Marycrest Motherhouse Chapel Rededication; Marian Sisters of the Diocese of Lincoln
Bishop James Conley; October 26, 2014
Click here to watch video coverage of the Rededication.
And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, make haste and come down; for I must stay at your house today” (Lk: 19:5).
My dear brother priests, beloved sisters, dear friends in Christ, “today salvation has come to this house” in a new and glorious way. For today, as we celebrate the 60th year of the Marian Sisters foundation here in the Diocese of Lincoln, we are rededicating your newly restored chapel, which you have lovingly set aside, and planned, and furnished for the worship of God in your community.
What a grace it is for all of us to be here with you to share in the joy of this day. In fact, this is really a wonderful time to be the Bishop of Lincoln, where churches and chapels across the diocese are being constructed, or renovated, or restored, to beautiful spaces for the worship of the Lord and for the celebration of the Sacred Liturgy.
Today salvation has come to this house.
Some of you may have seen that Crisis magazine did a feature last month on the restoration and renovation of Catholic Churches across the country—it was called “How Lovely (Again) is your Dwelling Place” (Psalm 84). The story featured the Diocese of Lincoln, and in particular, Fr. Jaime Hottovy, our own expert priest-architect. In the article, Fr. Hottovy says something very insightful, something that he has experienced first hand as he goes around the diocese and consults with priests and the lay faithful regarding church renovations. He says this: “every renovation has a very theological and symbolic weight to it, and people have a hungering for that.”
This beautiful chapel certainly has intentional theological and symbolic weight to it. So many aspects of this chapel evoke the meaning of the Incarnation of Jesus of Christ and the history of your religious community. And it is strikingly beautiful. This chapel is beautiful in a way that points the soul to transcendence—to the beauty of the beatific vision, and captures, through the windows and the artistic appointments and images, your Franciscan charism, as well as your glorious Czech history.
A chapel as beautiful as this needs no justification. Beautiful liturgy needs no justification. We build beautiful churches, like this one, simply because they glorify God. Renovating your chapel is worthwhile, laudable, and praiseworthy simply because the Blessed Trinity merits beautiful worship.
Pope Benedict put it this way: “the encounter with the beautiful can become the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes” to true faith.
As I mentioned above, one of the more interesting elements of your chapel’s renovation is how much it responds to your community’s charism. The charism of the Marian Sisters of the Diocese of Lincoln is to “do God’s will joyfully in imitation of Mary and St. Francis."
You are, in a fashion, members of the great family of religious who follow after St. Francis. And so, as you rebuilt your chapel, I suspect you kept in your minds the first words St. Francis heard from Jesus Christ.
In the little, broken down chapel of San Damiano, in the foothills just outside of the village of Assisi, St. Francis heard Christ speak to him from the cross. “Francis, Francis,” the Lord said, “go and repair my house—rebuild my Church--which, as you can see, is falling into ruins."
St. Francis rebuilt that church with his bare hands, stone by stone, turning it into a beautiful place.In fact, he spent two years living as a beggar and rebuilding stone churches with his bare hands.And then Francis began to realize that the job of rebuilding Christ’s Church began with beautiful buildings, but went far beyond their walls.
The author of the Crisis essay points out that a common refrain to projects like this, is that they are “unnecessarily extravagant, and that the money would be better spent on helping the poor.”
To that criticism, Fr. Hottovy answers that in all of the parishes in which he’s worked, they have already had a very active outreach to the poor and to the issues of social justice, and that it doesn’t have to be an “either or” but a “both and” answer. Fr. Hottovy notes that; “the Church has always been responsive and caring for the poor.” He goes on to say, “that does not diminish, and the poor are welcome. The church is built for them, for them to be able to enter into the beauty that they might not otherwise have access to.”
In the same way that Francis rebuilt beautiful spaces for sacred worship, he is known for his love of poverty and simplicity, and he labored tirelessly to rebuild the fabric of the Church’s life, with the beautiful witness of a joyful and simple Christian life.
St. Francis undertook a kind of “new evangelization” in his own day. He presented Christ anew—as if for the first time—to the Church and to the world. He was an icon of Christ, speculum mundi -- the suffering servant.And with new enthusiasm, and new zeal, and new ardor and new methods, he invited Christians to a deeper commitment to Christian discipleship, to missionary discipleship.
But his work began with the act of rebuilding a simple chapel—of restoring a place to beauty for the worship of God.
The New Evangelization, the proclamation of the Kingdom, calls for the witness of beauty in a particular way, now more than ever. Pope Francis says that “via pulchritudinis—the way of beauty—ought to be part of our effort to pass on the faith,” because, he says, “a renewed esteem for beauty is a means of touching the human heart and enabling the truth and goodness of the Risen Christ to radiate within it.”
The mission of St. Francis—which is the mission of the New Evangelization—is sorely needed. I often think that the crisis of our times is not only a crisis of faith and a crisis of reason, but also a crisis of beauty. The crassness of contemporary culture, and the ugliness and functionalism of contemporary art and architecture and entertainment, has the effect of dimming and darkening the vision of human souls and moving people to settle for mediocrity.
But beauty brings light into the darkness of an ugly culture. Beautiful liturgy elevates the human heart to transcendence. In the same way, beautiful lives, beautiful witnesses, beautiful friendships, especially, have the capacity to elevate the human soul—to lift the human soul to greatness and to imbue in him a sense of his own dignity, the goodness of the world, and the goodness of God.
Consider the witness of your new vocations—the two young novices and your new postulant, as well as your two junior professed sisters.Young women, committing their lives to Jesus Christ in religious life, or even considering the vows of religious life—are beautiful. They witness, far more than any work of theology ever could, what joy in the Christian life really means.
And this witness of joy and a desire for holiness, speaks more eloquently to the modern world than any argument from apologetics or even rational proof. Again, Pope Benedict puts it thus: “I have often affirmed my conviction that the true apology of Christina faith, the most convincing demonstration of its truth against every denial, are the saints, and the beauty that the faith has generated. Today, for faith to grow, we must lead ourselves and the persons we meet to encounter the saints and to enter into contact with the Beautiful.”
All of our lives should witness joy.They should witness gratitude. They should witness hope in things unseen.The world needs the joyful witness of Christians living a good life—the witness that virtue, and hope, and charity lead to the highest kinds of human happiness. That kind of beauty is what rebuilds Christ’s Church.
The first reading we heard today is particularly impressive, and particularly relevant to the rededication of this chapel to the mission of your community.
Nehemiah is a servant and advisor to the Persian king Artaxerxes, in the time when Israel has become conquered entirely by the Persian Empire. In fact, Israel has not only been conquered, it has been destroyed.And for the most part, the Jewish people have lost the faith of their fathers. They’ve largely lost the law. They’ve largely lost their customs. They have been, for lack of a better term, secularized.
When Nehemiah hears that Jerusalem, once a beautiful city, has been destroyed, he asks the king to appoint him governor of Judah, and to fund the restoration of Jerusalem.
With the king’s blessing, Nehemiah goes to Jerusalem and rebuilds the walls. He rebuilds the beautiful city.He partners with Ezra, who has rebuilt the temple and is restoring the faith of the people.In the reading today, together Ezra and Nehemiah, bring the Law of Moses—the Law of the Lord—to the people—and they confer upon them the blessing of God.
And when the people heard for the first time the proclamation of the Law and the word of God, after decades of slavery and exile, “all the people wept when they heard the words of the Law.” And then Nehemiah and Ezra say to the people: “This day is holy to the Lord your God, do not mourn or weep… for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
Nehemiah has done what Francis does—he rebuilds the house of the Lord, literally, and then he restores the people to a deeper relationship with God and thus renews their faith in the Lord. And the rich and beautiful symbolic nature of this ancient rite of rededication that we will witness in a few moments, borrows from this tradition and puts us in contact, in some mystical way, with the rededication of chapels, and churches to the Lord, going all the way back deep into the Old Testament and to our ancestors in the faith.
In the witness of what Nehemiah does, the people learn that “rejoicing in the LORD is your strength” and it is as true for us today as it was to the people in the day of Ezra and Nehemiah.
The Gospel brings the story of Nehemiah to an even deeper fulfillment. In the first reading from the Book of Nehemiah, the people are set apart, and purified, so that the Lord and his Law might dwell with them.But in the Gospel, Jesus Christ expresses something new—that he will come and dwell in the house of sinners.The Lord goes to the house of Zaccheaus not because he was holy, but in order to make him holy.“For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost.”
The Lord, in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, is dwelling place of the Lord, the new Torah, and he makes his dwelling, literally, here in your house. And in your house, he is making you holy.He is purifying you, and transforming you, and bringing you into more intimate relationship with his most Sacred Heart.
And our second reading taken from Saint Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians affirms this. For do you not know that “your are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?”
You, dear sisters, are the temples of God.The Spirit dwells in you! The foundation of your community is Jesus Christ.The foundation of this chapel is Jesus Christ.The foundation of your lives, together, is Jesus Christ.
And, like St. Francis, Christ is calling you to follow after him.To go into the world—as Christ does in the Gospel today. To go, as Pope Francis says, to the “existential peripheries.”
When you receive the Lord, in this beautiful chapel, you enter into a deeper union with him. He desires to enter the homes, and the lives, of the lost—and so you, in union with him, must enter into their lives, in all the many and varied apostolates in which you serve in the Diocese of Lincoln and beyond.You are called to be Christ—in union with him, seeking what is lost, gathering his sheep back to the flock.
Sisters—you have rebuilt a beautiful chapel for the Lord. I pray that, in imitation of St. Francis and the Blessed Mother, you will continue to propose the Gospel in the beautiful witnesses of your lives, your apostolates, and your community.
Sisters, this chapel glorifies God.You have rebuilt it beautiful way. May the Lord now bless you, and be with you, as he calls you also to rebuild his Church.
