Parish and School News

Mass for Movements and Ecclesial Communities

Tuesday 14 August 2012

ON Thursday 9 August, the Feast of Saint Teresa Benedicta Stein, Bishop Peter Elliott celebrated the Mass for Movements and Ecclesial Communities at the St Paul’s Missionary College, Wantirna. In Bishop Elliott's homily below he urged all Movements and Communities to learn from the exemplary life of Edith Stein.

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By Bishop Peter Elliott

IN THIS Year of Grace, we celebrate the new movements and ecclesial communities that so enrich the life of the Catholic Church in these uncertain times. No less than twenty seven movements and communities are represented at this Mass, each of them contributing in different ways to the life and mission of the Church of Melbourne. 
 
Today is an appropriate feast day, the relatively new memorial of one of the most remarkable, and hidden, women of the twentieth century, Edith Stein. She is now celebrated by the Church in the new missal and revised calendar as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, having been canonized in 1998 by Blessed John Paul II. Significantly, her feast day falls just after our own Saint Mary of the Cross, Mackillop.  These two women living in different eras and in very different societies were both called to carry the cross of Christ for the sake of others.
 
Edith Stein was born into a Jewish family in Breslau in 1891. She studied in three universities, Breslau, Gottingen and Freiburg, rising to become a brilliant young philosopher. In her life as a scholar we find the intersection of streams of thought  that have shaped our world for good and ill, the last phase of the Enlightenment, already at the end of its tether, a rationalism that exhausted itself and now it is left in shreds of amateur atheism, scientism and post-modern absurdities. Edith could see where this jumble of human presumption was heading nearly a century ago.
 
She represented the cream of German-Jewish culture that would be brutally driven out and crushed in her own lifetime. She became a disciple of Edmund Husserl the phenomenologist. Her enquiring spirit led her beyond atheism in her quest for a deeper philosophy of the person and the reality around us, with which we interact as persons. And then, everything changed. Guided by the writings of Saint Teresa of Avila, she encountered Jesus. 
 
In 1922 she humbly and joyfully responded to his first call as the true Messiah, to come to the waters of new life, to be born again in the Holy Spirit as a Christian, united to Jesus, her personal Lord and loving Saviour.  Then amidst a highly successful academic career and acclaimed as a leading Catholic intellectual, she heard the second call of the Lord Jesus. The Divine Bridegroom called her to become his mystical bride in Carmel, to embrace the hidden life of the cloister, to ascend the holy mountain of interior prayer and union with God.
 
She entered the Carmel of Cologne-Lindenthal in October 1933. But that was the fateful first year of the godless Third Reich. Once the persecution of the Jews intensified, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross had to flee to Holland, where she was welcomed into the Carmel of Echt late in 1938.
 
Then came the third call of our crucified Saviour, the sublime vocation, the call to martyrdom. The War engulfed Holland in 1940 and she was no longer safe. In 1942 the Dutch Bishops denounced the Nazi persecution of Jews and in reprisal the Nazis arrested all Jewish Catholics. With her sister Rosa, Sister Teresa Benedicta was arrested and later sent to Auschwitz to share the fate of their Jewish brothers and sisters in the Holocaust. Her words on leaving the convent were: “Come, Rosa, we go for our people…” They were both gassed on this day in 1942.
 
What she teaches us in her life of fifty years is the triumph of grace whenever we respond generously to the call of the Lord.  You have all responded to that call, indeed to a series of calls, for you have found a particular vocation in the Church within a spiritual movement or ecclesial community.
 
When God calls, God always empowers with grace to respond. Then God sends his called and chosen ones on a mission, on work for the sake of others, still sustained by his grace. Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross shows a remarkable vocation, a response to grace that continues to influence many, especially Catholic women today.
 
Once we recognize the silent message of her vocation, the centrality of grace, then we become aware both of divine possibilities and also of human limitations.  No movement or community can lay exclusive claims for itself. None is the perfect answer to all the complex issues in the world or all the needs of the ever growing Church. Each has its own distinct charisms, its own contribution to make in the wider Body of Christ where, Saint Paul tells us, all our gifts and talents build up one body. This is not our work, but God’s master project, the work and presence of the Holy Spirit, the blazing triumph of grace.
 
Among the movements here tonight I see grace at work as I honour and recognize that you all put the love of Christ into action, love recorded concretely in the Gospels. Through you Christ reaches out to teach, to convert, to forgive, to heal, to console, to correct, to reconcile, to encourage. By his grace you become ministers of grace to others, and to one another in your communities and groups.
 
I note with joy the presence here of new religious communities that the Holy Spirit is raising up in the Church of our times. Fifty years after the Second Vatican Council we are reflecting on the changes wrought by the Council, and a salient area is the religious life. The conversation over the Council as continuity with the past or a rupture from the past will no doubt focus on the religious life. Much can be said. It is a matter of “loss and gain”, to use the tactful understatement of Blessed John Henry Newman. But one area of gain is evident in the green shoots now springing up, new, often radical and original, forms of religious life. But these tender shoots will only grow and strengthen if religious commitment and fidelity to vows is seen more as the work of grace, and less as the product of our own efforts.
 
As St Paul learnt from the Lord when he was troubled, God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness. Seen in the life of Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross or seen in our own lives, this is the godly paradox. We carry within us the hidden triumph of grace.

Photos courtesy of Focolare Movement. Copyright 2012.