Mission Sunday
St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney
Ex 17:8-13; 2 Tim 3:14-4:2; Lk 18:1-8
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
21 Oct 2007
Today is Mission Sunday, when we remember the obligation we have as members of Christ’s Church to evangelise, to be missionary. It is an irony of Australian Catholic life that in some ways we have been more aware of our duty to spread the gospel overseas than we have worked to offer the Catholic understanding of Christ to our fellow Australians.
However with the growth of unbelief we now have an expanding Australian market of people, who need Christ and his message. And while Generation Y, those under 30 years, are less religious than their grandparents, they also have fewer anti-Catholic prejudices and are open to religious influence; or at least a minority of them are. Just last week I was speaking to a Catholic army chaplain at a big Australian military base. On each Saturday night half his congregation are non-Catholics and in the past few years he has brought about 120-130 into the Church.
Earlier today I celebrated Mass at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Church, Randwick for the centenary of the death of Father Jules Chevalier, the founder of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart and co-founder of the Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart. There are now thousands of these priests and nuns working in over fifty countries throughout the world.
Faced with such spectacular achievement we are tempted to think of founders with extraordinary human gifts, coming from wonderful Catholic families (as the Little Flower did) and working in strong climates of faith.
Some Australians can be tempted to think that unbelief is very modern, something new to our age, one place where we excel. But unbelief is very old fashioned, as the Western world was pagan before it was Christian; and a ruthless, hard world it was too. Neither was Australian history all like the Catholic story here fifty and more years ago. During the first half of the nineteenth century, for example, the different Australian colonies were among the most irreligious places in the world!
But back to Father Jules Chevalier. He was born in south central France in 1824 to poor parents with an irreligious father and a strongly Catholic mother. Too poor to enter the seminary, his father’s employer offered to pay for his seminary studies. That simple act of kindness had immense consequences.
After ordination he was posted to the town of Issodun, which had a reputation as the most godless de Christianized town in the region. At about the same time St. Jean Vianney was posted to Ars, another anti-religious hot spot! In fact the MSCS were twice expelled from France by anti-clerical governments.
It was at Issodun that he and his companion Father Emile Mangenest founded the body of men we know as the MSCS to explain the importance of God’s love, using the symbol of the Sacred Heart, to counter-act not only the unbelief of the times but the severity of a group of Catholics known as Jansenists.
Although they were still then a small order, Pope Leo XIII at the end of the nineteenth century gave them responsibility to preach the gospel in the Central Pacific (Kiribati), in Papua New Guinea and in what is now Eastern Indonesia, Sulawesi.
Their task was not easy and they continued to encounter many difficulties. But they persevered because they were convinced of the value of their mission. Sometimes difficulties are good for us because they force us to examine the value of what we are proposing. Is it worth the trouble of persevering?
The gospel today from St. Luke has Our Lord, telling us of the parable of the unjust judge, who eventually gives justice to the persistent widow to get rid of her. The crooked judge is used as an image of God, a shocking and scandalous comparison. The lesson is however clear. If an unjust judge will reward perseverance, how much more will our loving God listen to us, even if He does not, perhaps cannot, intervene to answer our prayers short of a miracle.
This parable is often linked with the parable of the man wanting bread for his family at midnight from his neighbour, who is already in bed with his family. He eventually gets out of bed and gives the bread to obtain some peace. It is another unusual parable, stressing the importance of persevering in prayer and with an equally strange image of the un-altruistic head of family, who finally acts in a kindly way.
In the Our Father, Our Lord asks us to pray for our daily bread and in these parables he is reminding us to persevere in prayer especially when the praying seems pointless. He is not implying that our particular prayers will be answered, although Moses’ prayer for the Jews in their struggle with the Amalakites was answered. Moses persevered with a little help from his friends. But Jesus is assuring us that God his Father loves us, is listening to us and eventually justice will prevail, all will be well, even if we have to wait until we enter Heaven.
On many occasions the progress of the Kingdom of God is impeded or sidetracked. We see that in the story of the Sacred Heart families, but they, like us, are called to persevere in prayer and action.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
