Becoming Spiritual Grown-Ups
by Fr. Roger Landry - July 10, 2009
On June 28, when Pope Benedict concluded the Year of St. Paul at the Basilica outside the walls in Rome, most of the headlines generated centered on his announcement that tests on the bones found within the tomb underneath the high altar are consistent with those of the man the Lord encountered on the Road to Damascus. It's since been revealed by Cardinal Andrea Cordero Lanza di Montezemolo, the former Archpriest of St. Paul's Basilica, that Pope Benedict waited almost a year to release those findings. He delayed in the hope that the news about the tests on the apostle's remains would maintain the Church's and the world's interest in St. Paul long after the conclusion of the 2000th anniversary of his birth. The Pope had evidently spent a great deal of time thinking about how he wanted the Pauline Year to end, so that the end of the year might lead a new beginning for believers and the Church as a whole.
The same care seems to have been exercised by the Pope with respect to the homily he chose to preach at the June 28 Vespers. The Pope didn't focus, as he normally would, on the readings taken from the Church's Liturgy of the Hours for Evening Prayer I on the Solemnity of SS. Peter & Paul. Instead, after emphasizing that St. Paul "remains the 'teacher of the Gentiles'" for all of us today, he turned to what he said the Apostle reveals to us as the "essential nucleus of Christian existence," the concise synthesis of how St. Paul says each of us is called to respond in faith to the mystery of Christ. This seems to be the "last word" Pope Benedict wanted to give us during the Year of St. Paul, indicating the chief take-away he hopes each of us learns from the teacher of the nations.
This "essential nucleus" of the Christian life is summarized, Pope Benedict said, in two verses St. Paul wrote in his Epistle to the Romans: "I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect" (Rom 12:1-2).
The first and most fundamental thing we learn from these words of St. Paul, Pope Benedict says, is how we are supposed to worship God. Christ began a "new way of venerating God," a "new form of worship," that consists in the person's not giving adoration or making sacrifices, but becoming adoration and becoming the sacrifice. "It is no longer things that are offered to God," the Pope says. "It is our very existence that must become praise of God."
The Holy Father says that the second verse of the passage shows how each of us becomes true spiritual worship. "The two decisive words of this verse are 'transformed' and 'renewal.' We must become new people, transformed into a new mode of existence. Paul tells us: the world cannot be renewed without new people. Only if there are new people will there also be a new world, a renewed and better world. Only if we ourselves become new does the world become new." The way this renewal occurs, as St. Paul himself experienced in his own life, is through a living encounter with Christ so deep that it leads to a conversion in which we die to ourselves and learn to live for Christ. St. Paul "became new, another," the Pope illustrated, "because he no longer lived for himself and by virtue of himself, but for Christ and in him." Likewise, "we become new if we let ourselves be grasped and shaped by the new Man, Jesus Christ, if we deliver ourselves into his hands and let ourselves be molded by him."
That remolding by Christ begins, St. Paul says, with the transformation that comes "by the renewal of [our] mind." Our way of thinking, our reason, must become new. It's not enough that our behavior change, but the renewal "must go to the very core," the Pope commented. "Our way of looking at the world, of understanding reality all our thought must change from its foundations."
The Pope described what this transformation looks like. The way most of us think is "usually directed to possession, well-being, influence, success, fame and so forth. In the final analysis, one's 'self' remains the center of the world. We must learn to think more profoundly, to learn to understand God's will, so that it may shape our own will. This is in order that we ourselves may desire what God desires, because we recognize that what God wants is the beautiful and the good. It is therefore a question of a turning point in our fundamental spiritual orientation. God must enter into the horizon of our thought: what he wants and the way in which he conceived of the world and of me. We must learn to share in the thinking and the will of Jesus Christ. It is then that we will be new people in whom a new world emerges." He says that St. Paul, in short, is calling us to a new "way of being human."
This renewal will lead us to what St. Paul calls in his Letter to the Ephesians, "mature manhood," to being spiritual grown-ups. St. Paul contrasts this "measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" with those who are spiritual "infants, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles" (Eph 4:13-14). Pope Benedict emphasized that St. Paul "wants Christians to have a 'responsible' and 'adult faith'" and then described what such spiritual maturity is and isn't.
"The words 'adult faith' in recent decades have formed a widespread slogan," the Pope stated in a remarkably candid passage that strikes at the heart of the pretentions both theological dissent and cafeteria Catholicism. The slogan "is often meant in the sense of the attitude of those who no longer listen to the Church and her pastors but autonomously choose what they want to believe and not to believe; hence a do-it-yourself faith. And it is presented as a 'courageous' form of self-expression against the Magisterium of the Church. In fact, however, no courage is needed for this because one may always be certain of public applause. Rather, courage is needed to adhere to the Church's faith, even if this contradicts the 'logic' of the contemporary world. This is the non-conformism of faith which Paul calls an 'adult faith.' It is the faith that he desires. On the other hand, he describes chasing the winds and trends of the time as infantile."
The Pope then got very specific about the contrast between adult and infantile faith with respect to the issues of sacredness of human life and the institution of marriage: "Being committed to the inviolability of human life from its first instant — thereby radically opposing the principle of violence also precisely in the defense of the most defenseless human creatures — is part of an adult faith. It is part of an adult faith to recognize marriage between a man and a woman for the whole of life as the Creator's ordering, newly re-established by Christ. Adult faith does not let itself be carried about here and there by any trend. It opposes the winds of fashion. It knows that these winds are not the breath of the Holy Spirit; it knows that the Spirit of God is expressed and manifested in communion with Jesus Christ."
The point of the Year of St. Paul, the "essential nucleus of the Christian life," was to help lead us to the type of adult faith that St. Paul had and sought to help the early Christians achieve. It was meant to assist us in becoming true adoration of God by the transforming renewal of our minds so that we might think as Christ thinks and think with the Church. This is a work not merely of a 365-day period, but of a lifetime. Pope Benedict hopes, however, that the greater study and imitation of the life and thoughts of St. Paul during the last year would lead all of us in the Church closer to that spiritual maturity.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
