Sunday Homily 6-3-12, Trinity
Readings:
Deuteronomy 4, 32-34, 39-40, Ask from one end of the sky to the other, did anything so great ever happen?
Psalm 33, Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.
Romans 8, 14-17, The Spirit bears witness to our spirit.
Matthew 28, 16-20, Behold, I am with all days until the end of the ages.
Observations on the Readings:
1st reading from Book of Deuteronomy (Chapter 4)
Deuteronomy is the 5th book of Bible and of Jewish Torah or Pentateuch. Though traditionally attributed entirely to Moses, modern scholars agree that it is a collection of Jewish traditions, later adapted to nationalistic reform and its final form coming after the Babylonian captivity in late 6th century BC.
It is written as if from the mouth of Moses, who was considered the greatest of the prophets, for the authority his name gave the book. See last verses of final chapter 34. The most famous verses are Ch 6:4-5: “Hear O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone! Therefore, you shall love the Lord, our God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.”
3rd reading from the Gospel of Matthew (Chapter 28)
This book is the second gospel chronologically, and was written with the Jewish people in mind, to show a direct connection between the Jewish Law and the Prophets and the teachings
of Jesus.
Homily
This year we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the opening of the
Second Vatican Council in 1962. I recommend the article in the blog by Giovanni Franzone, a former Italian Benedictine Abbot. As an Abbot, he attended the Second Vatican Council as one of the ‘Fathers’ of the council. He is now 86, and his article gives a fresh “I was there” perspective. I want to talk a little today about Vatican II, which has been called the most significant event in the life of the Catholic Church in modern times.
Pope John XXIII became Pope following the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958. Less than a year later, John 23rd announced that he would call an ecumenical council. You may remember his story of how he had a dream one night in which the church was coming together in a council to renew itself. He awoke thinking what a great idea that was and thinking “I must tell the pope about it.” And then he realized, “Wait a minute, I am the Pope.”
So he called the council to bring together representatives of the church all over the world, including many great minds of the time, and including representatives of other Christian faiths and non-Christian faiths. The two main purposes were “aggiornamento”, a bringing-up-to-date of the Church, and a striving for Christian unity. In answer to someone’s question about the purpose of the council, Pope John once said:
‘to let some fresh air into the Church”.
I didn’t just honor and give respect to Pope John 23rd; I loved him—for who he was as a man, and what he did for the church’s world
community. And we also shared the same birth day of November 25th.
Vatican II continued for a couple more years and eventually
documents were approved by the council. Perhaps the five most significant were: The Constitution on the Church, The Decree on Ecumenism, The Decree on the Pastoral Office of Bishops, The Declaration on Religious Liberty, and the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Contemporary World. I will say just a little about the first three, and I hope we can look at more of them, and in more detail, during this 50th anniversary year.
In the Constitution on the Church, the significant updating was, as
Mike said last week, a new (yet old) vision of the church primarily as the
‘People of God’, equal through Baptism, rather than primarily as a hierarchical and clerical structure.
The Decree on Ecumenism reached out to people of all
faiths and erased the old belief that you had to be Catholic to ‘be saved’—to be with God. Remember we read a lot from some Acts of some Apostles during the Easter Season.
In Chap.10 of Acts Peter said: ‘I can see now that God is no respecter of persons, but that in every nation anyone who reverences him and
does what is right, is acceptable to him.’ In other words, every human being who reaches moral adulthood chooses between what his conscience judges to be right and what his conscience judges to be wrong. If a person makes the basic choice for right as he knows it, he is in fact choosing God.
The Decree on the Pastoral Office of Bishops included the notion of ‘collegiality’ among bishops with the Pope, that bishops are not just advisors to the Pope, but co-deciders with him and the People of God. The Decree encouraged the formation of regional councils and, all the way down to the parish community level, councils were to be formed to allow participation in decision making by the community from the ground level up. How many of you ever served on a parish community council?
We have good reason to remember the aggiornamento begun by Pope John 23rd. I remember following the sessions of the council closely with enthusiasm and optimism. My 50th was last year, so I was ordained the year before the council opened. Stack was just a few years from ordination and no doubt also following it equally closely. Pope John died in 1963 less than a year after he opened the council, and was followed by Pope Paul VI. The article by Abbot Franzone in the blog provides a lot more information about Vatican II and about the role of Paul VI during and after the Council.
Vatican II is the most significant event in the life of the Catholic Church in modern times. My question today is: how much do we know about it? and how are we living out its updated teachings and its spirit?