Homily for Solemnity of St. Angela Merici

Homily for the Solemnity
of St. Angela Merici

Jan. 27, 2020                                               

John 15: 9-17
Proper Collect
Eph 3: 14-19
Hos 2: 16-20
Ursulines, Willow Dr., New Rochelle, N.Y.

The Ursuline Order, or the Company of St. Ursula, was founded in 1535 by St. Angela Merici.  I was privileged this morning to celebrate the Eucharist for them on their foundress’s feastday.

“You did not choose me, but I chose you” (John 15: 16).

Statue of St. Angela Merici on the campus of the College of New Rochelle, 2011.

The college closed last June due to financial difficulties.

That’s an apt verse to go with the “loving initiative” of God in calling Angela for an inspiring life of “contemplation and service” (Collect).  Considering the canons and traditions of the Church—which would block the plan of St. Francis de Sales for the Visitation 70 years after Angela—it was evidently divine initiative that Angela could found a company of women so radically new, and so radically necessary for the Catholic Reform that was barely getting started and most churchmen still didn’t know was needed.  It was evidently divine initiative that Pope Paul III saw what even Angela didn’t, that this company merited canonical recognition.

Hosea speaks of God’s leading Israel once more into the wilderness, to speak tenderly to her and rekindle her love (2:16-17).  Call the wilderness a contemplative encounter with God; it’s the necessary foundation for any great enterprise in God’s service, as necessary for us (still, at this stage of our lives) as it was for Angela, at it was in our younger, more vigorous, perhaps more exciting, days.  Only with such contemplation of the Father and of the Lord Jesus can “we be attentive to the flow” of God’s love now, here (Collect).

St. Paul prays that “charity be the root and foundation” of our lives (Eph 3:17).  That was the goal of all Angela’s work with the young, in founding your Company—the charity of grasping the depth of God’s love for us in Christ (3:18) and sharing that love with our sisters and brothers.  She grasped families form the young, no doubt influenced by her own experience as an orphan taken in by her own relatives, and so how important it was to prepare the young for family life, and thru families to form a healthy society.  For us, love is to be shared 1st in community, then with the wider world, so desperately needing authentic love.

May our Lord Jesus, who has chosen us to be his friends (John 15:14) as well as his apostles, empower us to live as friends with our community and with all until we abide entirely and finally with him (cf. Eph 3:19).