Homily for Alumni Day of Theological College

Memorial of Saint Francis of Assisi

October 4, 2023
Crypt Church of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception
Washington, DC

Leviticus 19:1-2, 17-18
Psalm 16:1b-2a, 5, 7-8, 11
Galatians 6:14-18
Matthew 11:25-30

“You are my inheritance, O Lord.” We pray this psalm today with the Church as we gather to worship God as He desires to be worshipped through the sacrifice of the Mass. We do so as the entire Church, made so by the Eucharist we offer, and we particularly do so in gratitude for our priestly vocations nurtured and formed at Theological College of the Catholic University of America. In fidelity to our call and to our ordination, we pray for our departed formators and mentors, and our departed friends and priestly brothers for their eternal repose in God’s Mercy. The responsorial psalm for this Memorial of Saint Francis of Assisi speaks profoundly of the evangelical meaning of the poverty of Saint Francis and its import on our life as the Church in contemporary times and particularly on our mission as Christ’s priests, configured to Him at our ordination as Head and Shepherd of the Church. “You are my inheritance, O Lord.”

There are three points I would like to offer for our reflection. These points are Creation, Configuration, and Poverty.

Creation. Today, as we receive the Apostolic Exhortation, Laudate Deum, from our Holy Father, Francis, which is intended to clarify and to complete what he wrote in the Encyclical Laudato Si, some eight years ago, we must emphasize that Creation is not simply a religious and antiquated euphemism for the “environment.” Creation is a relational word. Creation is the activity of God in which the world (not just the planet), everything that is not God, is made to exist. As has been pointed out by the philosopher and fellow alumnus, Robert Sokolowski, “In Christian belief the world is understood as existing in such a way that it might not have existed. And in the Christian understanding, if the world had not been, God would still be. God would not be diminished, in His goodness and perfection, if the world were not.”

Likewise, God is not perfected or completed through His act of creation of the world. He creates in complete generosity and love, in complete selflessness, and out of nothing He brings something but not just anything. What he brings about is His creation of each and every being as His beloved creature. This establishes a relationship of dependence upon the Creator by His creatures. It is a relationship that calls forth gratitude among volitional creatures capable of reason: angels and human beings. It is a relationship that calls forth responsibility and love.

As Pope Benedict XVI pointed out, “The garden tells us that the reality in which God has placed the human being is not a wild forest but a place that protects, nurtures and sustains; and human beings must not consider the world as a property to be looted and exploited but as a gift of the Creator, a sign of His saving will, a gift to be cultivated and safeguarded, to increase and to develop with respect and in harmony, following its rhythms and logic in accordance with God’s plan.”

Yet, this logic and its correlative rhythm and derivative responsibilities become obscured after the commission of the first Adam’s sin of the garden prompted by the temptation of the serpent. Gratitude is replaced by selfishness. Wisdom becomes cunning. Dominion becomes domination. The garden becomes a jungle and an uncharted wilderness. Man and woman become adversaries and they each adopt a suspicious stance towards God as a rival to their freedom.

Through His Incarnation, His Crucifixion and Resurrection, Jesus Christ, the new Adam, restores the original state of nature and even elevates it to a climax above the original preternatural state of man. The relationship between God and human beings is again clarified as that between a loving Creator and creatures, with privileged and graced status of uniqueness in God’s image and likeness, distinct from other creatures whose distinct relationships are likewise restored. Through the Cross, human beings now become a partner in God’s new creation.

This liberating Gospel prompts Saint Paul to proclaim, “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world…From now on, let no one make troubles for me; for I bear the marks of Jesus on my body.”

Saint Francis understood this mystery intensely and could uniquely make the same boast as Saint Paul because he shared the stigmatized wounds of Christ that marked and sealed him for his mission to make Christ and His Passion and Death known that he could carry out Christ’s command as issued forth from the Cross of San Damiano, “Go repair my Church which you see is falling into ruin.”

The world and the church in which Saint Francis lived and ministered were filled with corruption and confusion. The temporal concerns among the church’s leadership, both clerical hierarchs and lay princes, had replaced and obscured the clarity and charity won and given by Christ on the Cross, restoring humanity’s relationship of creature to God as Sovereign Creator and Father. The revolution of radical Aristotelianism which imported through the newly discovered texts of Aristotle from the Islamic world obscured the accepted and reasonable accounts of the world and its cause through God’s free and loving creation. His love for all of God’s creatures bore witness to the expansive generosity of God’s love in creating every animal, plant, sea, mountain, valley, and plain in the world — and especially human beings, all of whom he loved for the sake of Christ.

Configuration to Christ. It is this radical witness that completely configured Francis to Christ through His wounds, spiritual and physical, the wounds of love and sacrifice that undercut the confusion of the radical Aristotelians and outflanked the sinful and greedy corruption of the contemporary oligarchs — both clerical and lay. The stigmata of Saint Francis show us that there is not configuration to Christ without the love that brings the suffering of conversion that is the Cross. This love undergirded the simplicity and poverty of Saint Francis that in itself bore witness to the truth of the Gospel without his having to rely upon argument for his effective preaching of Christ crucified. “Preach the Gospel at all times and if necessary, use words.” “I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.”

Poverty. This evangelical counsel was essential to the life, witness, and ministry of Saint Francis to bring clarity through his poverty to Christ’s identity and selfless love. The disposition and character of Saint Francis were so radically configured to Christ that he took on an eschatological but not apocalyptic dependence upon God and love of neighbor. It was a dependence and love that called forth brothers and sisters to share in this witness and in his life, one could see the eschatological mystery that the Kingdom of God is at hand. So much so, that after his death, it fell to the evangelical wisdom of Saint Bonaventure to develop rules and expectations for the community’s life and ministry without abandoning Saint Francis’ radical configuration to Christ, which was eschatological because its rule was imbued in Saint Francis’ physical, moral, and spiritual life. In his configuration to Christ, Saint Francis became a type for John the Baptist, preparing for Christ’s second coming, which he understood to take place not simply at linear end of time, but as the center of the fullness of time.

Creation. Configuration. Poverty. Today we live and minister as priests configured to Christ in a world that is corrupt and confused again, that rejects our message because of its rejection of God’s sovereign status as Father and Creator, Son and Redeemer, Advocate and Sanctifier. The oppressive ideologies of gender and race, the contrivances of critical theory, obfuscate and repulse the truth and sovereignty of God, the goodness of men and women as God’s children with sexual integrity and purpose, and the beauty of the world, including the environment and its resources, as God’s creation. The shards of postmodernity slice at our ecclesial and societal integrity because God is rejected, ignored, and recast arrogantly as either a mascot for our rationalized cravings, or as a feared rival to our unbridled drives when acknowledged.

Christ speaks again from His Cross. In reading the signs of the times, we hear Him ask us as He asked Saint Francis to repair His church which we see falling into ruin. To answer His call, we each must first take seriously our own poverty as a witness to our complete dependence upon God as our Sovereign Creator and loving Father, who without deficit or benefit accrued to Himself, who could have chosen justly not to call us into being, let alone to His priesthood. Without honest and regular prayer, we will lose our poverty and become ensnared in the world that is passing away.

The most important message of Laudato Si and Laudate Deum for us is not in its detailed prescriptions and prohibitions, but in the truth that Christ reveals God to be our Creator. Without our hearing this Gospel, we cannot preach this Gospel. Without preaching this Gospel, even without words, we risk the continuation of the confusion and the collusion with the corruption of our times by making idols and false gods of a creation that ideologically becomes only our environment. As Pope Francis wrote in Laudato Si, “A spirituality which forgets God as all-powerful and Creator is not acceptable. That is how we end up worshiping earthly powers, or ourselves usurping the place of God, even to the point of claiming an unlimited right to trample His creation underfoot. The best way to restore men and women to their rightful place, putting an end to their claim to absolute dominion over the earth, is to speak once more of the figure of a Father who creates and who alone owns the world. Otherwise, human beings will always try to impose their own laws and interests on reality.”

Creation. We are creatures, we are not the Creator. We are finite and we are not sovereign. Configuration. We are configured through love to Christ — the Word made Flesh, the eternal Word of the Father, by whose wounds we are healed. We are both subjects and instruments of Christ’s saving work, and the call to the perfection of creation, which is found in the fulfillment of God’s purposes for creation, rather than in any human scheme for the arrangement or redistribution of material wealth and earthly goods. Poverty. We are poor because we are incomplete. We are rich because we are created for glory. We are poor because on our own we cannot attain the glory for which we are made. Our poverty reminds us of our incompleteness and insufficiency. Our poverty, if it is a true, Christian poverty, can make a clearing for God’s initiative and God’s saving work. We sinners are loved sinners, because of Christ. With Saint Francis and Saint Clare, with Saint Peter and Saint Paul, with our alumni who have gone before us and who may already behold the face of God, we can proclaim to the world that creation is good, that man can be great, and Jesus Christ alone is our inheritance.