, informing them that their illicit relationship or voluntarily missing Mass is a mortal sin that will lead them to the inferno. Others have said they talk about religious duties and seek to make them feel guilty about their lack of response to God’s goodness. But these approaches normally don’t bear much fruit because most people today respond negatively to what they perceive as scare tactics or guilt-tripping and these arguments only reinforce the caricature of faith they have.

Even more challenging than trying to persuade born-and-fled Catholics to revert to the practice of the faith is to try to propose the faith to those who have grown up without God in their life at all. How do you share the faith with atheist immigrants from China or North Korea, or children who grew up in the home of thoroughly secularist parents who taught that all religious is mythical, or those who grew up in situations like the skateboarding teens in front of St. Anthony’s in New Bedford who used to ask me why I dressed funny because they had never seen nor heard of a priest?

Many Catholics don’t know where to start in order to evangelize people in these categories, because before we can discuss Jesus, the Sacraments and the Christian life, we need to meet them where they’re at and have credible answers to their basic questions about whether God exists, whether there’s meaning to life, whether and why there is good and evil. Even Catholics who would be competent debating justification with Lutherans, explaining the beauty of Marian devotion to Baptists, and defending Trinitarian theology before Jews and Muslims, don’t know where to begin to engage those who at this point have no faith at all and often, for that reason, are in situations contrary to their own good.

During this Year of Faith in preparation for the New Evangelization, it’s important that every Catholic be given an opportunity to receive formation in both of these areas, so that, more deeply rooted in Christ and firm in faith, they can speak credibly and persuasively about the gift of faith to others.

There’s a great program that delivers on this double need. It’s called the Alpha Course for Catholics and a team of parishioners and I are planning to launch it at St. Bernadette’s on Wednesday nights at 6:45 p.m., beginning January 23. I’d like to invite you to participate in it if you feel a hunger for this type of training and are able to get to Fall River.

The Alpha program was originally developed by Anglican priests at Holy Trinity Parish in London to share the Gospel in a non-threatening and relaxed way with those who had no faith and to invite those who had stopped practicing back into the Christian community. It came to be so successful in introducing or reintroducing people to the central truths and way of the Christian life that, beginning in the early 90s, it began to spread all over England, into other countries, and into various Christian denominations, including the Catholic Church. Since, there have been more than 60,000 Alpha courses run in 169 countries, proposing or strengthening the faith of more than 19.6 million people, including courses for Catholics in 74 different languages.

During the Vatican’s Synod on the New Evangelization and the Transmission of the Faith in October, Alpha for Catholics was looked at as a model not only for reaching those with no faith at all or weakened faith but also for strengthening the faith of practicing Catholics and helping them learn how to propose the faith in an appealing way to others without watering it down.

Alpha for Catholics is a 10-week course that includes a meal, a 45-minute movie, and then small group discussion each night. It examines in a contemporary, irresistible way the basic Gospel message and the essentials of living the Christian faith: who Jesus is, why He died, faith, prayer, the Bible, God’s guidance, good and evil, talking about Jesus to others, healing, and the importance of the Church. In the middle of the course, there is a retreat focused on getting to know the Holy Spirit and allowing Him to fill us and help make the most of the rest of our life. There’s no cost for the program, except a small free-will donation for the food.

If you’d like to participate in the course, or if you know any friends or family members who might be interested in giving the faith a second look — or a first one — please know you’re warmly invited. Please just send me an email so that we can make plans for food.

Right after Thanksgiving, the Diocese of Fall River hosted Carolyn Woo, the director of Catholic Relief Services, for a powerful talk at St. Julie Billiart Parish in North Dartmouth. In the presence of Bishop Coleman, many priests and deacons, faithful from numerous parishes and a large contingent of students from the five diocesan high schools, Dr. Woo described the work CRS does in 100 countries across the globe serving more than 100 million of the world’s poorest people. She also took the time, in this Year of Faith, to describe her own remarkable journey of faith.

She was born in Hong Kong, the fifth of six children in a traditional Chinese family whose parents needed to flee the communist revolution in China. As a young girl in a school run by Maryknoll Sisters, she was profoundly moved that her teachers had left the comforts of America to travel to a place of poverty and disease to teach young children. When the Sisters told her they had done so out of love for God, she knew that God had to be real in order to inspire such choices. She became a Catholic.

She was inspired by her American teachers to want to continue her education in the United States, but it was rare for Chinese women to get university degrees and her family didn’t have the money to afford American universities. Nevertheless, they raised just enough for her to be able to go for one year to Purdue. She took double the ordinary course load, anticipating that it might be the only year she would have.

At the end of the year, inspired by prayer and daily Mass, she put out into the deep and applied for a fellowship, even though such fellowships were never given to international undergraduates. She ended up getting one anyway, and then bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees, eventually joining the Purdue faculty and becoming associate vice president for Academic Affairs. Since her own family lived across the world in Hong Kong, the Catholics at Purdue had become her family and celebrated all of these milestones with her.

In 1997, she moved to Notre Dame to become dean of the Mendoza School of Business, which she led to become the top-ranked business school in the country.

In January 2012, moved by her faith, she left Notre Dame to become director of Catholic Relief Services, to help implement the international charitable programs of the U.S. bishops and the Catholic Church they lead.

Hers is a powerful story of faith: the faith-filled instruction of the Maryknoll Missionaries, the faithful hospitality of Purdue Catholics, the faithful generosity of American Catholics, the faithful gratitude of millions helped by CRS across the globe, and the faithful perseverance and hard work of Dr. Woo.

The real highlight of the afternoon came at the end of a half-hour’s worth of questions. Doubtless moved by her powerful personal story and the stories she recounted from her first year as head of CRS, someone asked whether she was planning to write a book about these adventures. This is a question she gets a lot, she replied. When she eventually gets the time to write a book, she said, two chapters will be musts: one dedicated to her experiences as a lay women in the Church; the second, she said, on the “theology of excellence.”

As soon as she mentioned the expression, “the theology of excellence,” I perked up in my seat. This is a theme about which I’ve given a lot of thought, ever since two disappointing encounters early in my priesthood.

One was with the family of the valedictorian of a parish grade school. She wanted to go to Bishop Connolly High School and from there to college, but her Catholic parents thought since they never went to college and turned out “just fine,” she should just go to the vocational technical high school and get a trade. I tried to speak to them about the parable of the talents, but they weren’t particularly interested in developing their daughter’s talents. Their expectations were not for excellence, but were limited to providing their bright daughter the best chance, without a college degree, to get a full-time job at 18.

The second experience happened when a Catholic superintendent of schools gave a presentation on the Catholic high schools in his diocese. They were doing quite well, he attested, and as proof he offered their high graduation rates. I was somewhat shocked, because, frankly, Catholic high schools should have higher goals than merely helping kids graduate. I asked him what was the rate of students going on to college, and it was much lower than the graduation percentage. Another asked how many had gotten into the most competitive Catholic and non-Catholic colleges and universities; the number was just a few across the entire diocese. There’s a saying about low expectations: even if you achieve them, you do not achieve very much, and I thought that diocese had set very low expectations.

That’s the background why I was interested in Dr. Woo’s wanting to write a chapter on the “theology of excellence.” She said that much of what she’s been able to achieve in life, despite all the obstacles she had to overcome, was because she’s always had high standards. She had high standards as a student, shattering the customary ceiling for what was expected for Chinese girls. She had high standards as dean of the Mendoza School of Business, saying that they became the top-ranked business school in the country not because of some type of “destiny,” but because she and her colleagues worked harder to get better in every area over the course of her 14-year tenure. She said she also has very high standards for herself and all her collaborators at CRS that leads them to set high goals and constantly strive to improve.

When she got to Notre Dame, she met Father Theodore Hesburgh, the famous president emeritus. He told her, “Our Lady is never pleased by mediocrity.” It’s a phrase she’s never forgotten.

It’s obvious that the reason why Father Hesburgh would say such a thing, and Dr. Woo would be interested in writing a chapter on the theology of excellence, is because in the experience of both they have often found mediocrity, complacency, and low standards where, especially in Catholic institutions, they expected, if not excellence, at least the desire and striving for it.

Satisfaction with mediocrity is a spiritual cancer. The Lord calls us to the greatness of holiness, to use and develop the gifts He’s given us for His Kingdom, to serve Him and others as well as we can. The virtue of humility doesn’t mean that God wants us to get C’s in class when He’s given us the capacity to get A’s, or do lackluster work when we could do great work, or have average Catholic schools, hospitals and parishes when they could be good or great.

God calls us to be “perfect” like He is perfect, which doesn’t mean that He expects us never to make a mistake but that we develop to the full the gifts He’s given us. That’s our Christian vocation, to be an excellent father or mother, an outstanding son or daughter, a superb student, first-rate taxi driver, homemaker, or employee, and an exemplary Catholic.

As we begin a new civil year, spurred on by Dr. Woo, it’s a good time to focus anew on high standards in school, work and life, and make some resolutions, with God’s help, to strive for the excellence they require.

On Tuesday we will mark one of the greatest scandals in history: there was no room in the inn. Not only did people turn their back on a woman about to give birth, but, without knowing, refused hospitality to the long-awaited Messiah. The Son of God made Man came to His own people, as St. John would write, but they didn’t accept Him. They made no room for Him. This scandal culminated, we know, in the cross.

And this scandal continues in multiple ways. When Jesus knocks gently on the doors of our hearts wanting to bring us into a deeper union with Him, many try to pretend as if no one’s at the door. With regard to His presence in the Holy Eucharist, Jesus said to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque that most people respond with indifference, irreverence, coldness and scorn. Many also continue to refuse to be inconvenienced when they become aware of pregnant women in need.

But one of the places this scandal of inhospitality frequently occurs is, of all places, at Christmas Mass, in the way many in the Church respond to those the various “guests” coming home to their spiritual Bethlehem.

Rather than being welcomed with warmth, often visitors are made to feel as if they’re intruding on someone else’s turf. They sit in someone else’s pew. They often don’t know how to genuflect or bless themselves. Older kids who haven’t been to Church in a while may not know how to behave and they, rather than the Liturgy, will become the center of attention. Those who are recognizable often receive greetings filled with thinly-veiled judgmental sarcasm, like, “Long time no see.” Rather than sensing joy that others are thrilled to see them at Mass, they are made to feel guilty that they haven’t been seen, perhaps, since Easter.

The question of how practicing Catholics should respond to “CAPE” Catholics — those who come only on Christmas, Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday and Easter — is one of the pressing pastoral problems of our age. Beyond the 30 million Americans who now self-identify as ex-Catholics, three-quarters of the 78 million who still call themselves Catholics come to Mass infrequently. Many of those 59 million Catholics will be coming to Church on Christmas Eve and Day and it’s a tremendous opportunity for us to reintroduce them to the real love that should flow from our Catholic faith.

Several years ago, Pope Benedict was asked his thoughts about those who come to Mass only on a few times a year. His response should influence the reaction of everyone in the Church: he said he was happy that they still have some faith. Although their faith may be weak, they still feel a bond to the Church and want to come to celebrate at least the most important mysteries. There’s still a flame of desire for God burning within them and their coming provides the Church an opportunity to fan that flame.

It’s true, some will say, that their voluntarily missing Sunday Mass most of the year is a serious sin and that therefore they need to be called out of love to convert from their eschatologically dangerous life. But the call to conversion, an essential part of the Church’s mission, is probably only going to succeed after people feel welcomed, cared for, and loved by God and His family.

There’s no greater witness to this approach than the Lord Jesus, Who was called a “Friend of sinners” and not only welcomed but went out in search of those on the moral periphery of Jewish life. He never ceased to call them to repentance and a new and better life with Him, but He first showed them that He didn’t consider them outcasts, but friends. This happened even on the first Christmas: shepherds had anything but a reputation for religious exactitude, but they’re the ones to whom the Good News of great joy was first brought.

As we think of the type of Christian hospitality that should mark our parishes, homes and hearts throughout the year, but particularly on Christmas, I think of the Benedictines, who have taught the entire Church how to be hospitable for 1,500 years.

St. Benedict wrote that when a guest arrives, the abbot and all the monks should stop what they’re doing and go to greet him. They should either bow their head to the guest or, if they can, lie prostrate on the ground before him. Then the guest should be led to the chapel to pray and, if he’s hungry, the superior should accompany him to get some food and eat with him, even breaking a fast to do so. The Abbot should wash the guest’s hands and then, together with the monks, wash his feet. Then he should accompany him to his guest room and make sure that he has everything he needs. And this should happen whenever a guest arrives, no matter how poor or unexpected.

That type of hospitality strikes us as absurdly extravagant, but if the Benedictines truly want to receive all guests the way they would receive Christ, then this “excessive” receptivity becomes logical. If they were welcoming Christ Himself, Who said, “I was a stranger and you welcomed Me,” would we not expect the abbot and everyone else to interrupt what they’re doing to go to the door to meet Him? Would we not expect them to lie prostrate before Him, pray with Him, show Him every kindness and break their fast to eat with Him?

The problem for many Christians is that, no matter how many times we’ve heard Jesus’ words about welcoming others as we would Him, we don’t act on them. If it were a question of welcoming Jesus Himself, all of us would want to welcome Him with all the love we’ve got, but we don’t love others in practice the way we love Him. Jesus says that at the end of time, many will ask, “Lord, when did we see You a stranger and refuse to welcome You?” implying that they would have given Him a welcome they refused to give others. The tragic response Jesus says they’ll receive is, “As often as you failed to do it to the least of My brothers and sisters, you failed to do it to Me.”

So as we prepare to welcome many at the Christmas Masses we don’t see every week, we need to prepare like Benedictines to treat every guest the way we would want to treat Jesus, Mary and Joseph. If we would excitedly welcome Mary and Joseph to our parish, then we should welcome every young couple, no matter their circumstances. If we would never allow the Blessed Virgin to have to climb over us to get to the inside of the pew so that we can keep our real estate on the aisle, we should just slide down for everyone. If we would not be upset in the least if the Baby Jesus were crying in the pew behind us, we should have that same attitude toward crying children made in His image and likeness.

If we make Christmas visitors to our Church feel the love with which Christ embraced outcasts and Benedictines welcome strangers, we would almost certainly see them more often. Hospitality is a crucial part of the “New Evangelization.” Let’s do all we can — as individuals and parish communities — contagiously to welcome every family the way the inn-keepers of Bethlehem should have welcomed the Holy Family that first Christmas.

During the Advent season we’ve become somewhat accustomed to hearing jeremiads against the commercialization of the season, from clergy, faithful and even those who long ago stopped caring much about the religious side of Christmas.

They charge that the generic “holiday season” worships not the baby Jesus, but mammon — from wide-screen high definition televisions, to iPads, smartphones, Wii consoles, clothes, shoes and jewelry — and leads people to spend more time in malls than they do in prayer. Millions, they point out, think nothing of spending all night in adoration of commerce on Black Friday yet few will arrange their schedule to get up in the middle of the night to adore the Baby Jesus at Midnight Mass. Even many of the most faithful Catholics seem to focus more on getting Christmas trees ready and preparing to welcome and assist Santa Claus than they do on getting their souls ready to embrace and assist Christ.

But while there are clear excesses of emphasis that should concern anyone who cares for God, for our culture, and for others, I’ve never really joined in this chorus of criticism. Rather I’ve always been more impressed at this time of year by the generosity of people, who will spend their time and money unselfishly getting gifts for others, not just the members of their family, but through Secret Santa Programs, Giving Trees and the like, for people they will likely never even meet. I’m convinced that the sacrifices people make, the selfless generosity that’s involved, and its connection to the celebration of the birth of Jesus, must please God very much.

What I have a great issue with is what gifts we actually give. Rather than giving presents that help others to recognize and rejoice in the reason for the season, rather than trying to bring them into a greater communion with God-with-us, many Catholics give things that can foment others’ idolatries.

To a young boy who adores Tom Brady and the Patriots more than Jesus Christ and the saints, we fork over a small fortune to buy him a Pats jersey emblazoned with the number 12. For a young girl who obsesses about clothes and her outward appearance far more than she cares about the state of her soul, we purchase sweaters, dresses and foot gear that will spend far more time in her closet than they ever do on her. To teens who already are isolating themselves from family members by electronic games and gadgets, who are looking forward to Christmas not as a day of faith and family but to play a new game of Wii all day long or to barricade themselves in their room downloading and listening to songs on a new iPod, we sacrifice to get them what will indulge, rather than address, their wasting their time and alienating themselves from communion with God and others.

In other words, rather than giving gifts that will help others to celebrate Christmas, embrace the One who comes to us in Advent, and grow in faith, we sacrifice to give what may actually hurt them by weakening their faith through catalyzing the materialist secularism pushed by our culture.

In this Year of Faith in which we are reflecting on how our faith is meant to influence all we are and everything we do, it’s key for us to ponder how our faith is supposed to influence what, how and how much we give at Christmas.

As Catholics we should give differently than those who do not share our faith. In our giving, we should try to give in such a way that those we love receive something of the pearl of great price, the buried treasure that rust can’t corrode, burglars can’t steal and the IRS can’t tax. We should give in a way that they receive something of the real Gift of Christmas.

This does not mean we should never give material gifts. If we know a young child who has no winter jacket or winter boots or other necessities, it’s a beautiful thing to buy such a gift directly or as a Secret Santa. But when those for whom we’re buying aren’t in material want, how much better would it be in this Year of Faith for us to give and spread our faith along with our gift?

For young kids, we could give a Veggie Tales DVD, or a good book for kids on Bible stories or on the lives of the saints. We can give a statue or a framed image of a beautiful Nativity that can help others ponder the mystery of Christmas throughout the year. We can support the work of organizations like Bethlehem Christian Families (bcfmission.com) who come to the churches of our diocese to sell olive wood sculptures made by the families of Bethlehem, to try to support economically those who are trying to maintain a Christian presence in the Holy Land, while giving on to others beautiful handmade goods.

If the person for whom you’re shopping likes jewelry, perhaps you could get a beautiful Crucifix necklace, or a stainless steel scapular or miraculous medal, or a Rosary ring like the members of my Team of Our Lady gave me a few years ago and I’ve used it every day since to pray.

If you normally get others gift certificates, rather than giving a pre-paid credit card or certificates to Amazon or to iTunes, perhaps you could give a certificate to the gift shop at La Salette Shrine, where your friends and family can not only visit the great Christmas display but, in passing through the gift store, allow God to attract them to something that will help them advance in faith.

Other good ideas would be to give a DVD of a good Catholic movie — like the recently released “For Greater Glory” or any of the dozens of films at Ignatius.com — or a good Catholic book. Pope Benedict’s latest short read on the Infancy Narratives of Jesus would be a great work for anyone who is a college graduate or student. Christopher Kaczor’s latest work, “The Seven Big Myths about the Catholic Church,” would be a great read for anyone who has questions about the Catholic faith. For guys who might think that reading a book on the faith is not a virile activity, I’d encourage you to challenge them with Father Larry Richard’s accessible and compelling, “Be a Man!” And for women, young and old, I’d recommend Colleen Campbell’s “My Sisters the Saints,” about which I wrote last week.

When you send Christmas cards, rather than sending the secular ones featuring Frosty the Snowman or generic messages wishing “holiday cheer,” think about sending one with a beautiful image of Christmas with a message that expresses our great Catholic hope that they may join us in the joy of the Holy Family, shepherds and magi.

In the midst of a world that is trying to take Christ out of Christmas, it’s crucial for us who believe in Him — particularly in this Year of Faith — to take advantage of this season to spread our love of Him, by keeping Him front and center in the way we spend our time this season as well as in the way we sacrifice for others, by trying to give gifts that can be bridges for those we love to come to the Giver Himself and the greatest Gift of all.

The day before Thanksgiving was a rare treat when I had no afternoon or evening appointments. I decided to download to my iPad Pope Benedict’s third and final volume of “Jesus of Nazareth,” focusing on the Infancy Narratives, which had been released the day before.

It’s a great journey into the mind and heart of someone whom I believe one day will be numbered among the greatest doctors in the history of the Church. In it he examines the Gospel genealogies, Jesus’ conception, birth and presentation, the visit of the Magi, the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt and finding of Jesus in the Temple and applies the truths he unveils to our lives and to the life of the Church.

I anticipated, based on the first two volumes in the series, that the Infancy Narratives would occupy the rest of my day, but it’s much shorter than the other volumes and took up only a couple of hours.

So, happily nestled in my comfortable chair, I turned to another book I had downloaded a few weeks prior, Colleen Carroll Campbell’s “My Sisters the Saints.” Within minutes I recognized I wasn’t going to be able to put it down. I also grasped that, even in comparison to Pope Benedict’s new work — featuring his characteristic lucidity that has led me to devour more than three dozen of his books over the years — “My Sisters the Saints” was going to be the best work I read the day before Thanksgiving, and one of the most inspirational books I’ve read in years.

I met Colleen in August when she invited me to New York to tape an episode for her EWTN series “Faith and Culture.” I had been impressed seeing her on television a couple of times as well as reading some of her op-eds for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but I really didn’t know much about her. Google soon taught me she had been a speech-writer for President George W. Bush as well as had written an important book — “The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy” — that several people had recommended but I had never had the chance to read. When we were conversing prior to the taping, I discovered we had several good friends in common and that we were both alumni of a great summer seminar in Krakow, having missed each other by a year.

For the program she wanted to talk about how Catholics can make a compelling case for the Church’s most controversial teachings, particularly on contraception. It became obvious over the course of our half-hour together not just that she’s a very poised and down-to-earth host, but is able to articulate the Church’s teachings with clarity, personal warmth and freshness. Those traits are even more on display in her new book.

“My Sisters the Saints” is a riveting spiritual memoir in which Campbell illustrates how six female saints helped her endure, understand and sanctify four different personal crises. Along the way, we not only learn much about Campbell and about the saints who accompanied and inspired her through these trials, but, insofar as the ordeals she describes are not unique, we learn by entering into her experiences how better to approach those and other adversities with faith, courage and heavenly help.

The first crisis happened at Marquette University as an undergrad in the ’90s when she became a self-described party girl who kept the letter of her Catholic faith but not its spirit. After hangovers and courses on radical feminism, however, she recognized that there had to be something more to life than smashing the patriarchy and the pursuit of pleasure. On a trip home to St. Louis, her father gave her a biography of St. Teresa of Avila, whose “spicy, messy and meandering spiritual journey” illumined her own struggles and gave her a model of faith, femininity, freedom and good fun that she could admire and appropriate.

The second crisis happened when she was a college senior and her father Tom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. She gives a very moving account of not only her father’s virtues in his illness but the struggles she and her mother had in caring for him. The first saint who came to her aid was St. Therese Lisieux, whose own father suffered with dementia for six years at the end of his life. The other was Blessed Mother Teresa, whose struggles with spiritual darkness provided Colleen with light to understand her father’s sufferings and her own and helped her to embrace Christ in the midst of them. For anyone with a loved one suffering from Alzheimer’s, this part of the book will move you and fill you with hope.

The next challenge took place when Colleen unexpectedly was offered a job as one of President Bush’s speech-writers. She was persuaded by her fiancé that it was an opportunity too good to pass up and she moved to D.C. While there was a certain exhilaration that came from putting your own words in the mouth of the most powerful politician in the world, it didn’t make up for what she knew she was missing with her family and her fiancé. As she wrestled with what to do, she befriended St. Faustina Kowalska, Jesus’ “secretary” in giving to the world His message of Divine Mercy. Praying with her the Chaplet of Divine Mercy early each morning at the White House, she learned from her Polish sister the humility, trust and courage she needed to leave a dream job at the White House and prioritize marriage and family back home in St. Louis.

The final trial she describes was to remain faithful and hopeful despite several years of agonizing struggles trying to conceive a child after her marriage. Wanting to remain true to the Church’s teachings that children are supposed to begotten of conjugal love not manufactured via in-vitro fertilization, yet worn down by years of medical interventions, pressure from doctors, unsolicited advice from those who benignly thought they had all the answers, and a litany of failed pregnancy tests, she was left in a moral and existential quandary. St. Edith Stein’s writings on womanhood and spiritual maternity helped her rediscover her femininity in light of her faith and fertility struggles. Colleen’s crisp, clear and comprehensible summary of Stein’s theology of woman is the best I’ve ever read. In our sexually-confused age, I hope every woman — and every man who loves a woman and wants to figure her out! — will ponder it.

Merely seeing her fertility struggles through the lens of faith, however, didn’t take away the pain. Her faith led her to turn in prayer to another spiritual sister, the most famous saint of all. Years of Memorares to the one whose Immaculate Conception we’ll celebrate tomorrow led finally to Colleen’s and her husband’s conceiving twins. And Mary continued to accompany all four Campbells through serious scares during pregnancy and childbirth. In this section Colleen gives far more than a grateful tribute to an intercessor. She presents a beautiful and accessible treatise on Marian devotion that will be helpful to all, and will provide special hope for those contending with similar fertility struggles.

The best gifts we can give to others at Christmas, especially in this Year of Faith, are those that can inspire them to live by faith. If you introduce your family and friends to Colleen Campbell this Christmas, she’ll bring over her six saintly sisters who may impact their lives even more than they’ve impacted hers.

Today we finish November, the month in which the Church annually reflects on the last things of death, judgment, Heaven and hell. Last week I mentioned that this meditation is happening less frequently today because, even though death remains a certainty, many have begun to believe that Heaven is just as certain for almost everyone who dies. Judgment and hell are irrelevant, they think, because how could Jesus — Who desires all to be saved and died on the cross to make salvation possible — ever flunk someone on the final exam of life?

Theoretically, of course, we can fathom that Judas, Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, serial killers, and all the people who don’t like us might end up in hell, if there is a hell; but we can’t envisage ourselves, any of those we care about, or a sizable chunk of ordinary people ever ending up in Gehenna.

How could a God Who is full of compassion, slow to anger, and rich in kindness ever set up an eternal, infernal dungeon in which He mercilessly punishes people for disobedience? How could God Who is love ever establish an everlasting Abu Ghraib for anyone, not to mention His beloved children?

And if it’s the case that only those with post-doctoral degrees in Satanic wickedness are candidates for the eternal hall of shame, then, at a practical level, we can all just calm down, because very little now matters to our or others’ eternal destiny. It doesn’t matter if we spread the faith, because everyone gets to Heaven whether or not they know Jesus Christ. The Sacraments don’t matter. The Word of God doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if we pray or play, if we keep or break promises, if we steal or sacrifice, if we come to Mass or sleep in, if we’re faithful to our spouse or cheat, if we provide for or neglect our family, if we forgive or settle scores, if we love or abuse the poor, or if we welcome or abort the littlest of Jesus’ brethren. None of this matters — or at least none of it matters much. Since almost everyone in the class is going to make the eternal honor roll no matter what they do, while we may still admire those who study hard, the really wise ones are those who eat, drink and be merry and still get their easy A.

But this way of believing and behaving is not Christian. Contrary to the idea that the final judgment is a cake walk and that everyone is with Led Zeppelin on the “Stairway to Heaven,” Jesus, as we saw last week, taught that “many” are on the wide, easy road leading to destruction and relatively “few” are entering through the narrow door leading to life (Mt 7:13-14). Jesus came from Heaven to show us the way to Heaven and indicated quite emphatically that not all roads lead there. To get to Heaven, we need to follow Him. If we tragically refuse to follow Him on that path, that choice has consequences.

Just as much as Jesus discoursed on the beauty of Heaven, he spoke about the reality of hell. He compared hell to a blazing furnace, an unquenchable fire, a worm that doesn’t die. We can make choices, He said, that cause us to lose body and soul in hell, that exclude us from the banquet of the Kingdom, that lead God to say to us, “I never knew you.”

Those who end up in this state, Jesus said, may be shocked because they had dined with Him, heard His sermons, even worked miracles in His name, but they had never really developed an intimate communion of life with Him. Those to whom Jesus will say, “Depart from Me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels,” will be startled to recognize that every time they neglected to nourish, dress, welcome and care for others — every time they failed to love their neighbor — they were failing to love Jesus Himself in disguise. And those choices matter.

In talking about hell, Jesus was not an ancient Stephen King entertaining the multitudes with fictional horror stories. He was communicating that hell is a real possibility of human freedom. Hell is not part of the Gospel Jesus proclaimed — hell is not “Good News” — but it is a reality for those who freely decide not to believe and live the Gospel.

But the question remains: How is hell consistent with Divine love? If God calls us to forgive 70 times seven times, doesn’t hell mean that there’s a limit to His mercy?

Hell was not part of God’s original plans, for everything He created was good. He formed us in His image and likeness in order to share His life and love, but He took a tremendous risk in creating us free: He made it possible for us to misuse our freedom against Him, others, and ourselves. Sin, suffering, death and hell are all the creation not of God but of those who refuse Him, the consequences of a disordered self-love so strong that it excludes the love of God.

Jesus said that He had come into the world not to condemn the world but to save it, but He added, “The one who rejects Me and does not receive My word has a judge, and on the last day the Word that I have spoken will serve as judge” (Jn 12:47). Those who reject Jesus’ words of eternal life, who prefer to walk in the darkness instead of the light, become their own judges by the way they respond to the truth God has revealed. “There are only two kinds of people in the end,” C.S. Lewis once famously wrote. “Those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in hell choose it.”

Hell exists not despite God’s love but precisely because of it, in order to honor the desires of those who don’t want to live in loving communion with Him and others. It is the state, as the “Catechism” calls it, of “definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed.” It is the tragic possibility of human freedom for those who, in voluntarily choosing sin, separate themselves from God and others.

When we ponder all God has done to make salvation possible, including Jesus’ brutal crucifixion to pay the full price for our sins, our response should not be to take Heaven for granted, but to say, with emotion, “So much mercy, so much love, and still some people choose against God!”

Jesus on the cross paid the price not so that we could sin as much as we want and presumptuously still think we’ll get to Heaven, but so that we, moved by the horror of sin and by the immensity of His love, might choose to live in His light, lovingly unite our whole lives with Him, follow Him home to Heaven, and help others to join us on the narrow path to His eternal right side.

It’s the choice between life and death, light and darkness, Heaven and hell. Jesus did everything necessary to enable us to choose well. But we have to choose Him lovingly in return, in each moral decision.

During the month of November, which begins with All Saints’ Day and the Commemoration of all the Faithful Departed, Catholics are called to meditate on the last things, death, judgment, Heaven and hell.

This is something that Catholics are doing far less of today, not only because of a phobia of death, but also because many no longer think death and hell are relevant. Most people think, rather, that everyone gets to Heaven — except perhaps serial killers, public smokers and those who gulp soft drinks larger than 16 ounces in New York City.

But this is a very dangerous error — in fact a heresy, universalism — that carries with it potentially the most serious of eschatological consequences.

Jesus once was asked how many would be saved. He didn’t respond by giving a number or even a relative percentage, because He hadn’t come to die on the cross to satisfy our curiosities. He replied by answering not how many would be saved but how to be saved: “Strive to enter through the narrow door, for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and not be able” (Lk 13:24).

The word translated as “strive” is the Greek word to “agonize.” To get to Heaven, in other words, we need to agonize, like Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane, to conform our will to the Father’s. We need to work harder than an undrafted free agent gives everything he’s got in Patriots’ training camp to make the cut. The width of the narrow door to Heaven is the span of a needle’s eye, the girth of the cross, something that is anything but easy to pass through.

Jesus told us that many will seek to enter through the narrow door but not make it. They will be left outside the door, pleading, “We ate and drank in Your presence and You taught in our streets,” and remembering, ‘Did we not prophesy in Your name, and cast out demons in Your name, and do many miracles in Your name.” Jesus says that God will then reply, “I never knew you” (Lk 13:25-27; Mt 7:21-23).

Jesus is emphasizing that it’s not enough to have heard Him speak. It’s not sufficient to have eaten and drunk with Him, even the Holy Eucharist. It’s not adequate to proclaim the Gospel in His name, do exorcisms or even work miracles. After all, Judas Iscariot did all of these things, but he never really knew Who Jesus was. We need to enter into intimate friendship and communion with Him. We need to follow Him not just on the outside, but on the inside. We need to become His true friend.

Jesus never answered the question of how many would be saved, but He did give us a snapshot of how many are heading in the direction of Heaven and how many on the path to hell. After stressing the need to enter through the narrow door, He added, “For the door is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction and those who enter by it are many. And the door is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Mt 7:13-14).

This is not necessarily a picture of the way everything ends up — because the whole mission of the Church is to try to rescue people from the broad, easy, congested “highway to hell” and lead them to the narrow, uphill, way of the cross that leads to life — but it is a striking image, given to us by Jesus Himself, about the way the vast majority of people are trending.

A quick glance at the practice of the Beatitudes, the Sacraments, and the Ten Commandments shows us why Jesus’ point is as valid today as two millennia ago.

The world says we need to be rich to be happy; Jesus says we need to be poor in spirit and treasure God’s Kingdom. The world says we need to be laughing and having a good time; Jesus says we need to be so sensitive we mourn over other’s misfortune and sins. The world says we need to be strong and pulverize whoever gets in our way; Jesus says we need to be meek, merciful and peacemakers. The world says happiness demands having all our sexual fantasies fulfilled and living like Hugh Hefner; Jesus says blessed are the pure in heart. The world insists we need to be popular and respected by everyone; Jesus says we’ll be blessed when we’re reviled, persecuted, calumniated and killed on His behalf. How many are really walking with Jesus on the narrow road of the Beatitudes, and how many are on the very easy boulevard leading away from Him?

Likewise, how many Catholics seriously agonize to meet Jesus in the Sacraments He’s founded? Are there more Catholics coming to Mass each Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation or not? Regularly receiving His mercy in the Sacrament of Penance or not? Passionately spreading the Gospel in response to the Sacrament of Confirmation or not? How many are agonizing to remain on the moral path of the Commandments that Jesus said leads to life versus how many are regularly, unrepentantly and mortally breaking one or more of them?

When we consider these relative trends and note how many times Jesus in the Gospel preached about the judgment and about hell, does it make any sense at all that many presume that the final exam of life is an easy-A and almost everyone goes to Heaven?

One of the most common things people say today after someone has died is that the deceased is “now in a better place,” regardless of the way the person lived or died. Those who say such things normally mean well, but they have no grounds whatsoever for making such a statement. Jesus told us emphatically not to judge and to leave all the judging to Him. This certainly means, most people recognize, not to judge people to be in hell, because no matter how wicked their deeds may have been — and Jesus clearly wants us to judge deeds like murder, adultery, and lying to be evil — we cannot see the person’s heart and soul.

But Jesus is also saying that we cannot judge someone to be in Heaven, because no matter how good a person’s external deeds seemed to be, we likewise can’t see the heart and soul. The only exceptions to this would be a baptized infant and a canonized saint, someone whose presence in Heaven God certifies, so to speak, by the working of miracles that God alone can do in response to prayers made through that deceased person’s intercession.

So we can certainly hope that someone who has died is in a better place — namely in the best place of all, with God in Heaven — but we can’t judge a person to be there and we shouldn’t say it. Not only is it possible that we could be dead wrong, but we just contribute to the universalist heresy that all roads — including the broad, easy road to perdition — end up in the same place. And we make it less likely that people on perdition alley will agonize to convert and to follow Jesus along the only path that we can be sure leads to life.

God loves us and indeed wants all to be saved, but we need to love Him back and work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Phil 2:12). November is a month to remember this central truth and recommit ourselves to what it takes to pass through the narrow door that leads to life. May God help us all!

I’ve been a sports fan all my life and have witnessed some amazing comebacks, but few compare to the incredible recovery that was made with regard to Ballot Item 2, which was trying to make it legal for doctors in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to prescribe poison for those with terminal diagnoses to kill themselves.

At the end of September, a Boston Globe statewide poll showed 68 percent of likely voters were planning to vote yes on Question 2, compared to 19 percent opposed. Over the course of the next month, not only was the gap closed but on election day, 51.1 percent voted to defeat it.

Much of that credit goes to the Catholic Church, particularly the Archdiocese of Boston, which raised most of the $4 million that was required for the campaign against Question 2 and was the fulcrum of a coordinated effort bringing together doctors and nurses, disability advocates, leaders of religious groups and other groups.

But much of the credit for the victory also goes to the voters in the Diocese of Fall River.

Across the cities and towns of our diocese, 53.8 percent of voters rejected doctor-prescribed suicide. If you look at the western side of the bridges, from Attleboro through Wareham, Question 2 was rejected by 57.0 percent of the electorate. Even though the number of votes cast across the non-Cape part of the diocese comprised only 4.2 percent of the overall votes cast statewide (124,922 out of 2,970,326), it constituted 48.6 percent of the margin of victory (30,517 out of 62,842).

And when you look at the cities and towns across the Commonwealth that were most against Question 2, many come from our diocese: Acushnet (63.3 percent against), Fall River (63.1), New Bedford (62.5), Taunton (59.0), Somerset (58.7), Swansea (56.7), Raynham (56.4), Dighton (56.1) and Dartmouth (55.6). North Attleboro, Fairhaven, Attleboro, Yarmouth, Freetown, Mashpee, Wareham, Sandwich, Westport, Dennis, Seekonk, Mansfield, Rehoboth, Barnstable and Bourne all not only defeated it, but defeated beyond the statewide average of 51.1 percent opposed.

This testifies to the efforts made throughout our diocese to get the word out, from Bishop Coleman’s excellent audio message the weekend previous to the election, to the yard signs, bumper stickers, educational materials and most importantly personal witness that helped citizens recognize what was at stake and got them motivated to defeat this attempt to pretend that suicide is somehow “dignified” rather than unmistakably tragic.

On a frigid election day, with several dedicated lay people, I held signs for almost three hours on an Eastern Avenue median in Fall River, just outside one of the polling places. I got an inkling that things were going to go very well in our area. There were a handful of passersby who screamed insults as they passed by in their cars, but there was an enormous outpouring of support from people heading in both directions: many encouragingly tooted their horns, gave the thumbs-up sign, waved enthusiastically, and even stopped in traffic — somewhat dangerously — to say how happy they were to see the Church’s leadership on this ballot item.

What happened in Massachusetts was a shot heard round the country on election day. Few believed that Massachusetts would defeat this perversion of mercy and the medical profession, especially after the polls predicting a blow-out in favor. There are, therefore, many lessons to be drawn from the victory, and not just with regard to physician-assisted suicide.

First, society is not on an inexorable decline to the culture of death. Sometimes Christians and Pro-Lifers can become cynical because there hasn’t been a lot to cheer about in recent times, but we should never lose hope. When people know what’s at stake, when we’re able to inform their consciences properly and effectively, we’ve just seen that people can respond well.

Second, the winning frame was not a moralistic one — “suicide is wrong” — but one drenched in true compassion for those who are suffering and might be tempted to end their lives. The message was that suicide is a tragedy for those who think it’s the only response to a depression caused by a terminal diagnosis, a tragedy for their family members and friends (as suicide always is!), and a tragedy for a society. We focused on the fact that there were better alternatives, like palliative care to handle the pain, psychological care to treat the depression, and simple human loving accompaniment so that one doesn’t have to suffer alone. We were able to show that life is worth living, even when one has a terminal diagnosis, as Victoria Reggie Kennedy’s moving op-ed about the last 15 months of Senator Edward Kennedy’s life gave powerful witness.

The Pro-Life movement in particular has a lot to learn from this. Just as suicide is always a tragedy, we need to convey how and why abortion is likewise always a tragedy, for the child, for his or her mother, father, other family members and all of society. We should emphasize that there are better alternatives than abortion to address the multiple reasons why a woman in a difficult pregnancy might look at abortion as the only way out. In an emotivist age, we should give greater voice to those women who have made the choice for life under difficult circumstances and how they’re so grateful they did. We should enhance and publicize even more the pre- and post-natal equivalent of palliative and Hospice care: the incredible work done by crisis pregnancy centers to help pregnant women in need as well as those who have chosen to keep their babies. Too often abortion is presented moralistically as an “issue,” rather than a tragedy impacting people in distress whom we with compassion want to sacrifice to help for the long-haul. The defeat of Question 2 is a positive wake-up call for the whole movement that when faced with an alternative between lethally unbridled autonomy and genuine compassion, the latter can win.

Third, the Church in this effort, while praying as purely as doves, was as wise as serpents. We convened focus groups and did in-depth studies. We put together an action plan to persuade secular voters and even those in favor of physician-assisted suicide why they should oppose Question 2. We formulated ads like the brilliant “pharmacist” commercial to show people that suicide by Seconal is never a dignified way to die. Jesus called His followers to be shrewd in dealing with the things of this world (Lk 16:8) and in this case the Church was.

Finally, we need to grasp why we were trailing 68-19 percent a month from the election and never make the same mistake again. Polls at the beginning of the year showed us trailing 43-37 percent. At the terrible advice of the political consultants advising the Church, however, we basically suspended all educational efforts until after Labor Day and even pulled superb educational materials from the Internet. The other side was able to advance its arguments when our side muted itself voluntarily. Few knew what was even on the ballot, not to mention why Question 2 should be defeated. Thanks be to God, we had just enough time to triumph at the end, but we should never have been down as much as we were. The Church’s educational efforts should be ongoing and never muzzled. And they should continue now all the more, because what we’ve just won is but one important victory in a much larger war in defense of human dignity.

Buoyed by this victory, we move on to the next battle!

It’s not often, especially for us in the United States with our relatively brief history, that we have a chance to celebrate a 1,700th anniversary.

When we look back millennia, we can normally pinpoint years when momentous events occurred, but it’s a very rare thing when we’re able to specify an actual day on which something happened. That points, however, to the special significance of what took place on Oct. 28, 312: the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, one of the most important battles in world history and an event of particular significance for Christians.

Since the time I became a guide to the Vatican necropolis and St. Peter’s Basilica as a seminarian, and needed to tell the story of the battle as background for the building of the basilica, the date has always been special for me. I had Oct. 28, 2012 circled on my calendar for more than 15 years!

In 312, the Roman Empire was basically divided into four parts, but the dominant emperors were Constantine in the northern and western parts and Maxentius in Rome. Even though Constantine was married to Maxentius’ sister, Fausta, Constantine and Maxentius were not able to coexist amicably and eventually hostility grew to such a degree that they declared war on each other.

Constantine and his armies started the march toward Rome, annihilating Maxentius’ garrisons in the north and central parts of Italy. But Constantine was too brilliant a military strategist not to realize that in order to defeat Maxentius, he needed to take Rome — and he could not see how that would be possible.

Forty years before, Rome had been surrounded by impregnable city walls the likes of which the ancient world had never seen. Not only was there no way at the time to penetrate them, but they also enclosed so much farmland and so many underground aquifers that there really was no way to siege Rome. Two famous military generals had already tried and failed. Maxentius was happy to remain within the city walls for as long as it took, and Constantine didn’t have anyone on the inside whom he could somehow get to open the gates.

But then something miraculous happened. On October 27, as Constantine and his troops were about six miles north of the center of Rome near a place called Saxa Rubra (“Red Rocks”), he and his soldiers looked into the sky and saw an image.

Two contemporary historians, the Latin Lactantius and the Greek Eusebius, present the image in slightly different ways, but, taken together, what was seen was what would look in our alphabet as a capital P with a horizontal bar cutting across the stem of the P about half way up. Lactantius focused on the sign being in the form of a Cross. Eusebius said it was the first two letters of the title Christ in Greek, the letterChi (the CH in Greek, which looks like an X, formed by the intersection of the vertical and horizontal bars) and a Rho (the Greek letter “R,” which looks like a capital P in our alphabet, seen at the top of the vertical bar). Underneath this sign, Eusebius tells us, Constantine saw the expression, En touto nika, which translated from the Greek means, “In this, victory.”

Constantine was not a Christian at this point and wondered what the apparition meant. In a dream later that night, he was instructed to place that sign on the shields and standards of his army, which he did the following day. Eusebius candidly admits that if he hadn’t heard the story directly from Constantine’s own lips, it would have been hard for him to believe it. This adds to the historical reliability of the accounts.

Something then occurred that Constantine considered even more miraculous than the sign itself. Maxentius, spurred on it seems by a pagan prophecy that on his anniversary of becoming emperor the enemies of the Romans would perish, decided to leave the security of the impregnable walls of Rome and accompany his troops toward Saxa Rubra, where they crossed the Tiber River at the Milvian Bridge. A fierce battled ensued. Eventually Constantine’s cavalry and soldiers began to have the upper hand. Maxentius sought to flee via the Milvian Bridge, but because previously he had the bridge partially destroyed to prevent Constantine from crossing the Tiber, he didn’t make it. He and many of his retreating soldiers were killed in the Tiber. Surrounded by his ebullient troops, Constantine entered the city of Rome and was acclaimed emperor of the West.

Constantine wanted to thank the Christian God who had given him the miraculous sign and led him to a previously inconceivable military victory.

The first thing he decided to do — the least he could do! — was to eliminate the law that made it a crime punishable by death for Christians to worship the God Who had given him that wondrous sign in the heavens. He did it with his famous Edict of Milan the following year, in which he extended religious freedom to the Christians and ended a period of 250 years of persecution and martyrdom. Christianity wouldn’t become the official religion of the Roman empire until the end of the fourth century, but it now became possible to practice the faith freely.

The second thing he did — now that Christianity was legal and Christians were coming in great numbers to the holy places without fear — was to build basilicas in which Christians could worship adequately. He sent his mother, St. Helen, to the Holy Land where, with the imperial building crews, she had churches built where Jesus was born, where He died and rose again, and where He ascended. In Rome, Constantine had five churches built, over the tombs of St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. Agnes, at the Catacombs, and in the Lateran, where he constructed a cathedral and a palace for the pope over the place where Maxentius had formerly housed his equestrian stables.

Constantine would also help out the Church in another way, convening the first ecumenical Council in Nicaea (Turkey) in 325, in order to combat and eliminate the Arian heresy that was disputing Christ’s Divinity and dividing the Church.

But all of this began 1,700 years ago with a sign in the heavens — the sign of the Cross together with the name Christ and an expression, “by this (sign), victory” — that led to a totally unexpected triumph.

As we ponder Tuesday’s election results, it’s important for us to do so with not only the eyes of faith that Christ and the Cross leads to victory, but also with an historical consciousness of what has happened before us. The Church, after 250 years of brutal on-and-off-again persecution, after 250 years of regular crucifixion, experienced liberation and resurrection by the sign of Christ and His Cross.

Let’s mark, not our military standards and shields, but our minds and hearts with this sign of victory and march on with confidence and serenity, knowing, with gratitude, that the same Christ Who took on our human nature and entered our history in Palestine, the same Lord Who intervened 1,700 years ago in the heavens and on the ground, remains with us still. By the same sign, with Him, we will conquer, too.

A month ago I received an email from a young woman from our diocese who is studying in Ohio. She was asking advice about whether she should register to vote in Ohio or get an absentee ballot to vote in Massachusetts. She wanted her vote to make the biggest difference it could.

I wrote her back saying I was proud of her just for asking the question. It showed how seriously and responsibly she was living her faith and trying to exercise care over the common good. Rather than answer her question directly, I tried to engage her in a conscience-forming dialogue, asking her to compare the advantages, as a Catholic voter, to casting her ballot here or where she’s going to school.

She replied saying that the greatest advantage to voting in Massachusetts would be to defeat item #2, which is trying to give doctors the legal permission to prescribe poison to enable people with terminal diagnoses to kill themselves. According to the polls, she said she thought her ballot would make little difference in the presidential election. While she believed her vote could be consequential in her Congressional district and the race for Senate, in both campaigns, however, she framed both races as pitting a gung-ho pro-abortion candidate against a pro-choice candidate who basically supports some abortion restrictions. She said she wasn’t particularly excited to vote for someone as the lesser of two evils.

Turning to Ohio, she admitted that she didn’t know anything yet about the Ohio Senatorial election or even who was running for Congress in her district. But she thought that if she registered in the Buckeye State, her vote might make a difference in the presidential election, since most election experts then — and still now — look to Ohio as the most important of all the battleground states that could decide the whole contest. In that election, she said, she would be able to vote to defeat a candidate who not only is staunchly in favor of abortion but is trying to force Catholics and all people of conscience to have to pay through their insurance policies for others to have free access to chemical abortions, sterilizations and contraception; whose policies, as the U.S. bishops have said, could force Catholic schools, hospitals, food pantries and other charitable institutions to close through crippling fines rather than exempt them from having to pay for these practices; who is trying to redefine Marriage to be a husband-less or wife-less institution and who has instructed his lawyers to argue that the belief that Marriage is a union of one man and one woman is bigoted and unconstitutional; and who, she fears, will nominate as justices to the Supreme Court only those who support abortion and the radical redefinition of Marriage.

She wasn’t thrilled with the main alternative — whom she didn’t trust because of how easily he’s changed his positions over the years on crucial issues — but she said that while there’s some doubt about whether that candidate will keep his campaign promises, there’s little doubt over what the first candidate will continue to advance.

I gave her feedback on what she had written and asked her to identify, among all that she had noted, what for her was the biggest and most realistically achievable goal that could come from her casting her ballot. She emailed two days later stating that even if the battle against the assisted suicide ballot item was lost, we could still work to try to prevent the suicides, and so her vote, as important as it would be, was not necessarily a game-changer. In terms of abortion and Marriage, because much of the debate is happening in the courts, she thought that even if fervent Pro-Lifers were elected to the White House, the Senate and Congress, progress in many areas would probably be slow and bumpy. But she said that with regard to the presidential election, there would be a dramatic impact on the question of religious freedom and whether the Church’s overall charitable mission can continue unencumbered. On that basis, she decided to register to vote in Ohio.

I recount this conversation not because many of us are going to be in the situation of determining where to vote, but to highlight the type of seriousness with which all of us should approach our solemn Christian and civic duty. Our votes always matter. They matter not just because there are occasionally elections like the 2000 presidential election in which 537 votes in Florida decided the entire contest. They matter not just because they express our deepest values and preferences and form our character. They matter because, one way or another, they express a message, a message that countless candidates, consultants, pollsters, pundits and others grasp.

Even when an election or ballot item doesn’t go the way one wants, a message is sent. When one scribbles in a write-in candidate rather than vote for two or more candidates whose positions one can’t stomach, a message is sent. One of the reasons why so many races in Massachusetts are uncompetitive and both parties routinely put up candidates who support intrinsic evils is because Catholics here have largely demonstrated in past elections that, unlike the Catholic girl from our diocese studying in Ohio, their faith matters very little to them when they vote.

Last week, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput talked plainly about the message Catholics are called proclaim at the ballot box. “We’re Catholics before we’re Democrats. We’re Catholics before we’re Republicans,” he said. “We’re even Catholics before we’re Americans, because we know that God has a demand on us prior to any government demand on us.” He said a lack of this clear awareness among Catholics has, for example, allowed the Democratic Party to become so virulently pro-abortion. “Catholics have been historically part of the Democrat Party in great numbers, and I think really could’ve stopped [the party’s push for abortion], if they tried, but they didn’t, in order to accommodate people from the other side of the issue. That’s why the position of the Democrat Party has gotten worse and worse as time goes on, because Catholics haven’t abandoned them as they’ve moved in that direction.” Our votes matter and the more Catholics vote in favor of pro-abortion candidates, others notice that our faith isn’t really that important to us.

Archbishop Chaput didn’t spare Republicans either. “You can’t trust the Republicans to be Pro-Life 20 years from now,” he added. “You can’t let any party take your vote for granted. And that’s unfortunately what’s happened. I think many of the Democrats have (taken) Democrat Catholic votes for granted because they’ll go with them no matter what the party position might be on abortion. … So we just have to be insistent on that, Catholic identity takes precedence over everything.”

Our Catholic faith is meant to influence every thing we do. Catholics should vote differently from the general populations, and consistent with the teaching of the faith. When we do, that’s when our votes will matter. That’s when no party will be able to take our votes for granted. That’s when Catholicism in our country will regain its salt and once more become real light and leaven for the betterment of the country we love.

Let’s make our votes count on Tuesday.

St. Gregory of Nyssa, one of the great early Fathers of the Church, said that, morally, we are our own parents. By our actions, by the choices we make in response to the values we prioritize, we form our character. By telling the truth we become an honest person. By sacrificing unselfishly for others we become loving. By taking what doesn’t belong to us, we become a thief. Our values, choices and actions all help to mold who we are and eventually they manifest who we have become.

We are now 11 days from the election and it’s important for all of us to remember that voting is a supremely moral action. First, to exercise the right vote is a moral duty (“Catechism,” 2240). It is one of the important ways in which we follow the commission Christ has given us to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world, and the leaven of our culture. A person who chooses not to vote is opting to be profoundly and literally irresponsible, to forsake the responsibilities he or she has as a Christian and as a citizen. That’s why the Church considers the choice not to vote a serious sin of omission.

But it’s not enough merely to vote. We also need to vote as salt, light and leaven, as responsible stewards who are striving to promote the common good. Like any moral action, how we vote expresses what we prioritize. Depending upon the values we’re expressing in our electoral choices, we could be voting either morally or immorally, and forming ourselves to be either morally better or morally worse.

Catholics are called to vote in accordance with the truths and values of the Catholic faith, according to a well-informed conscience. Many Catholics today are confused about what the conscience is, not to mention how to inform it and act morally in accordance with it. At a practical level, many people think that “conscience” means simply one’s own thoughts about right or wrong, or one’s preferences about the way things ought to be, or one’s gut-instinct about what one should do.

Conscience, rather, is an organ of sensitivity — like an “inner ear” within our head, heart, and soul — given to us by God by which we’re able to hear His voice telling us to do or avoid something or helping us to see whether something we did or failed to do was in accord with what He wanted. Conscience is not an “oracle” barking out divine mandates but an “organ” by which we tune ourselves to what God is saying to us. Just like an ear, however, this organ can lose its hearing — and even when it can hear clearly, it can listen to and believe falsities and lies.

Catholics are called to form their consciences to be able to hear, as clearly as possible, God’s voice guiding us. We’re given various “hearing aids” — God’s word, the “Catechism” and teaching of the Magisterium, prayer, the lives of the saints and the wise counsels of trustworthy men and women with well-trained consciences. But the essence of voting according to a well-formed Catholic conscience means to be turning to the Lord and asking Him, “How should I vote?”

Voting is not a morally autonomous zone. It’s certainly not an area about which God is indifferent, leaving us on our own to vote for whoever or whatever we “like” as if our choices were amoral and inconsequential. We can clearly see from the history of the Jewish people how God approved of certain leaders and political decisions and thoroughly disproved of others. Our leaders matter to God. Our votes matter to God.

So how does God want us to vote? Do we need to read lengthy tomes to discover what God wants us to factor into our electoral decisions? Is it hard to decipher God’s values and priorities and what He’s asking of His faithful sons and daughters? In most cases, no.

He is the Lord of life. In a choice between a candidate who recognizes that abortion is the massacre of innocent human beings and intends to work to reduce and eliminate it and one who celebrates abortion as a great civil “right” and even wants to force Catholic individuals and institutions to have to pay for it, is it complicated to figure out which candidate’s values God wants us to support? Similarly, would He want us to vote for or against candidates and legislation that would give doctors the ability to help patients commit suicide?

God instituted Marriage in the beginning as the union of one man and one woman, as a reflection of His own image. Would He want us to support candidates who see Marriage as He does or those who believe that such an idea of Marriage is bigoted, unconstitutional, and needs to be redefined to embrace husband-less or wife-less unions?

God founded a Church, calls us to use our freedom to live our faith through acts of charity, and wants us to be people who conscientiously follow His voice. Would He want us to support candidates who defend freedom of conscience and religion or those who want to use their office to compel Catholic institutions, priests, nuns, families and businesses to pay for other people to have free chemical abortions, sterilizations, and contraception?

The answers, for those of a well-formed conscience, aren’t complicated.

Could a Catholic ever vote for someone who supports abortion, doctor-prescribed suicide, the redefinition of Marriage and attacks on freedom of religion and the rights of conscience? Only in extreme circumstances, when the person abhors the evils that the candidate supports and votes for the candidate for reasons that the future Pope Benedict in 2004 said would be “proportionate” to the gravity of those evils.

What would such issues be? They would have to be so grave as to persuade an African-American, for example, to vote for a KKK member or a Jew to vote for someone anti-Semitic, since Catholics need to be against the evils mentioned as African-Americans are rightly against racism and Jews against anti-Semitism. The justification would have to be sufficient that one would feel comfortable saying to the Lord at the particular judgment, “I really believed in conscience that you wanted me to support that person despite the intrinsic evils that the candidate supported because I believed that the evils the other candidate supported were objectively even worse.” That’s a very high standard indeed.

Unfortunately today there are many candidates who support what God and His Church have emphatically taught as intrinsic evils. Even more unfortunate is that many Catholics reflexively vote for them. To support such candidates is to become materially complicit in the evil they do when elected. When we choose to vote for them, we’re prioritizing other values — often party affiliation, or financial concerns, or a candidate’s “likeability” — over fighting with God the real moral evils the candidates support. Such votes express our character, or better, our lack of character.

As we prepare for November 6, let’s keep in mind that it’s a moral decision that will be considered in the election at the end of our life in which we’re the candidate and God has the sole vote. May we prepare to cast our ballots by listening for His voice in conscience and responding in such a way that when we meet Him face-to-face, He’ll be able to say to us, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Once a lawyer, to test Jesus, asked Him what he had to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus responded by asking the man first to give his own opinion of what was written in God’s law. The lawyer replied that we needed to love God with all we are and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Jesus told him he had the right answer and promised him that if he loved in this two-fold way, he would live forever.

But the lawyer was a smart aleck and asked Jesus who his neighbor was. The question betrayed a common belief among many of Jesus’ contemporaries that certain people, like fellow Jews, were neighbors you needed to love and others — like pagans or Samaritans, even if they happened to live right next door — were not neighbors and therefore you were justified in not loving them.

In order to stress the point that we’re supposed to be neighbor to everyone, that God wants us to treat everyone who comes into our ambit with compassion, Jesus presented the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

We know the details of this famous illustration very well. A man journeying from Jerusalem to Jericho was ambushed by robbers, who stripped him naked, beat him and left him near death. Two people followed who would have been expected to help the dying man — a priest and a member of the priestly tribe of Levi — but they crossed the road and just kept walking. Then a Samaritan — whom most Jews hated for religious reasons, and vice versa — approached. To get a sense of what Jesus’ Jewish listeners would have been expected from a Samaritan, we could substitute someone today like a serial killer, or armed robber, or Al Qaeda member. They would have expected no good, and perhaps even some evil. And yet this man, seeing the Jewish man lying at the point of death, had compassion, drew close, totally inconvenienced himself, poured precious wine and oil in the man’s wounds, brought him to an inn, gave an enormous sum to the inn-keeper to care for him and, as a further act of compassion, indicated he would be back to check on the man’s recovery and promised that he would pay the inn-keeper for any other expenses incurred.

When Jesus asked the lawyer who had proven neighbor to the victim, the lawyer correctly answered, “The one who showed mercy on him.” And Jesus told him — and us — to go and do the same.

The Good Samaritan “showed” mercy. There’s a difference between “feeling compassion” and “showing compassion.” Compassion literally means “suffering with” another, sharing in that person’s life so that he doesn’t suffer alone and sacrificing oneself in love to help him bear his sufferings and if possible recover. That’s precisely what the Good Samaritan did and why he’s one of the most famous illustrations of true love of neighbor in the history of the world.

In the context of the Doctor-Prescribed Suicide ballot item on which Massachusetts citizens will be voting in two-and-a-half weeks, we could ponder a twist on Jesus’ parable to highlight what is being proposed:

“A man was heading from Jerusalem to Jericho and he was brutally attacked by a team of bandits, who beat and abused him, stole his clothes and left him in a ditch to die. Soon after, a relative of the victim was passing on the way, but when he heard the man’s cries for help, he just kept on going, too busy with the various tasks he had to accomplish that day to stop. A little later, a doctor passed by and likewise heard the man’s pleas for help, but he was on the way to make a house call to someone else and refused to be delayed. Finally, a Samaritan approached. He heard the naked victim groaning that he was in so much pain and filled with so much shame after the abuse he had suffered that he was begging God to end his life. The Samaritan didn’t ignore the man’s pain and drew near. ‘I’m here to help you,’ he said comfortingly. He took out a flask of wine and poured it into the man’s mouth as an anesthetic. He opened up a container of olive oil and bathed the man’s wounds, to palliate a little of the pain. As the suffering man began to thank him, the Samaritan reached once more into his sack and pulled out a knife. He placed it in the victim’s hand and said, ‘I’ll hold your other hand as you do it.’ He promised not to abandon the man, and that after it was over, he would take the man’s cadaver to the graveyard and arrange for a proper burial.”

This new version of the parable, which would have shocked Jesus’ original listeners and should shock us, is actually what’s being proposed by those pushing to give doctors in the Commonwealth the legal permission to prescribe poison to help their patients commit suicide. Proponents believe that a compassionate response to those who, because of their suffering and pain, are thinking that life is no longer worth living is to give them the means to end their lives.

But this is not a response of true compassion. It’s not an attempt to share the person’s sufferings. It’s not even an attempt to help treat the person’s sufferings. It’s the decision to end the person’s sufferings by helping the person end his life. For that reason, Blessed John Paul II called the practice of assisted suicide and euthanasia a “false mercy” and a “perversion of mercy.” Real love of neighbor doesn’t lead us to try to help others kill themselves because they or we cannot bear their pain. Real love of neighbor leads us to inconvenience and sacrifice ourselves to accompany them and try to lift them from the depression leading them to think it’s pointless to go on.

The true Good Samaritans always try to persuade others not to take their lives. They don’t facilitate their suicide.

We all admire those volunteers who staff the Samaritans’ anti-suicide hotlines in order to help people at their most vulnerable moments not to make the most tragic decision of all. On the Samaritans USA website, the Samaritans say they are “caring, responsive and motivated individuals who not only talk about helping others but actually do something about it.” They recognize that suicide is always a tragedy and they want to go beyond talk, beyond “feeling” compassion for others, to dedicating their time and efforts to try “showing compassion” by trying to save rather than end the lives of those contemplating suicide.

As we approach the November 6 election, the question is what type of Samaritan we’re going to be and what type of Samaritans we’re going to enable in our culture.  A “yes” vote on ballot item #2 is to vote to give “Bad Samaritans” a steady supply of knives to place into the hands of the most vulnerable and to pass by on the other side of the road as they seek to take their lives. A “no” vote — while not as significant as volunteering at Samaritan hotlines — is to bring the values of the Good Samaritan into the voting both and try to carry out electorally what true Samaritans seek to do on the phone.

Yesterday, the Church began the Year of Faith.

The context of this holy year is rather clear: It began four days into the Synod on the New Evangelization and the Transmission of the Faith, a three-week “mini Vatican Council” of representatives from the Church all over the world with Pope Benedict, because of the crucial connection between faith and evangelization.

The New Evangelization — the re-proposal of the Gospel to those who have been baptized but who either no longer believe the Catholic faith or who are not living in accordance with it — is arguably Pope Benedict’s biggest priority, the reason for which several conclave-participating cardinals said they elected him. There is a real danger that, without a profound revitalization of faith, many parts of Europe on account of secularization and Muslim immigrant birth rates might go the way of various countries in Northern Africa, and lose the presence of the Christian faith altogether.

Pope Benedict called this synod to focus the attention of the universal Church on the need for a New Evangelization. He’s formed a new department in the Vatican Curia specifically to promote the New Evangelization. And he has been preaching and teaching about the need for it ever since he was elected.

But the New Evangelization is not an effort a pope can single-handedly achieve. It’s not something that can be accomplished by a synod or even by the concerted effort of zealous bishops, or priests, or religious. It is an effort that requires all hands on deck in Peter’s barque.

And that’s why there’s a need for a Year of Faith, because we can’t pass on the faith to others unless we understand it and are living it. We can only give what we have. The Year of Faith is precisely about the internal evangelization of those in the Church before attempting external evangelization of those who have stopped coming to Church. It’s a chance to assimilate the faith more deeply so that they in turn, more capably, more naturally and more supernaturally, can transmit that faith to others

With regard to the need for those in the Church first to be evangelized before being capable to carry out the New Evangelization, it’s important for us to ponder something that Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, Ireland, said in 2010 with regard to the state of the Church on the Emerald Isle. He said that Ireland was probably the most catechized country on earth, but the least evangelized: basically everyone has studied and can regurgitate the doctrines of the Catholic faith, but many know them only at a superficial level, at the level of trivia. Many have never believed them, understood them and lived by them with the principle of faith.

I bring his observation up because one of the dangers we face as we begin this Year of Faith — a danger to which I think many dioceses and even some Vatican departments have succumbed — is to look at this Year of Faith fundamentally as a “Year of Catechesis” in which the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” and the documents of the Second Vatican Council can be studied on the respective 20th and 50th anniversaries. In an age of widespread religious illiteracy in the United States due to a few decades of insufficient catechetical formation of young people, this is a great temptation. But Archbishop Martin’s thoughts help us to recognize that even a superb Catechetical Year would not necessarily be a Year of Faith. Something more is needed.

There’s a classic distinction about faith that goes back to St. Augustine in the fifth century. He distinguished the fides qua from the fides quae. Even though there’s only one letter’s worth of difference, there is a great difference in meaning in the Latin expressions that denote, respectively, “the faith by which things are believed” and the “faith that is believed.” The fides qua refers to the act of entrustment we make to God; the fides quae refers to the content we believe on the basis of that trust in God Who reveals it. Every act of faith is a belief in something (fides quae) on the basis of a trust in someone (fides qua).

The real goal of a year dedicated to increasing our faith ought to be focused on both the fides qua and the fides quae. If we’re going to give priority to one of the two, however, I believe that priority should be given to the fides qua, which I think is the greater crisis today.

There is certainly an issue of religious illiteracy that needs to be remedied by a greater knowledge of the content of the faith, but I think that that’s not the principle reason why we need a New Evangelization prepared for by a Year of Faith. The main issue is a lack of trust in God and therefore in His teachings. While it’s clear that many don’t know the “why” behind the “what” of the content of the Christian faith, I think in most circumstances, they do know the “that.”

Many who know, for example, that Jesus and the Church speak very forcefully about the meaning of Marriage as an indissoluble union of one man and one woman from the beginning, that He speaks about forgiving 70 times seven, that He eagerly desires to eat the Passover of the Eucharist with us at least each Sunday, and that He established the Sacrament of Penance on Easter Sunday evening, still nevertheless deliberately decide to divorce and remarry, to support husbandless or wifeless pseudomarriages, to hold grudges and seek revenge, to put work, sports, sleep and so many other things above Sunday Mass, and to avoid the Sacrament of Penance for years. The deep reason for this is not ignorance, but the failure to connect these truths of faith to their trust in Jesus and to grasp that to believe in Jesus means to believe in what He said and did, including what He did in founding a Church and sending the Holy Spirit to guide it to all truth and to prevent it from erring with regard to what we need to believe (faith) and do (morals) to please God and enter into His life.

Therefore, I think the real goal for the Year of Faith is to collaborate with the Holy Spirit to fortify the fides qua so that we and others may have a stronger hunger to know and to live the fides quae. This is the type of trust St. Peter had when, after a fishless night on the Sea of Galilee, he put out into the deep again and lowered his nets for a catch.

To buttress the fides qua is one of the reasons why in Pope Benedict’s letter “The Gate of Faith” launching the Year of Faith, he spent so much time talking about the heroes of faith, those who show us what faith looks like.

We’re all called to be able to be looked at as real icons of fides qua as, over this year, we grow in the ability to credible teachers of the fides quae to a world and Church in need of both.

The Year of Faith announced begins next Thursday. It has no official theme, but I think the best one would be, “Lord, increase our faith” (Lk 17:5), the plea the Apostles made to Jesus after they realized how much they needed His help in order to live up to His call to forgiveness. There are no plateaus in the spiritual life; we’re either going uphill or sliding downhill, and hence this upcoming holy year is an opportunity for each of us to look candidly at the vitality of our faith and ask the Lord’s assistance that this great gift may grow.

The greatest compliments Jesus ever gave were about faith. “O Woman, great is your faith,” Jesus said to a pagan woman in Tyre after she with beautiful perseverance begged Jesus to heal her daughter. Jesus publicly marveled about the deep faith of a Roman centurion who showed total confidence that Jesus could heal his servant simply by saying a word a great distance away. He likewise praised the faith of His own mother as one who heard, believed into practice the Word of God (Lk 11:28), indicating, as the early saints of the Church beautifully noted, that before she had conceived the Word of God in her womb, she had already conceived Him in faith in her heart.

In contrast to these great icons of faith, there are also figures of little or no faith. Jesus reproved the Apostles on four occasions because of their “little faith.” Jesus wasn’t able to work miracles in various places, including His hometown of Nazareth, because He was amazed at their lack of faith. He candidly called out many of His contemporaries for being a “faithless and perverse generation” (Mt 17:7). And forebodingly, Jesus wondered aloud about His second coming: “When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth?” (Lk 18:8).

As this Year of Faith begins, it’s important for us to ask: Would the Lord compliment us for our “great faith” or reprove us for our “little faith”? If He were to come today, would He find faith in us?

All of us this year in the Church — whether we’re fervent or tepid, a daily communicant or fallen away — need to imitate the Apostles and beg, “Lord, increase our faith!” Even better, we should say with the father of the stricken boy, “Lord, I do believe. Help my unbelief!”

The Lord will never give us a stone when we ask for something good, like an increase in faith. But we have to be prepared for how He will respond.

Many people have come to me discouraged that, no matter how much they pray for patience, it seems that they’re always losing it. “How do you think God responds to such prayers for patience?,” I generally ask them. “Do you think He responds by removing you from whatever would try your patience or rather by giving you His grace but then providing challenging opportunities to grow in that virtue?” Most recognize it’s the latter. “The next time you find yourself in a situation that puts your patience to the test,” I counsel them, “try to remember that it’s an answer to your prayer to grow in patience. God is with you to help you to respond patiently.”

In a similar way, when we pray for an increase in faith, the Lord is going to respond by permitting us — individually and together as a Church — to have our faith tested, so that, in responding well in those trials, our faith may grow. I say “may,” because whether our faith grows depends on how we respond to the situations that put our faith to the test. We have to be ready for those trials.

The last time the Church had a Year of Faith, many in the Church just looked at it as an occasion for a few pious events. It remained on the periphery of most of the Church’s life. And when the tests came, many in the Church were caught off guard, with disastrous consequences.

Back in 1967, Pope Paul VI called a Year of Faith ostensibly to celebrate the 1,900th anniversary of the martyrdoms of SS. Peter and Paul. But the pope saw some portentous signs on the horizon and called the holy year specifically to strengthen his brothers and sisters in the faith before, somewhat literally, all hell would break loose.

Just look at what happened in 1968: the multiple assassinations, riots across the globe, the excesses of the sexual revolution, the terrible destruction of the war in Vietnam, and the massive crisis of faith after the pope published Humanae Vitae reaffirming the Church’s teaching on the sinful character of contraceptive use by married couples. And that was just the beginning. Within a few years, thousands of priests and religious abandoned their vocations, while many others remained within but were consciously unfaithful to their promises and vows, most notoriously the priests who began the cycle of abuse of minors that eventually came to light in 2002. There was also the publication of the Dutch “Catechism,” in which the bishops of Holland officially proposed as authentic Catholic doctrine things that were heresies.

Rather than a palpable increase of faith, Paul VI would say in 1972, that the “smoke of Satan” had entered the Church. “There is doubt, incertitude, problematic, disquiet, dissatisfaction, confrontation,” he went on. “There is no longer trust of the Church; they trust the first profane prophet who speaks in some journal or some social movement, and they run after him and ask him if he has the formula of true life. Doubt has entered our consciences, and it entered by windows that should have been open to the light.”

That’s what happened the last time. What’s going to happen this time?

Pope Benedict has called this year in order to strengthen our faith so that when it is tested, the Church may respond with greater fidelity than the last time around. We’re facing the challenges of a highly secularized society seeking to push faith to the margins or ban it altogether. The faith of many Catholics has been wounded by scandal and a lack of holiness among many Church leaders. We see the crisis of faith in the vocations crises affecting Marriage, religious life and priesthood.

So as we prepare for the Year for Faith, we have to be conscious of the stakes. I believe that if faithful Catholics and Church leaders could have foreseen what would follow the 1967 Year of Faith, they would have lived the year with much greater insistence and fervor. We need to try to ensure that the same thing doesn’t occur this time around.

This is a year in which we’re called to prepare for the tests of faith that are on the way so that, when they come, we may respond by putting out into the deep, with a faith that can move mountains.

When I was in Lourdes earlier this month, I went early in the morning to pray at the Grotto where Mary appeared to St. Bernadette in 1858. I had with me a biography of St. Bernadette and was preparing to meditate once again on the content of the apparitions and try to appropriate the lessons.

I was planning to ponder what I normally ponder on the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes each February 11: the significance of Mary’s praying the Rosary with Bernadette; her having Bernadette wash her face in what seemed only to be mud, but turned out to be the miraculous healing spring; her insistence on the need for Penance; her request for a Church to be built; her self-revelation as the Immaculate Conception; and her promise to Bernadette to make her happy in the next life, not in this one.

But when I began to re-read Bernadette’s account of the first apparition, I noticed something I had always passed over as an insignificant detail. Bernadette recounted, “I wanted to make the Sign of the Cross, but I couldn’t. My hand fell. Then I became afraid because I couldn’t do it. The Vision made the Sign of the Cross and I tried again to make it myself and then I could. And as soon as I had made it, I became calm.”

Bernadette had been prevented from making the Sign of the Cross until she had seen the Blessed Mother make it. On subsequent appearances, Bernadette would make the Sign of the Cross together with Mary and tried to imitate precisely how Mary made it with profound reverence and recollection. After the apparitions, when Bernadette was subjected to the endless line of interviews from people seeking to get her to divulge all that Mary had revealed to her, she would often be reticent about many of the details. She would readily respond, however, when her interrogators asked her to show them how Our Lady demonstrated to make the Sign of the Cross.

When she became a Sister of Charity of Nevers, Bernadette continued to make the Sign of the Cross as Mary had taught her. It often brought other Sisters, accustomed to making the Sign of the Cross routinely and without much thought, to conversion.

“The way in which she made the Sign of the Cross indicated that she was full of the Spirit of faith,” Sister Vincent Garros said after Bernadette’s death. “She couldn’t stand to see others make it poorly. One day, when I had made it very negligently, she asked me if I had hurt my arm or was in a hurry.”

A young novice, Sister Emilienne Dobuoué, recalled that Bernadette once politely indicated to her that she made the Sign of the Cross poorly. “You should pay attention to it,” Bernadette encouraged her, “for making the Cross well is important.” To another Sister who asked what she needed to do to go to Heaven, Bernadette without hesitation said, “Make the Sign of the Cross well. That in itself is already a great deal.”

Bernadette sought to make the Sign of the Cross as she had witnessed the Blessed Mother make it: slowly, in a sweeping gesture, raising her right hand so that her fingers touched to the very top of her forehead, then lowering her hands to touch her waist, and then slowly touching the extreme of her left shoulder followed by her right. She did so entrusting herself to the Three Persons of the Trinity Whose name she would invoke, while opening herself up to the infinite graces Christ gained for us on the Cross and at the same time committing herself to embrace her daily Cross and follow Christ as a new Simon of Cyrene.

Among the various things on my iPad that I had downloaded to pray at the grotto were the homilies given by the popes at Lourdes. When I began to read Pope Benedict’s 2008 homily for the 150th anniversary of the apparitions, I noticed that he spent most of his time focused on the same connection between Mary, Bernadette and the Sign of the Cross that the Holy Spirit had inspired in me earlier that morning.

“At Lourdes, in the school of Mary,” Pope Benedict said, “pilgrims learn to consider the Cross in their own lives in the light of the glorious cross of Christ. In appearing to Bernadette, the first gesture of Mary was precisely the Sign of the Cross, in silence and without words. And Bernadette imitated her in making also the Sign of the Cross with a trembling hand. Thus, the Virgin gave a first initiation into the essence of Christianity: the Sign of the Cross is the summit of our faith, and in making it with an attentive heart, we enter into the fullness of the mystery of our salvation.”

Most Catholics, I believe, treat the Sign of the Cross as a gesture to open and close a time of prayer, but Pope Benedict was stressing that we learn in Lourdes it’s much more than that: it itself is a prayer and one that has the capability to bring us into the fullness of our relationship with God if we pray it well.

That insight triggered in me a memory of a great Vietnamese professor I had during my one year at the Angelicum in Rome, Father Joseph Phan Tan Thanh. In all the classes there, we would start class with a prayer, but normally we would either invoke the Holy Spirit, say a vocal prayer like the Our Father or Hail Mary, or the professor would offer a spontaneous prayer based on what we would be studying that day. We would, of course, begin and end the prayer with the Sign of the Cross. But the only prayer I really remember 17 years later is the one Father Phan Tan Thanh would make to start and end classes. He would close his eyes and very slowly make the Sign of the Cross in a broad gesture that must have been very similar to St. Bernadette. The first time he did it, my fellow students and I thought he “forgot” the prayer. Then we realized not only was the Sign of the Cross his prayer, but our whole class was likewise supposed to be a prayer.

As we prepare for the Year of Faith, there will be lots of events, programs, educational materials, pilgrimages and more to help us live it well. All of these will be good and useful. But when Mary appeared in Massabielle to Bernadette to help her and through her others to grow in faith, this model of the Church’s faith started by helping Bernadette learn how to pray the Sign of the Cross well. For the rest of her life, Bernadette taught this lesson to others until she made her last devout Sign of the Cross just before she breathed her last.

Making the Sign of the Cross with faith, love and reverence might be a great place for all of us to start the Year of Faith as well.

At the beginning of September I went to Spain to do a retreat and a continuing formation course for priests in the Pyrenees. In addition to a lot of time for prayer surrounded by natural and artistic beauty, some very thought-provoking lectures on the upcoming Year of Faith, many new friendships with 29 priests from Spain and the obvious opportunity to improve my Spanish, the retreat center was also strategically situated to provide some incredible excursions: a pilgrimage to Lourdes, something I’m always ready to do, but even more important now that I’m pastor of a parish dedicated to St. Bernadette; Barcelona’s famous and recently dedicated Basilica of Sagrada Familia; the breath-taking mountain shrine of Our Lady of Montserrat; the cave in Manresa where St. Ignatius of Loyola began writing his “Spiritual Exercises”; the Basilica of Our Lady of Pilar in Zaragosa; some incredible mountain hikes and more.

It was a very rich interior and exterior pilgrimage, but the most unforgettable stage on that itinerary was totally unexpected. One afternoon, two carloads of us went to a small city called Barbastro where we visited the birth place of St. Josemaria Escriva, the Spanish priest and Apostle of the Laity canonized a decade ago by John Paul II who founded Opus Dei to help lay people to become holy in the midst of daily lives and work. As we were thanking the woman who gave us the tour of the house in which he was born, she asked if we were going to go to the shrine housing the relics of the Claretian martyrs. Most of us had no idea what she was talking about, but we said we were interested. She gave us directions and told us to hurry, because she thought it was about to close for the day.

We arrived at 7:20 p.m., 20 minutes after closing time. But the door was still open and I entered and spoke to a religious Brother inside, asking if it were still possible to visit the relics. He said that they had just closed for the day but, sensing a different Spanish accent, he asked me how far I had traveled to get there. “De los Estados Unidos,” I responded with a smile. He graciously said that, considering I might never make it back there, he would give me and my brother priests a tour after hours.

Using models and diagrams, he told the story of the Spanish Civil War and how on July 20, 1936, a group of anarchists firing muskets burst into Barbastro’s Seminary of the Missionary Sons of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, popularly called “Claretians” after their founder St. Anthony Mary Claret. They rounded up all those present: the three priest formators, the seminarians preparing for priestly ordination, and the Brothers of the community who worked in the seminary and received formation, 51 in all. After taking a census and roughing some up for sport, the three priests were brought to the city jail and the rest were brought across town to another religious house that the anarchists were using as a makeshift holding cell. Over the course of the next month, they were taken in waves to be slaughtered: first the priests on August 2, shot in the cemetery; then the six oldest of those who remained, who were scourged with wires and cords to the point of death and then shot; on August 13 and 15, in two groups of 20, the Claretians prepared for and celebrated the Assumption of Our Lady by seeing her in person; and on August 18, the two last Claretians, who had been sick, were executed.

The brother then took us into a room unlike any I had ever seen, even at Auschwitz. There were display cases featuring the bullets that had been taken from the bodies of several of the martyrs and then guns that had been used to shoot them. Other displays featured their breviaries, opened to the Common of Martyrs, which they prayed every day as they prepared to become martyrs themselves. There were hymn books featuring the sacred music they would chant as they were incarcerated awaiting their fate. The silver tabernacle in an adjoining chapel was made to look like a bread basket, because each morning the person whom the anarchists sent to bring them bread would also smuggle the Eucharist hidden within the basket. There were display cases with front pages of the Socialist Worker newspaper, proclaiming with joy that they had bombed the Basilica of Our Lady of Pilar, were extinguishing religion after millennia of ignorance, and executing priests, religious and seminarians.

When we got to the room with the remains of the 51 martyrs, arranged in small, transparent caskets with their names on the outside and their bones visible on the inside, we all knelt down to pray right before them. After I opened my eyes, I looked at the remains in the casket in front of me, a seminarian named Josemaria Ormo. The first thing I noticed was the bullet hole into the top of his skull, meaning that he was shot kneeling. I called the attention of the priest next to me to it and he then pointed out to me the crushed skull of the martyr’s remains in front of him. We were both stunned.

It’s hard to believe that not even that was the most powerful part of the visit. The letters they wrote were. While the Claretians were awaiting their deaths, they wrote to their families, fellow Claretians, murderers and the whole Church on any writing materials they could find — on the bottoms of piano benches, on wrapping paper for chocolates, on the insides of walls — hoping that these last testaments would be discovered after their death.

One of the seminarians wrote in Latin a phrase that indicated their bravery, that they saw themselves as the successors of the valiant gladiators of old: “Christe, Morituri te salutant,” “O Christ, those who are about to die, salute You!”

But their overall message was one of comfort to their families of origin and in religious life, telling them not to be sad, but to rejoice, because they were about to be martyred and would pray for them from Heaven. They wrote that even though they would not have the chance to preach the Gospel from pulpits, they would preach it even more powerfully by their witness and, like St. Therese, spend their eternity doing good upon the earth. Finally they wrote that they forgave their assassins, begging God to accept the shedding of their blood as a prayer that He not hold their sins against them.

Pope John Paul II, who beatified them all on Oct. 25, 1992, said that they were the most illustrious graduates a seminary could ever have, and called their house of formation a “Martyrs’ Seminary,” a place that prepared them not only to celebrate the Mass but to enter fully into Christ’s passion, mercy, death and resurrection and show others how to do the same. On this day in which we celebrate the triumph of the Cross, we remember how they preached this mystery 76 years ago.

In the days leading up to Republican Convention, there were various television specials and articles about Mormonism, since Mitt Romney is the first Mormon ever to be nominated for president and very few Americans outside of those parts of the United States where Mormons are concentrated know much about it beyond its polygamous history.

The programs and articles touched a little on the founding of Mormonism, when, according to legend, Joseph Smith Jr., found in Manchester, N.Y. in the 1820s a group of golden plates bound by rings and inscribed on both sides with text in “reformed Egyptian.” The texts contained the writings left by indigenous Americans, members of the lost tribes of Israel, centuries before Christ’s birth, which Smith translated into a tome that became the Book of Mormon.

Some programs took up the question of whether “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints” is actually Christian. The Catholic Church doesn’t consider Mormons Christians, or accept Mormon baptism, because, among other things, Joseph Smith claimed that God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit were not three persons in One God but three separate beings or “personages.”

A few touched on some of the peculiarities of Mormon theology and practice, such as baptizing the dead, the rejection of original sin, the belief that man, like God, is uncreated and eternal and that the world was formed, not out of nothing but of pre-existing matter, and the idea that God reestablished the Christian Church through Joseph Smith, having Peter, James, John and John the Baptist appeared to him giving him priestly authority.

But most focused on what makes Mormonism a compelling reality rather than a curiosity: that despite its historical and theological oddities, Mormonism is the fastest growing religion in the United States. This should bring all those of religious faith to ask why. It’s especially important for Catholics to consider what we can learn from the growth of Mormonism, because many of its most alluring attributes are things for which the Catholic Church was once famous.

The first thing that is striking about Mormons is their commitment to their faith. Soon after high school graduation or the first couple of years of college, most Mormon young men voluntarily serve two years in a mission, often far away from home, supporting themselves with money they’ve saved during their teen-age years. Many young Mormon women willingly do the same on 18-month missionary tours. Mitt Romney, even though his French was not very good, spent two years in France. Dressed in dark pants, a white shirt, tie and a name tag, these Mormon young people crisscross neighborhoods trying to engage people in conversation about life, faith, and Mormonism.

During my time as a priest in this diocese, I’ve admired the Mormon apostolic pairs going door-to-door in the neighborhoods of Fall River and New Bedford, no matter the weather. Many times their knocks are ignored. On other occasions, doors are slammed in their faces. It’s not easy work. During the summer of 1995, with three other diocesan seminarians, I sought to bring the Gospel to the housing projects of Fall River and I can testify personally to how demanding this work is. Most Mormon young people, however, look forward to it despite the routine setbacks. It’s an example for all Catholics — young and old — who by Baptism and Confirmation have been called and strengthened by God to be missionaries. The Mormon commitment to bringing their faith to others is clearly bearing fruit. The more one gives, the more one receives.

This period of missionary work is not the only commitment that Mormons make. It’s really the fruit of a tremendous earlier dedication. Every day in most Mormon homes, the family gets up early to study the Mormon Sacred Writings (the King James Bible plus the Book of Mormon and a Book of Doctrines and Covenant). When Mormons reach high school, they sacrifice sleep and comfort to leave home early in the morning before school each day for 45 minutes of “seminary,” focusing on one of these four books each year. By the time they graduate high school, most have a systematic understanding of their faith, capable not only of going on mission but also in defending his or her faith when challenged. The results are impressive. Seventy-four percent of Mormon teens say their religious beliefs are very similar to their parents, compared to 32 percent of Catholic teens, who, if they’re lucky, have one 45-minute catechetical class a week until Confirmation in eighth, ninth or 10th grade. The much greater commitment to the formation of the young creates a situation in which young Mormons are able much more easily to find role models and friends who support their faith in the face of secularizing peer pressure in public schools and wider society as a whole.

The commitment of Mormons is also seen in their generosity and charity. Mormons tithe, giving 10 percent of their income after expenses to the needs of the Church and her charitable outreach, caring for those who are struggling with food, rent and other necessities. In one television special there was a feature on the giant warehouses Mormons have built that distribute food wherever there’s need as well as the “retail” places where all the food and goods are free for those referred by the lay leaders — “bishops” — of the various congregations. The quantity of Mormon charity is dwarfed by all the work done by Catholic Charities, Catholic Relief Services, the St. Vincent de Paul Society and so many parish food pantries, but the per capita Mormon involvement in Mormon charities is very impressive nonetheless. The average Mormon adult in the United States sacrifices nine hours a week for charity, compared to the national average of one hour a week. The impact of this charity is that, in addition to addressing material needs, it forms friendships, fosters widespread cooperation and concern for those in need and helps all Mormons realize that living the faith means more than coming together for worship.

We can also applaud the Mormons for their commitment to marriage and family. The Mormons are serious about helping the young to understand the beauty of chastity before marriage and young Mormons by and large look at it not as a burden but as part of their sacred commitment to their future husband or wife. They are likewise serious enough about living a holy marriage that they almost always seek to marry someone of their own faith, asking potential spouses to convert once the relationship gets serious. This not only lessens the potential of future conflicts over the education of children but brings a greater harmony to the bond. Monday nights are generally dedicated to family time, to praying, talking and playing together. Catholics were once distinguished by similar practices flowing from our Catholic faith, but whereas many Catholic parents, kids and sometimes catechists have lost confidence in the beauty of these priorities and practices, the Mormons happily maintain them.

As we prepare for and participate in the New Evangelization, it’s important for Catholics to ponder the recent spiritual fruitfulness of Mormons in America and recover a similar commitment to family, sacrificial giving in tithing, time, and talent, to the formation of the young, and to the missionary commitment of all the baptized. These have characterized the Church’s evangelical expansions in the past — and despite pusillanimous and pessimistic prophets preaching accommodation to opposed “modern” trends — they’re all crucial to the reproposal of the Gospel in the modern age.

Last week, we considered Buffalo Bishop Richard Malone’s thoughts on martyrdom in the New Evangelization and we distinguished between what Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen used to call “red” and “white” martyrdom: red, the martyrdom of blood, and white, the martyrdom of suffering and rejection on behalf of the Gospel. Bishop Malone indicated that Catholics today must recover the courage of the martyrs in proclaiming and living our faith in the midst of a relativist culture that is becoming increasingly intolerant.

It’s a supremely obvious point that we have no greater example of the type of witness to which we’re called than Jesus Himself, Whose life featured both red and white martyrdom. Catholics are well aware of His bloody witness — we remember it every time we behold the crucifix and make the Sign of the Cross. But His white martyrdom may be even more instructive to us as we seek to heed His commands to come to Him, to follow Him and to proclaim the Gospel to every creature.

Jesus’ white martyrdom began soon after He was born, as He was called by Simeon a “sign to be contradicted” and was persecuted by Herod before the Word would even utter His first human words. It continued when His cousins tried to seize Him because they thought He was out of His mind, when He was vehemently opposed by the Scribes and Pharisees who accused Him of the capital sin of blasphemy, and when His fellow Nazarenes rose up to try to throw Him off a Nazarene promontory after hearing Him preach in their synagogue.

The most poignant instance of Jesus’ white martyrdom, however, happened in the scene the whole Church contemplated on Sunday. After having told the crowds in Capernaum that He was going to give them the greatest gift ever — Himself as their spiritual nourishment — Jesus had to endure seeing not just the crowds but His “disciples” abandon Him in great numbers, murmuring to themselves that His teaching was hard and unendurable. Jesus was so wounded that He turned to the Twelve and asked them if they, too, were going to leave Him.

He had labored already for quite some time to form a group of disciples around Him. He had preached. He had worked miracles to feed them. He had labored from dawn to dusk on various occasions curing one-by-one all the sick that had been brought to Him. And after the Bread of Life discourse, he was left basically with the Twelve — including His betrayer, as Jesus recognized for the first time on that occasion.

When the Good Shepherd who had promised to leave the 99 to go, find and save each lost sheep, saw the “99” abandoning Him, He conceivably could have gone after them to prevent them from leaving. He could have offered to multiply another five loaves and two fish to feed them. He could have walked on water and invited them, like He once invited Peter, to do the same. He could have put on another show of curing the blind, deaf, and lame. He could have offered to water down or change His teaching on the need to eat His Body and drink His Blood.

He didn’t. As much as it must have been killing Him to see them walk away, He knew that they had heard Him accurately and they just didn’t want to believe in Him and what He was saying. He was promising to give them the greatest gift the world has ever known, but they were rejecting that treasure.

The importance for each of us to contemplate Jesus’ white martyrdom in Capernaum was shown to me a couple of years ago in an unforgettable way.

I brought a group of American seminarians doing a summer course in Rome to meet Cardinal Raymond Burke, the former Archbishop of St. Louis and now Prefect of the Vatican’s Apostolic Signatura (Supreme Court). When Cardinal Burke began to take questions at the end of our session, one of the seminarians asked him if he had any advice for them as they were preparing to be ordained to preach the Gospel. The young man said that the cardinal had the reputation for being one of the most prophetic preachers in the United States, not ducking any of the controversial issues even when he had to suffer, and the seminarian wondered what lessons the cardinal had learned from these experiences that could guide them.

Cardinal Burke prefaced his answer by saying that we always have to preach the truth with charity and to strive to communicate to others that passing on the truth of Christ is one of the greatest acts of charity.

But then he got to the heart of his reply: He said he couldn’t imagine any preacher of the Word mounting the pulpit without having prayed long and hard about Jesus on the cross and about Jesus’ rejection in Capernaum after He had tried to indicate to them the new daily Manna that would sustain them in the desert of life far better than the first manna had sustained the Israelites. That is a meditation He returns to frequently, he said. We learn there the truth, he said, that sometimes, sadly, people reject the good. Sometimes people reject the Lord and the truth and love He came into the world to give. And sometimes those who are trying to pass on Jesus’ truth with charity will be the first to experience the pain of that rejection — and they have to be prepared for it.

The seminarian then asked, with humility and candor, what he should do if he is afraid to suffer rejection for preaching the difficult truths that many of the Catholics in his diocese might not want to hear.

“If someone who has been commissioned to preach the Gospel doesn’t feel that he can preach the whole truth of God that will set us free,” Cardinal Burke stated before taking a long pause. I anticipated he was going to conclude the sentence by saying something like, “He should think about another line of work.”

But after the delay, Cardinal Burke gave his apodosis, “Such a seminarian should pray long and hard that the Lord give him the grace to preach that truth with faith, charity and courage.”

That same advice is valid for all Catholics who have been commissioned by Christ through Baptism to preach the Gospel. It’s particularly timely as we prepare for the white martyrdom — and perhaps red — that will accompany the New Evangelization.

On August 10, Bishop Richard Malone was installed as the new shepherd of the Diocese of Buffalo.

I’ve known Bishop Malone for more than 20 years, from the time he was chaplain to the Harvard-Radcliffe Catholic Student Center when I was an undergraduate and daily Massgoer. Throughout his priesthood and his time as auxiliary bishop of Boston and Bishop of Portland, Maine, he has become one of the true experts in the Church in the United States on Catholic education, catechesis and evangelization.

That experience is one of the reasons why his installation homily two weeks ago at Buffalo’s St. Joseph’s Cathedral has garnered so much attention.

Normally, installation homilies allow the newly-arrived bishop a chance to chart out his Christian apostolic vision, to mention themes important to him and the Church, and to sketch in broad outline some pastoral priorities.

Bishop Malone used the occasion to speak about martyrdom — specifically martyrdom in the New Evangelization.

He introduced the theme with a little bit of humor. August 10 is the liturgical feast of St. Lawrence, the third-century deacon whose martyrdom in Rome under the Emperor Valerian is one of the most famous in hagiography. Being burned to death on a red-hot gridiron, he turned to his executioners and said, “Assum est. Versa et manduca,” “This side’s well-done. Turn me over and have a bite.” Bishop Malone used the line to comment, “Getting grilled is not an unknown experience for bishops these days!”

The message of the martyrdom of St. Lawrence, however, is one, he said, “for me and for all of us.” He described that the Greek word martyr translates as “witness” and emphasized that the martyr is the greatest Christian witness of all. The martyr is one “whose discipleship is so authentic, so deep, so uncompromising, so credible that she or he is ready and willing, with God’s grace, to give all, surrender all, to Christ and the truth He has revealed, and to do so in the face of fear, loss, scorn, rejection, suffering, even death. It is total self-giving in response to Christ’s love poured out for us from the cross.”

Like with St. Lawrence, sometimes “the witness’ surrender rises to a dramatic climax, like death on a grill,” Bishop Malone continued. But while only some of us are called to a red martyrdom, all of us are called to a white martyrdom. “For most of us,” he said, “our witness is a matter of persevering commitment to Christ and the Gospel, a daily dying to self, again and again, in large things and small. And this can be attempted in a wholesome, healthy and life-giving way only with profound hope, and even, paradoxically, real joy.”

This type of white martyrdom is something to which Jesus calls every disciple, the bishop stressed. Commenting on the words of Jesus in the Gospel of St. Lawrence’s feast day, “Unless the grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies it remains just a grain of wheat, but if it dies, it produces much fruit” (Jn 12:24), Bishop Malone said, “This startling yet foundational teaching of Jesus is relevant not only for our own personal growth in holiness, … [but] has profound meaning for our mission in this world,” for our fulfilling the New Evangelization.

Christians must be willing to die to themselves, to die to their egos, to die to their excessive desire for human respect if they’re ever going to be able to bear the Gospel to others.

“We need the martyrs’ conviction, courage, tenacity, selflessness and hope,” Bishop Malone declared, “to stand up in our increasingly relativistic society in defense of [the] truths and values so threatened in our time,” and help in the “transformation of individuals in Christ and the transformation of our increasingly secular culture into a civilization of love and a culture of life, respectful of human life from conception to natural death and at every moment in between; of marriage as the union of one man and one woman, open to new life; protective of religious liberty and conscience rights; compassionate toward the poor and toward immigrants, and so much more.”

Christians today need guts. Catholics need guts. To be faithful to Christ means that in some way we’re going to suffer.

For some it may mean suffer the jibes of family, friends, colleagues, fellow students, and opinion-makers who think we’re hopelessly backward for believing in Christ.

For others it may mean suffering more than taunts, like teens who forsake employment rather than work shifts that would force them to miss Sunday Mass, pharmacists who lose their jobs for not filling immoral prescriptions, or politicians who endanger their electability by standing up for the truth when the truth is unpopular.

And for some it may mean imprisonment or death on account of the faith, like is happening today in India, China, Vietnam and several Muslim countries where communist, Hindu or Muslim fundamentalists are able to harass, persecute, rape, torture and kill Christians with impunity. Two weeks ago, I hosted a missionary priest from southern India who told me of the story of one of his priest colleagues who last year was brutally murdered by Hindu fundamentalists just for founding a Catholic school to educate the “untouchables.”

To be a Catholic missionary, a new evangelizer, today requires bravery. One of the reasons why there’s a need for a New Evangelization is because in many places in the West, Christians have become soft. Rather than re-evangelizing culture, the mushy, pusillanimous elements of our consumerist, materialist, hedonistic culture have to a large degree “de-evangelized” us, such that churches are empty when there’s an inch of snow on the ground while supermarkets and malls are packed. We’ve padded our pews and kneelers, but fewer are using them to pray.

That’s why, in order to become agents of the rebuilding rather than the decline of the Church today, we need to go “back to the martyrs.” That’s the summons Bishop Malone was giving to the Church of Buffalo, which has begun to echo throughout the country. We have to become “the grain that falls to the earth and dies if we are to give credible witness to Christ, to the truth.”

Cowardice, softness, and mediocrity only lead to apostolic sterility and ecclesial and culture decline. On the other hand, if we, like Christ and the martyrs, are willing to suffer and die to ourselves for the Lord and for the Gospel, then we will be able to bear great fruit.

The blood of the martyrs, Tertullian said 1,800 years ago with words that are perennially valid, is the seed of the Church.

Therefore, Bishop Malone reminded us in his important inaugural homily, it’s the perspiration, pluck and if required the plasma of true Christian witnesses today that will be the seed for the harvest of the New Evangelization tomorrow.

Last week I relaunched this column by focusing on the future Pope Benedict’s comment, “The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.”

For us to put out into the deep and faithfully carry out the Lord’s command for a New Evangelization today, we need to focus not so much on rational arguments per se — as important as these are — but on the “argument” of irresistible attraction: the beauty of faith in response to the beauty of God.

For the most part, this column will focus on the light of God radiantly shining in those saintly men and women, boys and girls, who put out into the deep in a communion of life and love with God. As we prepare, however, for the beginning of the Year of Faith during the Synod on the New Evangelization in two months, I didn’t want to let the other part of Cardinal Ratzinger’s great insight escape, because it partially explains why we’re in need for a year of faith and a New Evangelization in the first place — as well as indicates the path forward.

In his famous 1985 book length interview with journalist Vittorio Messori, “The Ratzinger Report,” the then head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith spoke about the importance of beauty within the Church.

“If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her Liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the Resurrection? No. Christians must not be too easily satisfied. They must make their Church into a place where beauty — and hence truth — is at home.”

He added, provocatively, that without this beauty, “the world will become the first circle of hell,” merely a vestibule for final alienation from God.

Cardinal Ratzinger went on to describe a theologian he knew who bragged that he was a “barbarian,” someone who gave no importance whatsoever to beauty. He reacted by saying, “A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental: they necessarily are reflected in his theology.”

We could say the same thing about a “barbarian” pastor, whose aesthetic blindness will necessarily be reflected in his preaching, and about “barbarian” lay people, whose impairment will influence the way they speak, live, dress and witness to God and the faith.

This truth about beauty is key to the New Evangelization because one of the reasons why we need a New Evangelization is because, since the time of the Second Vatican Council — in the context of a movement in art that has downplayed beauty in favor of the “interesting” and “creative” — there has been a widespread obscuring of the beauty of our faith in favor of banality and ugliness.

Many venerable churches were iconoclastically stripped of so many of their beautiful treasures — paintings, statues, pulpits, exquisite altars and communion rails — in favor of whitewashed walls or third-rate replacements in a process that earned the pejorative title of “wreckovation.”

Many new churches more readily called to mind spaceships, restaurants or motor lodges than the cross or anything evocative of the faith.

Masterpieces in the treasury of sacred music were supplanted by trite melodies (Mass parts, for example, done to the tune of “Take me out to the ball game”) or with lyrics that were either patently heretical (“Look beyond the bread you eat”) or painfully narcissistic (“Give us the courage to enter the song”).

Tabernacles began to look more like plain “bread boxes” than the residence of the Eternal Son of God.

Crucifixes began to make Jesus look like an antiseptic extra-terrestrial stick-figure than the fully human, strong carpenter about whom St. Claire of Assisi said, even “bathed in blood, was more fair than the fairest of men.”

Church banners and altar frontispieces began to look like they were subcontracted to a first-grade art class at the beginning of the school year.

Stained-glass windows, rather than portraying in alluring ways the mysteries of our faith, started to become unintelligible kaleidoscopic hodge-podges.

And perhaps most conspicuously uninspiring of all have been Missalette covers, which have consistently portrayed the Lord, great figures and mysteries of faith in unappealing art unrecognizable to human life.

The New Evangelization requires a new appreciation for beauty over banality.

That’s already started, thanks be to God, with the elevated, often poetic language of the new translation of the Roman Missal. We see it in the stunning monthly “Magnificat” prayer books featuring the best of Christian art. It’s evidenced in the beautiful new hymnals like the Vatican II Hymnal pointing to a quantum leap in the quality of vernacular sacred music. And it’s witnessed in the rediscovery of beauty in Church art and architecture as liturgical buried treasures are being taken from church basements or acquired through Ebay.

These are all parts, important parts, in the “arguments” of the New Evangelization.

Reintroducing people to the beauty of the faith is an urgent pastoral need to help people to perceive the truth, Cardinal Ratzinger emphasized in a speech to lay people in 2002. “The pastoral life has to foster the human person’s encounter with the beauty of faith. To admire the icons and the great masterpieces of Christian art in general, leads us on an inner way, a way of overcoming ourselves; thus in this purification of vision that is a purification of the heart, it reveals the beautiful to us, or at least a ray of it. In this way we are brought into contact with the power of the truth.”

The pope built on this connection between beauty and truth in a 2008 question-and-answer session with priests. “The beauties created by faith,” he said, “are simply the living proof of faith.” They are a “luminous sign of God.” And they communicate an objective truth. “Christian art is a rational art. … It is the artistic expression of a greatly expanded reason, in which heart and reason encounter each other.”

That’s why in trying to introduce others to God, truth and beauty should always be conveyed together. “This is proof of the truth of Christianity: Heart and reason encounter one another, beauty and truth converge.”

And the beauty of the saints — in whose hearts beauty and truth have converged — and the beauty of art likewise go together. “The more that we ourselves succeed in living in the beauty of truth, the more that faith will be able to return to being creative in our time too, and to express itself in a convincing form of art.”

This is what the New Evangelization is about.

In his pastoral plan for the Third Christian Millennium, Blessed John Paul II denominated “Put into the Deep” as the motto for the Church for the next thousand years.

Like St. Peter at the seashore in Galilee, even if we’re fatigued, even if we think we won’t catch fish in deep water in daylight when normally fish are caught in shallow water at nighttime, we’re called, with trust in Christ’s words, to launch anew into the depths and lower our nets for a catch.

This motto is a summons to a New Evangelization, to a bold new attempt to cooperate with the Lord in bringing Him and His saving Gospel to others.

It is a courageous act of faith that, even when human wisdom and other factors portend a failure, as did the Carpenter’s advice to the professional fisherman on the Galilean Sea, we, like Peter, don’t hesitate to put our trust in a higher wisdom and at the Lord’s command lower our nets.

That’s why, back in 2004, when I first began writing for The Anchor, I chose this imperative of the Master as the title of a new column, hoping that, together with John Paul II, all of us in the Diocese of Fall River, thinking with the Church, would act audaciously with the whole mystical body in casting out the nets.

I’ve always been struck by the fact that our diocese boasts by far the largest commercial fishing port in the United States and I think that New Bedford’s excellence should be a particular inspiration for us as we ponder the command Christ has given St. Peter and us. If the faithful of the Diocese of Fall River were to work as hard in fishing for friends and family, neighbors and colleagues as New Bedford commercial fishermen work to catch flounder, haddock, tuna and cod, we could easily become the top “Christian fishing port” as well.

Anyone driving by New Bedford Harbor sees hundreds of boats regularly launching out and — despite all types of obstacles from onerous government regulations —returning with catches far bigger than Peter’s on the Sea of Galilee. In my time as a pastor in the Whaling City, I met hundreds of gutsy, gritty fishermen who gave new meaning to the expression “hard workers.” They’d head out for long trips to the deep waters of the Atlantic, laboring not only through grueling shifts but also in difficult and often dangerous conditions brought out by storms and seasons. They would invariably return from their expeditions exhausted from many days of back-breaking work. Anyone who has ever watched “The Deadliest Catch” on the Discovery Channel would easily understand why.

When Jesus calls us to be fishers of men, He’s calling us to a similar type of courage and tenacity. Jesus isn’t summoning us to the spiritual equivalent of taking a small motorboat out on a placid pond on a crisp, sunny day, with a rod in one hand and a beer in the other, mildly hoping that some fish decide to bite. The mission He has given us is not meant to be a recreational sport or hobby! He’s calling us to the type of commitment we see in the pescadores of New Bedford.

That’s what this column is about. It’s an opportunity to feature those who put out into the deep in living and spreading the faith, like saints old and new, canonized or hidden. It’s about inspiring figures who seek to live with heroic virtue. It’s about the challenge given to all of us by those who do.

I’m very grateful to Father Richard Wilson, the new executive editor of The Anchor, for his invitation to resume this column, which I wrote from 2004-2005 and from 2007-2010. It’s always been a joy for me to write these articles, because they allow me to describe the “good news” that is active, alive and incarnated in so many men and women, boys and girls, near and far, present and past.

The future Pope Benedict said back in 1985, “The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.”

I’ll have a chance next week to focus on the importance of the art the Church has generated, but mainly this column will continue to be dedicated to the saints in the broad sense, those inspiring personalities who give witness to the joy of the faith lived to the full.

“Every crisis the Church faces is a crisis of saints,” St. Josemaria Escrivà once said, and Church history has proven him correct. The greatest bait, the greatest nets, we have in carrying out the Lord’s command to fish for others is the luminous example of God radiating through those in true communion of love and life with Him.

“Today, for the faith to grow,” Cardinal Ratzinger said in Rimini in 2002, “we must lead ourselves and the persons we meet to encounter the saints and to enter into contact with the Beautiful.” Notice the capital “B.” This insight is crucial with regard to the upcoming events of the Year of Faith and the Synod on the New Evangelization and the Transmission of the Faith, both of which will take place in October.

The future pope was saying that it’s through our and others’ encounter with the holiness of the saints that we come into contact with the most beautiful reality of all, God Who is holy, holy, holy. Mother Teresa, with all her wrinkles, Damien de Veuster with his leprous sores, and John XXIII with his rotund physique attract more by the perennial supernatural beauty of their holy lives than supermodels with all their natural beauty, make-up and air-brushing. And it’s through contact with the beauty of God in this way that we grow in faith and become instruments of God to help the faith grow in others.

So let’s get down to work and together throw The Anchor into the deepest and most beautiful water of all.

One of the lessons Blessed John Paul II brought with him from Poland to the papacy was the importance of opportunities to give the entire Church and the wider society the time to pray about, study and act together with regard to particular pressing issues. In 1966 the Polish Church marked the Millennium of Christianity in the country with a year’s worth of prayer, cultural and historical events, and public witness to remind all Poles of their dignity, rights and national and cultural history that the communist government was trying to extirpate. It was an enormous time of growth that helped set the stage for the eventual downfall of Soviet suppression. This was one of many such focused times of prayer, education and witness that the Polish Church routinely organized in order to give prayerful and peaceful resistance to oppression and to form people in the virtues to persevere in the truth.

John Paul took these lessons with him to the Vatican, where he regularly inaugurated opportunities that would combine prayer, learning, and action with regard to priorities that could help and strengthen believers around the world. This is what was behind the various holy years called to focus together on the meaning of our redemption, on Mary, on women, on the family, on each of the Persons of the Trinity, on the Incarnation, the Rosary and the Eucharist — something Pope Benedict has continued with the inauguration of the Year of St. Paul, the Year for Priests and the upcoming Year of Faith.

These lessons have not been lost on the bishops of the United States and this is partially the background for the Fortnight for Freedom that the Church in our country began yesterday. In response to the multiple threats against religious freedom at home and abroad not only being allowed but waged by various agencies of state and national governments, the bishops have not just responded with a postcard campaign, but with an unprecedented, coordinated, concentrated tripartite focus on prayer, education and action. Over the course of these two weeks, the bishops are asking all Catholic institutions and individuals to give their attention to the threats to religious liberty and freedom of conscience and to respond with prayer, study and public witness.

The first part of the campaign is prayer, since prayer ought to be the first response of Catholics anywhere to anything. The bishops have asked dioceses and parishes to schedule specific times for people to come together to pray. Many dioceses have scheduled special Masses, holy hours, days of eucharistic adoration, recitations of the Rosary, days of fasting on the Fridays of the Fortnight and more. The bishops have also composed a Litany for Liberty and a special prayer in defense of religious liberty that they’re asking all Catholics to recite daily during the Fortnight. Like all good prayers, when prayed devoutly and attentively, it will form those who pray it in the knowledge and virtues needed to respond as conscientious, competent and courageous citizens.

The prayer begins by turning the first words of the Declaration of Independence into words of praise and thanksgiving, “O God our Creator, from Your provident hand we have received our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Then it describes how those rights correspond to religious duties that society must respect: “You have called us as Your people and given us the right and the duty to worship You, the only true God, and Your Son, Jesus Christ. Through the power and working of Your Holy Spirit, You call us to live out our faith in the midst of the world, bringing the light and the saving truth of the Gospel to every corner of society.” Next, it turns to prayers of petition that we might act in accordance with our God-given rights and gifts and that God will fortify us during this Fortnight to protect and promote true freedom. “We ask You to bless us in our vigilance for the gift of religious liberty. Give us the strength of mind and heart readily to defend our freedoms when they are threatened; give us courage in making our voices heard on behalf of the rights of Your Church and the freedom of conscience of all people of faith.”

Then it prays for the gift of unity in the Church. Some joke that the only time the Church stands together is at the Alleluia before the Gospel. It’s now a time in which the Church needs the gift of true communion to overcome division in order to give a united witness to liberty, and turn back the threats of liberty not merely for ourselves but for all those who will come after us. “Grant, we pray, O heavenly Father, a clear and united voice to all Your sons and daughters gathered in Your Church in this decisive hour in the history of our nation, so that, with every trial withstood and every danger overcome — for the sake of our children, our grandchildren, and all who come after us — this great land will always be ‘one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’”

The second part of the campaign is an educational and catechetical component. The bishops’ special website, fortnight4freedom.org, has a plethora of materials from the bishops conference and from dioceses across the country. The point of the educational and catechetical campaign is to equip Catholics with a deeper awareness of the history of religious freedom in the founding and growth of our country and in the teaching of the Church, so that as Catholic citizens they can defend the right to religious freedom and freedom of conscience in society and help others to appreciate their centrality. One document all Catholics should study during this Fortnight will be the U.S. bishops’ “Our First, Most Cherished Freedom,” which we published in our April 20 edition and which is available at fortnight4freedom.org. Another great opportunity for learning will be the town meeting that Cardinal Sean O’Malley is hosting at 8 p.m. on June 25. It can be watched live on Catholic TV (Comcast 268, Verizon 296, and CatholicTV.com, which will archive it for viewing anytime) and listened to on WQOM, 1060 AM. Various parishes throughout our diocese have scheduled important educational opportunities to bring their parishioners and others up to speed and prepare them for mission.

The third leg of the campaign is action. Ideas have consequences only if we make them have consequences by living in accordance with those ideas. The bishops are asking people to speak to their friends, family members and neighbors about the threats to religious freedom, to contact those who represent them in office, to write letters to newspapers, to give public witness as many have been doing through the Stand for Freedom rallies across the country. One act of collective witness that the bishops have requested is for all Catholic churches in the country to ring their bells at noon on the Fourth of July. Catholics are encouraged in a particular way to take time out of their Independence Day activities to pray, study and act, and opportunities around the noon “Let Freedom Ring” initiative might be a powerful way to do so.

The bishops scheduled the Fortnight for the 14 days between June 21 and July 4 because this is a time in which we mark the feast days of so many great martyrs — SS. Thomas More and John Fisher, St. John the Baptist, SS. Peter and Paul, the first martyrs of the Church of Rome, and St. Thomas the Apostle — who freely gave their lives rather than violate the truth they knew in conscience. It’s also a time, on Independence Day, that we recall that our freedom doesn’t come free and that so many national heroes — acting not only with patriotism but also disproportionately acting as a result of their Christian faith —  have shed their blood to keep us free. If these soldiers who died to keep us free were alive today, they would doubtless be urging all of us to get off our sofas and be as dedicated to the protection of freedom when it’s threatened here from within as they were in sacrificing themselves to keep us and others free when freedom was being challenged from without. Such dedication, shown by martyrs and soldiers serving a cause far higher than themselves, is required during this Fortnight and beyond to ensure that America remains truly the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” Happy Fortnight!

There’s a famous Latin aphorism corruptio optimi pessima, “The corruption of the best is the worst of all.” This is true not only because falls from grace are more severe the higher the position from which one tumbles, but also because when one topples from a prominent position there is a greater possibility of harming others by the fall. This could be said to constitute the dual background for two recent actions of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF): the April 18 publication of the doctrinal assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) and the June 4 Notification about the grave doctrinal problems found in Mercy Sister Margaret Farley’s 2006 book “Just Love: A Framework for Christian Social Ethics.” In both cases, there is an attempt to lift the religious women in question up from an obvious fall from the teaching of the Catholic faith and an effort to remedy the damage to other Catholics caused by the scandal of their failure to give witness to authentic Catholic doctrine. Sadly, in neither case have the Sisters responded faithfully and humbly to the Church’s fraternal correction given in charity.

On June 1, the LCWR board released a statement after a three-day meeting convoked to respond to the CDF’s assessment and pathway for reform (which was described in the May 4 editorial). “The board members raised concerns about both the content of the doctrinal assessment and the process by which it was prepared,” the statement said. “Board members concluded that the assessment was based on unsubstantiated accusations and the result of a flawed process that lacked transparency.”

If the assessment were truly based on unsubstantiated accusations and a secretive and flawed process, the Sisters would have legitimate grounds to complain, but as Toledo Bishop Leonard Blair, who was appointed by the CDF in 2008 to carry out the assessment, said in a June 8 statement: “What the CDF commissioned was a doctrinal ‘assessment,’ an appraisal of materials that are readily available to anyone who cares to read them on the LCWR website and in other LCWR published resources. The assessment was carried out in dialogue with the LCWR leadership, both in writing and face-to-face, over several months. The fundamental question posed to the LCWR leadership as part of the assessment was simply this: What are the Church’s pastors to make of the fact that the LCWR constantly provides a one-sided platform — without challenge or any opposing view — to speakers who take a negative and critical position vis-a-vis Church doctrine and discipline and the Church’s teaching office?”

The accusations weren’t unsubstantiated; they were grounded in LCWR materials and conferences, which questioned and challenged Church teaching not on peripheral, perhaps debatable areas, but, as the CDF assessment declared, on the “revealed doctrines of the Holy Trinity, the divinity of Christ and the inspiration of Sacred Scripture,” not to mention women’s ordination, same-sex activity, abortion and euthanasia, the papacy and the importance of the Eucharist. The process didn’t lack transparency: it gave the LCWR leadership the opportunity to respond face-to-face and in writing to the questions given. The Toledo bishop indicated that a “key question posed by the doctrinal assessment had to do with moving forward in a positive way. Would the LCWR at least acknowledge the CDF’s doctrinal concerns and be willing to take steps to remedy the situation?” It was only when the LCWR submitted unsatisfactory responses and refused to reform itself that the CDF announced its action.

The June 1 response of the LCWR board suggested that the LCWR is still, unfortunately, not interested in moving forward in a positive way. Bishop Blair lamented, “The response thus far is exemplified by the LCWR leadership’s choice of a new age futurist to address its 2012 assembly, and their decision to give an award this year to Sister Sandra Schneiders, who has expressed the view that the hierarchical structure of the Church represents an institutionalized form of patriarchal domination that cannot be reconciled with the Gospel.” Bishop Blair wasn’t the only one to express disappointment at the LCWR’s continued recalcitrance.

The Religious Sisters of Mercy of Alma, Mich., a thriving community of women religious that numbers among them many doctors and multiple medical establishments and is not part of the LCWR, released a June 2 statement ruing how the LCWR has been responding with the “language of politics” rather than the “language of faith.” While affirming that they “see great hope for the future of religious life within the Church and for a continuation of its health care mission in the service of all people,” the Alma Mercy Sisters said that this hope would be fulfilled only by “remaining within the deposit of faith and the hierarchical structure of the Church. We cannot separate ourselves from sacred tradition or claim to advance beyond the Church.” The last phrase seemed to be an allusion to then-LCWR president Sister Laurie Brink’s 2007 matter-of-fact acknowledgement that some Sisters had moved “beyond the Church, even beyond Jesus.”

While the CDF process regarding Sister Margaret Farley’s “Just Love” is independent of the LCWR intervention, it is responding to similar concerns about a certain woman religious leading people not deeper into the understanding of the Catholic faith but away from it. Beginning in March 2010, the CDF wrote to Sister Farley indicating the doctrinal problems they discovered in a preliminary evaluation of “Just Love” and engaging her in a two-year process asking her first to clarify and then to correct the unacceptable theses in her book. In response to the CDF’s charge that she contradicted Church teaching on the immorality of masturbation and homosexual acts, on same-sex marriage, the indissolubility of marriage and divorce and remarriage, she said in a June 4 statement that she did “not dispute the judgment that some of the positions contained within [“Just Love”] are not in accord with current official teaching,” but said her work was “not intended to be an expression of current official Catholic teaching, nor was it aimed specifically against this teaching,” but was a series of “historical explorations of … Christian sexual ethical principles and its consideration of similar principles across many religious traditions … designed to help people, especially Christians but also others, to think through their questions about human sexuality.”

Regardless of what her intentions were, Sister Farley, an emerita professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School and a member of the Religious Sisters of Mercy, didn’t just present a survey. She wrote, “It could be said that masturbation actually serves relationships rather than hindering them”; “same-sex relationships and activities can be justified according to the same sexual ethic as heterosexual relationships and activities”; argued in favor of “gay marriage”; and taught that “a marriage commitment is subject to release” and there’s nothing that would “disallow a second marriage.” When she refused to correct these statements over the course of a two-year process, the CDF finally published its Notification, affirming that her positions are in “direct contradiction with Catholic teaching in the field of sexual morality” and warning the faithful that “Just Love” is “not in conformity with the teaching of the Church.”

The chief issue in the LCWR and the Sister Farley interventions is not a bunch of aged, authoritarian chauvinists using Church power to bully innocent Sisters into conformity, as some defenders of the LCWR and Sister Farley are alleging. It’s about the Church’s desire to help Sisters who are veering from the understanding and teaching of the Catholic faith to come back into doctrinal communion and to prevent their wounding the understanding of faith among others who look up to them. Theological abuse — passing on to others erroneous understandings of the Christian faith and moral life, whether intentional or not — may be the greatest spiritual sadism of all. If people are led by Sister Farley to believe masturbation, same-sex activity and the adultery of remarriage are good rather than sinful activities, the damage done may not be limited just to this world.

Likewise, if people are led to believe by some of the actions, materials and conferences of the LCWR to doubt the Trinity, the importance of the Mass, the immorality of abortion and other defined aspects of Christian faith and life, the relationship of many with God and the Church He founded may be impacted. The consequences of this type of falsity being given instead of truth is likely one of the reasons why Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do so shall be called least in the Kingdom of Heaven” (Mt 5:19). The Church wants religious women to be great in the Kingdom so that they in turn may inspire the whole Church to greater fidelity, not less. That’s why the Church is now intervening, why we should be grateful she is, and why we should be praying that the Sisters in question will respond, not with the language of power, but with true Catholic faith.

On May 21, 43 Catholic institutions— dioceses, hospitals and health care chains, universities, elementary and high schools, Catholic Charities offices, peace centers, newspapers and cemetery associations — filed suit in 12 different federal jurisdictions against the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor and the Treasury and their respective Secretaries over the HHS mandate forcing all employers, including most religious employers, to pay for, provide or facilitate abortion- causing pills, sterilizations and contraception. It is asking the federal courts to overturn the HHS mandate on the basis of its violating the First Amendment, the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act; as it awaits trial, it also asked the courts to grant an injunction prohibiting the U.S. government from enforcing the mandate.

In a February 22 letter to his brother bishops, New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Bishops’ Conference, detailed the work the Church had tried to do with the administration and Congress to remedy the HHS mandate’s violation of religious freedom, but, despite the enormous efforts of the bishops and their staffs, they proved ineffectual. Cardinal Dolan confided in them, “Perhaps the courts offer the most light,” and told them why: “In the recent Hosanna-Tabor ruling, the Supreme Court unanimously defended the right of a Church to define its own ministry and services, a dramatic rebuff to the administration, apparently unheeded by the White House,” which nine days later published the final rule of the HHS mandate. “Thus, our bishops’ conference, many individual religious entities, and other people of good will are working with some top-notch law firms who feel so strongly about this that they will represent us pro-bono. In the upcoming days,” he said, “you will hear much more about this encouraging and welcome development.”

It took three months, but that’s what we heard about on May 21 with this vast array of lawsuits filed across the country by Jones Day, one of the nation’s largest and most prestigious law firms. Cardinal Dolan summarized, “We have tried negotiation with the administration and legislation with the Congress — and we’ll keep at it — but there’s still no fix. Time is running out, and our valuable ministries and fundamental rights hang in the balance, so we have to resort to the courts now.” Since the mandate — unchanged — became law on February 15 when the Obama Administration entered it into the Federal Register and since it goes into effect on August 1 of this year, Church institutions couldn’t risk waiting around to see whether the Supreme Court will vacate the Affordable Care Act as a whole later this month on the basis of the alleged unconstitutionality of the individual mandate. Hence, in case the act is upheld, the parties sued for an injunction against and overturning of the attacks on religious freedom. The wide variety of parties to the suit all across the country, Cardinal Dolan said, is a “compelling display of the unity of the Church in defense of religious liberty. It’s also a great show of the diversity of the Church’s ministries that serve the common good and that are jeopardized by the mandate — ministries to the poor, the sick, and the uneducated, to people of any faith or no faith at all.”

Of the 43 parties to the suit, the one that has gained the most attention is the University of Notre Dame. Three years ago, Notre Dame controversially invited President Obama to give its commencement address and receive an honorary degree. The president, within the context of speaking about health care reforms, declared, “Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree … and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded not only in sound science, but also in clear ethics.” That Notre Dame would now be suing precisely because the president did not honor these commitments is noteworthy, to say the least. In a statement announcing its participation in the lawsuit, the president of Notre Dame, Father John Jenkins, described what it was all about and why every Catholic institution — including those, like Notre Dame, that sympathize with President Obama on a wide range of public policy items — needs to be concerned about what the HHS mandate actually means.

The HHS mandate, President Jenkins said, “requires Notre Dame and similar religious organizations to provide in their insurance plans abortion-inducing drugs, contraceptives and sterilization procedures, which are contrary to Catholic teaching. The decision to file this lawsuit came after much deliberation, discussion and efforts to find a solution acceptable to the various parties. Let me say very clearly what this lawsuit is not about: it is not about preventing women from having access to contraception, nor even about preventing the government from providing such services. If the government wishes to provide such services, means are available that do not compel religious organizations to serve as its agents. We do not seek to impose our religious beliefs on others; we simply ask that the government not impose its values on the university when those values conflict with our religious teachings. We have engaged in conversations to find a resolution that respects the consciences of all and we will continue to do so.

This filing is about the freedom of a religious organization to live its mission, and its significance goes well beyond any debate about contraceptives. For if we concede that the government can decide which religious organizations are sufficiently religious to be awarded the freedom to follow the principles that define their mission, then we have begun to walk down a path that ultimately leads to the undermining of those institutions. For if one presidential administration can override our religious purpose and use religious organizations to advance policies that undercut our values, then surely another administration will do the same for another very different set of policies, each time invoking some concept of popular will or the public good, with the result these religious organizations become mere tools for the exercise of government power, morally subservient to the state, and not free from its infringements. If that happens, it will be the end of genuinely religious organizations in all but name.”

The statement from the Diocese of Pittsburgh, its Catholic Charities and Catholic Cemeteries about their joint lawsuit was the feistiest of all. After mentioning that the breadth of the lawsuits against federal agencies have “no doubt raised some eyebrows,” it went on to say, “Under the new HHS mandate, our Church-sponsored organizations — everything from hospitals for the sick to soup kitchens that feed the hungry — are required to let the federal government be the final arbiter in determining which of our beliefs we can follow and not follow as we carry out our ministries of service to the community.” Turning to President Obama’s February 10 announcement of an “accommodation,” it replied, “No accommodation exists. The mandate was made final February 15. It is the law and will go into effect for some institutions this August, for others next August. The mandate remains in place exactly as first written, as the president proudly stated in his commencement address at Barnard College May 14.

The fact is that talk of accommodation is smoke and mirrors. The mandate holds as originally written. Nothing has changed to expand in any way the very narrow so-called religious exemption. Nothing has changed in the federal government forcing faith-based institutions to provide access to services our Church considers morally and religiously objectionable. Nothing has changed in the federal government forcing virtually every Catholic social service agency, university or hospital in the United States to violate their religious beliefs.” They concluded, “The filing of these lawsuits has nothing to do with politics. We did not pick this fight or this timing. The federal government chose to impose this on us now. In fact, this lawsuit takes the issue out of politics and places it in front of the courts, which exist to protect our constitutional principles and freedoms. The issue is simple. Can the federal government ignore religious freedom guaranteed in the Constitution and force the Church to do what it considers morally and religiously objectionable?  We will not give to the federal government the power to make us choose between our sacred beliefs or shutting our doors because we cannot violate our conscience. That is why we have filed this lawsuit.”

All Catholics should be grateful for the staunch leadership of the bishops and Catholics institutions across the country in defending our constitutional freedoms and core religious beliefs. As we get ready for the Fortnight for Freedom, beginning June 21, all Catholics should pray not only for the lawsuits’ successful outcome but for a renewed respect for religious freedom and freedom of conscience among all citizens and especially among those who serve us in public office.

This Sunday the Church celebrates in a special way the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Jesus during the Last Supper prayed repeatedly to the Father for the Church He was founding, that the communion among His disciples would be a profound reflection of, and participation in, the communion among the three persons in the One God: “May they all be one, as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they may also be in Us, … [and] brought to perfection as one.” The reason was not just for their personal happiness and holiness — that “they might share My joy completely” — but also for the Church’s whole mission, so that “the world may know that You sent Me and that You loved them even as You loved Me” (Jn 17).

Our communion as believers is one of the most powerful evangelical testimonies of all, witnessing to God Who is a communion of persons in love and Who sent the Son to invite us into that loving communion. We saw the full powerful and attractiveness of this witness of communion in the early Church. “All who believed were together and had all things in common,” we read in the Acts of the Apostles. “They were of one heart and soul.” The early Christians sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to those who had need; they attended the temple together; they celebrated the Eucharist together; they ate together. The results of this mutual sacrificial love were immediate and impressive: “The Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved” (Acts 2:44-47; 4:32-35). The ancient world had never beheld such love before. Few sacrificed even for family members; to do so joyously for those who had previously been total strangers was an irresistible witness to the type of love Jesus had been sent into the world to bring. People could not help but be drawn by the Christians’ loving communion to want to enter it.

In his fifth and last ad limina address to visiting U.S. bishops, Pope Benedict on May 18 highlighted that as the Church in our country takes up the task of the new evangelization of our culture, we must begin by examining and fostering our true loving communion with each other in God. A divided Church is in contradiction to the most basic Christian truths and message: the Communion of Persons Who is our Triune God and the “one” holy, Catholic and apostolic Church Christ established as His Bride and Body.

Speaking to the bishops of the various Eastern Churches in the United States, the pope said one of the biggest challenges to the Church in America historically has been to find a communion among the many Catholic ethnic groups present in the country. Despite the truth that in Christ there is no longer “Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:26-28), in the history of the Church in the United States in some places, ethnicity was treated as more important than catholicity. “The Church in America has struggled to recognize and incorporate this diversity,” the pope noted, but went on to say that with God’s help, the Church in America “succeeded, not without difficulty, in forging a communion in Christ and in the apostolic faith that mirrors the catholicity that is an indefectible mark of the Church.” This communion, he added, “finds its source and model in the mystery of the Triune God,” in Whom “unity and diversity are constantly reconciled and enhanced.” But “preserving, fostering and advancing this gift of Catholic unity as an essential condition for the fulfillment of the Church’s mission in your country,” the pope said, is a constant challenge.

He mentioned one context in which this gift of Catholic unity is certainly being threatened: immigration. He said that the Catholic community in the United States is called “with great generosity, to welcome waves of new immigrants, to provide them with pastoral care and charitable assistance, and to support ways of regularizing their situation, especially with regard to the unification of families.” He noted that immigration reform is “clearly a difficult and complex issue” from the civic, political, social, economic and human points of view, and he encouraged the bishops to stay involved in defense of the “just treatment and the defense of the human dignity of immigrants,” a dignity that is not dependent on legal status. But he also said that within the Church, there must be a special Christian hospitality to immigrants, something that goes beyond defending their human rights but brings them into loving communion. “The Church in America is called to embrace, incorporate and cultivate the rich patrimony of faith and culture present in America’s many immigrant groups, including … the swelling numbers of Hispanic, Asian and African Catholics.” Bringing about a “communion of cultures,” he declared, “entails more than simply respecting linguistic diversity, promoting sound traditions, and providing much-needed social programs and services. It also calls for a commitment to ongoing preaching, catechesis and pastoral activity aimed at inspiring in all the faithful a deeper sense of their communion in the apostolic faith and their responsibility for the Church’s mission in the United States.”

In some places, instead of Christian hospitality, immigrants face misunderstanding and even outright xenophobia from those who believe themselves to be Christians. And some state governments are trying, in total violation of religious freedom, to force the Church to reject undocumented immigrants rather than see in them an image of the Savior Who said, “I was a stranger and you welcomed Me.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the State of Alabama where last year the state legislature passed the strictest and broadest immigration law in the nation, which prohibits nearly every possible assistance to illegal immigrants living in Alabama. The bishops of the state described the consequences of the law in a letter last August to the citizens of the state: “This new Alabama law makes it illegal for a Catholic priest to baptize, hear the Confession of, celebrate the Anointing of the Sick with, or preach the Word of God to, an undocumented immigrant. Nor can we encourage them to attend Mass or give them a ride to Mass. It is illegal to allow them to attend adult Scripture study groups, or attend CCD or Sunday school classes. It is illegal for the clergy to counsel them in times of difficulty or in preparation for marriage. It is illegal for them to come to Alcoholic Anonymous meetings or other recovery groups at our churches. The law prohibits almost every activity of our St. Vincent de Paul chapters or Catholic Social Services. If it involves an undocumented immigrant, it is illegal to give the disabled person a ride to the doctor; give food or clothing or financial assistance in an emergency; allow them to shop at our thrift stores or to learn English; it is illegal to counsel a mother who has a problem pregnancy, or to help her with baby food or diapers, thus making it far more likely that she will choose abortion. This law attacks our very understanding of what it means to be a Christian, [because] the love of Christ impels us to care for the needs of all our neighbors.”

The Alabama bishops have filed a suit against the law on religious freedom grounds and were successful in securing a temporary injunction against the enforcement of many of the laws’ provisions while the case proceeds. The whole fact that such a law was passed, however, demonstrates how important it is for the Church to evangelize members of our culture as well as some within our churches that immigrants are not demons to be exorcised, or germs to be extirpated, but fellow human beings seeking a good life for themselves and their families. We’re called to treat them as we would treat Christ, even if it means eventually for the stability of our society and respect for our laws that they would have to return to their countries of origin. The chaos of our immigration laws is not an excuse to dehumanize and mistreat others whose only crime is entering our country without proper documentation in order to try to live the American dream.

Pope Benedict reminded the American bishops of “the immense promise and the vibrant energies of a new generation of Catholics,” which he said “are waiting to be tapped for the renewal of the Church’s life and the rebuilding of the fabric of American society.” The history of our nation is one of immigrants who worked to forge a national unity that made us stronger than the sum of our parts. The welcoming of immigrants into the communion of the Church, rather than weakening our nation and our churches, will strengthen both. A culture of communion and a communion of cultures promotes the community good much more effectively than disgregation and division. A divided house cannot stand

Fr. Roger J. Landry
EWTN’s Our Lady of the Angels Chapel in Irondale, AL.
Solemnity of Saint Joseph
March 19, 2012
2 Sm 7:4-5a, 12-14a, 16; Ps 89:2-3, 4-5, 27 and 29; Rom 4:13, 16-18, 22; Mt 1:16, 18-21, 24a