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Homily, Triumph of the Cross 2008
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I
invite you ...
to rediscover with me the
beauty of knowing Jesus Christ and the
rich treasury of faith that comes to us from the Apostles. This renewal
in the love of Christ and the faith of the Church will, by the grace of
God, inspire us to new ways of sharing this good and life-giving news
with the men and women of our day.
Beginning
in Fall 2008, each of
the next five years will be devoted to
reflection upon a particular dimension of our faith. The centre of it
all, of course, will be the Person of Jesus Christ. Our hope and prayer
will be to encounter Him anew as Son of God and Saviour.
To
prepare the way, we shall
begin in the first year with reflections upon the mystery of the human
person, created by God and saved in Jesus Christ. The second year will
then be directed to a new proclamation of Jesus, who alone is the
answer to the questions and the fulfillment of the hopes of human life.
This will be followed by a year dedicated to the Church, understood and
lived as the mystery of communion in Christ. Our fourth year will focus
upon the life of grace, that is, life lived as a disciple of Jesus
Christ guided by the Holy Spirit. Finally we shall reflect upon the
mission of the Church, called to witness before the world to the truth
of God's love revealed in Christ.
Speakers
and witnesses will be
invited to present the doctrine of the Church in all of its radiance
and testify before us to the beauty of the life of faith. Everyone in
the Archdiocese will have an opportunity to hear these presentations
and to consider how the Lord is calling each of us to a rebirth of hope
and joy.
The
title I have given to this
endeavour is Nothing More Beautiful.
These words are borrowed from Pope Benedict XVI, who, in his homily at
the Mass to inaugurate his ministry as the Successor of St. Peter, said:
Date/Topic
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Catechist
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Witness
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In
the Image and Likeness of God
7
p.m., Friday, Dec.
12
Feast of Our
Lady of Guadalupe
"We
are not some casual and meaningless
product of evolution.
Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed,
each of us is loved, each of us is
necessary."
Benedict XVI
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Most Rev. Richard
Smith, Archbishop of Edmonton
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Lea
Singh, Assistant Director, Catholic Organization for Life and Family
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The
Human Body
in God's Creative Design
7
p.m., Thursday, Feb. 12
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Sister M. Timothy Prokes, F.S.E.,
Professor of Spirituality and Theology
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Michael and Terese Ferri of Pembroke,
Ont.
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Our New Life in Jesus Christ
7
p.m., Thursday, April 30
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Most Rev. Charles J. Chaput, Archbishop
of Denver
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Mary Rose Bacani, Producer, Salt + Light
Television, Toronto
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Towards a Culture of Life
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Most Rev. John Corriveau, Bishop of
Nelson |
Patrick Stewart, Director, Marian
Centre, Edmonton |
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Speaker Biographies
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Archbishop Richard Smith,
a native of Halifax,
was ordained to the
episcopate on June18, 2002, and served the Diocese of Pembroke before
being
appointed to the Archdiocese of Edmonton in 2007. He was struck by the
words of
Benedict XVI in the homily at his papal inauguration Mass:
“There is nothing more beautiful than to be
surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing
more
beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship
with him.”
This was the inspiration for Nothing More
Beautiful, the name Archbishop Smith has given to a five-year
process of
reflection and renewal in the Archdiocese. |
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Lea
Singh
is Assistant Director of the Catholic Organization for Life and Family
(COLF), a national nonprofit organization devoted to education and
intervention in the Canadian public square on life and family issues.
Lea grew up in Edmonton, where she attended Archbishop MacDonald High
School. She completed her university education in the United States at
Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School. In 2003 Lea passed the New
York bar and worked as an associate in a major New York City law firm.
A year later, she decided to work more directly for the Church, and
worked as Legal Counsel of the Catholic Family & Human Rights
Institute (C-FAM), on whose behalf she lobbied the United Nations.
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A Franciscan Sister of the Eucharist, Sister Timothy Prokes
has published Towards a Theology of the Body and
Mutuality:
the Human Image of Trinitarian Love, in addition to several
articles. She
has taught at many universities in the U.S. and Canada, and
frequently lectures at
conferences on the themes of theology of the body, bioethical issues
and the
spiritual life. She is also a professor of the Permanent Diaconate
Program of
the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., conducts retreats for both
religious
communities and the laity, and delivers lectures and short courses for
parish,
diocesan, and professional groups.
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Michael and Terese Ferri live in Pembroke, Ontario.
Michael is a psychiatrist
and medical chief of staff at Pembroke General Hospital. Terese
practises family law at her own firm. They have been been married for
32 years and have 14 children and 13 grandchildren. Mike and Terese are
frequent speakers in the area of family life. They will share how the
beauty of the Gospel, particularly as it finds expression in Pope John
Paul II's theology of the body, has inspired and
guided them in their personal and family lives.
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Archbishop Charles J. Chaput is spiritual leader of
almost 385,000 Catholics in 120 parishes in the Archdiocese of Denver.
A member
of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, St. Augustine Province, he was
ordained to the
priesthood in 1970 and to the episcopate in 1988. Pope John Paul II
appointed
him Archbishop of Denver on February 18, 1997. As a member
of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Tribe, Archbishop Chaput
is the second Native American to be ordained bishop in the United States, and the
first Native
American archbishop. In his new book, Render
Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living
our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life, Archbishop Chaput calls
for
Catholics to deepen their commitment to Church teaching on abortion,
the death
penalty, immigration, poverty and other matters of social justice, and
to carry
their faith-rooted convictions into public life.
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Mary
Rose Bacani remembers three special transitional
moments in
her life when she felt called by God to do something:
one was to go to Rhode Island to join
the
Regnum Christi movement as a consecrated member after one year at the
University of Toronto, the next was to go to California to attend
Thomas
Aquinas College for her Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts, and the third
was finally
to go back home to Toronto. There
she did what she felt in her heart she had to do – check out Salt +
Light
Television. Since then Mary Rose has produced several shows and
documentaries for
S+L, including Journey of Light and Catholic
Women’s League: for God and Canada. Her most
recent project is The
World I Know: Virtues in Action series co-produced with the
Dufferin-Peel
Catholic District School Board.
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Bishop John Corriveau grew up in small-town Ontario and went on to
become the
worldwide leader of his religious order, the Franciscan Order of Friars
Minor
Capuchins, in 1994. During his two terms as Minister General of the
Capuchins,
he was based in Rome but travelled
widely. Upon
his return to Canada in 2006, he
was assigned to
work at St. Francis’ Table, a restaurant for the poor in Toronto’s Parkdale
area, where he
greeted guests and waited on tables. He was serving as Provincial
Minister of
the Capuchins’ Province of
Central Canada in November
2007 when Pope
Benedict XVI appointed him Bishop of Nelson. The diocese, located in
the
beautiful Okanagan and Kootenay regions of British Columbia, is home
to about 78,000
Catholics.
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Patrick Stewart
has spent the last 11 of his 18 years in the
Madonna House community serving at the Edmonton
inner-city
apostolate known as the Marian Centre. He was born in Frankfurt,
Germany,
and raised and
educated in the United
States.
He spent 11 years serving as a commissioned
officer in the U.S. Navy, a period in which he abandoned his Roman
Catholic
faith and committed himself to a secular vision of life.
Six months before ending his naval
career
however, Patrick was profoundly confronted by the shallowness of his
personal
life and the emptiness of his heart. A
Roman Catholic priest in North
Carolina, a friend of his
family, stepped into this void
and helped Stewart recover his faith and claim a long-denied call from
the
Lord. Patrick is also an accomplished artist with an international
patronage. |
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Prayer
Heavenly Father,
we
come before you in praise and thanksgiving
for
you have called us to be your own.
You
sent your Word
to
bring us truth
and
your Spirit to make us holy.
Through
them we come to know
the
Beauty that is You.
Draw
us to a new encounter with Jesus, your Son.
Deepen
our love for His Church.
Help
us to embrace anew
the
beauty of our faith in all of its richness.
Empower
us to see there is nothing more beautiful
than
our relationship with You,
so
that we may reflect to others your image,
in
which we have been created.
We
pray that, rooted and grounded in your love,
and
through the healing power of the Cross of your Son,
we
may be strengthened for mission
by
your Holy Spirit.
We make this prayer through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
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Resource
Documents
The following documents can provide insight into Nothing More Beautiful
and the new evangelization.
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Homily of His Holiness Benedict XVI at
Mass
of his Inauguration – April 2005
“There is nothing more
beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with
Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak
to others of our friendship with him.”
Full text
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Gaudium et Spes, 22 – Pastoral
Constitution
on the Church in the Modern World – Pope Paul VI (especially Ch.1, The
Dignity of the Human Person)
“It is only in
the mystery of the Word incarnate that light is shed on the mystery of
the human being.”
Full
text
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Internet: A New Forum for Proclaiming
the
Gospel – Message for 36th World Communications Day – Pope John Paul II
"The Church
approaches this new medium with realism and confidence. Like other
communications media, it is a means, not an end in itself. The Internet
can offer magnificent opportunities for evangelization if used with
competence and a clear awareness of its strengths and weaknesses. Above
all, by providing information and stirring interest it makes possible
an initial encounter with the Christian message, especially among the
young who increasingly turn to the world of cyberspace as a window on
the world. It is important, therefore, that the Christian community
think of very practical ways of helping those who first make contact
through the Internet to move from the virtual world of cyberspace to
the real world of Christian community." Full
text
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Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope
Benedict
XVI) speaks on The New Evangelization
"Human life
cannot be realized by itself. Our life is an open question, an
incomplete project, still to be brought to fruition and realized. Each
man´s fundamental question is: How will this be realized --
becoming man? How does one learn the art of living? Which is the path
toward happiness?
"To evangelize means: to show this path -- to teach the art of living.
At the beginning of his public life Jesus says: I have come to
evangelize the poor (Luke 4:18); this means: I have the response to
your fundamental question; I will show you the path of life, the path
toward happiness -- rather: I am that path." Full text
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Do you
have questions or comments about Nothing
More Beautiful? Some key contacts:
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