Memorial of Saint John de Brébeuf and Saint Isaac Jogues, priests and martyrs, and their companions

Our Lady's statue
by the Friar's cemetery

For he is our peace, he made both one
and broke down the dividing wall of enmity, through his Flesh,
abolishing the law with its commandments and legal claims,
that he might create in himself one new person in place of the two,
thus establishing peace,
and might reconcile both with God,
in one Body, through the cross,
putting that enmity to death by it.

For as long as it stood, only Jewish men were allowed into the inner court of the Temple in Jerusalem. There was a wall to separate the women’s court from the inner court, and another for those areas where gentiles were permitted.

As Saint Paul welcomed gentiles into the Christian movement and saw an entirely new religion developing his fertile mind imagined Jesus’ risen body as the new Temple for God’s people. Within Jesus’ own body the barriers between Jews and Greeks, male and female, slave and free are dissolved. Or, to use another analogy, they are destroyed by the cross. In this new Congregation, it does not matter if you are Jew or gentile; the only thing that matters is your belief in Jesus.

Two thousand years later few of us remember our Jewish ancestry or that ancient crisis. But there are still walls of separation that must be dissolved in the body of Christ. Catholics in this country are sometimes divided by race and language. Especially there is the Hispanic/Anglo divide. Almost daily new Catholic immigrants arrive in our churches. There is the law-abiding/criminal divide; the conservative/liberal divide; and the prosperous/poor divide. There is the troubling divide between heterosexual and homosexual (or LGBT).

When I was in Louisiana I often visited the local jails and discovered how Jesus brought me into communion with convicted criminals. I was delighted to find they are people just like me. They wish they could be home for Christmas; they love their children and their parents; they worry about how to pay the bills. Many are frightened by their noisy, steel and cement environment. Although they were kept behind bars and I was only visiting, for a while there was no dividing wall between us.

In the Body of Christ we cannot allow legitimate boundaries to become hostile barriers. As you probably know the word martyr means witness. Today’s martyr witnesses by honoring the Christ-like humanity of every person, putting that enmity to death.