Lent, 2001: giving up our resentments

It’s time to think about Lent, which begins this week on Ash Wednesday. Giving something up for Lent, making a Lenten sacrifice, has been complemented in recent years with resolutions to also do something positive during Lent. Our spiritual lives are marked by both passivity and activity. We empty ourselves, sacrifice ourselves in union with Christ, so that God can transform us. We also do things, give alms to the poor here and abroad, visit the sick, work for racial justice, pray, fulfill a promise left hanging for too long, in order to cooperate positively with Christ in the work of redeeming the world.

Pope John Paul II writes a message for Lent each year. This year’s message complements his January 1 message for World Peace Day. At the New Year, the Pope asked us to find occasions to enter into a dialogue of cultures in order to build a peaceful world through mutual understanding among peoples. That was a request to do something positive for peace. His Lenten message this year asks us to give up resentments which poison our relationship to God and to other individuals and peoples. That’s the negative pre-requisite to dialogue.

The hardest moral injunction in the Gospel is: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you” (Lk. 6:27). In order, positively, to do good to our enemies, we have to give up our resentment against them. “Love is not resentful” (I Cor. 13: 5). Forgiving is one of the greatest forms of practicing charity. It takes great self-sacrifice, true inner conversion, to forgive someone who is not, in fact, sorry for having offended you. Without a desire to forgive, however, both personal and social disputes destroy the love God wants us to enjoy.

		‘Forgiving is one of the greatest forms of practicing charity. It takes great self-sacrifice, true inner conversion, to forgive someone who is not, in fact, sorry for having offended you.’

Perhaps thinking of the renewed conflict in Israel and the Palestinian territories, perhaps thinking of old conflicts in other parts of the world, the Holy Father writes in his message for Lent this year: “The numerous and tragic conflicts which tear at humanity, sometimes also arising from misunderstood religious motives, have left marks of hatred and violence among peoples. Occasionally, this occurs also among groups and factions within a nation itself. In fact, with a sad sense of helplessness, we assist at times to the return of skirmishes which were believed definitively settled. This gives the impression that some people are involved in a spiral of unstoppable violence that will continue to reap victims upon victims, without a concrete solution envisioned.”

Giving up collective resentments, historical hurts, requires a purification of memory on the part of individuals as well as peoples and nations. Each time we examine our conscience in preparing to confess our sins and be reconciled to God, we look at our past actions and attitudes in order to discover who we are in the sight of God. God’s love is infinite, and He, in Christ, makes it possible for everything to be forgiven. What we ourselves choose to neither forgive or forget, however, serves to define who we are, individually and collectively.

Occasionally, as I visit around the Archdiocese, resentments surface that leave me wondering how I might be a better instrument of reconciliation so that we can get on with our lives as a particular Church. There are some who resent the closing of parishes or schools which were part of their lives. Some still resent the closing of Quigley South. Some resent Cardinal Cody, for one reason or another. For some, resentment stems not from an action but because of a teaching of the Church. Some resent changes in the liturgy and some resent the liturgy’s not changing in the way they think it should. Old rivalries between ethnic groups still cause resentment. Parishioners resent the anger of a priest long dead, and priests resent mistakes by my predecessors. If Chicago is not to be Kosovo West, we might use this Lenten season, the first in a new millennium, to ask God to heal our hearts of resentments and old grudges, even when they are understandable and justifiable in an economy short of infinite love. God is eager to help us become a reconciled people and will show us, through His grace, how to forgive others with all our hearts and so become spiritually free.

Resentments, individual and collective, continue to be born. Last week I read the most recent issue of Loyola, the magazine published by Chicago’s Jesuit university, which is preparing to welcome a new president after Lent this year. The magazine contains an article by a professor of French literature, Ann Bugliani, who reports the impressions that foreign students at the university form of their American peers. She writes: “A portrait emerged of a typical young American that was both familiar and unfamiliar. They frequently used such adjectives as ‘independent’ and ‘individualistic.’ The typical young American, according to some, is also friendly, fun-loving, optimistic, realistic and happy. Most young Americans, they point out, are also enthusiastic about sports.... The international students thought Americans drink and smoke more, are more interested in sex and have a higher incidence of homosexuality than young people in their homelands.... Another remarked that Americans want to be the best, the richest and the most beautiful. Some students couple independence and individualism with indifference and inactivity. They blamed the computer and television for the latter. They also cited pessimism, a lack of sensitivity, cliquishness, stubbornness, egotism and even cruelty—particularly cruelty toward family members and toward foreigners. ... Others also mentioned tolerance as an attribute but gave it a novel twist when they claimed that young Americans tolerate everything that’s wrong with the world. By far, however, the most common characteristics they cited were materialism and greed. Some of the remarks included: ‘They love things’; ‘they work for themselves, not for others’; ‘money dominates their lives’; ‘they adore money’; ‘they only work for money’; ‘they are extraordinarily materialistic’; and ‘they think that if they have more expensive things, they are better.”

Professor Bugliani wrote that she was “dismayed” and went on to explain how she used this conversation to help all students understand themselves better and also understand how Loyola strives not only to educate minds but also to form students to be “people for others”. It was a thoughtful and useful article for all of us in various forms of ministry. Many of us would share her dismay and feel, as well, that the portrait of Americans is an unfair caricature. In part, at least, it certainly is. But it is a marvelous example of the stuff of which resentments are born, on all sides, between individuals and among entire peoples. Without constantly checking our impressions and without regularly purifying our memories and without prayer for the grace to forgive, our lives are ruled by resentments.

Fasting from food; abstaining from meat on Fridays of Lent; giving alms with greater generosity; frequenting Mass and the sacraments, especially the sacrament of Penance; finding extra time for private prayer and devotions and spiritual reading; associating yourself with those working for social justice—let all these figure in your planning for Lent. But this year, in particular, fast also from resentments, and then ask the Lord to make you a person able to reconcile individuals and cultures. That’s the negative and the positive, the passive and the active, for Lent 2001. God bless you.

Sacramental marriage in Catholic theology is a covenant between a baptized man and a baptized woman united in Christ. It therefore takes on the characteristics of the relationship between an infinitely loving God and the people He wills to love for all eternity. Because God is the author of marriage, the bond of matrimony unites, makes fruitful and lasts until the death of one of the partners.

Again, because God is the author of marriage, the covenant between husband and wife is born in their free consent to marry one another. This consent is publicly witnessed by the Church, which, with each marriage, rejoices in a new source of grace for her children. Marriage is not a private affair. It changes not only the relationship between a man and a woman but also between their families and all those who know them. Marriage in the Church changes all of us who are believers. This is why marriage, along with the sacrament of Holy Orders, is called a social sacrament. It changes everyone’s life, not just the lives of those who enter into a particular marriage covenant. Everyone therefore has a stake in the success of a marriage.

Because marriage, public and social in nature, is the context in which we truly understand our sexual natures, sexual activity is never purely private. When we try to make sex “a private matter”, we trivialize sex and lose the sense of who we really are. We can even begin to think that we are merely animals, for whom sex is basically instinctual, and look to the study of primates for clues to understanding what it means to be “truly” human. Instead of being a source of contentment and joy which brings hope to an entire life, “private” sex ends in frustration and tears and, often, bitter estrangement. Not only a divine commandment but human experience itself tells us fornication and adultery are sins.

The best preparation for faithful marriage is a chaste life. Our youth groups and young adult programs should help young men and women understand this truth and live it. Our teaching in catechetics and homilies should also help people understand why celibacy for the sake of God’s kingdom is integral to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and is possible because of the strength of God’s grace. Celibacy, too, is social in nature. It builds up the Church and makes her more fruitful. This is a strange truth, although no stranger than the proclamation that Jesus is truly risen from the dead in his own crucified body. Today, however, since sex has more or less become the national religion, those who purposely refrain from practicing it become suspect. If Catholic priests and consecrated women and men did not publicly promise to live chastely as celibates, there would be a lot less curiosity and speculation about their lives.

The Second Vatican Council called the family a “domestic church” (Lumen gentium 11). In the family, the connection between sex and love and marriage becomes clear. In the home, children who are the fruit of the love between husband and wife first learn of God’s love and begin their journey of faith. This journey begins with great security when a child comes to understand that his mother and father love him because they love one another and God. Celebrating St. Valentine’s day can literally bring that lesson home. It’s a beautiful day.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago