Reflection for Vespers for Thursday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time

Oath of Fidelity for Candidates for Diaconate Ordination

August 7, 2025
St. Patrick Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas

Psalm 72
Psalm 72
Revelation 11:17-18; 12:10b-12a:3-4
1 Peter 1:22-23

Every time we pray vespers, we pray the Magnificat, the song of praise sung by Our Lady at the Visitation of her cousin Elizabeth. Her song is a song of hope in God’s triumphant intervention into human history, and it reveals her to be filled with God’s Grace, her trusting dependence and complete communion with God and calls us to our own reliance on His grace in our own vocations. Like so many other graces from God, we can take for granted the message of the Magnificat that we pray every day.

We have worked very hard to arrive here and our zeal can soon become impatience because we can forget that we rely on God’s power for everything and that we are only instruments in His hand. The cultural expectations placed upon us in part through the technological innovations of social media demand that we claim our power by “living our own truth.” In these circumstances, we can forget that we are powerless over so many aspects of our own lives and we require His grace to form us as human beings, as Christians, and as deacons. While it is true that each of us are responsible for how we live our lives, this responsibility is always in answer to God’s unconditional Love.

We each have responded to the Lord’s call with love for our brothers and sisters nurtured through obedience to the truth — not our own truth but the Truth. The Truth who is Jesus Christ, the Word Incarnate through the purely spoken “yes” of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This obedience to the Truth is what purifies our hearts, as we read in tonight’s reading. Like Mary, we obey the Truth that is not an abstraction or “the adequation of the thing to the mind” but the Truth who is God Himself.

The Blessed Virgin Mary sings of the fear of the Lord in her Magnificat, “He has mercy on those who fear Him in every generation.” In a few moments, we will join her in her song and express with her this gift of the Holy Spirit called “Fear of the Lord.” This term can seem confusing when we consider that the Archangel exhorted Mary not to be afraid. Fear and love seem incompatible. To clarify this, I note that Pope Benedict XVI once wrote, “Perhaps this is a phrase with which we are not very familiar or perhaps we do not like it very much. But ‘fear of the Lord’ is not anguish; it is something quite different. It is the concern not to destroy the love on which our life is based. Fear of the Lord is that sense of responsibility that we are bound to possess for the portion of the world that has been entrusted to us in our lives.”  It is the sense that we are accountable to God, and we do not want to fail Him because He loves us.

In a scene from Robert Bolt’s wonderful play A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More is incarcerated in the Tower of London because he refuses to take an oath acknowledging the supremacy of King Henry VIII over all foreign leaders, including the Pope. But More has already taken an oath pledging his loyalty to the Church.

Margaret (Meg), More’s daughter, sees the gross injustice of the king’s insistence upon the oath and is searching for any means that might free her father from jail and save his life. She visits him in his cell, and the two have the following conversation:

Margaret: “God more regards the thoughts of the heart than the words of the mouth.” Or so you have always told me.

Thomas More: Yes.

Margaret: Then say the words of the oath and in your heart think otherwise.

Thomas More: What is an oath then but words we say to God?

Margaret: That’s very neat.

Thomas More: Do you mean it isn’t true?

Margaret: No, it’s true.

Thomas More: Then it’s a poor argument to call it “neat,” Meg. When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. (He cups his hands) And if he opens his fingers then — he needn’t hope to find himself again. Some men aren’t capable of this, but I’d be loathe to think your father one of them.

Margaret: In any State that was half good, you would be raised up high, not here, for what you’ve already done. It’s not your fault the State’s three-quarters bad. Then if you elect to suffer for it, you elect yourself a hero.

Thomas More: . . . If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we’d live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see the avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose to be human at all . . . why then perhaps we must stand fast a little, even at the risk of being heroes.

Tonight, as men of the Church, you take an oath to uphold and to convey what the Church teaches as authentically handed on from Christ through the Apostles. The Truth you uphold is Christ Himself.