By JAMES DRUMMEY
Part 2
(Editor’s Note: Below is a talk given by James Drummey, editor of the Catholic Replies column, at a retreat in Vermont, June 11, 2016. We published his talk in two parts because of its length; part one appeared in last week’s issue.)
+ + +
There are many saints we could talk about, but I want to focus on just three of them who lived within the last 100 years. The way in which God raised them up is truly remarkable, and their stories should inspire us to follow them in such a way that we will be recognized as “companions of Jesus.”
Amazingly enough, the three saints I’m going to mention all grew up a few miles from each other in Poland early in the 20th century, but they never knew each other.
The first is St. Faustina, a nun who was born in 1905 and who entered the convent in 1925. Jesus first appeared to her in 1931 and told her to have a painting done of Him that would say across the bottom, “Jesus, I trust in you.” You have seen the painting many times, I’m sure. There are two rays coming from the side of Jesus in the painting — the white rays signify water and the red rays signify blood. You recall that water and blood flowed from the side of Jesus when His heart was pierced with a lance on Good Friday.
The water from the side of Christ symbolizes the water of Baptism, which washes away original sin. The blood symbolizes the Holy Eucharist, when the wine is changed into the Blood of Christ, and it gives life to our souls. Jesus said that all the sin and evil in the world are just a drop in the ocean of His mercy.
It’s good to remember these words of our Lord today when it seems that we are being overwhelmed by a tsunami of evil. Recall, too, the consoling words of St. Paul, who said that “where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more” (Romans 5:20).
In 1935, Jesus appeared again to Sr. Faustina and dictated to her the Divine Mercy Chaplet, a series of prayers said on the rosary that will help even the most hardened sinner get to Heaven if he sincerely prays that chaplet. On the Our Father beads, as you know, Jesus said that we are to say, “Eternal Father, I offer you the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, of your dearly beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world.” On the Hail Mary beads, we are to pray, “For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.”
And at the end of the chaplet, we are to pray three times, “Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us and on the whole world.” This chaplet is to be prayed every day at three o’clock, the hour when Jesus died on the cross.
Sr. Faustina must have wondered how a humble little nun in Poland could possibly publicize to the world the Divine Mercy devotion, and she never saw the fruits of her efforts since she died from tuberculosis in 1938. She was only 33 years old, the same age as when Jesus died.
At first, her wishes and those of Jesus were not heeded because some Church leaders weren’t sure they were authentic, but after John Paul became Pope in 1978, he showed that Faustina’s requests were legitimate and, in 2000, he declared her a saint and proclaimed to the whole world that the Sunday after Easter would henceforth be celebrated as Divine Mercy Sunday.
Two Crowns
The second Polish saint is Fr. Maximilian Kolbe. He was born in 1894 and, at the age of six, had a vision of the Blessed Virgin. She showed him two crowns — a white one for purity and a red one for martyrdom — and asked him which one he wanted. Maximilian said he would take both crowns.
The white crown of purity came first as Brother Maximilian professed his religious vows, including the vow of chastity. He would later be ordained a priest and start the Militia Immaculata, an army of disciples of Mary that would be under the generalship of the Blessed Mother herself and would fight against the enemies of the Church.
Fr. Kolbe later served as a missionary in Japan and built a monastery there that miraculously survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945. He returned to Poland in 1936 and, when his country was overrun by the Nazis in 1939, he was arrested, released, and arrested again in 1941, along with thousands of Polish priests who would die in the death camps.
In August of 1941, a prisoner escaped from the camp at Auschwitz, and it was Nazi policy to kill ten prisoners for every one who escaped. The commandant of the camp lined the prisoners up and went down the rows selecting ten men for execution. One of the men begged not to die because he had a wife and family, but the commandant ignored him.
Then from the back of the group came a prisoner who said he would take the place of the man with the family. “Who are you?” the commandant asked. “I am Fr. Kolbe, a Catholic priest,” Fr. Maximilian replied. The Nazi soldier accepted the substitution and marched Fr. Kolbe off with nine others to the starvation bunker. After two weeks, only Fr. Kolbe was still alive, so the Nazis injected him with carbolic acid to stop his heart. Thus had Fr. Kolbe won his red crown of martyrdom.
By the way, the prisoner whom Fr. Kolbe replaced survived the death camp and attended the ceremony in Rome in 1981 when Pope John Paul raised Maximilian to sainthood. “Maximilian did not die,” the Holy Father said, “he gave his life…for his brother.”
Five years ago, when my daughter Meg was expecting a baby, she asked me for a suggestion about a boy’s name. She wanted the name Max, but did not want to call him Maxwell. So I suggested Maximilian. So if today you ask him his full name, Max will respond, “Maximilian Kolbe Corcoran.”
An Underground Seminary
The third saint from Poland during that time of war and persecution and suffering was the aforementioned Karol Wojtyla. He was born in 1920 and worked in a factory while his country was under the control of the Nazis. He was also a poet and an actor. He felt a calling to the priesthood in 1942 and studied in an underground seminary until he was ordained in 1946. He became a bishop in 1958 and a cardinal in 1967 — all during which time he was battling the Communists, who had taken over Poland when the Nazis were defeated.
When Pope Paul VI died in 1978, Cardinal Wojtyla went to Rome and helped elect an Italian cardinal who took the name Pope John Paul. When he died quite unexpectedly 34 days later, the cardinals went back to Rome and elected Cardinal Wojtyla as the first non-Italian Pope in 400 years. He took the name John Paul II and reigned until his death in 2005.
When Pope John Paul came to Boston in 1979, my wife and I joined a million other people on the Boston Common to welcome him in the pouring rain. My wife was expecting a baby at the time, and we decided that if it was a boy, we would name him after the Holy Father. We now have a 36-year-old son named John Paul.
In 1981, while he was riding through St. Peter’s Square in Rome, Pope John Paul was shot twice by a Communist assassin. The Communists hated the Pope because he was working to end Communism in Poland. Two bullets hit the Holy Father, and he should have died, but the bullet fired into his stomach made a right turn, sparing his life. He credited the Blessed Mother with saving his life because the assassination attempt happened at 5 p.m. on May 13. John Paul knew it was Mary’s intervention that saved him because her first appearance to the children at Fatima in 1917 was at 5 p.m. on May 13. The assassin fired the bullet, he said, but the Blessed Virgin deflected it.
One year later, on May 13, 1982, John Paul went to Fatima to thank our Lady for saving him. He brought the bullet with him and had it placed in a crown on the head of her statue.
So in the lives of St. Faustina, St. Maximilian Kolbe, and St. John Paul II we can see what it means to be a “companion of Jesus.” All of them lived in very difficult times. Yet, like Saints Peter and Paul, they never wavered in their love for Jesus or in their efforts to bring others to Christ by their words and actions.
We also live in difficult times, when it is not popular to be a “companion of Jesus,” when people don’t want even to hear the name “Jesus” mentioned in public, unless that holy name is used as a swear word. Then it’s okay.
You remember that incident at a college in Oregon last year, when a man pointed a gun at some students and asked them if they believed in Jesus. If they said yes, he shot and killed them. Just like the hundreds of thousands of Christians who have been brutally tortured and killed by Muslim fanatics in the Middle East and Africa simply because they believe in Jesus.
Are you brave enough and bold enough to defend Jesus, and to invite people to follow Him as the only sure way to get to Heaven? Will you use the gifts of the Holy Spirit to come closer to Jesus in the years ahead?
I once saw a sign in front of a church that read, “If you were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?” We could rephrase that to read, “If you were arrested for being a companion of Jesus, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”
I think that all of us here could truthfully answer yes to that question. After all, we are hear at a weekend retreat, we attend Mass faithfully, even daily Mass, we sign up for Bible study and adult formation classes, and we reach out to those in need both in our parish community and in the community at large. So we are proud to be known as companions of Jesus.
Admonish The Sinner
Another way to show our friendship with Jesus, in this Jubilee Year of Mercy, would be to perform the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy. Jesus made clear in chapter 25 of Matthew’s Gospel how important are the Corporal Works. In his description of the Last Judgment, our Lord said that our ultimate fate will be determined by whether we fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, and visited the sick and those in prison.
For if we did all of this for the least of our brothers and sisters, said Jesus, it would be the same as doing these good deeds for Him, and our reward would be eternal joy in Heaven.
Conversely, said Jesus, if we failed to perform these works of mercy for the least of our brethren, then we failed to perform them for Him, and we will be cast “into the eternal fire prepared for the Devil and angels.” Those who think there is no such thing as Hell, or that Jesus would never punish anyone with eternal fire, need to be made aware of what He said in these verses from chapter 25 of Matthew.
We hear a lot about the Corporal Works of Mercy, which have to do with the body, but very little about the Spiritual Works of Mercy, which have to do with the soul. You remember them, don’t you? Admonish the sinner, counsel the doubtful, instruct the ignorant, comfort the sorrowful, bear wrongs patiently, forgive all injuries, and pray for the living and the dead. All of them, with the possible exception of praying for the living and the dead, require wisdom and knowledge and courage to carry out, but today let’s just discuss the first one — admonish the sinner.
It is very difficult these days to warn the sinner, first, because too many people don’t believe in sin anymore, or at least don’t think they are ever guilty of sin. Second, no one likes to be warned that their words and actions may be harmful to themselves, to their families and friends, or to the society around them.
And third, we live in a world where the only real “sin” is being intolerant of the behavior of others, or worse, being “judgmental.” Isn’t it odd that people who neither know nor care about Jesus feel quite comfortable in quoting His statement, “Judge not lest you be judged”?
First, a word about tolerance: The key thing to remember is that we are always to be tolerant of persons, because everyone, even the worst person who ever lived, is made in the image and likeness of God and was redeemed by Jesus’ death on the cross. But we are never to be tolerant of immoral or evil behavior. Or to put it another way, we are always to love the sinner but never to love the sin.
This is what Jesus meant about not judging others. He never meant that we should not speak out against sin and evil, but rather that we should not judge the motives of those committing the sins since only God knows what is in the human heart and why people do the things they do. Take the example of abortion, which Vatican II called “an abominable crime.” It is always and everywhere evil to destroy innocent human life, and we should strongly work and pray to end abortion.
But there is a big moral difference between a frightened teenager seeking abortion under the pressure of parents, a boyfriend, or a guidance counselor at school and a mature woman who has had several abortions and even brags about them. Both actions are wrong, but the motives determine the subjective guilt of the person. Canon law recognizes this distinction in stating that all those involved in deliberately procuring an abortion, including the doctor, the woman, and family members and friends who advised and encouraged the abortion, are all automatically excommunicated.
However, this penalty would not be incurred if a person were truly ignorant of the penalty attached to abortion, was under the age of 16, acted out of serious fear about parental or societal reaction to the pregnancy, or erroneously believed that the abortion was necessary to save the mother’s life. Objectively speaking, abortion is always a grave sin, but whether it is a mortal sin for a particular person depends, like all mortal sins, on whether the person knew it was a grave evil, but deliberately went ahead with it anyway.
How do we know that Jesus was not opposed to judging evil actions? Because He said in chapter 18 of Matthew’s Gospel that if a person sins, we should speak to him about his sin. If he or she won’t listen, then we are to get one or two other persons to speak to them. If this doesn’t work, we are to refer them to the Church. And if they still won’t listen, Jesus said that we should treat them as outcasts.
Remember that Jesus gave us Ten Commandments, not ten suggestions, and He said that if we truly loved Him we would keep the Commandments. He can hardly be happy with persons who deliberately break the Commandments and jeopardize their chances of reaching Heaven.
At the risk of a punch in the nose, or the loss of a friendship, we must speak to those who are living in immoral relationships, or supporting abortion or euthanasia or same-sex “marriage,” or watching pornography, or drinking too much, or deliberately staying away from weekly Mass, and warn them that these actions separate them from God and put their eternal salvation in jeopardy. And we should not vote for any political candidate who supports abortion or same-sex behavior or transgender confusion.
To speak out clearly on these serious moral issues will not bring us praise. We can expect to be persecuted just as Jesus was persecuted. But if we want to be recognized as companions of Jesus, then we must imitate our Savior and call upon people to take up their crosses and follow Him. St. Paul told us to speak the truth in love, and we must do so prudently and tactfully, realizing that there is no greater act of love than to steer someone away from Hell. Better for us to cause hurt feelings now than to have someone we love suffer real hurt feelings in that “eternal fire prepared for the Devil and his angels.”
So let’s go forth from this retreat bound and determined to speak and act in such a way that all will know that we are companions of Jesus.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress