To Save the World That is Gasping for Truth
Homily Given by Bishop Robert C. Morlino at Opening Mass of the Holy Spirit
(Fall 2007 Newsletter)
In John's Gospel, we are given to understand that the Holy Spirit
will, as history proceeds, teach us all things and remind us of
everything that Jesus said and did. That is what we do at every
Eucharist: we are reminded in the best possible way of what
Jesus said and did. The Eucharist is never a time for novelty. It
is a time for being reminded in the best possible way, and so we
are engaged this morning.
As one with strong Jesuit ties, I usually have three points. But
this group is so special that I have four, just to make sure that
you won't be short-changed. None of them are too long, and I know
exactly how I will stop. So don't worry.
Receive the Holy Spirit Unto Strength
 I
don't know how many of you swim, or swim under water, but if you
go a good distance under water, and you come up again, you are gasping
for breath. It is a very urgent matter. Similarly, when you get
a bad case of the hiccups (caused by God only knows what), you hold
your breath to stop them. Then, when you have held your breath as
long as you can, you are breathless, and you gasp.
It is interesting that the Hebrew word for spirit is ruah
or breath, God's own breath, moving over the waters at the dawn
of creation, before God said, "Let there be light." In
today's Responsorial Psalm, the Holy Spirit Himself calls Himself
"God's breath." That familiar line, "Send out your
Spirit and they shall be created, and you shall renew the face of
the earth," has another translation with a different connotation.
It goes like this: "You send out your breath; fresh life begins;
you constantly renew the world."
That teaching of the Holy Spirit about Himself in the Psalm is very
useful for understanding what we hear Jesus say in the Gospel today:
He breathes on them and says "Receive the Holy Spirit."
That same breath of God that moved over the waters at the very beginning
is now breathed on the apostles and on the whole Church through
them so that fresh life begins and the world is renewed.
That is what happens through the wonderful reception of the Holy
Spirit. Most of you who are Catholic, I am sure, have received the
Holy Spirit in Baptism, the Eucharist, and at Confirmation. If you
are Catholic and you have not received the sacrament of Confirmation,
please get to that as a priority while you are here, because that
is a special outpouring of the Holy Spirit to make you stronger,
to have represented in your own life what we heard in the Gospel.
When you are confirmed, Jesus breathes on you and He says, "Receive
the Holy Spirit unto strength." That is the first point.
The World Is Gasping for Truth
The second point takes us back to being breathless and gasping.
It is a terrible thing to be breathless. When one is definitively
breathless, the other name for it is dead. Gasping for air
is a very difficult situation, and so often as a priest I have seen
that happen as someone is close to death. The dying often have to
go through moments of gasping for breath.
So, my second point is that we live in a culture and in a society
today that is gasping for breath, gasping for the life which is
the truth. Our culture and our society really are gasping, almost
like the death rattle. In the name of "separation of church
and state," our culture and our society have brought to life
an old religion—not a new religion, but an old one—secularism,
which is a religion. It certainly is not philosophical but, rather,
anti-philosophical, and it has a very short creed. "There is
no objective truth," is their creed, and it is a religion.
Not only is it an act of faith, it is an act of absolutely blind
and irrational faith. It is a faith where God is free to be irrational,
as in radical Islam. What's worse, it is a faith where "I am
God, I am free to be irrational."
I put a symbolic logic proof on the board one day in a philosophy
class, and a student said to me, "I don't agree with that."
So I said, "Show me where it is wrong." He responded,
"I just don't agree with that. That is just how you feel."
"Well," I said, "if that denotes a feeling, I will
eat both of my hats." Indeed!
So desperately is society gasping for the truth in their confusion
that the one truth they claim in their creed couldn't possibly be
true. That is why we have what Pope Benedict XVI calls the "dictatorship
of relativism"—scepticism, subjectivism, relativism, deconstructionalism;
all of those "isms" are generated by the creed of secularism.
Not only has society come up with that, but in the name of the "separation
of church and state," society is forcing that religion on us.
In the name of the "separation of church and state," our
governmental authorities frequently—frequently—force a
state religion on us—secularism in the very name of "separation
of church and state." So, this is the world in which we find
ourselves in the United States in 2007, gasping for breath, gasping
for someone to give the real truth, who is the Holy Spirit. That
is the second point.
Your Mission Is to Save the World
 And
the third point is that this is your problem. The world needs to
be saved, and the major point of the Second Vatican Council is that
in the pursuit for holiness, this is the task of the lay Christian
faithful.
So often the lay Christian faithful say, "Why don't bishops
do something about those politicians?" Pope Benedict said a
just state and a just society are the achievement of politics, not
the Church. I am not afraid to speak out; I get in trouble for it
sometimes. But when I hear lay people say this, I say, "Never
mind what I do; what are you going to do?" A just society and
a just state are the achievement of politics, not the Church. Priests
and the bishops are supposed to stay out of politics. What are you
going to do? You change the world through politics, you do it. That
is your mission. My mission is to give leadership and order within
the Church. Your mission, as the Church, is to go out and save that
world that is gasping for breath, for the truth of the Holy Spirit.
That is your job.
To Know and Defend the Natural Law
Being here, you get so many of the tools that you need. One tool
that you absolutely need for the world which is gasping for breath,
for the truth of the Holy Spirit, is a deep habitual understanding
of and ability to explain the natural law, starting with the existence
of God.
We can know by reason alone the existence of God, the dignity of
the human person (that people are always to be treated as ends and
never as means), the definition of marriage (one husband and one
wife, one lifetime with openness to children), and the truth that
violence is irrational. You see, secularism opens the door to violence;
it makes us more like radical Islam. How often now in our country
do people execute a multiple murder and then kill themselves at
the end, even young people? That is what radical Islam does, and
it is becoming more common. That is what secularism does; it desensitizes
us to violence and lends credibility to the idea that problems can
be solved, and my disappointment and discouragement in life can
be helped if I kill somebody and then myself. That is where secularism
leads, to the irrational, because the founding document, the creed,
is irrational.
The major antidote to that poison is the natural law. You have every
opportunity here not only to understand it but to try different
ways of explaining it so that ordinary people get it. And then they
will stop saying to us, "Stop forcing your religion on us."
They will realize we are not forcing religion, only that we are
trying to get them to be truly in tune with their own humanity.
We are not forcing the Trinity, we are not forcing the Immaculate
Conception. We are asking society to govern itself in a way that
our humanity might flourish rather than be left breathless. That
is the third point.
Obedience Is the Manifestation of Love
The last point is the most important: If you become really good
teachers out there in the world, it is not going to get you too
far without holiness. My fourth point, therefore, is obedience.
Holiness is all about love. God is love. The act of love by which
Jesus Christ saved the world was obedience. He learned obedience
from what He suffered, we hear in the letter to the Hebrews. The
letter to the Philippians says "He obediently accepted
even death, death on the cross." And in the garden, He said
"Father not my will, but thine be done." Christ's ultimate
act of love was none other than an act of obedience. Obedience
manifests love. Obedience grows out of humility. So, besides
learning to be good teachers of the natural law and many other things,
as you grow in holiness, you have to grow in obedience by
practice.
Of course, you know that 'obedience' comes from the Latin words
ob and audire, meaning to listen hard. In the first
place, we have to listen hard to the words of scripture, and we
have to listen hard to the teaching of the Church that explains
the scripture. We have to be obedient there. But it gets more concrete.
We have to be obedient to the legitimate requests of legitimate
authority. We have to practice obedience in order to love, obedience
to parents. There is an exception to that though. For example, some
young woman may want to be a consecrated sister, or some young man
may want to be a priest, but the parents say no. In such a case,
you do not have to be obedient. You've got your dispensation today
from that.
But when legitimate authority makes a legitimate request, the response
should be obedience. Your response should be obedience to those
in the administration and to the tutors who are here; that is for
your good. Obedience should be your response to civil laws that
are just. If 21 is the drinking age, then 21 is the drinking age.
When I was your age and I went to college in New York, the drinking
age was 18. I guarantee you that did not help us in any significant
way.
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| Bishop Morlino with student-prefects and students
from Wisconsin |
The Fruit of Obedience: Humility, Mercy, Hope, and Joy
A discipline of obedience is a discipline of humility. Humility lived
out is obedience, but pride lived out is disobedience. To become
an obedient person is to become a humble person, is to become a
loving person. Humble people are merciful. They know that they are
not perfect, and they are never harsh on other people when they
are not perfect either. Humble people are merciful. Jesus Christ
is mercy Himself.
Humble people are merciful and people who are merciful know that
they will obtain mercy. "Blessed are the merciful for they
will obtain mercy." So, humble people as merciful are hopeful.
And hopeful people are discouragement-proof. The gift of courage
at Confirmation—if you receive it with an open heart, if you
think about it, if you take a big overdose of that gift of courage
from the Holy Spirit—can make you discouragement-proof.
If you are humble, then you are merciful, and you are hopeful,
discouragement-proof, and then you are joyful. If the Lord puts
all of that together in you by the power of the Holy Spirit which
He gives you when He breathes on you anew each day, then you are
not only a great human being but you are a saint. And that is what
we are doing here, really, nothing else—becoming saints.
So I will leave you with the closing words of the letter to the
Hebrews, Chapter 10, which inspire me every day, as you inspire
me today. "Never allow to be thrown away your confidence in
Christ, which promises a reward so great." Never allow that
to be thrown away. Life can and will get tough again and again and
again. "The just man finds life through faith if he draw back
I take no pleasure in him" (Heb 10: 35, 38), it says in the
letter to the Hebrews. As for you and me today and every day, by
the power of the Holy Spirit, we are not among those who draw back
and perish. We are among those who have faith and live. May it be
so.
Come Holy Spirit. Praised be Jesus Christ.
Robert Morlino was born December 31, 1946, in Scranton, Pennsylvania,
and was ordained a priest for the Maryland Province of the Society
of Jesus on June 1, 1974.
He holds a Bachelor's degree in philosophy from Fordham University,
a Master's degree in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame,
the Master of Divinity degree from the Weston School of Theology
in Cambridge, Mass., and a doctorate in moral theology from the
Gregorian University in Rome, with specialization in moral theology
and bioethics. Father Morlino has taught philosophy at Loyola College
in Baltimore, St. Joseph University in Philadelphia, Boston College,
the University of Notre Dame, and St. Mary's College.
In 1981, Father Morlino became a priest of the Diocese of Kalamazoo
and served there as Vicar for Spiritual Development, Executive Assistant
and Theological Consultant to the Bishop as Moderator of the Curia,
and as the Promoter of Justice in the Diocesan Tribunal. He also
served as administrator of a number of parishes, and as rector of
St. Augustine Cathedral in Kalamazoo.
Father Morlino was scheduled to begin a full-time faculty appointment
as professor of theology at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit
when, on July 6, 1999, Pope John Paul II appointed him the Ninth
Bishop of Helena. Bishop Morlino was appointed the Fourth Bishop
of Madison on May 23, 2003, and he was installed on August 1, 2003.
Bishop Morlino currently serves as chairman of the Board of
Directors of the National Catholic Bioethics Center. He is past
chairman of two committees within the United States Conference of
Catholic Bishops: from 2001 to 2004, he chaired the Bishops' Committee
on the Diaconate, and from 2001 to 2004, he also chaired the Ad
Hoc Committee on Health Care Issues and the Church, which assists
the bishops in responding to moral and theological questions surrounding
specific health care situations in their dioceses.
-- Qtrly Newsletter, Fall 2007
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