Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 1, 2024 - Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-8; James 1:17-18, 21B-22, 27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
I told you last week we’d have a guest speaker. Guess who? The Propagation of the Faith, like almost all Catholic organizations, is running out of people to speak. And so, I volunteered to speak on their behalf this Sunday. But I volunteered so long ago that, at that time, there was still a question of whether or not I would still be Pastor after this weekend, and you will see on the back of the bulletin that I am. And you probably already know what you are going to give in our second collection, unless you just happen to be passing through. So, the point of this talk is not to get you to give, but to explain the purpose of your giving and give it some context. And I am no stranger to preaching for the Propagation of the Faith.
The very first time I ever preached to a congregation as a deacon, 24 years old, with the oil still fresh on my hands, was the weekend of June the 5th, 1968. Do you remember what happened on the weekend of June the 5th, 1968? Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. So, I had a congregation, for the 9 o’clock Mass in my home parish, of the children from the school - two hundred and some odd of them - with their parents sitting around the side pews. A whole bunch of children, many of whom had no notion of what Robert Kennedy represented. And a bunch of adults, most of whom were dyed-in-the-wool Republicans. And I had to say something meaningful about the death of a very public Catholic figure.
The very next weekend I was sent to preach for the Propagation of the Faith. I had to go from my apartment in the Bronx, down to Grand Central Station, and take the Grand Central Railroad up to Poughkeepsie. And I preached at about thirteen or fourteen Masses that weekend. Large parish. They had two evening Masses on Saturday night, and they had rotating Sunday Masses - one in the church, one in the school, and so on. And so, I was back and forth all Sunday morning, preaching for the Propagation of the Faith. That was my trial by fire.
But my vocation to become a priest, probably the first inklings were at the end of junior year in high school or maybe at the beginning of senior year. I went to an all-boys academy, run by the Jesuits. We had 162 graduates in my senior year, and 19 of us entered the priesthood. That’s 12% of the graduating class. There was one Franciscan, one Dominican, one priest for the Diocese of Brooklyn, one priest for the Archdiocese of New York, and twelve Jesuits, and three Maryknollers, missionary priests.
When I was thinking about the priesthood, the very first decision I made, even though I loved the Jesuits, was that I would not be a Jesuit. It takes them five years longer to become a priest than it did for me. The second decision I made was that I wouldn’t join any religious order, period, because I didn’t want to take vows. Secular priests like me have no vows. We can own whatever we can afford. We have a contract with our Bishop, which is not the same as obedience, and every priest has a sort of vow of chastity. We call it the requirement of celibacy in the secular priesthood.
I also decided that, under no circumstances, would I be a missionary. And that troubled me a great deal. I didn’t want to go to some far away place, to speak some language that I’d never heard, among people that were very different from me. And my rejection of that mission idea troubled my heart. I thought it was very selfish of me and therefore I would be unworthy of the priesthood. But, after several sessions with my spiritual director, he convinced me that, “You’re just being called to serve the Church. And if you want to serve the Church in the New York area, where you understand the culture and the language, that is perfectly fine. There is nothing wrong with you because you don’t want to go and be a missionary.” But still, I recognized that there was a greater calling that I would absolutely refuse to do.
I want to tell you how the Propagation of the Faith Society began. Back in 1799, so that’s about 225 years ago, a little girl was born in León, France. Her name was Pauline Jaricot. And when she was a teenager - she came from a very rich family - when she was a teenager, she suffered several health issues that kept her out of the social world, so to speak. But she gathered a bunch of girlfriends together, and between them all they decided that they would put away a half a penny a week for the missions and pray, when they did it, for missionaries everywhere. She was prompted to do that by her older brother, who was then studying to be a priest in France. Within a couple of years - by 1822, when she was around 23 years old - the Propagation of the Faith Society was born, blessed personally by the Pope. Imagine that! One little French girl getting the attention of the Pope.
The first donations made from the Propagation of the Faith’s finances were to two dioceses in the United States of America. They gave money to the Diocese of Kentucky and the Diocese of Louisiana. Now, back in the 1820’s, the Diocese of Kentucky would have been the entire state of Kentucky. But the Diocese of Louisiana went from the Florida Keys to the Canadian border. They really needed a lot of financial help just to do the physical traveling back and forth, back and forth to the few Catholic missions here and there in the wilderness.
But what’s the image that most of us grew up with of missionary work? Now, if you are of a certain age and went to Catholic School or a very large religious education program, you probably got the Maryknoll Magazine every now and then in class, and you might have gotten a weekly publication called My Little Messenger. And there were always articles about the missionaries. If they had a photograph, what was the photograph? It was some nuns, dressed all in white, and priests dressed in white. Why white? Because it reflected the sun in the equatorial regions, and it wasn’t as hot to wear as black. But, always, the nuns were holding a little baby. The nuns were smiling; the baby was probably crying. And the notion we got as kids was that the job of missionaries was to save the souls of the Pagan babies. Right? That was kind of a narrow-minded view of missionary work.
And right now, we live in what they are calling “cancel culture.” And one of the targets of cancel culture is the work of the Catholic Church during the great exploratory time in history. Is it true that the Church was a part of it? Yes, it’s true. Missionaries traveled with the explorers. The explorers were, almost always, exploiters. They were sent to find wealth and take it back with them. Some of them also engaged in military conquest. Were they cruel to the peoples with whom they engaged? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. There are ugly stories about some of the Franciscan missions in California. On the other hand, the Jesuits who worked in and around Quebec and northern New York in the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century had a stated policy of inculturation. That’s what we call it now. There was no name for it back then. But the Jesuits were very specific about writing back to headquarters everything they did, every year, detail by detail. And the one constant was that the policy of the Jesuit order was that, when you went among native peoples of any sort, you learned their language, you lived among them in the kinds of dwellings they lived in, you ate their food, you participated in the daily life of a community, listening all the time for how those people related to some kind of concept of a higher power. Then you looked for all the places in their mythology that made sense in Roman Catholicism. And very slowly, you began to introduce Jesus to them, on their own terns. As a matter of fact, there’s a very famous statue in St. Patrick’s Cathedral that looks like the child Jesus, but it is a Huron statue of the Holy Child of heaven and earth, all dressed up in rabbit skins. That’s how inculturated the Jesuits intended to be with all of their people.
So, where does that leave us? I have a cousin, on my father’s side of the family, who was born and raised a Catholic, then left the Catholic Church and became an Evangelical Protestant. And he is a real missionary. His mother and father write to me all the time about his exploits. He goes to all the sorts of dangerous places in the world, where there are terrible diseases. He has to be inoculated over and over and over again. He goes to places with political unrest and the danger of violence erupting right in the villages where he’s working. And they have these massive, massive demonstrations, with 1500 or 2000 people whom they convert with an altar call. Catholic missionaries don’t do anything like that at all.
Pope Francis’ current phrase for the way in which our missionaries work is journeying. It’s the same thing as inculturation. We journey with the people to whom we go. Living with them, living for them, and hoping that the good example we show, the kindness we show, the justice we try to bring, will eventually cause some of them to recognize that the God we follow truly is the One True God.
That’s missionary work today. And I hope that helps you to understand what you’re giving to in the second collection this morning. Now I don’t have to wear my hat anymore.