By Most Rev. Richard W. Smith, Archbishop of Edmonton

Monday, April 24, 2017

The Love that Heals is the Mercy that Restores

Archbishop Emeritus Lavoie and Archbishop Smith receiving gifts at St Kateri celebration Mass

On the weekend, I had the great joy of gathering with First Nations parishioners and other people of the Archdiocese to honour St. Kateri Tekakwitha. This gave us the opportunity to reflect upon her story and example. What a wonderful saint the Lord has raised up for the world in this first Native North American to be canonized!
Statue of St Kateri at the Catholic Campus

Among the many things that have been recounted of her, what has often struck me is the miraculous event of healing surrounding her death. Throughout her life, she bore on her face terrible scarring, the result of the smallpox from which she had suffered. As she lay dying, the only words she uttered repeatedly were: “Jesus, I love you.” These words gave expression to the great love she had borne throughout her life for the risen Lord; a love out of which she had turned her entire life over to him. Moments after her death, witnesses testified to the disappearance of the scars as her face was restored to its original beauty.

We may not bear external scars, but we certainly know what it is like to carry internal ones. Humanity today is deeply wounded. Psychological and emotional scars are borne by many people, the result of hurts, disappointments, betrayals, addictions, abuse, bitterness and so on. When left unaddressed, the interior wounds in the individual person fester and give rise to communal collateral damage: in the family, the civic community and even among nations. St. Kateri’s example has left us a teaching that must be heeded with great urgency: the handing over of one’s life to Christ in a relationship of love opens the heart to the healing for which every human person and our entire world is clearly longing, and that only our Risen Lord can give.
Divine Mercy Sunday at Our Lady Queen of Poland
The Kateri celebration was followed the next day by Divine Mercy Sunday. The coincidence of events is providential. It underscores what we know from experience: the divine love that heals reaches us as mercy. St. John Paul II, who established Divine Mercy Sunday, opened his great encyclical on mercy thus: “It is ‘God, who is rich in mercy’ (Eph 2:4) whom Jesus Christ has revealed to us as Father…” (Dives in Misericordia, 1). God our Father is all-loving and most merciful. When, in Christ and out of love for Christ, we present our wounds and scars to him, he heals us by the divine mercy that restores us to the beauty that is ours as his children.

St. Kateri, pray for us. By your intercession, may we all be fully open to the gift of divine love and mercy, and thus know the joy and peace that flow from God’s gift of healing.

Read the full story on the St Kateri Celebration here.

Sister Kateri played a role in the canonization of St Kateri

Monday, April 17, 2017

Hindsight Grounding Foresight



The Easter Vigil is a liturgy of extraordinary depth and beauty. The solemn proclamation of Easter (Exsultet) unfolds beneath the flaming paschal candle and announces the Risen Christ as the light that dispels all darkness. The expanded Liturgy of the Word traces the awe-inspiring course of salvation history leading to the wondrous event of the Resurrection. The Baptismal Liturgy extends to the recipients of this sacrament the gift of new life in Christ, and welcomes them into his embrace through membership in his Mystical Body, the Church. The liturgy culminates with the sacrament of the Eucharist, in which the Risen Lord renders himself truly present in fulfillment of his promise always to be with us and as food for our journey toward the fullness of life in heaven.

I'd like to focus briefly upon the Liturgy of the Word proclaimed at the Vigil. The proclamation of the many Scripture passages is an exercise of what I like to call holy hindsight. This part of the liturgy looks back over history and sees it anew in the light of the Resurrection of Jesus. In this light, we see a history of wondrous and ineffable love. After God created the human family we abandoned him through sin. Yet he never abandoned us, but walked with us always, intervening in our history, both collective and personal, in order to draw us back to himself. When we erred, he did not turn his back on us, but worked to turn all to our good by transforming our wrong turns into right ones and our mistakes into blessings. His definitive and decisive intervention is what we celebrate at Easter. Jesus, the Son of God incarnate, after having taken to himself all of our sins and dying on the Cross, rises from the grave, triumphant over sin and death. In this way, he reverses forever the downward trajectory on which our sin had launched human history.
 
This holy hindsight announces the steadfast love and mercy of God as always present and perennially victorious over evil. In this way, the holy hindsight grounds our hopeful foresight. We cannot see all that lies before us, but we are certain that in every event and circumstance our Risen Lord will be there, in the full power of his resurrection, to love us by guiding us, correcting us, forgiving us and leading us to eternal life. It is no wonder that our Easter liturgies resound with "Alleluia!" Christ is truly Risen and with his people. We are not alone; never alone. Let this conviction banish all fear as we place our faith fully in our Risen Lord and surrender our lives to him.
 
 

Monday, April 10, 2017

Follow or Flee?



The liturgy of Palm Sunday is dramatic. Recounting events in Jerusalem in the last days of our Lord's earthly life, it traces a path from triumph to shame. Scripture recalls that crowds of people hailed him as king upon his entry into the city, but that a few days later he was left abandoned as he hung upon the Cross. 

This commemoration poses a question that we would do well to carry with us into Holy Week: follow or flee? The crowds were quite happy to follow the Lord into Jerusalem when all seemed well. They wanted to benefit from the triumphal liberation that they supposed him to be bringing. At some point, though, it became clear exactly where the Lord's particular path was leading. The shadow of the Cross began to loom very large, and the enthusiasm for Jesus quickly evaporated. They fled. 

Entering Holy Week means entering Jerusalem with him. We follow him into the city through our participation in the solemn liturgies of the coming days. The story of the crowds in Jerusalem of old raises for us today the question of just how far we are willing to go. Will we follow or will we flee? Will we go where he leads us or will we choose to forge our own path? 

Faithful following of Jesus Christ leads to the Cross. We know that. Yet we also know that the journey does not end there. This Holy Week will culminate with the joyful celebration at Easter of the Lord's resurrection from the dead. The path of Jesus leads to the fullness of life, indeed, to eternal life. This is where he is leading us. Yet his journey also makes clear that this path passes inevitably through the Cross. The path followed by the disciple of Jesus is that of self-denial, self-sacrifice, indeed death to self so as to live for God and for others.

In our age that exalts personal autonomy to the point of idolatry, any idea of self-sacrifice or abnegation, even for the sake of a greater good, is for many incomprehensible. It is, indeed, something to flee. What Jesus teaches, though, is that flight into the self leads nowhere. That path finishes in a dead end. In light of the Resurrection we see clearly that only the Cross opens our lives up to a limitless future, to an infinite horizon. It is not something shameful from which to flee in terror but a wondrous mystery to be embraced with hope.

May the grace of the Holy Week celebrations free us from fear and strengthen our faith, so that we may follow the Lord in all things and never flee from his love.