MASS CELEBRATING THE DIACONATE IN THE YEAR OF MERCY
- 29th April 2016, Feast of St Catherine of Siena
(1 John 1:5-2:2 & Mt. 11.25-30)
I find that Gospel passage is a very useful one to bring comfort in times of personal struggle and, perhaps especially, at funeral liturgies. It is particularly helpful for funerals where the family of the deceased have had to accompany their loved one on a long journey of frailty and sickness before their ultimate death. Tonight, however, I suspect that its offer of simplicity, an ease of burdens and rest has another connection with the life and example of today’s saint, Catherine of Siena.
Catherine was a tertiary Dominican sister who lived in the C14th. Canonised only 80 years after her death, in our rather stuffy, patriarchal church it took a further five centuries before she was recognised as a Doctor of the Church by Paul VI, and only at the end of the last millennium that she was made one of the patron saints of Europe, by John Paul II. Perhaps most famously she is known for telling the Pope of the time, Gregory XI where to go:- to leave Avignon where the successive popes had lived in exile for decades, and return to his See in Rome!
She packed a great deal into a short life of only 33 years, travelling around Northern and Central Italy encouraging repentance and renewal for all, as well as reform of the clergy. She influenced many people who became her admirers through the extensive correspondence found in her letters. Needless to say in such a male, clerical world she had to face much opposition to her ideas. That, however, did not deter her one little bit, “Speak the truth in a million voices,” she once wrote, “It is silence that kills.”
In our First Reading we heard St John elaborating on Jesus’ claim, in the Fourth Gospel, to be “the Light of the World”. Much of St Catherine’s ministry, in her call for repentance and reform, was precisely about allowing this light of Christ to enter our lives and to drive out the darkness of sin. Purification leads to enlightenment. This is very much akin to the theme of our current Year of Mercy, “Re-discovering the merciful face of the Father.” In a state of enlightenment St Catherine noted that, “It is heaven all the way to heaven.” We know that we already live in, and are surrounded by, God’s love and mercy at every step of our journey of faith.
Back once more to our Gospel Reading – Jesus offering rest when we are overburdened. Catherine lived a very active life but at the core of that life was a still centre where she was able to rest in God. This is clear from her mystical writings in which her closeness to God is manifest. She once told her confessor and biographer, the Dominican priest Raymond of Capua that she was able to sustain herself in her work by “building a cell in (her) mind from which (she could) never flee.” In all her busyness rest in God’s presence was always hers. It is this, as much as anything else in her life that is presented to us as an example for imitation in our own lives and ministry.
Whether we are called to exercise our baptismal priesthood and its ministry as laypersons or as part of the servant leadership of the ordained ministry – as a Permanent Deacon, for example – the means of sustaining that ministry and its goal are the same: through contemplative prayer knowing that we always rest in God’s love, and are therefore enabled to share something of “the merciful face of the Father” in whatever we do. I am reminded of something Fr Richard Rohr – a great proponent of contemplative prayer for all people, and a great admirer of St Catherin’s writings – said in answer to a question about the Centre for Action and Contemplation that he runs in New Mexico. The questioner asked him which was the most important word in the title of the Centre. Without hesitation he answered, “The word ‘and’.” Everyone, whatever our ministry, is called both to prayer and to action, as St Catherine exemplified in her life.
A final encouraging word from St Catherine brings all of this neatly together, “If you are what you should be, you will set the whole world on fire.” That is our prayer in this Year of Mercy especially tonight for our permanent deacons, but remembering that whoever we are, whatever our ministry in the Church, we are all part of this one great enterprise of bringing God’s love and mercy to a world so much in need of this today.