The great Christian
revolution has been to convert pain into fruitful suffering and to turn a bad
thing into something good. We have deprived the devil of this weapon; and with
it we conquer eternity. - St. Jose Maria Escriva: (1902 – 1975: founded
Opus Dei, an organization of laypeople and priests dedicated to the teaching
that everyone is called to holiness and that ordinary life is a path to
sanctity)
Gospel
Text: (JN 15:18-21)
Jesus said to his disciples:
“If the world hates you, realize that it hated
me first.
If you belonged to the world, the world would
love its own;
but because you do not belong to the world,
and I have chosen you out of the world,
the world hates you.
Remember the word I spoke to you,
‘No slave is greater than his master.’
If they persecuted me, they will also persecute
you.
If they kept my word, they will also keep
yours.
And they will do all these things to you on
account of my name,
because they do not know the one who sent me.”
There is no doubt; we are living in an age of
growing persecution against Christians. Cardinal Dolan of New York recently
addressed the Conference of US Bishops gathered in assembly. Cardinal Dolan
told his brother bishops: We are living in what must be recognized as, in
the words of Blessed John Paul II, "a new age of martyrs." One expert
calculates that half of all Christian martyrs were killed in the twentieth
century alone. The twenty-first century has already seen one million people
killed around the world because of their belief in Jesus Christ - - one million
already in this young century.
And
the threat to religious believers is growing. The Pew Research Center reports
that 75 percent of the world's population "lives in countries where
governments, social groups, or individuals restrict people's ability to freely
practice their faith." Pew lays out the details of this "rising tide
of restrictions on religion," but we don't need a report to tell us
something we sadly see on the news every day.
In our own lives, we will suffer, we will be
misunderstood, betrayed by friends, shipwrecked (at least figuratively),
and we will experience the instability that often accompanies the struggles of
daily life. St Paul and many of the saints that have gone before us show us how
to choose the better way, the way of discipleship. When we learn to make that
choice we will find the path to contentment and the way of true freedom.