Saturday of the Sixth Week of Easter

He vigorously refuted the Jews in public,

establishing from the Scriptures that the Christ is Jesus.

The conversion of Apollos to the Christian religion must have been a major coup for the early church. He brought not only zeal and preaching ability, but also a deep knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures. He must have dazzled Jews and gentiles alike in an age when oratory was the mode of communication.

The Acts of the Apostles chronicles the vitality and depth and power of the Holy Spirit in the first days of the Church. The first disciples of Jesus, by the unanimous testimony of the gospels, were hardly an impressive group. They were eager and willing, convicted and convincing but brought little real learning to the enterprise.

When Father (Saint) Maximillian Kolbe arrived in Nagasaki he spoke not a word of Japanese. He had not even intended, when he set out from Italy, to go to Japan. He was heading for India but somehow landed in Japan. On fire with the love of the Blessed Virgin Mary he managed to print out a page of her praises in execrable Japanese. Then he stood on the corner of busy downtown streets handing out his tracts and talking to anyone who might speak Polish, Latin or Italian.

And his second tract was much better. He had won over some young people by his sheer enthusiasm and conviction. They translated his tracts into polished Japanese, joined his foreign religion as the nation was preparing for war with America and Europe, entered his friary and took vows as Franciscans. (Fortunately, the friary was on the far side of a hill when the city was devastated in 1945.)

This is how the Holy Spirit works. When we think our Church is suffering, disheartened, confused and adrift we should only reread the Acts of the Apostles and remember God Is Still In Charge.