PhotoCardinal O'Connor's Homily




Passionists Praised

Cardinal stresses power of the cross, value of offering one's suffering

This is the text of Cardinal O'Connor's homily at Sunday Mass in St. Patrick's Cathedral Oct. 31, when Passionist Fathers were present.

I do not want to brag because I may fall off this pulpit but I told you I would be back with or without hair!

There is a significant number of the press corps here. May I say something without any way seeming to try to curry your favor. I have been here almost 16 years, and I have had a professional relationship with the press. You have written or said what you think you should. I have written or said what I think I should without anyone's trying to offer a special favor. But during the past couple of months during my special situation I have to thank you for the graciousness with which you have reported this. You can say whatever you say, but you have in the past couple of months been really very, very kind, and I would feel remiss if I did not express my gratitude.

Periodically I quote from this pulpit from books of children's letters to God. There is a brand-new calendar out, "Children's Letters to God." I would like to quote just a few of the letters in the calendar. There is one for each month but I will not do that. But I have a purpose.

(For January) "Dear God, Our teacher told us about the millennium. When you started the world did you ever think it would last this long? Dexter."

(For March) "Dear God, Do you get your angels to do all the work? Mommy says we are her angels and we have to do everything. Love, Maria."

(For May) "Dear God, My friend Arthur says you make all the flowers. I don't believe it. Benjamin."

(For September) "Dear God, We read Thomas Edison made light. But in Sunday school they said you did it. I bet he stoled your idea. Love, Donna."

Well, just those few are adequate. What has the reading of these letters to do with the presence of the Passionists? A great deal in my judgment. Toward the later years of the 17th century, on into the 18th, a great blight fell upon Europe. It was not an agricultural blight, such as those that have in the past devastated Ireland--the potato famine for example--but a disastrous intellectual, moral, spiritual blight, a kind of blight that ate into the hearts and souls of God's people in that particular period of time.

Permit me to read, for example, a very brief descriptive paragraph of the so-called Enlightenment. The term "the Enlightenment" is generally used to refer to the dominant characteristics of the intellectual climate that prevailed in the Western world throughout the 18th century. These characteristics centered on an optimistic belief in the ability of man's mind to penetrate into all the mysteries of the universe and to chart a course of limitless progress for mankind. This conviction finally led many thinkers to attribute quasi-divine qualities to human reason and to challenge most of the traditional doctrines of Christianity.

Enter St. Paul of the Cross and, soon after, the magnificent establishment of the Passionist Congregation, usually referred to today as Passionists. St. Paul of the Cross was born in 1694, so just a few years ago in 1994 we celebrated his 300th anniversary and then the founding of the Passionists came just a few years later.

St. Paul of the Cross had the most profound insight into those ideas that would later become the Enlightenment, ideas that were forming during the 1700s. He recognized that this kind of thing, this gross attack on the Church, the gross attack on Almighty God himself was made because they believed that they themselves, in essence, could become God. Just like Adam and Eve they would know everything. They could penetrate far beyond any of the so-called divine revelation, so he recognized that they could not be responded to by mere secular knowledge or even by clever arguments of the teachings of the Church, however articulate they may have been. He recognized that as critical as were the teachings and preachings of Christ on earth, it was Christ's cross and his suffering that made possible the salvation of souls. This has been the essence of the teachings of the Passionists that he founded. For almost three hundred years the Passionists have taught the clear teachings of the Church, but always the clearest of all the indispensability of the cross and the use of suffering.

I do not know what I have tried to express more frequently from this pulpit than the power of suffering. I may at times embarrass those here who are in wheelchairs, for example, my good friends Patti Ann and Steve McDonald, such as those. The tremendous power that they generate, a tremendous power that every one of us can generate. I know I repeat this to utter boredom perhaps for some of you, but a headache, a backache, a toothache, if our feet hurt, if we have cancer, if we have lost a dear one, a husband, a wife, if we are living through old age, lonely, maybe even in a single-room hotel, every bit of this can be offered to Almighty God for the good of souls. It changes everything. It does not take away the suffering but it gives it meaning. It unites it with the suffering of Christ on the cross.

The Passionists have taught, as I said, the clear teachings of the Church, but always, the clearest of all, the indispensability of the cross and the use of suffering. Perhaps never has the world needed more desperately this teaching. Perhaps never have we been more subject to false teaching, to purely a secularist teaching. Today, while extending in its own way the teachings of the enlightenment that just abandon all teachings that we might have presented as coming from Almighty God and turned rather to their own devices, never, never perhaps have we more desperately needed this teaching of the cross and suffering. Perhaps never have we been subject to false teaching--I don't know that. We are in these years, not those years, but at least it would seem it would be difficult to live in an age more subject to false teaching.

There are many, many wonderful people, many good people like you here, of course, who have rejected false teaching. I know that. I am speaking of the world at large. That false teaching has now spread with incredible rapidity because of modern communications, of course. Things that would have taken years and years to reach another land now with extraordinary rapidity reach another land. Not only does this spread around the world but I fear it perverts our daily communications with much, not all by a longshot, of our television, our radio, our newspapers, our sophisticated journals. Everywhere we see attacks on the Church, many of which go unanswered because we have not only accepted our culture but so very, very often many, I am sorry to say, Catholics themselves would be incapable of responding intelligently.

When our Divine Lord told us that unless we become as little children only then we shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, he did not mean that we become ignorant. He did not mean that as little children we let ourselves be misled by the culture. None of that did he mean. Nor did he mean that if we are going to enter into the kingdom of God we must be ignorant. Quite the contrary. Or that as adults we should retain those simple or erroneous concepts about God and our responsibilities such as expressed in these delightful stories. They are very fine. They are very simple. They give us a nice little sentimental approach to Almighty God. But the stories, at the same time, clearly do not express anything remotely related to the fullness of the teachings of God. And as we have seen, some of them have the most erroneous concept of Almighty God. I won't do this. I won't do that and so on. How tragic that much of the world looks with even less understanding than that found in these little stories.

It is to this culture, not at all unlike the culture of the Enlightenment, and in its own way a continuance of that culture, but even made more sophisticated by much of modern philosophy, so much of our modern science, so much of the culture itself, including the culture that our Holy Father so often calls the "culture of death" which eats our minds and hearts and souls just as did the teaching of the Enlightenment in its day.

I return to the Passionists and what a tremendous contribution they have made by bringing the truth. I will never forget the impact they made on me personally when I was a youngster. They contributed very significantly to my becoming a priest. My father would take me to our parish church of St. Clement's in Philadelphia and there annually we would have a parish mission. Some of you remember, one week it would be women and their daughters and the next week it would be the men and their sons. Even at that age the missions were so very meaningful to me, and I will always be grateful to them.

Above all I remember the big black cross that would often be erected in the sanctuary--some other communities do that too--but even more the cross that the preacher would wear in his sash, the belt that he would wear around his habit. I would always think of that sash as the sword of the spirit. It would remind me of the lance that the soldier thrust into the side of Christ on the cross, and after a little blood and water flowed out then he cried out, "This indeed was the Son of God." This is all of the meaning of our faith in the crucifixion followed by the resurrection of Christ.

The Passionists taught me to love the cross together with the power of the suffering that every one of us can use for the salvation of our own souls and those of others. Today's Scriptures speak about it, in their own way, in the language of that day, in the language of the Old Testament, in the language of Jesus. What do they say? Malachi the prophet warns his people, "You have turned aside from the way and have caused many to falter by your instruction...I, therefore, have made you contemptible and base before all the people, since you do not keep my ways."

What does Jesus say of the scribes and Pharisees who succeeded Moses as teachers? "Do everything and observe everything they tell you but do not follow their example." What a thing to say about the leaders of the culture.

To conclude, it is the truth of Christ, and of his saving power of the cross and the use of suffering that alone can turn this culture around. So many of you, thank God, are engaged by the very nature of your lives, your goodness, your acceptance of your daily sufferings, your use of these, you are offering them to Almighty God. This is the truth. This is the teaching of the cross and of the use of suffering that have marked the life and the efforts of the Passionists for some 300 years. We indeed owe them our deepest debt of gratitude. May we now express it.

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