Homily for the Memorial of
St. John XXIII
Tuesday,
Week 28 of Ordinary Time
Oct.
11, 2022
Gal
5: 1-6
Christian
Brothers, St. Joseph Residence, New Rochelle
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“For freedom Christ set us free” (Gal 5: 1).
There’s a scene in
A Man for All Seasons in which Thomas More is debating with his
son-in-law Will Roper. More has been
telling him how he’ll hide in the thickets of the law from the pursuit of Henry
VIII’s anger; that he so trusts the benefits of the law that he’d allow it to
protect the Devil himself. Roper objects
that to pursue the Devil he’d knock down every law in England. To that, More responds, “And when you’ve
knocked down every law and the Devil turns on you, where will you hide?”
The law has a
protective purpose, a guiding purpose.
St. Paul knew that and believed it.
But he also knew that the law had its limits. It could only condemn those who violated it,
not restore them to righteousness. By
itself the law could become its own objective; it could enslave one in fear of
its consequences. Christ came to set us
free from the consequences of breaking the law, which as sinners we are prone
to do. There’s a greater law, Paul
preaches, that of faith, that of love.
John XXIII didn’t
speak in those terms, but in essence he worked to set the Church free from a
kind of enslavement to law—to a rigid interpretation of canon law, to the
confines of a narrow scholastic theology, to arid liturgy. Therefore he wanted to open the Church’s
windows and let the fresh breeze of the Holy Spirit blow thru; wanted to take
the ageless truth of the Gospel and make it understandable to people of the
20th century. Thus, “through the Spirit”
(quoting Paul, 5:5) he convened the Vatican Council, perhaps the 1st council in
church history not with a doctrinal purpose like Nicea, Chalcedon, Trent, or
Vatican I but with a pastoral purpose:
to set the Church free from slavery to the law and enable her to be,
instead, the light of the world, lumen gentium, the title of the
Council’s most important document.
Discerning the
truth of the Gospel and making it alive and relevant for the contemporary world
remains an issue. Thus the debates over
papal documents and synodality. Where
does law or doctrine serve to guide and protect us as we follow Christ, and
where does it become its own objective and a hindrance to a personal
relationship with Christ, to personal holiness, to “faith working thru love”
(5:6)?
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