In Good Company Truth Whispers and is Heard

Apr 27, 2010

“Ten men who whisper the truth speak louder than a hundred million who lie.”

To an absolutely packed Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in our nation’s capital last Saturday, Bishop Edward Slattery of Tulsa preached those words of encouragement and assurance.

The occasion was the 5th anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy. The form of the observation was the first solemn high pontifical mass celebrated at Washington’s basilica in 45 years. The mass was celebrated in the Extraordinary Form.

It was to be a joyful moment: a gorgeous liturgy in the Easter season honoring a wise, gentle and popular pope. That was no doubt the organizers’ plan.

No one could have foreseen that in the weeks leading up to the celebration, news in Ireland and Germany would pick at the scab of our own national church’s past wounds, or that so much latent anger and hurt would be directed at the pope, however unfairly.

 “We have a lot to talk about” Bishop Slattery told the overflow crowd of what friends in attendance called “every kind of Catholic.” In his homily on the meaning of suffering, the bishop reflected on what good can come from hard times.

Yes, the Church and the Pope are suffering, he acknowledged. Our suffering takes place in the context of the broader suffering of the people of our time: contemporary martyrs, victims of war or abuse, women deceived into abortion, illegal immigrants, the sick and dying in all their myriad symptoms and illnesses. The bishop went so far as to say suffering is what defines contemporary culture.

All this suffering would be terrifying by itself. It is made bearable only by the mystery we celebrate this season: Christ’s Resurrection. His Eminence reflected, “Suffering by itself is simply the reminder that death will claim these mortal bodies of ours, but suffering in Christ is the promise that we will be raised with Christ, when our mortality will be remade in his immortality and all that in our lives which is broken because it is perishable and finite will be made imperishable and incorrupt.”

What is the link between our suffering and Christ’s? Obedience is understood not as something we do reluctantly, under compulsion, but as a response of love. In a marvelous turn of phrase Bishop Slattery observed, “obedience is that movement which the heart makes when it leaps in joy having once discovered the truth.”  When we suffer in a spirit of obedience, we are joining Christ’s obedience to the heavenly Father, which revealed his glory.

We see this pre-eminently in the Mass, Bishop Slattery pointed out. In it, Christ, in an act of obedience, offers himself to the Father as a sacrifice of atonement for our sins. Then we obey Christ and offer ourselves to the Father through him. “And thirdly, in sharing Christ’s obedience to the Father, we are made obedient to a new order of reality, in which love is supreme and life reigns eternal, in which suffering and death have been defeated by becoming for us the means by which Christ’s final victory, his future coming, is made manifest and real today.”

The bishop asked the assembled not to be discouraged by the fact that many people even in the Church fail to recognize the redemptive value of obedience and suffering. It’s enough that some people know the truth, for the truth spoken in a whisper is louder than many lies.

My husband and I weren’t able to attend the mass or hear this homily. We were across town witnessing the baptism and initiation into the Church of our friend Hadley Arkes, the brilliant pro-life theorist and constitutional law scholar. That one of the finest minds of our time could choose this low public moment as his time to enter the Church is evidence of the truth of Bishop Slattery’s words.

In the midst of so much suffering, even within the Church, Christ himself is still whispering to the hearts of men.

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