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A Word From the Associate&
The Usual Suspects
This past week the Church celebrated the feast of St. Mary Magdelene. There is something on the face of it a little odd about this: the Catholic Church, noted for its strong and often unpopular defense of sexual purity as an ideal, making a hero out of a former prostitute.
But Mary isn't the only odd presence in the
line-up. Look at St. Peter: weak, vacillating, putting
his foot in his mouth, making promises he can't keep, even to
the point of bragging with his chest puffed out that he
(unlike these others), he would never deny his Master, and the very same night swearing an oath: I tell you I have never met the man, all to save his skin. And what about St. Paul: a strong and strident personality, the opposite of Peter, filled with arrogant pride and anger against Christ, hunting down Christians from town to town, dragging them before the authorities and delighting in seeing them put to death. And St. Mark, a relative of Barnabas, who lost heart on mission with Paul, found the way too difficult, and went back to the comforts of home. What a lot. The usual suspects, the dregs of a fallen race.
This is the special glory of the Church. Its boast is not that it finds wonderful and talented and good-hearted people, and then brings them into its fold. There's nothing very impressive in that. It is rather that the Church takes hold of the worst of this world and by a unique miracle turns evil into goodness. It makes heroes out of criminals, music out of cacophony, diamonds out of blackest coal. It takes dirty straw and spins it into finest gold. By the transforming power of the Holy Spirit's presence, a weakling like St. Peter became the rock upon which the whole of the Church has been built. A proud and raging zealot like St. Paul became the great apostle to the Gentiles, to precisely those people whom he had previously despised as being outside the Covenant. A quitter like St. Mark founded the great Church of Alexandria and gave us one of the inspired Gospels. And a woman in bondage to physical desires, enduring the self-loathing and embitterment that comes of selling one's body, the dark view of humanity that such a profession encounters, has become the shining example of love and purity. Blessed are the pure of heart, said Jesus, for they shall see God, and it was Mary Magdelene, the pure one, to whom it was given first to see the risen Christ, and then charged with a message for Peter and the others.
There is something deeply comforting about this. If God can take the weakness, the pride, the laziness, the sensuality of people like this and make of them something beautiful, then surely there is hope for that particular person who so annoys me, that weak and sensual and proud and lazy fellow I see in the mirror every morning. The same Spirit that transformed Mary Magdelene is also at work within me, and if only I will cooperate, the Lord will make of me someone equally, if differently, strong and beautiful. It's the whole point, the reason the Church exists, the reason Christ invaded our darkness in the first place. There is no other power on earth that can accomplish this.
Fr. Michael Keating
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