10/13/02

Mission in the life of the Church and life in the mission of the Church

On Oct. 20, the universal Church celebrates Mission Sunday. Catholics throughout the world will pray for missionaries in all parts of the world and will contribute financially to their work. Missionary work is central to our life as a Church, because Christ told his apostles to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth. The Gospel is a gift from Christ; it is the Good News of the world’s redemption. If we don’t share the gift of faith we have received, we ourselves will lose it. Missionaries share the gifts Christ gives his people: the Gospel as preached by the Church, the seven sacraments of the apostolic Church, pastoring in historical continuity with Christ’s commissioning of the apostles. Missionaries share these gifts with all those whom Christ loves, which is everyone. World Mission Sunday brings home that universal dimension of Christian mission.

It brings home, as well, our responsibility to be missionaries or evangelizers at home. What does that mean? Many things, but in his message for World Mission Sunday, 2002, Pope John Paul II writes that the Gospel “...is the proclamation that God loves us and wants all people united in his loving mercy. He forgives us and asks us to forgive others, even for the greatest offenses.” We need to learn how to forgive or we cannot be missionaries anywhere. Only forgiveness from the heart can release us from our own hurts and misery and free us to share Christ’s gifts with others.

There are times in a person’s life when forgiveness may seem impossible. Simon Wiesenthal, a survivor of the Jewish holocaust, in his book, “The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness,” tells this dramatic story. While a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, Wiesenthal was taken to the bedside of a dying member of the SS. The young soldier, overwhelmed by the guilt of his crimes, graphically confessed to Wiesenthal what he had done and asked him, as a Jew, for forgiveness. After listening to and agonizing over what he had heard, Wiesenthal, overwhelmed at that moment, could only depart in silence.

Marietta Jaeger, a founding member of “Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation,” opposes the death penalty for the kidnapper and murderer of her daughter. “Forgiveness is hard work,” she explains. “Anyone who thinks forgiveness is for wimps has never tried it.” Forgiveness is impossible, I believe, without a sense of one’s having been forgiven by God. The Pope writes for Mission Sunday this year: “From the cross, Jesus shows us the conditions which enable us to forgive. To the hatred with which his persecutors nailed him to the cross, Jesus responds with a prayer for them. He not only forgives them (Lk. 23:24), he continues to love them, to want their good, to intercede for them. Forgiveness is a personal decision to go against the natural instinct to pay back evil with evil. It goes beyond pardon to the giving up of resentment. It may not quite reach as far as reconciliation, for the offender may not desire forgiveness. Nonetheless, the offer to forgive is necessary for healing and peace; and the preaching of forgiveness, from God and with one another, is central to the Church’s mission in the world.

The Church’s preaching of God’s forgiveness explains her constant preoccupation with respect for human life, from conception to the moment of natural death. Forgiveness restores life; hatred brings death. I finish writing these remarks designed to prepare us for Mission Sunday on Oct. 6, this year’s Respect Life Sunday. As we pray for peace this year, we are praying to respect life. As we prepare to vote next month, the protection of human life becomes again the touchstone of the interaction between the Church’s teaching and our political life. The “life issues” are many.

They are brought together in the “consistent ethic of life,” and at the heart of this consistent ethic is absolute respect for the life of the unborn child. A direct attack on the innocent life of a living human being waiting to be born is the most fundamental affront to human dignity. Abortion is not health care; it is an act of violence justified in the name of individual freedom.

The campaign not only to allow but to justify abortion in any and all circumstances becomes increasingly coercive in nature. In the current campaign for the office of governor of Illinois, the placing of any kind of restrictions on abortion has been characterized by one candidate as evidence of an “extremist” view. I find this extremely irresponsible speech. Effectively, any faithful Catholic who understands that abortion is killing has now been labeled an extremist by a mainstream politician. Perhaps it was not deliberately said but, in the current climate, being labeled extremist is a step on the way to being excluded from the political conversation and to being held suspect in public opinion. Already, being pro-life means one can not be considered as a candidate for major political office, certainly in the Democratic Party and increasingly in sections of the Republican Party. The abortion issue has been effectively used to screen out believing Catholics and others who are pro-life from full participation in our civic life.

It’s not the first time that belief has brought exclusion and even imprisonment and death. The weekend of Oct. 12, I will be in Rome for the dedication of a special shrine in the Church of St. Bartholomew. This is my titular Church as a Cardinal, and I will be joined there by the Holy Father’s Vicar for the City of Rome, Cardinal Ruini, and by the Orthodox Patriarch of Romania. The shrine is dedicated to all the Christian martyrs of the 20th century: Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant. The shrine is witness to our common baptism and our faith in Christ our savior. More Christians were martyred during the 20th century than in all the other centuries since Jesus’ death on the cross. They were put to death by atheist regimes, Communist and Nazi, and in the name of various nationalisms.

Martyrdom is the paramount missionary act. It proclaims the martyr’s belief that Jesus Christ is Lord of life and death, and it does so in the face of death itself. We do not know what the future holds for believing Catholics in this or any country. Who could have foreseen in 1902 the bloody history of the 20th century? We know only that the Lord accompanies us in life and in death and that we ourselves must never “intentionally kill or collude in the killing of any innocent human life, no matter how broken, unformed, disabled or desperate that life may seem.” (U.S. Catholic Bishops, The National Pastoral Plan for Life).

Mission and forgiveness, life and martyrdom are all connected in the vision and call that come to us in faith. On Oct. 20, each of us can fill in the blanks and draw the connections for ourselves in supporting the World Mission collection. I hope that the people of the Archdiocese will continue this year their striking record of support for the missionary activity of the Church throughout the world. I am confident of your prayers and your generosity. I hope that we will also be led this year to a deeper reflection on how the practice of forgiveness is at the heart of the Church’s work to spread the Gospel. I pray that our concern for the Church’s mission abroad will help us rethink the mission of the Church in our country, especially here in the Archdiocese of Chicago. God bless you.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago

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