The Man Born Blind: growing in faith and holiness
The fourth week of Lent brings into our journey a man whom Jesus
cures of his blindness (John 9: 1-41). Never to have seen the
faces of his parents or friends, the light of the sun, the objects
surrounding him, the man born blind is pictured for us as someone
seeking to see. “Lord, that I may see,” is his call. He asks Jesus
to cure him, and he gains both sight in his eyes and insight into
his healer. Confessing that Jesus is the Son of Man, the one whom
God sends for our salvation, the formerly blind man begins a journey
of faith.
Just as his eyes were healed through Jesus’ action and his own
cooperation, so his faith grew through Jesus questioning him and
his seeking the answers to the Lord’s questions. Lent is a time
when we accept again the truths of the faith, given to us as a
gift through the Church, and grow in our understanding of the
mysteries revealed to us in the passion, death and resurrection
of Jesus by allowing Jesus to question us through the Church.
Lent is a time to look back over the years and trace our growth
in understanding the Catholic faith.
Each year I try to spend a bit of time with the catechumens and
candidates for full communion who will receive the Easter sacraments
in the Cathedral on Holy Saturday. Those who have accompanied
them through the RCIA process often comment on their growth in
understanding the faith. It is wonderful to see.
Growth in understanding should be accompanied by growth in holiness.
As we know Christ better, we should love him more, but that doesn’t
always follow. An abstract or dead faith is a faith without love.
Even the demons have that kind of faith, an accurate but dead
understanding of the truths of our Catholic religion. They could
pass a catechism quiz. Finally, however, the Lord will question
us on how we have loved. Love is the measure of holiness.
Sin destroys love because all sin ultimately resolves into selfishness.
When we sin, we place ourselves instead of God at the center of
the universe. When sin is forgiven, its effects can still impede
our holiness. We do penance after being forgiven in order to overcome
the lingering effects of sin, the weakness of our will, the indifference
of our heart, the concupiscence of our desires. The confessor
in the Sacrament of Penance always gives a penance to the forgiven
sinner in order to help make up for the effects of sin. Doing
penance helps us grow in holiness, which can seem even slower
than our growth in faith. It takes time to overcome the after
effects of sin and to grow in love.
A holy year, like the Great Jubilee of the year 2000, is a time
when the Church wants the entire world to be delivered from the
effects of sin. A jubilee celebration offers the possibility of
sanctifying ourselves and the world because the Church designates
special times and places where indulgences can be gained.
The very use of the word “indulgence” in Pope John Paul II’s letter
officially announcing the Holy Year a few months ago elicited
some surprise, as if the Church had done away with indulgences
some time back. Since we live in a culture shaped more by the
Protestant than the Catholic faith, some Catholics, even without
realizing it, take to themselves Protestant attitudes about our
own faith. For them, indulgences are an embarrassment.
Behind the granting of indulgences, however, lies a faith that
is communal rather than individualistic. Jesus is our only Savior,
but he doesn’t come alone, nor do we return to him alone. As members
of his body, the Church, we can help one another grow in holiness.
One way of doing this is simply to pray for others; another way
is to gain specific indulgences for them. An indulgence is a short-cut
on the road to holiness, a way of saving time. Receiving an indulgence
is like riding on someone else’s shoulders on our journey to the
Father. The Someone Else is Jesus Christ, but Christ’s speed is
shared with his body, the Church (Eph. 4: 16). The Church is inadequately
understood simply as a spiritual support group, a sort of twelve-step
organization for those seeking transcendence; the Church is a
living and active organism, a body.
In 1967, after the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI issued
an Apostolic Constitution on Indulgences. The Pope reviewed the
unity of all in the saving work of Jesus Christ. He set out the
distinction between the forgiveness of sin, which is the work
of Christ alone, and the eradicating of the consequences of sin,
which engages our cooperation with Christ in making satisfaction
for sin and takes time in prayer and penance. The Pope then spoke
of how the faithful during the time of the early persecution went
to those to be martyred to ask them to pray for them in their
suffering and then offered the sacrifice of the Mass over the
tombs of those killed for their faith, joining the sufferings
of Christians to those of Christ himself. Together, head and members
of Christ’s body brought about satisfaction for sin. This remission
of the “temporal punishment due for sins already forgiven” is
called “indulgence”. Paul VI explains, “In an indulgence, the
Church, making use of its power as minister of the Redemption
of Christ, not only prays but by an authoritative intervention
dispenses to the faithful suitably disposed the treasury of satisfaction
which Christ and the saints won for the remission of temporal
punishment.” He then went on to simplify or streamline the rules
governing the Church’s granting of indulgences.
Some members of the Church spend their lives doing penance for
their sins and the sins of others. Most of us do well to piggy
back on the penance of the saints and are grateful that the Church
enables us to do this through indulgences. In the Great Jubilee
beginning Christmas Eve, 1999 and extending to January 6, 2001,
conditions for gaining indulgences will be liberalized so that
more may take advantage of this Holy Year to progress in holiness.
Daily I pray that the Archdiocese of Chicago advance in faith
and holiness and, especially during this last Lent of the second
millennium, I invite you to do the same. Together, always together
in Christ, we pray: “Lord, that we may see.”
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I.
Archbishop of Chicago
Top
