When St. Paul
talks about a gift over-flowing, he doesn’t just mean a benign trickle. He knew
what it was like to be bawled over by a torrent of over-flowing gift, Jesus
Christ’s gift of self, an act of love that changes the world. The gift of the
resurrection is that Jesus gives everything to show us that God’s love for us is
so intense that not even death, death at our hands, could keep him from being
with us. It’s a gift that finds its first installment in God’s own Spirit,
dwelling to closer to us than we are to ourselves, praying in us; a gift that
will find its perfect fulfillment when it leads us to live forever lives of such
love ourselves, standing shoulder to shoulder with the saints in heaven. It’s a
gift, as we heard Jesus say, that’s spoken into the darkest parts of our world,
and of ourselves, daring to go to places we’d balk to reveal, and lovingly
transforming them. It’s a gift that compels us to speak of it, wherever there
is light, Jesus says. And God has bathed his whole world in light.
Blessed Basile
Moreau, the founder of my religious family, the Congregation of Holy Cross, had
his life transformed by that gift, that warmed his soul with what he would
describe as “zeal: that burning desire to make God known, loved and served, and
thus save souls.” He grew up in
post-Revolution France, surrounded by the twin darknesses of impoverished faith
lives among the people, and a dearth of educational opportunities, especially
in rural areas. He formed a small band
of auxiliary priests, to go around preaching parish missions and soon joined
them with a group of teaching brothers who were running schools. Still today wherever we are sent, we go as
‘educators in the faith.’ This group was
to proclaim God’s gift, with our words, and with our common life of poverty,
chastity and obedience, making clear our dependence on God’s generous
providence and helping those we minister to and with to trust in that same
providence, feel the warmth of the light, have their hearts set aflame, and
proclaim the loving gift of the one who set the sun in the sky and counts every
hair on their heads to all they meet.
Moreau himself
had always dreamt of going to the ‘foreign missions’ (as they were called), but
he would discover that the walk God had laid out for him was firmly rooted in
Sainte-Croix, the small suburb of Le Mans whose name we render in English as
Holy Cross. He would selflessly send out
his brightest and best, his closest friends and brothers, wherever the Church
asked for them to be sent. Within years
of our founding, Moreau was sending Holy Cross priests and brothers to Algiers,
Bangladesh and a small settlement in the wilds of Indiana to found a little
school named Notre Dame. Don’t worry,
your mission appeal offerings aren’t going to go to pay Brian Kelly’s salary at
Notre Dame, but our work in Bangladesh… that’s somewhere where we do need your
help.
The religious
first from France and then from the US who traveled to Bangladesh founded
schools, orphanages, and parishes. We
started accepting native vocations and now Bangladesh is served by two
Bangladeshi led provinces of Holy Cross religious, who provide about half the
bishops of Bangladesh, and Bangladesh’s first and only cardinal. They have
expanded our work there amongst the most excluded and impoverished tribal people
and at the same timed dreamed big and founded Bangladesh’s first Catholic university,
to form leaders for Bangladesh who can lead in technology, commerce and
government with the heart of a servant.
One Holy Cross
priest who heard the call to go and serve in Bangladesh was a young Vincent
McCauley, now a servant of God. He was equipped for this work in seminary by
being part of a cohort who took classes in Bangladeshi languages and culture in
addition to the regular philosophy and theology. After faithfully fulfilling some needs our
community had in the US for a couple of years, he was overjoyed to finally
board the boat to Bangladesh. His joy
would be short-lived though, as he would find himself hit by debilitating
illness upon illness. The gift of God
still burned in his heart, though, and he found a new audience to share that
with, inspiring a generation of Holy Cross seminarians in the America to marvel
at God’s gift and proclaim that more powerfully. Then probably quite by
surprise one day he was called in to see our superior and asked to go as part
of a small party of priests and brothers to respond to a call from the bishops
of Uganda. They started working in
parishes and founding schools and then one day he received just as surprising
an invitation (which in religious life is more of a command): this one from the
Pope, to become the first bishop of Fort Portal, Uganda.
Today, the
district of East Africa spans three countries and has around 70 young men in
initial formation; that’s more than the 50 that Holy Cross has here in the
US. We’re still trying to live out
Bishop McCauley’s marching orders: in his words, “to give flesh to the Church
in East Africa… to raise up a People of God who love the Church and will
strengthen it.”
And we do that,
not despite the suffering, the crosses that we find there; we do that because
we encounter the gift of the cross there, because the cross is our only hope;
the cross points to resurrection. In
shanties in Mexico, I’ve visited the sick to bring communion and discovered a
devotion and a hunger that strengthens incalculably my wonder and awe at this
most precious and intimate of ways in which God feeds us, through Christ’s
sacrifice. In an orphanage in Haiti, I
was given a tour by a young child, in his broken English and my broken Creole,
but encountered a universally understandable practice of hospitality that
challenges me and awakens me to how lovingly God welcomes us into His home.
First and
foremost, I’m here to celebrate Eucharist with you, to be a minister of that
gift of sacrifice and love that Christ poured out on the cross. But, I won’t shirk from the fact that I’m
also here to ask for your help. Today,
we’ll practice that ancient Catholic tradition, the second collection. I’m gratefully aware that I can put food on
my plate, because people give. I hope
you can help me and my brothers, from Dhaka to Tanzania, to sustain a life in
which together we can proclaim how great a gift God has given us.
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