HOMILY OF FRANCIS CARDINAL GEORGE, OMI

OBLATE CELEBRATION OF IMMACULATE CONCEPTION, DECEMBER 5, 2005

NATIONAL SHRINE AND BASILICA OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Cardinal McCarrick, Very Rev. Fr. General, Wilhelm Steckling, Dear Brother Oblates, Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

Permit me to begin by thanking Msgr. Bransfield and the staff of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception for welcoming to the Shrine today the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, an international religious congregation of priests and brothers, and a few bishops.  Oblates have helped to staff this national shrine since its foundation, but today we come in pilgrimage to mark the 150^th anniversary of Blessed Pope Pius IX’s proclamation that the belief that the Virgin Mary was free of all sin from the first moment of her conception is a dogma of the Catholic faith, an integral part of that act of faith that opens our minds to God’s vision of the world and of our eternal destiny.  We mark this anniversary as members of a missionary group founded in 1816 to preach the Gospel to the poor in southern France.  We mark this anniversary as a group of almost five thousand missionaries preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the poor in all parts of the world.

The Gospel today and the season of Advent itself bid us listen to someone who preached the Gospel to the poor two thousand years ago: John the Baptist.  The Church calls him the forerunner to Jesus.  He cleared the path, he pointed the way, without being able to take it himself.  His preaching shaped that of Jesus: Repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand.  His death foretold that of Jesus.  His disciples, at least some of them, became disciples of Jesus. 

And the Kingdom he preached?  At a certain level, it seems realizable, with great moral effort.  Here on earth, we can imagine a society where every person, man , woman and child, born or unborn, is accorded the dignity which is theirs as a son or daughter of God.  A world structured so that it will be more difficult for one person to use another, to reduce a human being to a consumer in a marketplace, a cog in an industrial machine, a functionary of a totalitarian state, an object of empirical laboratory research, a sexual playmate to slake the biological drives of another, a mere instrument of another’s designs or plots or whims.  This is our vision for social transformation.  Attention to these goals would go far to creating a civilization of love.  Repent, change, the Kingdom of God is at hand--

But are these goals for a transformed society enough to establish the promised kingdom of God?  Listen to another preacher today, the prophet Isaiah.  He speaks of something beyond moral reform.  The kingdom is peaceable, but not just a place without war nor just a place where even wild animals are tame; The kingdom is a place where natural enemies find themselves at genuine, not negotiated, peace, joyfully together, where nature is never destructive, where there are no hurricanes or earthquakes, where disease is not just cured but where it never even occurs.  “There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain, says the Lord, for the earth shall be filled with knowledge of the Lord, as water covers the sea.”  The Kingdom of God is not first of all a moral project.  That might be earnest, but it would also be boring.  Think of all those movies on biblical themes, films about the Ten Commandments or Samson or Delilah.  The best parts, aren’t they, the really exciting parts are the chases and the battles and the banquets, the scheming and the villains. When everyone settles down and is ho hum good,  the movie loses its punch.  Moral reform is necessary but not enough.  It leaves our imagination stifled and our hearts still restless or, even worse, self -righteous. Morality without charity, without the love of God, is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Kingdom truly exists where God’s infinite love is like water that covers the sea; where his love is enough and more than enough, for it satiates our every desire, it fulfills our every yearning; it controls our every moment and fills the world with a joy so great that God is all in all.  The Kingdom is God’s, not ours.  The peace of the kingdom comes with more than repentance on our part; it comes as a gift from God.  St. Paul wrote to the Romans: “May God enable you to live in perfect harmony with one another according to the spirit of Christ Jesus, so that with one heart and voice you may glorify God.”  That is beyond our every effort.  The kingdom is pure gift, pure grace.  Promised by God, preached by the prophets, extended by missionaries in every age, the Kingdom is God’s, not ours. 

And so God prepares people to preach this gift, the good news to the poor, the Gospel of Jesus Christ..  Pre-eminently he prepared the Blessed Virgin Mary to be the first in the Kingdom established by the passion, death and resurrection of her divine Son.  Always free, because always free from sin, Mary was never isolated from God, she placed no obstacles to the fulfillment of God’s holy will in her own life or in the lives of others.  More than assuring her personal salvation, her immaculate conception prepared her for her mission to be the mother of her savior and ours.  She is saved by being protected from all sin; we are saved by being rescued from our own sins and that of our first parents.  Mary desires our salvation more than we want it ourselves.  No mother wants her son to fail.  Mary wants her son’s death to have its effect in the life of everyone for whom he died.  Mary prays and works that the poor of every age and every place may be raised up as citizens of God’s kingdom. 

Missionaries therefore count on her intercession and her help.  The founder of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Bishop Eugene De Mazenod told his sons to look on Mary as their mother and to pray to her as mother of mercy so that the hearts of sinners might be softened.  DeMazenod was present a hundred and fifty years ago at the Roman Basilica of St. Peter’s, for the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.  He spoke of the joy of that occasion, the joy like that in heaven over one sinner who repents.  He wrote of the abundance of graces and blessings that would flow like water over the entire world, poured out upon us to bring us to eternal salvation and to transform the world of his times.

The world of his times was not entirely dissimilar to ours.  DeMazenod founded the Oblates of Mary Immaculate because the poor people of France, after the ravages of the revolution, were uninstructed in the faith, young people were without moral compass, parishes were empty of worshipers and were without resident priests, the Church was as divided as the society itself.  Besides the challenges to Christ’s mission within the Church, there were and are the challenges thrown up by others.  In our day, we confront an ever more aggressive secularism which resents even the preaching of a moral order that would bring us out of our ways into a kingdom which is a gift from God.  We are faced with a renovated Islam, not as a political threat or a source of terrorism, but as a genuinely reformed religion, an alternative understanding of God’s kingdom which for more and more people of great sincerity and conviction is a path to fulfilling God’s will for the world.  We have with us, after more than fifty years of economic reform since the Second World War, ever increasing numbers of people who do not share in the increase of wealth created by a global economy.   The world sees these not as challenges to mission but as social problems to be solved by us.  And the solution is deadly.  Make all truth relative and all religion a matter of personal opinion, not to be imposed on anyone else; create a world so free of danger and threat that it becomes a prison for everyone; reduce poverty by reducing the number of people, by killing those who are too weak to defend themselves.  We must, of course, attend to all this, but as believers in Jesus Christ, who makes God’s infinite love incarnate and available to all his brothers and sisters.  Attention to moral reform is necessary because it prepares the kingdom, it makes its proclamation credible, makes religion seem, even to unbelievers, more than just whistling in the dark.  But there is something more important than moral reform: the proclamation of the Gospel to the poor.

And so, dear brothers and sisters, on this anniversary, let us go to work.  More, let us, through the power of God’s grace, repent of our sins so that God can work in and through us.  Since the kingdom is gift, let us look to those who know how to receive gifts well.  We look, therefore, to Mary, immaculate in her conception by the grace of God.  Her life is all gift, and she knew it.  She who said in Nazareth: “Let it be done to me according to thy will,” spoke to others at Cana of Galilee: “Do whatever he tells you.”  She tells us the same today: “Do whatever he tells you.”  And he tells us to preach the Gospel to the poor.  On this anniversary, with confidence in Christ, Mary’s Son and her Lord and ours; with unity and cooperation among ourselves as Christ’s body the Church, let us pick up the mission of the Church with fresh joy in our hearts.  Praised be Jesus Christ, and Mary Immaculate.  Amen.