Today we mark Laetare Sunday, so called because of the first words of the Introit of the Mass, “Laetare, Jerusalem”, rejoice O Jerusalem. This day marks mid-Lent and so Mother Church allows the use of rose vestments, flowers on the altar, use of the organ, as a time of anticipating the joy of Easter even amidst the penitential practices of Lent. The joy of this day is a subdued joy, but this subdued joy is really what Christian joy is all about. Christian joy is not ever immediate or sharp or of the moment. We all know that life is full of moments of great joy, and we know that life has moments of sadness and disappointment. What Christian joy is based on is not the good things that happen to us in this life that cause our eyes to brim with the tears of joy. Christian joy is based on the person of Jesus Christ. When John the Baptist leapt in his mother’s womb when Mary greeted his mother Elizabeth, he did so because he recognized Jesus in Elizabeth’s womb. His own life would at least by the standards of the world not be one of joy. And he would suffer a violent death at the hands of drunken king involved in a sacrilegious marriage. The joy in that embrace of Mary and Elizabeth: of course, the joy of two pregnant women is present and the wonder of those pregnancies is part of this. But the heart of the joy is in Elizabeth’s words: But who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me? The mother of my Lord. Elizabeth’s joy is grounded in the person of Jesus in Mary’s womb. And when Mary sings the Magnificat her joy comes from the child she carries in her womb, whose name will be called Jesus, the one who saves.
This is what we must always remember. The only source of our joy as Christians, the only source of joy that does not fade in the face of hardship and adversity in this life is the person of Jesus Christ. For it is He alone who by his death and resurrection promises us the ultimate joy that cannot be taken away, cannot be annulled by circumstances, for that ultimate joy is the joy of eternal life. In this sense our lives are like Laetare Sunday. In the midst of our lives in which there is intermingled peace and anxiety, health and sickness, darkness and light, we anticipate a joy that is beyond our expectations in that land of peace and rest made for us by Christ, in which we will all participate in that joy that comes directly from the love of God.
But the Catholic today finds himself, at least in Western society, part of a culture for which Christian joy is not only absent but a culture that demands instant gratification and which has no time for seeing things through a glass darkly, which militates against such a concept as irrelevant to post-modern man. This is a culture that has denied the presence of God as the foundation of true culture. Of course, this includes what is called the new atheism, where the existence of God is denied and often in a way that derides anyone who still believes in God. But quite apart from the fake novelty of new atheism, the fact is that most people in this culture do not even think about the question of God, because the context of this culture is a radical individualism that masks itself under the guise of a progressive liberalism whose goal is ostensibly to make as many people happy in an earthly sense. Included in this is the elimination of poverty, of sickness, of prejudice, and ultimately of anything that gets in the way of the individual’s pursuit of happiness in the earthly sense. I said that this is a mask for the radical individualism that is at the core of this culture. And part of this mask is an alleged concern for human rights. We must say alleged because this appeal to human rights has no basis other than what those in power define as human rights. Once one removes God from an understanding of human rights, then the naked individual becomes the basis of rights, then all is up for grabs, and whoever has the most power decides what these rights are and who should have them. Without the objectivity of the moral law whose author is God, then we arrive at the place where abortion has been declared a woman’s right, continuing down this path where gay marriage is seen as a human right and the movement to legalize this right is compared without a blush with the civil rights movement that sought to end discrimination against black Americans. Those who led the civil rights movement believed that what they were fighting for was based on the dignity of every human being as created in the likeness and image of God. This is totally clear in the writings and speeches of leaders of that movement like Martin Luther King. But those who are fighting to legalize gay marriage have as their basis their own abstract notion of human rights that is based on a perverse understanding of freedom that has its roots not in God, who alone is perfectly free, but rather based on their own desires and world-view. It may seem strange to appeal to Nietzsche to support the reality of what has happened. But this eclectic and anti-Christian philosopher saw quite clearly that the whole Enlightenment project was a sham that continued to use Classical and Christian terms like freedom and fraternity and equality and human rights while at the same time effectively killing the God that was the basis for the reality of these concepts. And he saw clearly that the use of these terms to further the rise of the amoral super man would be dropped as soon as the God who gave meaning to these moral concepts was for all practical purposes—dead.
It is indeed difficult for the Church to respond to the situation in which we find ourselves because many Catholics have abandoned the Christian understanding of freedom that is grounded in the love of the Cross and the Christian understanding of the basis of the moral law that is grounded in the ultimate reality of God. They live as practical atheists while still coming to Mass and protesting their loyalty to the Church. And they do so because of a flawed anthropology that has held sway among many Catholics for at least half a century, and this includes even priests and bishops, an anthropology that does not take seriously the fallen state of man and that has refused to preach the centrality of the Cross of Christ with its necessary and contaminate suffering to a world in love with itself and its progress to self-fulfillment. How can the Church talk to the world in dialogue about joy and hope without preaching about the cross of Christ as the only source of hope and the only source of joy? But that is precisely what the Church has not done in the past fifty years, preferring to soften the scandal of the Cross to engage a world that sees the Church as already irrelevant to their perverse conception of what is real. And how can we speak of joy today on Laetare Sunday in a way that really means something without saying that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son to die on the cross for our sins and that that love alone can conquer that death that threatens the very meaning of human existence?
And that is the heart of the matter. We live in a time in which the Christian faith is under attack. And everyone here would agree with that. But it is not only the increasing power of secularism that is a denial of the reality of God and that plays into that radical individualism that is part of the character of this country that we love. How do we account for the lack of young men who are called to the priesthood--and it does no good to point to increases in the young men in seminary in certain parts of this country. Even if they are all ordained in the future there will not be enough priests to lead our parishes as points of faith in a faithless society.
Ah, but the answer comes: we are in this situation because the world is changing and people want to be free to do what they want to do, and in so doing they want to be happy and free from the strictures of the Christian faith. And so one answer to this problem, a problem for the Church, is to make it easier to be a Catholic, to remove whatever is contrary to our fitting in to our society, to keep talking about Jesus as Lord and Savior and at the same time to decide to go beyond the words of Jesus in the Gospels so as to make them more palatable to the men and women of the society in which we live. Or even to deny Christ’s words: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, No one comes to the Father except through me.” And yet you have those in the hierarchy of the church who prattle about saying things like: All religions lead to God. That statement is both vacuous and not true. If you are a Catholic just because your parents were, or out of habit, then it is time to rethink this. Cultural Catholicism has not much to do with faith in the person of Jesus Christ, true God and true Man, who is the only hope of forgiveness of sin and eternal life. And cultural Catholicism is dying, and that is both good and sad in its way. For Catholic faith should in-form culture, not in a ghetto way, but in the way of personal faith.
Quod faciendum est? What is to be done” What must be done? Firstly, each of us must take our faith ultimately seriously. It is not about ethnicity; it is about truth. And the Church, and this must include the hierarchy, must take seriously the possibility that something went terribly wrong in the 1960s, in the imposition of a totally new form of the liturgy on the whole Church that was and is essentially discontinuous with the Roman Mass that developed in the womb of the Church for well over a thousand years. What we are doing here today, you and me, priest and people, is to give ourselves over to the act of worship of God in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. This Mass is not meant to teach you your faith---the sermon is a lacuna in the worship that is the Mass, sometimes good sometimes not. The only purpose of the Mass to worship almighty God by offering in this time and place the Sacrifice of Christ that alone is able to save us from eternal death, that offering for the living and the dead. And the fruit and the gift of this Mass is the true Body and Blood of Christ that we receive in the sure hope of eternal life. And that, my friends is why we can say today: Rejoice!
We await a new Pope, and in this diocese, a new bishop. And we do so with hope, not because of our trust in anyone involved in the election, but because we believe that God is in charge of the Church, in charge within the gift of human freedom. That is, our hope comes not from some pietistic understanding of the cardinals that excludes their own human frailty, not from some romantic belief that whoever is chosen must be the choice of the Holy Spirit in the immediate sense, but rather, from our faith that tells us that the Holy Spirit is present in the Church and will do what he must and will for the good of the Church and that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church. There is no doubt that the office of the Papacy is part of the mystery of the Church and as such is a place of special grace. But like all such mysteries, and this primarily includes the Sacraments, it is not magic. It always involves the mystery of free will and grace. And whoever appears on the balcony dressed in a white cassock sometime next week, we will greet him not as the world will greet him, that is, with a mixture of pride, scorn and boredom, but rather we will greet him with joy, a joy that is not based on our expectations for what he will do as the Vicar of Christ on earth for us, but we will greet him with the same joy as when a father and mother greet their new born child, we will greet him with that joy that the father embraced his prodigal son, we will greet him with that joy that the people had at the feeding of the five thousand, we will greet him with that joy that the disciples experienced when they heard the Lord’s words: This is my Body; we will greet him with that joy that Mary had in her heart at the foot of the Cross, we will greet him with that joy that Peter and John knew when they looked in the empty tomb, we will greet him with that Christian joy that looks forward to that joy that has no end. We will greet him with joy just because habebimus Papam, we will have a Pope, and God’s Church will go on as the presence of the truth of God in Jesus Christ in the world.
