Memorial of Saint Martin of Tours, Bishop
November 11, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/111123.cfm

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Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, there is a graceful coincidence of several themes calling me to prayer. I share them with you:

• On November 11th, Sisters of Mercy throughout the world commemorate the death of our beloved founder Catherine McAuley.
• This year that commemoration falls on the feast of the beautiful St. Martin of Tours.
• Our readings for the day prompt us to consider our beloved companions on our spiritual journey who provide a harbor of blessings in a fearsome world.

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Not just today, but often, I think about what Catherine would be like if she lived among us today. In her day, she was ever practical, focusing on healing the greatest unmet needs around her.

Her “un-technologized” world was smaller than ours. She encountered need simply by a walk through Dublin’s neighborhoods. Were she here today, need would pour into her awareness from every corner of the earth via technological means. How would she focus the power of her merciful heart for our times?

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Our readings prompt me to think that Catherine would do the same three things she did almost two hundred years ago:

• She would gather her companions on the journey
• Together, they would empty their spirits of anything that was not of God
• In that profound spiritual clarity, they would see where God called them to be Mercy for the world.

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In our first reading, Paul names a number of his companions, those who strengthened and assisted him in life and ministry. Catherine too had beloved companions without whom she could not have met the challenges of her call.

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In our Gospel, Jesus affirms that our hearts must be emptied of the undue love of anything that distracts us from God and God’s Way:

No servant can serve two masters.
He will either hate one and love the other,
or be devoted to one and despise the other.
You cannot serve God and mammon.”
The Pharisees, who loved money,
heard all these things and sneered at him.And he said to them,
“You justify yourselves in the sight of others,
but God knows your hearts;
for what is of human esteem is an abomination in the sight of God.”

Luke 16: 12-15

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While in her times, Catherine encountered the ravages of material poverty, I think that something much less tangible, but exponentially more destructive, would capture her ministerial awareness today.

Our world suffers from an intrinsic and debilitating fear which inclines us to amass power and possessions to the impoverishment of those around us. The fear of not being or having enough drives the systemic predation of the rich upon the poor, and the powerful over the weak. It is a fear that grows in a heart emptied of God.

While Catherine would continue to address the needs of those suffering from poverty and disenfranchisement, I think she would reach out in a new way to the healing of those underlying fears. These fears fester in a culture of spiritual ignorance endemic to our modern society. The naming and healing of that ignorance is deeply congruous with Catherine’s charism and calls to us urgently today.

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About St. Martin de Porres, Pope John XXIII said this:

“He loved his neighbors with the benevolence
of the heroes of the Christian faith.”

So did Catherine McAuley. So must we.

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Poetry: Where the Mind is Without Fear – Rabindranath Tagore

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let us awake.

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Music: There is No Fear in Love – The Bible Project