Sunday 3 (B-2006): Christian Unity

 “With full awareness, therefore, at the beginning of his ministry in the Church of Rome which Peter bathed in his blood, Peter's current Successor takes on as his primary task the duty to work tirelessly to rebuild the full and visible unity of all Christ's followers. This is his ambition, his impelling duty. He is aware that good intentions do not suffice for this. Concrete gestures that enter hearts and stir consciences are essential, inspiring in everyone that inner conversion that is the prerequisite for all ecumenical progress.”

These are the words of our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, on the day after his election. He therefore considers the full, visible unity of Christians as his primary task and duty.

In these first 9 months of his pontificate, he has certainly tried to live up to those words. During this week of prayer for Christian Unity he is trying even harder as a look at his busy schedule shows.

Full and visible Christian Unity must be the Pope’s primary task because it was the primary mission of Jesus Christ. He died so that the scattered children of God might be made one. His last will and testament was that the world would believe in Him as the result of the witness of his one, united Church.

Humanity has one Father, whether some recognize him or not, and that Father created us so that we would be one in his Son. It is not the disunity of the human race that is its natural state, but its unity.

But because of the disunity introduced by sin, Christ came to establish his Church as the sign and the seed of the reunification of the human race.

That Church he built and still builds on the rock of Peter’s faith: Peter, to whom he entrusted the care of his one flock until his return. Peter cannot but accept and admit that his first, Christ-given task is to work and to pray for the unity of the Church, which is as good as saying for the unity of humanity.

In what does the unity of the Church consist? And how is it achieved?

As with the inner unity of Jesus Christ himself, true man and true God, so the unity of the Church, his Mystical Body, is made up of a divine and a human element.

The divine is the most important: the unity of the Church is a gift of divine grace. That grace is nothing other than that communion of life, love and truth which is at the heart of the Blessed Trinity itself.

As Jesus himself prayed, “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us” (Jn 17,21). May they also be in us! That is, our unity is not something we have or create among ourselves as if we lived separately from God. Our unity is the result of our being in God.

Just as our sin broke our union with and in God and led to the distancing of ourselves from God, so the forgiveness of our sins leads to our return to God, indeed to our return to unity in God.

Christian Unity, then, is not in the first place the construct of successful negotiations between the, alas, thousands of Christian denominations. It is the gratuitous, merciful embrace of God who gathers his repentant children as a hen gathers her brood under her wings (cf. Lk 13:34).

This is why the sacrifice of Christ is central to the unity of the Church and of humanity itself: because his death destroyed our sins and made it possible for us to be made one by the reconciliation of each one of us through him to the Father.

How do we receive this divine grace flowing from the side of Christ?

The “how” of God is the Holy Spirit. The Father wills, the Son executes and the Spirit makes the fruits of the Son’s work available to all and effective in those who sincerely believe.

The Holy Spirit is the breath, the atmosphere, the air which makes it possible for us to breathe in the love between the Father and the Son. Indeed, the Spirit is that love.

As love, the Spirit is unity in person. Unity is not a juridical agreement; it is not an abstract concept; indeed, unity is not an “it” at all, but a “He”, a divine “He.” To seek Christian Unity means to seek the Spirit of God, to be open to him, to be stripped by him of all that is in each of us, or is in our denominations, which opposes him.

To seek and invite the Spirit to come is to let him make the Cross of Christ reshape our hearts and our understanding into one heart and one understanding, and to make the Resurrection of Christ render that heart immaculate and that understanding infallible.

The Spirit reconfigures each and all of us to be living icons of Jesus Christ. That is the unity of the Church. That is the unity of humanity.

But Christian Unity is not just the gift of the Trinity. The Trinity also seeks our free collaboration, and it is the lack of that collaboration which has historically led to an Unchristian Disunity.

The human element, then, is essential, but it is only effective because of the divine grace already given.

What is the core of this human element?

It is the sincere and persevering search for the Truth which is Christ and it is equally the sincere and persevering gift of oneself in love to him and to one another.

On the basis of this core, each one of us can and will become pure in heart and in mind, a double purity which is the raw material for the Holy Spirit to mould us into perfect images of Jesus.

In our ecumenical prayer gatherings, in our ecumenical works of charity and in our ecumenical theological discussions, that core must be alive and active. It will then be only a matter of time, God’s time, before unity becomes a reality.

As with everything else in Christian life, nothing can be achieved without God and nothing can be achieved without us.

But the beginning of any achievement is in the sacrifice of Christ and it must pass through the individual conversion of each one of us to him. To repeat the words of the Pope: “Concrete gestures that enter hearts and stir consciences are essential, inspiring in everyone that inner conversion that is the prerequisite for all ecumenical progress.”

Division is the work of the diaboulos, the Divider. Christian unity must begin with the expulsion of the divider, and that is done in baptism. But it can only be preserved if we faithfully seek forgiveness for the sins we commit after baptism in the sacrament of confession.

The avoidance of confession is personally very unwise and very dangerous, especially if our sin is serious. But beyond the personal, the avoidance of confession and conversion impedes the Christian Unity for which Christ died.

Unabsolved sin rots the soul and fragments it into pieces. The inner division of one will spill over into marriage, family, Church and society. If you want deep peace, confess your sins to the priest that he may restore to you the dignity of your baptism and the inner unity of your soul.

If every Catholic understood the danger of sin and sought out regularly the spiritual beauty and relief of absolution, the Spirit of God’s work to bring about Christian Unity would be mightily advanced.

Let us not leave the human collaboration with the Spirit to the Pope. How much easier and more effective his work would be if the world’s one billion Catholics stood united behind him with hearts absolved from sin and with minds wide open to the Truth of Christ!

Msgr. Peter Magee

Sunday, January 22^nd, 2006

Annunciation, DC: 11.30 am