Happy Third Sunday!
Well, it has been a remarkably frigid week. When I was a kid, like most children, it seemed I was impervious to feeling cold. These days it seeps into my bones! Even walking across the parking lot from the rectory is enough to give me the chills. Someday, when I grow up and am a more responsible human, I will remember to don more layers (haha!). But at the top of this shivery calendar year, let us laud our appreciation for physical warmth. It gives us Michiganders reason to hope for the joys that springtime and summertime will eventually bring. In the meantime, we bundle up, make a fire in the hearth, and slow-cook some chili in the crockpot.
The national remembrance of Martin Luther King Jr. (January 19th) and the liturgical remembrance for the legal protection of the unborn (January 22nd) reminded me this past week to dust off some reading material from my seminary days and reflect again on a global message delivered by Pope Paul VI on January 1, 1972.
In 1967, he had designated the first day of January as an annual worldwide Day of Peace. For in his midst was a world poor in peace, but awash with social, religious, and political upheaval. The introduction of the oral contraceptive pill in 1960 had unleashed a decade-long sexual revolution across Western culture, with the devastation of a moral hurricane. By 1972, the Vietnam War had entered its seventeenth bloody year. Even the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, concluded in 1965, was not without the continued reverberation of lost stability and confusion among many of the Church’s faithful.
Here in the U.S., disillusioned Americans had recently grappled with the Tet Offensive of 1968, the assassination of MLK Jr. later that spring, the Kent State shootings of 1970, and the Pentagon Papers of 1971. Roe v. Wade was argued before the Supreme Court in December of that year, just nineteen days before this papal proclamation. Everywhere you looked, it seemed that true and abiding peace among nations, across cultures, and within sacred and secular institutions was in scarce supply. So, on New Year’s Day, Paul VI stood in front of a microphone and uttered this incisive line to the world: “If you want peace, work for justice.”
To be sure, it wasn’t a trite political or social proposition. Justice, he said, arises from the awareness that each person is an inviolable, sacred being. This awareness discloses the unconditional debt of goodness that we owe them and charges us to render that debt without delay. Thus, justice demands our continual sacrifice of personal prestige and self-interest, and it requires greatness of soul in our actions toward others.
Greatness of soul, the pope said. We call that magnanimity. It is the holy ambition to do great things for the glory of God, to aim for spiritual and moral excellence, to live generously and courageously, to be noble of heart. Wow—think of this! How much would the world change if it were filled with such people? Would peace abound in that world? Well, buckle up. God has created us to be those people. Do not choose the poverty of a small-minded life. Go do something great for God this week! a simple embrace from you was all I needed to understand that it was okay. You knew exactly what I needed.
Fr. Brian