Homilies

Thanksgiving on the Feast of the First Martyrs of Church of Rome

30 Jun 2015

Homily for Mass of Thanksgiving on the Feast of the First Martyrs of Church of Rome
Chapel of St Peter Chanel, Domus Australia, 30 June 2015

We have learned this week that the Eternal City of Rome is home to the apostles, the great teachers and popes of the Church, but especially of the martyrs. If we think of the Appian Way along which were lined crucified Christians, or the Coliseum where they were assassinated for sport, or the tombs that we have visited of the Apostles Peter and Paul, Pope St Clement, Ignatius of Antioch and Sta Sabina in their great basilicas, this was from the beginning of the Christian era the city of blood, of martyrs. Even after it became the Christian capital it was sacked many times so that the blood of saints has watered the ground here many times.  

I remember back in 2001 when I attended the reception by Archbishop Hart of his pallium as Metropolitan Archbishop of Melbourne and Cardinal Pell of his second pallium, as Archbishop of Sydney, on the Feast of Sts Peter and Paul at the hand of the increasingly crippled St John Paul II. As we sat in the square for what was in that year an outdoor Mass, a tropical thunder storm rolled in and a great flood poured out of the heavens. Drenched through to their cardboard stiffening, the bishops’ mitres flopped over and the dye ran from their red vestments like blood once more running in St Peter’s Square and the streets of Rome. The Pope, still quick of wit if no longer of body, remarked upon the ancient Christian aphorism that the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians. The more you persecute us, the early Christians observed, the more we grow. Perhaps what faith-lazy Sydney needs is a good persecution!
It is easy to think that the age of the martyrs is over, but maybe it has just began. In ten thousand years from now, people may look back to the early church, with its first great teachers such as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Paul the Great and Benedict XVI, its first great pastors such as Augustine of Canterbury and Pope Francis, and its early martyrs such as John the Baptist, Thomas More, Maximilian Kolbe and the innumerable martyrs of the twentieth-first century, the bloodiest period of all in the long history of the Church so far. The foul Islamic State organisation is now drowning people in cages or crucifying and beheading them for their faith in Syria and Iraq and even children are suffering such treatment; in Niger and Pakistan churches (sometimes with their entire congregations inside) are daily burned; in countries like our own beloved Australia totalitarian secularists believe they can say anything, no matter how vile, against Catholic leaders and try to exclude religious voices from public life altogether. While today we celebrate the Proto-Martyrs of Rome we may well look back to those as the easy days for Christians in the first centuries in Rome compared with the twenty-first century when it is estimated that 11 Christians are martyred on average every hour. Christians are not the only persecuted people in the world today and sometimes in history they have been the oppressors: but most by far of those persecuted for their faith today are Christians and there are now more Christian martyrs every year than at any time in history.

In his apostolic letter at the beginning of the new millennium,  John Paul wrote that people who are willing to die for the truth become like Christ himself and have throughout history helped the Church to survive and grow. The Church in our day, he said, has once again become a church of martyrs and their witness must not be forgotten. His successor, Pope Benedict, thought the modern Gospel of the Beatitudes is being written in the blood of martyrs and that it is just when totalitarianism, persecution and blind brutality seem to have the upper hand that the testimony of martyrs can conquer hearts and civilisations. And his successor, Pope Francis, at yesterday’s pallium Mass of Peter and Paul charged the Metropolitan Archbishops with being “men of prayer, masters of prayer… men of faith, masters of faith… men of witness” who “can teach the faithful to not be frightened of the many Herods who inflict on them persecution with every kind of cross… courageous witnesses, who are convinced and convincing; witnesses who are not ashamed of the Name of Christ and of His Cross; not before the roaring lions, nor before the powers of this world. And this follows the example of Peter and Paul and so many other witnesses along the course of the Church’s history…”.

Last week, we spiralled down from the twenty-first century in the Basilica of San Clemente through the eleventh, the seventh, the fourth, to the first century AD. Along the way we witnessed the Church’s grandeur and danger. On the streets of ancient Rome we glimpsed those early Christians who lived in fear and trepidation, yet with extraordinary courage, fidelity and hope. We celebrated Mass at the tomb of Pope Clement I of Rome and St Ignatius of Antioch, passed ‘the Apostles to the Slavs’ Sts Cyril and Methodius and saw the Masaccio-painted chapel of the heroic philosopher-martyr St Catherine of Alexandria. And we met the descendants of the Irish Dominicans who fled the British Isles where ordination as a Catholic priest was a death warrant, hoping that one day they might return. All that history and blood was just in one church. You might say: it was ever thus.

        
The Liturgy of the Church proposes several ways for us to be saints. Membership of the club of Our Lady and the Apostles is closed to us. There are, however, openings amongst the Holy Doctors (or teachers) of the Church and the Holy Pastors (or priests). There are the Holy Virgins, who are all presumed to be women, and the Holy Men and Women, including religious and laity. There are special categories for those noted for works of mercy and for educators. And of course there are the Holy Martyrs’ whose membership is growing rapidly at the moment.
 

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As Christian disciples, each of us has his or her own path to sanctity by which we join the saints who’ve gone before us. We need twenty-first century saints for Sydney. Hopefully this won’t mean being executed, like Peter crucified upside down, or like John the Baptist and Paul beheaded, or like St Clement drowned at sea. But it will require that dying-to-self characteristic of the true Christian and that willingness to profess the faith even when this is unpopular or unlikely to serve our earthly ambitions. Fearlessly and prophetically, we must proclaim, by word and deed, Jesus Christ, true God and true man, Saviour of the world and “Very-Life-in-Death”.  It is not about a finger-wagging judgmentalism towards the world or those who are less than perfect: rather, it accepts that a certain ‘pruning’ occurs in any good life,  a certain sharing in the passion of Christ, even if there is also the beauty and feasting and friendship such as we have enjoyed together this past week.

Dear Friends, as we come to the end of our pallium pilgrimage here in Rome I again thank you for your company and support, for the love you have shown me, in some cases for 55 years, and for God and His Church, in some cases even longer. We all must be ready to give our lives like St Peter and the heroes with whom we’ve kept company this week past. At the Eucharist we bring forward gifts of bread and wine with which Christ does extraordinary things; but let that Offertory be a symbol of your bringing forward yourselves with those gifts so that Christ might do extraordinary things with you. Be ready to show the world that you are of Christ and for Christ! May God bless you always!

1.St John Paul II, Novo Millennio Inuente.
2.Ignatius of Antioch, Ad Eph. 7.
3.Jn ch 15.