Dear Friends,
First of all, my thanks to all of you who gave of yourselves to make our fall Spaghetti Dinner a great success. As I mingle with our guests throughout the day, they often comment about how they feel welcomed by your care for them, your friendly smile, and your generous spirit. The food is always wonderful but even more so is the experience of hospitality that they feel in your company. Congratulations and thanks for a job well done. Special thanks to Amanda and Christen for your many hours of getting things ready so the rest of us can work quickly and well.
Second, as some of you know, one of our parishioners, Elizabeth Wellendorf, is working in Bethlehem. She has been safe but can hear the fighting going on in the areas around her. She sent an email this past week with a request. Here is what she said, “I am reaching out today to ask for not only prayers for peace in Gaza and Israel but financial support from the Cabrini family. As you know I’m a volunteer here in Bethlehem in a home of special needs children called Hogar Niños Dios. We ask their families to help financially if they can but mostly we rely on providence and generosity of the community and international organizations to feed and house our children. Though we are not in Gaza we are feeling the effects of the war. Without the possibility of more volunteers or groups in the near future we will struggle more financially. The people of the community will hurt as well the longer this goes on so food security is not guaranteed. I was wondering if there was a free Sunday where we could offer up a second collection to support this home. Though I am not there, my mother could present a little about our home because she spent a month here. If you have any other ideas on how I could raise money to help the children please let me know as well. As always I will keep you and the Cabrini family in my prayers and please keep us in yours.” If you would like to help the home where Elizabeth is working, you can put the donation in an envelope, write Hogar Ninos Dios on it and drop it into the regular collection. We will make sure that money gets to the Hogar Ninos Dios.
Pope Francis sent you a reflection last Sunday on St. Therese of the Child Jesus to help us all set our hearts on what can truly help us live more loving lives. I encourage you to find the whole reflection online but let me give you a taste: From Saint Teresa of Avila, Therese inherited a great love for the Church and was able to plumb the depths of this mystery. We see this in her discovery of the “heart of the Church”. In a lengthy prayer to Jesus, written on 8 September 1896, the sixth anniversary of her religious profession, the saint confided to the Lord that she felt driven by an immense desire, a passion for the Gospel that no vocation, by itself, could satisfy. And so, in seeking her “place” in the Church, she turned to chapters 12 and 13 of the First Letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians.
There, in Chapter 12, the apostle employs the metaphor of the body and its members to explain that the Church embraces a great variety of hierarchically ordered charisms. Yet this description was not enough for Therese. She continued her search and read the “hymn to charity” in Chapter 13. There she came upon the eminent answer to her question, and wrote this memorable page: “Considering the mystical body of the Church I had not recognized myself in any of the members described by Saint Paul, or rather I desired to see myself in them all. Charity gave me the key to my vocation. I understood that if the Church had a body composed of different members, the most necessary and most noble of all could not be lacking to it, and so I understood that the Church had a Heart, and that this Heart was burning with love. I understood it was love alone that made the Church’s members act, that if Love ever became extinct, apostles would not preach the Gospel and martyrs would not shed their blood. I understood that Love comprised all vocations, that love was everything, that it embraced all times and places… in a word: that it was eternal! Then, in the excess of my delirious joy, I cried out: O Jesus, my Love… my vocation, at last I have found it… my vocation is Love! Yes, I have found my place in the Church, and it is you, O my God, who have given me this place; in the heart of the Church, my Mother, I shall be Love. Thus I shall be everything, and thus my dream will be realized”.
This heart was not that of a triumphalistic Church, but of a loving, humble and merciful Church. Therese never set herself above others, but took the lowest place together with the Son of God, who for our sake became a slave and humbled himself, becoming obedient, even to death on a cross.
This discovery of the heart of the Church is also a great source of light for us today. It preserves us from being scandalized by the limitations and weaknesses of the ecclesiastical institution with its shadows and sins, and enables us to enter into the Church’s “heart burning with love”, which burst into flame at Pentecost thanks to the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is that heart whose fire is rekindled with each of our acts of charity. “I shall be love”. This was the radical option of Therese, her definitive synthesis and her deepest spiritual identity.
Peace,
Fr. Damian