Feast of Saint Matthew, Apostle and evangelist

Lectionary: 643

R. Their message goes out through all the earth.

Not a word nor a discourse

whose voice is not heard;

Through all the earth their voice resounds,

and to the ends of the world, their message.

R. Their message goes out through all the earth.

On the feast of Saint Matthew the Church reminds us of our apostolic foundations. We are "one, holy, catholic and apostolic." The word refers to our confidence that the original message of the apostles, the Gospel, has never been lost nor diminished. That the word we preach today is the same throughout the ages. 

In this book, To Change the Church, (March, 2018) Ross Douthat writes of our tradition:

One of the striking aspects of Catholic life is the thread that runs backward through time and culture -- through novels, poetry, essays, devotional literature, and the wider arts -- linking the experience of believers across two thousand years. Of course ideas change, cultures change, and the experience of Catholic culture today is necessarily different from the experience of believers a century or a millennium before. But not entirely so: Read John Henry Newman and Thomas Aquinas and Augustine back to back to back, or read Evelyn Waugh and Dante together, or read Theresa of Avila and then Therese of Lisieux.

In each case the gulf of years and difference in cultural expression does not obscure the fact that they belong to the same tradition, the same story, and that there are ways in which Catholic Christianity really is a time machine: you can step into those worlds, the worlds of Catholic past, find your footing and realize that you are not somewhere altogether alien; that the past is another country but somehow yours; you can in some sense think with the letter writers of the New Testament and the church father scribbling in late antiquity and the medieval monk in the north of England and the Florentine poet and the philosopher-nun dealing with hapless popes and the mystic in Spain and the philosopher-martyr in Henry VIII's court and thence back around to the saints and novelists and polemicists of the modern world. 

page 180-181

I can vouch for that experience, especially as I have read the second selection of our Office of Readings ("Matins') in the Liturgy of the Hours. On every day of the year the breviary offers readings from past centuries. There are writings of second century saints like Ignatius of Antioch and Saint Barnabas, of Thomas A'Kempis and Thomas Aquinas, of Saints Theresa of Avila and Therese Lisieux, and passages from the Documents of the Second Vatican Council. Rarely would I "disagree" with any of them, though I might have to study their intent. More often I am inspired to think new thoughts. Although I have been reading Matins for over forty years, I still find a thought I had not thought before; and wonder what was I thinking when I read this very passage last year. 

The Church remains confident of this apostolic tradition despite centuries of struggle and reform, of changing climates, developing cultures, emerging philosophies, and missionary encounters with hitherto unknown nations. True, groups of Christians have splintered off from the Church; and, no doubt, they took a dollops of the Spirit and pieces of the Truth with them. Many ambitious sects split and flourished briefly before withering for lack of rain, soil or sunshine. Even bad ideas have to run their course and good people can be carried off by them. We continually invite them to return that Jesus' prayer may be fulfilled.  

The apostolic continuity remains. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschl describes in his book, God in Search of Man, a Catholic experience of faith: 

Not the individual man nor a single generation by its own power can erect the bridge that leads to God. Faith is the achievement of ages, an effort accumulated over centuries. Many of its ideas are as the light of a star that left its source centuries ago. Many songs, unfathomable today, are the resonance of voices of bygone times. There is a collective memory of God in the human spirit, and it is this memory of which we partake in our faith.