We Proclaim Christ to the Whole World

I wanted to share this magnificent homily with you. This lays out so beautifully the focus of the Catholic Church in all of its simplicity and profundity. As St Paul said "I am determined to know nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified". This very focus drew me into the Catholic Church back in 1984. I soon learned after coming into the Church, that the attention given to the Mother of our Lord was again turned back to her Son in her words at the wedding in Cana "Do whatever He tells you". Even the rosary is a Christological prayer, it being both a prayer and a meditation on the events of the life our Lord, seen through the eyes of Mary, asking at each step for the prayers of His first and best disciple to please pray for us sinners.
I think this focus should be the focus of every Christian everywhere, no matter what faith tradition. Jesus is why we are here, for "in Him, we move and have our being"



From a homily by Pope Paul VI
We proclaim Christ to the whole world

Not to preach the Gospel would be my undoing, for Christ himself sent me as his apostle and witness. The more remote, the more difficult the assignment, the more my love of God spurs me on. I am bound to proclaim that Jesus is Christ, the Son of the living God. Because of him we come to know the God we cannot see. He is the firstborn of all creation; in him all things find their being. Man’s teacher and redeemer, he was born for us, died for us, and for us he rose from the dead.

All things, all history converges in Christ. A man of sorrow and hope, he knows us and loves us. As our friend he stays by us throughout our lives; at the end of time he will come to be our judge; but we also know that he will be the complete fulfilment of our lives and our great happiness for all eternity.

I can never cease to speak of Christ for he is our truth and our light; he is the way, the truth and the life. He is our bread, our source of living water who allays our hunger and satisfies our thirst. He is our shepherd, our leader, our ideal, our comforter and our brother.

He is like us but more perfectly human, simple, poor, humble, and yet, while burdened with work, he is more patient. He spoke on our behalf; he worked miracles; and he founded a new kingdom: in it the poor are happy; peace is the foundation of a life in common; where the pure of heart and those who mourn are uplifted and comforted; the hungry find justice; sinners are forgiven; and all discover that they are brothers.

The image I present to you is the image of Jesus Christ. As Christians you share his name; he has already made most of you his own. So once again I repeat his name to you Christians and I proclaim to all men: Jesus Christ is the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, Lord of the new universe, the great hidden key to human history and the part we play in it. He is the mediator – the bridge, if you will – between heaven and earth. Above all he is the Son of man, more perfect than any man, being also the Son of God, eternal and infinite. He is the son of Mary his mother on earth, more blessed than any woman. She is also our mother in the spiritual communion of the mystical body.

Remember: it is Jesus Christ I preach day in and day out. His name I would see echo and re-echo for all time even to the ends of the earth.

Responsory

Our Saviour Jesus Christ has broken the power of death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, and out of his full store we have all received grace upon grace.

The whole universe has been created through him and for him. He exists before everything, and all things are held together in him, and out of his full store we have all received grace upon grace.


Amen.

St John Southworth (d. 1654)

I haven't posted in a while. This article on the Universalis website for today caught my eye. The other saint for today is St Cyril of Alexandria who championed the cause of Orthodoxy regarding the two natures of Christ at the First Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D.
However St John Southworth's story really spoke to me about standing for the faith against all the power of the state being placed against you. It made me realize how much we owe the martyrs who gave everything they had to be true to the Lord and to the Church. It makes my petty struggles seem so small. I hope this blesses and encourages you all. May I encourage you to study the lives of the Saints who have gone on before. The Book of Hebrews states that they are a "great cloud of witnesses" who watch over us. The Book of the Apocalypse (Revelation) speaks of the prayers of the martyrs and saints praying for those of us here in the Church Militant. We are all one body in the Lord, death does not separate us from them. We can petition them to pray and intercede for us for they are not dead, they are more alive than we are, because they are in the very presence of the Lord Jesus.

John Southworth is normally lumped in with the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, and only in the diocese of Westminster, where he died, is his feast kept separately, on the anniversary of his execution. But if he was worth canonising, he is worth knowing; for saints are not canonised to make up an arbitrary quantity.
John Southworth was the only English martyr to suffer under a dictatorship. The English Civil War ended; the King was executed; the Elizabethan Prayer-Book outlawed; freedom of conscience proclaimed. But Catholics, who had been accused of plotting against the King, were still persecuted when there was no King; they had been fined for refusing to accept the Prayer-Book, and they were still persecuted when there was no Prayer-Book; all they asked was freedom of conscience for themselves and their countrymen, and it was denied them. Priests had to come and go, in secret, in fear of betrayal and death, as they had done for more than a generation.
He first came to the attention of the authorities in 1637, when Westminster was devastated by the plague, and he was seen visiting an infected house. There could be only one reason for anyone to visit the sick under such dangerous circumstances, and so he was arrested and charged with being a priest. On that occasion the authorities quietly set him free; but such clemency enraged the Puritans, and, seventeen years later, in 1654, when they were in power, they had their revenge.
At his trial, it was open to John Southworth to plead Not Guilty to the criminal and capital charge of being a priest – most of the missionaries did, to cause as much trouble as possible to the persecutors. But he did not. If he had pleaded Not Guilty, the court might have acquitted him (as it was, the judge wept as he passed sentence): he would have saved his life, but he would have been denied the glory of solidarity with all the other English martyrs. Although the penal laws remained in force, perhaps the sight of such an obviously innocent man being tortured to death discouraged their application; for it was 24 years before the next priest was martyred. And no doubt his prayers have helped to win the temporary liberty of conscience that England now enjoys, imperfect and threatened though it may be.
May the prayers of all martyrs, everywhere, win true liberty for us all.

-from www.universalis.com for Sunday, June 27th