St. Thomas More Chicago

Fr. Robert Behnke

At times, God the Holy Spirit may seem to be the Neglected Person of the Blessed Trinity.  Though we speak of the Holy Spirit every time we make the Sign of the Cross, and also in the doxology Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit we pray to the Holy Spirit, in our conversations about God many people speak much more often of God the Father, and especially of God the Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ.  In a sense this is understandable, since God is essentially a Mystery—not to Himself but to us—revealed in nature as the one true God, but more fully by divine revelation as three divine persons in the one true God.  We could not know there is a Trinity of Persons, yet only one God, had God not revealed this truth to us; we absolutely could not have figured this out on our own.  You may know that a main objection to Christianity, and particularly to Catholicism, on the part of both Jews and Moslems is that, because we believe the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, Catholics are thus accused of believing in three “Gods.”  Also, our own human minds more easily conceptualize the notion of “father” and “son” than “spirit.”  Even the Catechism of the Catholic Church says far less about the Holy Spirit than about the Father and the Son.  In this, the catechism follows the example of the Church’s ancient creeds–the Apostles Creed; the Nicene Creed which we will recite in a few moments.  Likewise, the Catechism refers to the Holy Spirit as the Inexpressible Person, but the Person Whom we know: through the Scriptures which He inspired; in Tradition; in the Magisterium which He assists; in Baptism which makes us temples—dwelling places—of God the Holy Spirit; in the other six sacraments; in prayer; in every aspect of the Church’s life.  The Church prays to the Holy Spirit more often than we might think: in the Gloria of the Mass; at the conclusion of prayers; in the Divine Office, especially on Sundays in the hymn Te Deum Laudamus.  In the most important part of the Mass, it is God the Holy Spirit Whom the Church asks God the Father to send so that by the power of God the Holy Spirit bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood of Our Lord.  The Holy Spirit is inseparable from the Father and the Son; Our Lord tells us this Himself, assuring us that He and the Father are one – He who sees Me sees the Father—and in promising not to leave us orphans—not alone, not without Him, not without God—but to send the Holy Spirit–His Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is the Love between the Father and the Son, a Love so real that That Love is an Eternal Person, without beginning or end, in the triune community that is God.

Perhaps many Catholics connect the coming of God the Holy Spirit into their lives with their reception of the sacrament of Confirmation.  True enough, but not the total picture.  Recall that St. Paul tells us today, when we were baptized, we were…all given to drink of the one Spirit.  In Baptism, God dwells in you; you are filled with sanctifying grace, God adopts you as His child and makes you an heir of heaven.  What Baptism begins, Confirmation completes–the baptized person in Confirmation receives the supernatural ability to do what we cannot do under our own power—to be a witness to the truth of Christ found in His One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church.  That is exactly the transformation we see in the apostles on the first Pentecost.  That word apostle means Spirit-enlightened witness.  The disciples truly became apostles on Pentecost, or better said, they now know what it means to be an apostle - they are no longer afraid to witness to Jesus.  And that word martyr means witness.  Note the color red today, the color of the Holy Spirit.  Because red is the color of blood, it is also the color of martyrs.  It is the color of agape, the type of love that one has when he is willing to sacrifice everything, including one’s very own life, for Jesus.  On the first Easter night, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus—after they recognized Jesus in the Breaking of the Bread and after He then disappears—they say to each other …Were not our hearts burning inside of us….  That is how Jesus loves us, and how He wants us to love Him.  That is what Jesus does–His Sacred Heart burns with self-sacrificing love.  That is what He wants from us; that is what Scripture means when it tells us God is Love.

Make no mistake; these are not idle, flowery, wispy thoughts and words.  The witness of martyrdom has not disappeared; it is the golden thread that binds the Church with Our Lord for these two thousand years of the Church’s history.  In the past, there have been times in which it was relatively safe—even comfortable—to be a Catholic (I think the 50s and the very early 60s were such a time in our country, but not in the nations under Communism); many more times in history, being a Catholic has been dangerous.  All the martyrs, from St. Stephen to St. Maximilian Kolbe, show us this earthly danger.  We now seem to be moving quickly, and deeper and deeper, into a period when in the United States it will inevitably become more and more dangerous to live a faithful practicing Catholic life.  For that reason, we should pray every day to the Holy Spirit Who in the sacrament of Confirmation has already given us all we need to be faithful in a public way, that we will use His gifts to be faithful—faithful even to the point of martyrdom—since in so many ways our world is telling us that we really should not be free to be faithful Catholics in public; the culture says there is little or no place for Catholicism in the here and now of the public square—that it is wrong, a bad thing, even a crime, to be a faithful Catholic.  We have seen, over just the past few weeks, how the Illinois civil union legislation has impacted the ability of the Illinois Catholic Charities to place children for adoption and foster care according to what the Church teaches about marriage and family.  The freedom to be Catholic openly today in Illinois is at great risk.

Tonight's first reading, describing the descent of the Holy Spirit on Our Blessed Mother and the apostles, gives us a clue to the meaning of the experience of the first Pentecost.  The reading from The Acts of the Apostles does not dwell on the fire, the wind and the noise, but on the transforming experience of the devout men and women living in Jerusalem from every nation under heaven.  They hear these Galileans speaking foreign languages, so that each one of them hears the apostles preaching in their own language about the marvels of God.  This miracle is the reversal of the tower of Babel experience, in which man’s language became confused because of man’s attempt to climb, under his own power, right up to heaven—man’s attempt to substitute himself for God.  The descent of the Holy Spirit leading to the fearless preaching of the apostles shows forth the seeds of the Church as one holy, catholic and apostolic.  The Gift of the Holy Spirit does not rule out difficulty, suffering or human effort.  St Paul in today's second reading reminds the Christians in Corinth that the Church is like a human body and that the gifts of the Spirit are not about enthusiasm or special knowledge for an elite group, but a variety of gifts for building up the whole body of Christ, in which each of us has a part assigned to us by God.  St. Paul's image of the Church as the mystical Body of Christ reflects the truth of today's Gospel:  Our Risen Lord comes on Easter night to His closest followers—those who had deserted Him—to bring them now a peace which is not just a calming of hearts and conscience, but the surety of heart which will enable and embolden them to go out and preach the gospel to the very ends of the earth.  Having overcome death, now Our Lord breathes His Spirit into them, to enable them to witness to Him; He gives them the power to withstand and overcome the power of this world—the sins of the world which He bore on Calvary.
For years now, the trend toward liberal dogmatism and political correctness is serving to muzzle religious Christians who are doing nothing else but carrying on the Church’s Pentecost mission.  The hateful reaction on the part of homosexual activists and activist promoters of abortion—and the opposition to the Church on the part of many civil authorities, many of whom profess to he Catholic—the hateful reaction and the civic opposition to the Church’s legitimate request to be allowed merely to place children in homes, not according to some sectarian Church teaching, but according to the dictates of the law placed by God in human nature, demonstrates how serious the problem is becoming.  And, though we probably don’t think about it too much, our next-door neighbor Canada, a country where homosexual marriage is legal and opposition to abortion meets with unhidden scorn, and often with violence, punitive fines, or even jail time, is less than 300 miles from Chicago–just across the river from Detroit.
The recent and still ongoing health care debate; stem cell research; the absolute secrecy of every confession a priest hears, even for the most horrendous of sins; the Church’s right to control her own structure and finances; the right for a Catholic to refuse to cooperate in any medical procedure the Church teaches is intrinsically evil; the right of priests to preach about doctrine and morality that touch upon political questions; the right of Catholics to defend their faith in the public square without fear or intimidation; the right for me to say what I am saying right now: all these things are right now seriously challenged in some section of our country.  One has only to read most journalism in the secular press, a press which admires all kinds of perversion and seriously promotes all sorts of sins that cry to heaven.  Most mainstream media, entertainment in movies and TV, all the rest—all have numbed the conscience of America; years and years of Will and Grace have turned perversion into acceptable, fuzzy, warm, cuddly, laudable social behavior.  And those who openly object or oppose or even criticize any of this should know: the culture is coming after them next.
And then the rest of us.  Then come the laws which will put all of us, five or ten years from now, in the crosshairs of district attorneys and an increasing politically correct legal system which will then judge us guilty: guilty for using forbidden words, guilty for defending forbidden doctrine, guilty for–as the politically correct culture puts it–guilty for promoting hatred.
Yet we should not fear; we can not fear.  God keeps every one of His promises: He is with us always; He has sent us His Holy Spirit, the Spirit Whose works are wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear–fear not of the police, fear not of the government–fear of the Lord.  It is the same Holy Spirit that enabled those first apostles to face even death for the truth of Jesus and His Church.  They knew that even death would not, could not, separate them from God–God Who is both Life and Love.  No matter how difficult being a devout faithful Catholic may become, all this too will end.  Yet God does not—God will never—force us, as we well know.  Even God the Holy Spirit will not make us be His witness.  God does not make us–but God makes us able.  God is all just; God cannot require our doing what is impossible, so God makes us able to do all He requires, even to do what seems most painful, most difficult—even to do what is truly impossible without the help of God.  That is what God the Holy Spirit did for the apostles on Pentecost; that is what God the Holy Spirit does for us each time we receive the sacraments worthily—He gives us an increase of grace—an increase of His own life, until, when, our having have remained faithful, our earthly life is complete, over, finished, in us God will be all in all.