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I'm delighted to be here this morning.
It's a great opportunity to speak on a theme.
I've been asked a couple of things while I'm here.
I'm trying to get myself situated.
I'm falling apart.
i'm speaking from a text this morning because it's being
simultaneously translated.
So I've been warned to one, speak from a text
and two, to speak slowly.
This is not a gift I have, the speaking slowly part.
I speak very quickly.
The father of seven children.
I married up and I have seven beautiful children.
And when you have seven beautiful children,
you grab the food quickly, you speak quickly
if you ever want to get anything done.
So I will try to speak slowly this morning out of respect
for the translators, but I can't promise that old bad habits
won't emerge.
I've also never spoken in a room that echoed quite this much.
It's like the voice of God.
I feel like saying, build an ark.
I've been asked to do something particular this morning.
Something a little different that we normally talk about.
Those of us who are normally engaged in the work of life
and dignity of the church.
We are quick frequently, we are inclined to discuss issues
at the practical level.
What's the next policy we should be worried about?
What's the next thing we need to react to?
How do we make our programs and missions better?
We're going to do a lot of that today.
The program is full of such opportunities.
But I've been asked to start the conference with a reflection.
A spiritual and theological reflection about the work we do.
I think this is good for us.
Hopefully, I don't know if my reflection would be any good.
You can judge that.
It's a good opportunity for us to step back from the
day to day, from the daily grind, and just take a few
moments to ask
"okay why did I get into this in the first place?"
I think it's interesting that the deacon's readings
were chosen around the theme of suffering.
Because those of us in this work certainly do a bit of that.
And occasionally it's nice to step back and say
"why did I sign up for this again?"
As John puts it in the book of Revelation,
to remember our first love and the reason we're doing this.
What I hope is that the reflections
are an opportunity for you to reflect
and to consider the great call God has put on your life
for this work we do.
And that at the root of it all - what comes from it all it joy.
We do this work because we love God
and the fruit of that is joy.
Okay to the text.
I'll occasionally go off when I tell stories.
Before I turn to the body of my presentation,
I'd like to make one comment on the theme itself:
Called to Greatness.
It is certainly a ringing theme
and one that makes my heart sink.
But I think we all might agree that it's not always obvious
in our everyday life, that we've been called to greatness.
So many days, least for me, seem dominated by the struggle
just for survival.
The victories rare and far off.
The struggle just to get one word out
in the midst of loud noises.
a struggle just to get the ball forward a little bit.
So often it doesn't seem like I'm living
some call to greatness, rather it seems more like I'm just
struggling to survive.
This is when the Psalms,
particularly those labeled lamentations,
are particulary helpful.
Many people in this room have been in this work a lot longer
than I have and many are just starting.
But we all know that the task before us requires perseverance.
Perseverance that is often tested by discouragement.
Let's face it.
The cause of life, justice, and the love of God
are not striding the Earth as conquering heroes right now.
I think we've all met people in our work
and perhaps experienced it ourselves
who are mostly just going through the motions.
Just getting by.
Discouraged by the apparent impractibility.
The inability to move that out there that you see
and so often offends - justice, disregard for life, ecetera.
But there's another piece to this.
It isn't just a discouragement that we're tempted to
from the outside world, because it touches our lives as well.
Our private lives are touched by the same kind of suffering
and temptations of discouragement.
Especially in the midst of our work,
so much it is committed to accompanying others,
to walking with them in their personal struggles,
from the challenges of their communities,
we inevitably experience struggles of our own.
This is an age old problem.
I've found this beautiful description of it by
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.
By the way if I just call him Benedict or Pope Benedict
is because emeritus takes forever to get out of my mouth.
He wrote this beautifully in a series of essays
that were under the title Truth and Tolerance.
This is the description of what we can often face.
Quote "We experience a world that does not correspond
to a good God.
Poverty, oppression, unjust domination of every kind,
the suffering of the rightous and the innocent,
are signs of the times in every age.
And each single person is suffering.
No one can say about this world or about his own life,
stay yet a while, you are so lovely."
No one can say about this world, about their own personal life,
stay yet a while, you are so lovely.
That's a line from Beatrice Fouse.
I had to look it up on Wikipedia.
And yet we see this.
Our work makes us encounter this daily.
And yet we know the truth.
That every human being, by virture of how they were made,
and who made them is called to greatness.
At the root of all reality is the truth.
That every human being is called to be more
in the words of Benedict.
I'm reminded of this observation - I'm reminded of an observation
by J.R. Tolken, author of Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit.
He's writing to his son and in the letter to his son
he has this sort of striking line.
Quote "The greater part of the truth
is always hidden in regions out of the reach on cynicism.
The greater part of the truth is always hidden in regions
outside of the reach of cynicism." End quote.
The cynic is the one who always sees the surface of things.
The cynic sees suffering and injustice and simply
concludes that life has not meaning.
But we know that this is not the whole story.
And I want to focus my remarks on the sometimes hidden
because deeper truth that despite everything
that might seem out of joint and wrong in the world,
out there and in our own lives,
every human being is made for greatness.
As C.S. Lewis put it quote "There are no ordinary people.
You have never talked to a mere mortal.
Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal.
And their life as to ours is the life of a gnat.
But it is immortals that we joke with, work with, and marry."
End quote.
I sometimes wonder - I'll go off text for just a moment.
If one of the things that people find so inspiring in
Pope Francis is that he's calling them
to something deeper.
That just by seeing in the way he speaks, the way he acts,
there's something in us that responds that,
"I was made for more, I can do more"
I wonder.
There are all kinds of opinions about Francis and what
he needs to do and what he ought to do, ecetera, ecetera.
But there's something that is fundamentally
inspiring about him.
And I sometimes wonder if it isn't touching something
in us that knows we were made for more and for us to be more.
None the less he is very popular so I'm going to steal from him.
And I am told that in good Jesuit fashion,
he always couches his remarks around three words.
So this morning my remarks are going to be
organized around three words.
The three words are: number one vocation,
number two magnanimity, and number three joy.
Vocation, magnanimity, and joy.
And let me warn you now, magnanimity is the long one.
When we're halfway through it and you're looking at the clock
disparing of my talk ever ending,
just know thats the long one and the others are very short.
Those of you tempted to throw food from the balcony
hold on.
To expand briefly, first I want to consider what it means
that every person has a vocation.
And that every person in this room and the work you do
have a vocation.
Second, I want to describe this virtue
that we don't often hear about, magnanimity.
Magnanimity is a virture related to courage
and it's the primary virtue that would correlate
with this notion of being called to greatness.
It's our response to being called to greatness.
And finally a word on joy.
We know how hard it is to do this work.
How easy it is to be discouraged.
We need to understand God's definition of joy.
The number one: vocation.
At the heart of recent papal teaching on life and dignity,
the rearticulation of the churches,
the consistant teachings that human beings have an
inherent dignity.
But it's a dignity rooted in three things.
I think this important to us.
It's a dignity in our being made in the image of God,
being redeemed by the sacrifice of our Lord and Saviour,
and being destined to be with God for all eternity.
John Paul II puts it this way, quote "The dignity of the person
is manifested in all it's radius, when a person's origin
and destiny are considered created by God in His image
and likeness, redeemed by the most precious blood of Christ,
the person is called, vocarai, vocation.
The person is called to be a child and a son
and living temple of the spirit destined for an
eternal life with blessed communion with God"
End quote.
Why emphasize that?
I emphasize that because it's easy for us to recognize
human dignity becuse someone is made in the likeness of God
but we can sometimes forget that their dignitiy is also
rooted in the destiny that they've been called to do.
We think they deserve a certain kind of care
and have certain inherent rights because they are made a way
we sometimes forget that actually were they are going
is part of they're dignity.
A few observations from this
that I think are important to us.
They sort of frame our thinking.
First, it's important to note that this eternal destiny
we are called to be with God for all eternity
does not make life on Earth unimportant.
I probably don't need to say that in this room,
but let's establish that.
This is an error frequently addressed in Papal teaching.
Well it is true that our ultimate destiny
is the highest good, it does not mean that other goods
from food, to just laws, to peace, to helping families,
religious liberty are somehow unimportant.
Our vocation is tied to all of these.
Our human fulfillment and therefore our joy
is tied to all of these.
Everyone has the right to pursue their destiny, their vocation.
They're called to be more by God.
And it's the work of every human being,
but I think in a special way as Christians
who understand dignity to create opportunities, institutionally,
and individually in society that allows for every human being
to freely choose to pursue their vocation.
In fact, this is one way to define justice
in the broader sense of our society.
A just society is one that allows every human being
the ability to pursue their vocation.
The second observation - given - we understand that
but we need to also keep in mind,
that a human being is made for more
than a successfull life on Earth.
Ultimately we're made for union with God,
and this alone is a person's happiness.
The great line from Saint Augstine, from The Confessions.
"Our hearts are restless oh Lord.
You've made us for yourself for God.
And our hearts are restless until they rest in you."
There is no other place for the human soul to find peace,
joy, and fulfillment.
Integral human development, those words that Benedict uses.
Human development, that thing that many of us are after,
and persue and work for, ends in, finds it's culmination
in one place: in union with God.
So we can't loosse the eternal destiny to people we serve
We can't let that not be in our minds as well.
Nor can we not let it be in our minds
as we think about our own vocation.
That for all the work we do, all that we strive to do,
we aim for a peace joy and a victory that goes beyond
whatever victories we may attain in this life.
Okay.
Word two: magnanimity.
When we use this word in English we often use it to mean
someone who is generous or
who gives a lot of their time an energy.
You say a person is magnanimous
if they give away a lot of their money
and spend time with others and are free with their own things.
Sharing them.
This is part of what is meant by magnanimity,
but it's not the full meaning.
Magnanimity literally translated means great souledness.
Having a great soul.
Sometimes it's translated a little more loosely
using biblical language, great heartedness.
Having a great heart.
In the biblical sense, the heart is that place
where I deepest desires, longings, and our will,
our ability to choose the good all reside.
That center of our being.
When our Lord says of David, "He is a man after my own heart."
That's what he's getting at.
That at his very being and his very essence,
he's after God himself.
So magnanimity, great souledness,
great heartedness is - means one who has a heart that
longs for and chooses great things.
Chooses the highest good and will make sacrifice,
and will not be frustrated and will face danger
in order to achieve greatness.
The opposite of magnanimity or one of it's failures
is another long word pusillanimity.
It's little souledness or little heartedness.
It's used to describe the person who aims too low for example.
I suspect you all know this.
As a teacher, I've known plenty of students who are quite gifted
but who don't want to put forth the effort.
So instead of doing the hard work to get an A,
they'll settle for a B which they can attain easily
and allows them to do other things in their life.
We would say that is pusillanimous.
That is small souledness.
Even if you aim low, you can do better.
You can be excellent by degree in what you are doing, aim high.
We're tempted to do this.
Sometimes we do our work and there's certain things
we turn in and we just think "yeah it's good enough."
Well at least I am.
I don't want to speak for you.
Don't let me impose my problems.
Don't let me project my issues.
But there's another way we can be pusillanimous
or we can display pusillanimity.
And that is if we aim for something that is too low,
that the goal that we set ourselves for is beneath us
or beneath our full dignity.
For example, someone may decide to become the greatest Xbox
player in the universe and they may apply themselves to that
with assiduousness and hard work and in fact may acheive
Xbox greatness, but there's something in us that says
"Okay, there's probably more you could have aimed for there.
You could have aimed for a higher goal."
Now if there are any Xbox greatness people in the room,
it was just an example.
I was just thinking.
I repent now if I've offended.
And so we can miss, by aiming at a goal too low even if we
pursue that goal with excellence.
Let's put these together now with what I said under vocation.
If it is true that every human being's ultimate greatness
is a called to be like God Himself, with Him,
united to Him, the greatness of the Saints,
aiming for anything else is too low.
Let me be clear.
We all aim for other things.
That's part of life.
That's part of our vocation.
There are other things that need to get done.
But if ultimately we're not aiming for life with God
we're aiming too low.
A theologian Joseph Keefier puts it this way,
"Pusillanimity lacks courage for the great things that are proper
to the nature of the Christian.
It is a kind of anxious vertigo
that befalls the human individual when he becomes aware
of the height to which God has raised them.
Yet he neither the courage nor the will to be as great
as he really is.
He would prefer to be less great in order to thus avoid
the obligation of greatness.
Think about it.
One could aspire to be the greatest ball player,
one could aspire to be the President of the United States,
excellent things maybe in and of themselves.
but still not capable of fulfilling human dignity."
They're not high enough ultimately
for what you and I were made for.
It's profound.
I think this is why in the year of faith,
walking off the scripture for a minute.
One of the things Pope Benedict pointed us to was to
consider the lives of the Saints.
It's when we see the Saints, we see true greatness.
And there's something in us that thinks,
"That is amazing! Could I ever do that?"
The recent stories of Father Capone in Korea -
you read that story, I'm sure many of you have read it
or came across it.
And what he did you think "That's greatnesss!
Could I ever do that?"
And the answer is yes.
Not on your own, not without the grace of God,
but yes and that's true greatness.
That's higher than everything else.
I emphasize this and I talk about magnanimity pusillanimity
because, I'm going to use one more Greek word
and this is my last Greek word, I promise.
Because there are consequences when we don't pursue greatness.
And in the theological tradition,
that consequence is called achadia or asidia.
I'll just say achadia.
What is achadia?
Achadia is the sadness that comes from not pursuing
a true greatness.
A saddness that comes from not pursuing a true greatness.
Alright, let's unpack this a little bit.
We need to unpack this a little bit.
I'll do this with a story of a moment of achadia in my life
that caused me great sadness.
A young boy who loves sports growing up,
I aspired to be a professional basketball player,
but I was gifted with shortness,
which is not one of the virtues of basketball players.
So there I am, I think it was eighth grade in summer baseball
And I had one of those moments that a kid like me dreams about
for most of his waking life, sleeping life and waking life.
It was the bottom of the nineth, the bases were indeed loaded,
there were two outs.
We were down by two runs.
We needed two runs and I was up to bat.
Casey was at bat, Casey Reyes.
And I'm coming up to bat and I am excited.
I was batting third.
I was one of the good hitters on our team and here was a moment
for greatness.
They switched pitchers.
And they put in this kid who was gifted
with even more shortness that me, but was a lefty
with a curve that I couldn't hit.
I knew that from earlier in the season.
So I went from a magnanimous heart, dreaming of greatness,
delighted to have this opportunity to fear.
So what did I do.
He threw six pitches.
I never swung the bat and I got a walk.
So I walked, a run comes in, I advance the game.
People all clap for me.
"Good eye, good eye! Way to go! Way to be patient"
They're complimenting you, fast ball
My buddy Todd gets up after me.
Todd swings at the first pitch, hits it to the fence
it's caught on the warning track, we lose.
Here's the point.
Todd walks away from that game angry.
He's mad.
Five more feet and we would have won.
I walk away from that game sad because I had an opportunity
to do something great and I ran away from it.
The result of fleeing our call to greatness is sadness.
It's saddness, achadia.
That word sometimes gets translated as slow.
But sadness is a better translation actually.
Sadness in the face of good.
Saint Isador and Saint Gregory the Great
identified what they called the Children of Achadia.
What we might call the evidences of the sad.
What do we do when we run away from greatness.
The list is two sets of children.
I'm just going to read a little paragraph of an article
written by a good friend of mine that describes them.
So listen for these children of achadia.
"The result of not being magnanimous or aiming too low
this joyless, ill-tempered, narrow-minded, self-seeking
rejection of our nobility is two-fold.
First, we run from the call to greatness and this begets
in some cases, number one despair,
which is discouragement.
I don't want to do the hard thing.
It's too great. I quit. The end.
I don't want to be called into the dignity of
a son or daughter of God.
Then comes sluggishness about the commandments.
We don't even like doing the things God asks us to do.
We're mad because we don't feel like being holy,
we don't even want to do anything.
So we get sluggish about the commandments.
I hear this effects some of you.
It's never happened in my life.
Next is spite.
We actually get angry at people who are pursuing holiness,
who are pursuing greatness.
Sometimes we call it envy.
I don't want to try something because I'm afraid I might fail
but then I see someone else trying it and I get mad at them.
I get envious because they're going for it.
There's a great experiment, a monkey is climbing a pole
to get bananas.
They greased the pole.
There are 100 monkeys in the room and they grease the pole
and put bananas on top.
they all try to get up there and none of them can get up there.
They take the grease off of the pole and put some new monkeys in
who didn't know the pole was greased.
So they climb right up and start-
They're climbing up sucessfully to get it.
The rest of the monkeys climb after him, reach down,
and rip him apart limb from limb.
"If I can't have the bananas, nobody can have bananas."
Spite.
Then there is malace.
One of the children of achadia that people can actually
get mad at God himself and angry at holy things period.
A rage against the things of God.
That's what happens when we run away from our call.
But there's another set of children of achadia
Which frankly go under the label of distraction
or what Gregory called "wanderings".
So there's this call to do great things,
but we don't want to do it so we try to fill our lives
with a bunch of stuff that keeps us busy.
I'm reminded of this of my dear friends
by many of my friends that have gone into religious life.
And many of them will share a story
of running from their vocation.
They have often pursued many things with great success
and hard work,
but they always know they are running from something.
They finally will say the call was always there.
It was always there and eventually it got me.
What are some of the children of distraction?
Well here they are.
Number one when it comes to our mind, distraction.
We fill our minds with stuff.
And in an age like ours, that is expert at distraction
you're plugged in all of the time, every individual
it says in one study, every individual in the United States
is exposed to three thousand discreet images of advertising
every single day.
It is so easy to be distracted
and not think about the things of God.
So we keep our minds busy.
We run around with schemes and speech is loquacity.
We talk too much.
Never silent, never reflective, afraid of contemplation.
Sometimes it's restlessness of the body.
Sometimes it's instability.
Running from cause to cause issue to issue.
I would say one of the effects that should be on this list is
workaholism.
For some people, working hard is actually a distraction.
It's a kind of fleeing in what they ought to be doing.
Not always, just in some cases.
And so I would conclude this section by saying
we need to ask ourselves - we who do this work
are we to the fullest of our abilities pursuing greatness.
Because it's easy in our line of work to get distracted.
To work really, really hard and
somehow think that's good enough.
We keep ourselves so busy you don't have to reflect.
I'm not saying we're doing that.
That's just a temptation that we want to keep in mind.
You know what I want to keep in mind?
One fruit of that is sadness in our work.
That's when we start getting discouraged.
It makes you want to quit.
Is there a difference?
Why are we still at this?
Why don't the people on the hill listen?
Sometimes its because we're not maybe,
responding to our call to greatness.
Sometimes it's in us.
Not always.
Again what I am saying to you is not that somehow I've perfected
these things or I know more.
They are just reflections and I hope they are helpful for you.
Third word: joy.
That's what you just experienced when you realized
I'm coming to the end of this talk.
In some ways these reflections might seem pretty theological
and you might ask what do they have to do
with my day to day work.
This is where I think it is
They have everything to do with our day to day work
because in the end, we are called to bear witness to joy.
And our joy is dependent on our saying yes to the call of God
of His goodness in its fullness.
In His fullness.
We have to be about more than just getting stuff done.
Which is a good thing.
Thank goodness there are people who get stuff done.
But we're not living up to our own human dignity
by just getting stuff done, necessarily.
It doesn't guarantee it.
We need to be pursuing our own greatness.
We need to be saying yes to God's call for us to be great.
The essential requirement for people who do our kind of work,
according to Pope Benedict.
is quote "To be persons ruled by Christ's love,
persons who's hearts Christ has conquered with his love.
Awakening them with the love of neighbor."
End quote.
We can only said to be conquered by Christ's love
if we say yes to His call.
His call to holiness, His call to greatness,
his call to sainthood, to be like Him.
This is important because you and I -
many of us know the cost of the work we do.
The human cost.
How hard it can be.
It's particularly hard for us because
we are being asked to do more than just provide a service,
to provide advocacy, or defend life
We're being asked to give our very selves.
Again in the words of Benedict, quote
"My deep personal sharing in the needs and sufferrings of others
becomes a sharing of my very self within.
If my gift is not to prove a source of humiliation
I must give to others not only something is not my own
but my very self.
I must be personally present in my gift.
This is what makes us different than a charitable NGO.
As good as they are, as much as you learn from them,
as great a partner as they are, what makes us differrent
is that we bring to our work not just a service,
but the gift of our very self.
And if we do that, we are guaranteed a wonderful
promise from God.
One of the promises you don't often hear about preached
one of the promises of God is
"You will suffer as I have suffered"
Yay! Not the kind of thing that sells books.
The promises of God.
Sufferring.
Are you greater than your master?
Therefore the world with treat you
as they treated their master.
This is our work.
And yet this is our joy because it's part of a great call.
I want to put this together from a scene from Mel Gibson's
Passion of the Christ.
It's a beautiful scene that stuck with me.
I haven't seen it in a while because
I find it a hard movie to watch.
There's a great scene if you remember it if you've seen
Passion of the Christ.
Christ is carrying the cross and Mary is having these -
his mother is having these reflections
on when he was a child, cutting back and forth,
Jesus the child running around
and everyone who is a parent you know is like "your'e killing me"
cause this is you know--
And Jesus is carrying the cross up and then he falls.
Then Mary imagines him as a child falling
And when the child then fell, Mary could go and console him
And here he is carrying the cross and he falls now
and Mary says "What do I do?" and so she runs to console him.
It was perfectly set up for the typical kind of exchange
that happens between my wife and my children
when one of them gets hurt, which a certain kind of pity
and compassion that I say to my son or my daughter
"It's okay, its going to be alright.
Let me console you"
For them to be crying and mommy it hurts or daddy it hurts
kind of thing.
What does Christ say?
He looks at his mother and with joy in the midst of this
whole little scene.
"See mother, I will make all things new."
This is the victory.
Precisely in the sovereignty.
Because this is the greatness that Christ himself had lived
and calls us to.
So I dare us to think about our work and I dare myself on this
and I forget it so often.
To think that the sufferring and frustration in our work
is not constantly an obstacle, but on occasion
can be the very source of making all things new.
Not that I'm the savior of the world.
Not that you're the savior of the world.
We're particpating the the Savior's work.
But it's precisely at that moment,
that greatness can be achieved.
Dealing with horrible circumstances, a prison camp,
being a source of joy to the men he was with.
How?
Because he saw the true call to greatness.
He said yes to his highest vocation
That can turn any sufferring into joy.
I hope I offered this -
I mean this as a sense of encouragement.
I mean it as encouragement.
But not trite encouragement.
Not the type of encouragement that says buck up little campers
you can do it!
That kind of encouragement that can only come
from our human dignity.
From our origin and from an understanding of our destiny.
There's a line that struck me that I want to share with you.
I've got two things I want to share with you and I'll be done.
The first is from a philosopher.
A French philosopher in the early 20th Century.
A personalist, a fella by the name of Emmanuel Munet.
Who is very much engaged in work similar to what we do.
He's reflecting on it and he gave this line.
He say's "One does not free a person simply by detaching
him from the bonds that paralyze him.
One frees a person by attaching him to his destiny."
One does not free a person simply by
detaching them from the things that bind him.
One frees a person by attaching him to his destiny.
Our work is to fulfil our own destiny and attach others to it.
And what a destiny.
A destiny that nothing on this Earth can compare to.
The greatness beyond time.
You know if we lived this, a little side light here,
I speak all around talking to college students.
One of the questions that frequently comes up i our work is
where is the next generation of people who carry on our work.
Where are they?
We can often think that the key to solving that problem is
somehow opening a twitter account or something.
Technology is not going to get us there.
The only way we are going to get young people to see
the high dignity of the work we are engaged in
is to live that high dignity.
There's a beautiful description that Dorothy Day
gives of one of her mentors,
a fella by the name of Peter Moran.
Those of you who know Dorothy Day's life,
Peter Moran was another Frenchmen
and key influence in her life
and shaped a lot of her thinking.
I want you to listen to this description
that she gives of Peter and in my mind,
I reflect and say can someone ever say that of me?
I long for the day when someone would dare say
something like this of me.
Do I work in such a way that they can say this of me.
Here's what Dorothy Day says about her mentor
quote "Peter made you feel a sense of his mission
as soon as you met him.
He did not begin by tearing down
or by painting so intense a picture of misery and injustice
that you've earned to change the world,
instead, he aroused in you a sense of your own capacity
the work and for accomplishment.
He made you feel and all men have great and generous hearts
in which to love God.
If we once reconize this fact yourself,
you will expect to find it in others."
End quote.
I think to the extent we live our mission,
this great ministry -
the various ministries our Lord has given us.
With a true yes, a complete and total yes to God
we would become the kind of people
when others see us they'll say that is greatness there.
This is our witness in a sense.
Just in case you thought I was making all of this up
I would like to end with a quote from Gouderman Spez.
It think it might help us - It might make sense to us
It might read differently that what I've said is true.
"The root reason for human dignity lies in man's call to
communion with God.
Many of our contemporaries have never recognized this intimate
and vital link of God or they have explicitly rejected it.
The church holds that the recognition of God
is in no way hostle to man's dignity.
Since this dignity is rooted and reflected in Him.
Above all the church knows that her message is in harmony
with the most secret desires of the human heart.
The most secret desires of a human.
What a line.
When she champions the dignity of the human vocation.
Restoring hope to those who have already despaired
of anything higher than their present lot.
Far from diminishing them, the church's message grows
to development, likes, life, and freedom."
I'm sure there are many things I should have said differently
or I could have said better, but I hope that I've said has
allowed you to have some reflection and think
and I want to end with a word of thanks.
Thank you for the work you do.
Thank you for being co-workers in the vineyard.
I need to see peers doing this.
We all know we need our peers.
We need to encourage one another.
We need to witness one another to the greatness
we have been called to.
It's a great labor we have been called.
I assure you of my prayer for your work
and I ask for a prayer for the Bishop's Conference.
That God may give us all of the grace
to respond to our greatness.
God bless you!
Produced by the Archdiocese of Washington