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.”
