Saturday of the First Week of Lent

Lectionary: 229

And today the LORD is making this agreement with you:
you are to be a people peculiarly his own, as he promised you....

 A s I listen to people I have noticed that one of the most important teachings of the Second Vatican Council is starting to be heard in the pews of our churches. Catholics have noticed, especially since the ascendance of a real estate huckster to the presidency of the United States, that we must be a people set apart and peculiarly his own. 

The immediate Catholic reaction of events in the 1960s -- including the presidency of John F Kennedy, the domineering prosperity of the nation, and the arrival of Catholics in educated, middle class America -- was to suppose that "the world" and the Church agreed with one another on the essentials. We support the equality of all men and women; and would provide education and opportunity for everyone. We prefer capitalism to communism; and recognize ownership of property, and the rights and dignity of all races and religions. Who could argue with those principles? 

But by the time Karol Józef Wojtyła became Pope John Paul II, the world was already going another direction. Education and opportunity were no longer as open to minorities and the poor, neither in the United States nor in "third world countries." While America gave school-age children laptops computers, children in poor nations had no chalk for their blackboards. Greed was good on Wall Street. Only reluctantly were some debtor nations allowed to default on loans which had been eagerly given to their corrupt leaders. 

But the corruption we tolerated in those "less developed nations" has metastasized; and in this 21st century even the United States is fascinated by the promises of tyranny. As W.B.Yeats wrote in 1920:

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity. 

Catholics are starting to realize that we are to be "a people peculiarly his own." We do not abort our infants; we do not engage in premarital sex, adultery, or divorce. We believe in marriage, sexuality, and the complementarity of men and women. We love our bodies as they are, and have no need to alter them in any significant way. Recognizing their roots in human arrogance and philosophical determinism, Catholicism shuns ideologies of every sort. We not only believe there is such a thing as Truth, we believe in truth and its right to intrude in human affairs. 

We are a holy people and have been sent as a blessing by God himself to the nations of this world. We are patriotic but not nationalistic, we fear the groupthink of partisanship. We have seen nations and empires rise and fall but we are still here to offer comfort to the world's victims. 

The season of Lent especially sets us apart. We sport ashes on Ash Wednesday and prepare our hearts for the drama, grief, and mystery of Holy Week even as we anticipate the astonishing, unexpected triumph of Easter. That will be for us a most undeserved triumph, and an unparalleled victory for the one Savior and Lord whom we know, touch, love, trust, and believe in. Let the nations rage as we sing: 

Worthy is the Lamb that was slain

to receive power and riches, wisdom and strength,

honor and glory and blessing.” (Revelations 5:12)