Luceat!

The soft light issuing forth from a Benedictine Chapel in Leon, Spain invited me and my travel-weary companions to evening vespers the evening of July 12th, 2007. As we began our pilgrimage to the tomb of St. James the Apostle in Santiago de Compostella, five FOCUS missionaries and six student leaders joined the Benedictine sisters who kept our albergue (hostel) for prayer before we began walking the next day. As the mother superior intoned the ancient prayers of the Liturgy of the Hours, something about her caught my attention. She possessed a beauty that was uniquely feminine and radiated a sense of peace that told me she had a heart that had experienced both profound suffering and profound joy. This was a holy woman.

After vespers, this beautiful bride of Christ spoke with Jason, the missionary that led our pilgrimage. With great sorrow in her expression, she spoke with Jason about the state of the Church in Spain – about the devastation after the Spanish Civil War and about the breakdown in family life and about the mass exodus of young people from the Church and about the profound shortage of priests. “And then I see you,” she said to Jason with a renewed light in her eye “and I have hope.”

She explained to Jason that she and her sisters beg our Lord for a renewal in the church in Spain, but they have not yet seen the fruit of their prayers in the way that they hope. She explained that she sees the Church flourishing in Africa and in India, but that with her understanding of how grace builds on nature, these places do not have the political stability nor the economic means to raise up the other cultures of the world. “No,” she said, “I believe, as did our beloved John Paul II, that the center of the New Evangelization must be the United States. The new Avila – the new Sienna – the new Assisi - must be your St. Louis, Missouri, your Chicago, Illinois, your Denver, Colorado.” Referencing the story of Joseph in Genesis, which happened to have been the first reading in mass that morning, she suggested that just as the family of God in Genesis was saved from famine through their youngest brother, so would the family of God living at this moment in Salvation History be saved through their “youngest brother,” the faithful disciples of Christ, especially “the dear young people” of the Catholic Church in the United States.

This experience set the tone for each one of the 200 miles of my pilgrimage to Santiago, and has carried with me into my service as a missionary at the University of Illinois. It is sobering to realize the gravity of the task before us, but awesome to realize that God has placed us at this moment in history, made our calling to the New Evangelization clear, and has provided the tools and the grace for us to walk in the good works he set before us, if only we have the courage to take Him at his word. Our lives are so small, and yet so significant.

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“The one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God’s paradise on earth, is to fight a losing battle – and not lose it.” .” G.K.’s Weekly, March 9, 1929