Feast of the Annunciation
18th Anniversary Mass of the Foundation of the Fraternas
Lima, Peru
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
25 Mar 2009
We are gathered here this evening on the Feast of the Annunciation to celebrate the 18th anniversary of the foundation of the Marian Community of Reconciliation, the Fraternas in 1991.
We thank God for this blessed group of lay women, fully available under obedience for many forms of apostolic activity, who already have 25 communities in 9 countries, including one in my home city of Sydney. One reason for my celebrating this Mass is to thank God and the superiors for the gift of this community to the Catholic Church in Australia.
There, across the Pacific Ocean, your community faces a different cultural challenge in a peaceful, generally prosperous and secular culture with a Christian majority of about 60% of the population. Although Catholics are now the largest religious denomination, Australia is not a Catholic country. We are neither as religious as the best Peruvian Catholics nor as anti-religious as e.g. the Shining Path Guerrillas.
One of Mother Teresa's nuns told me that Australia has proved to be the most difficult country in the world for them in attracting vocations; many women's religious orders in Australia have not had a vocation in decades. I hope and pray that the Fraternas lay vocation to work in the world will be a break through and represent a necessary change of direction. I ask you to pray tonight that the Church in Australia, all of us, will be open to doing God's will more faithfully and discerning more accurately.
I can understand why the feast of the Annunciation was chosen as foundation day for the Fraternas, because the Annunciation is a favourite theme for the followers of Christ and even for his enemies. Many great artists have painted the Annunciation and one only has to think of Fra Angelico's magnificent series of pictures.
The enemies of the Church see the Annunciation as emblematic of that submission to God's will, especially on the part of women, which they regard as less than human, as hostile to the necessary adult goal of human autonomy. To claim that Mary's greatness came from her submission to the one true God is a provocation, a confirmation to them of all that is wrong in Christianity, because they do not acknowledge that true freedom is only found in the truth. For many moderns this is a hard and unwelcome lesson. The free acceptance of God's will is the finest exercise of freedom.
However before pondering the wonderful model of obedience from Mary's "fiat", her acceptance of God's will, we might consider the other great mystery involved in God's choosing one individual rather than another, favouring one community to carry his work forward while other groups languish.
God's choice is unpredictable and undeserved. The prayer of the Church for today speaks of King David, certainly chosen against the odds to be King of all Israel, but rejected as the one to build the Temple in Jerusalem; an honour given to his son Solomon, whose later years were dangerously tainted by idolatry.
Certainly the gift of personal free will means that we must strive to cooperate with God's will, but no-one of us has deserved the roles which have been offered to us through baptism, or marriage; holy orders or lay leadership; religious life or episcopate. We should all thank God for our personal vocations, acknowledging that God's ways are often mysterious, sometimes difficult, even hard to accept at first.
We all know that there were no teenagers 2000 years ago, because teenagers are the product of mass secondary education and life then required a brutal transition from childhood to adult life. Most girls were married at 13 or 14, while the boys were a few years older.
Mary then was a young woman indeed by contemporary standards when she accepted God's will and later pondered the significance of her acceptance in her heart. No doubt her life of regular prayer and her silence helped her hear and heed God's loving voice.
The fruits of her obedience were no less than the Incarnation and the Redemption, the birth of the God-man and his redeeming death and resurrection. Her early obedience laid the foundations for her later achievements as a mother, during the flight into Egypt and during Jesus' public life culminating with her presence at the foot of the Cross and then at Pentecost. May she be for us too a model of fidelity and strength.
In conclusion I pray in thanks for the work of all the branches of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, the Fraternas, the Servants of the Plan of God and the many numbers of the Christian Life Movement. May God continue to bless you so you produce fruits of one hundred fold.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
click here to view the Spanish version (PDF)
