The Fraternity of St Genesius - Contact Information

Vatican II was the Council which was to prepare the members of the Church for this great outreach. This great Council was not one which created a breach with the Church of the past - there is no Church of the past or Church of the future - there is the Church, the Bride of Christ. Those “reformers” who think we can throw off the teachings and tradition of the Church to create a new entity which makes infallible their personal opinions are not people imbued with the spirit of the Council, they are creating a rupture, severing the disciples of Christ today from their faith and their spiritual heritage. Vatican II was a call to renewal - to look to the Scriptures, the Fathers of the Church, the lives and teachings of the great Saints down the centuries, the charisms gifted to the Church through founders and their spiritual families and then, on this firm foundation, the people of God are renewed and prepared to be sent out to preach the Gospel according to their state in life. The missionaries of the New Evangelisation are not just the bishops, priests and religious - the missionaries are the baptised, the members of Christ’s Mystical Body. The mission fields are no longer just the continents of Africa, Asia and the Latin and South America, now Europe and North America are included - the whole world. Now our own countries and our hometowns are the mission outposts and we, the baptised, are to bring the flames of faith back to the people we know, many of whom have lost hope. Many of them may be baptised themselves but have lost all sense of what it means to be a Christian. Their knowledge of Christ may be limited - they might not even know him at all. Some might have reinvented him to suit the ways of the world or their personal desires, and some may even hate him. It falls to the Church - and that includes us, to meet these people and to bring them to a fuller understanding of who Christ is, what he taught and what being a member of the Church means.

In recent years, despite the reports of decline, the Church is being renewed to begin this evangelisation. New congregations, new movements, the rise in vocations to the priesthood and religious life and a deepening of the prayer life of millions of Catholics, indicate that the Holy Spirit is forming his army. Holy men and women have walked in our midst and following the inspiration of God, have not only founded these congregations and movements, but though the holiness of their lives, provide us with contemporary examples of how to live our call as disciples and evangelisers. I mentioned Blessed James and Pope John Paul II, but there are so many others: Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, St Josemaria Escriva, Chiara Lubich, Br Roger of Taize, The Servant of God Fr Joseph Kentenich, The Servant of God Frank Duff, the Venerable Edel Quinn to name just a few. Many traditional saints are making a come back but not merely for devotional reasons, but inspiring new movements and associations in the Church to bring the New Evangelisation to various areas of human life. St Philomena is once again touching the lives of young people, as is St Maria Goretti in the promotion of chastity, and of course our own St Genesius who is pushing our association to reach out to his beloved men and women of theatre and cinema. The fire is burning, but how we wish it were already a great blaze across the world. It can be, if you, my brothers and sisters, allow Christ who entrusted the flame of faith to you, use you to set fire others with his love and mercy.

So we bring our Lent to an end. Knowing what Jesus asks of us we understand why we must discipline our lives, hearts and minds though prayer and penance. He offers holiness to us and a place in his plan for the redemption of the world. We must be transformed in order to be effective witnesses to his grace. If we are to convince others of the truth of the Gospel, of the beauty of the Church, we must be immersed in it ourselves and be shining examples. Yes, there is human frailty, and while we must confront that, even our sinfulness can speak volumes to the men and women of our times - we do not embrace our sinfulness, but repent of it and find in Christ a generous mercy, a healing grace and a reconciliation in which we find that our destiny has not been lost. As we feast for these seven weeks and then re-enter Ordinary Time, may we now ask the Lord to reveal to us what he wants us to do and then ask for the grace to fulfil it, resolved to live holy lives for his sake and the sake of those we will be called to evangelise and serve.

May the grace and peace of our Risen Lord descend upon all of you and transform you into true models of his glorious Self. May his blessings bring you joy, and his love set you alight with the fire of faith; may he sustain you in hope, and keep you always in the refuge of his Sacred Heart. May his Holy Mother, our Mother, be your companion and guide. And may all the Holy Saints of God who rejoice in this festival of salvation, intercede for all your needs.

With every blessing in our Lord Jesus Christ.

In June of last year Pope Benedict announced that next year, 2010, there will be a public exposition of the Shroud of Turin. Such expositions are rare - the last one took place in the year 2000 as part of the Jubilee celebrations - Pope John Paul II travelled to Turin to view the relic, as did over a million people that year. Pope Benedict has also promised that he too will go to see the Shroud next year “If the Lord gives me life and health”. Much controversy surrounds this piece of cloth which is believed by many to be the actual linen in which Jesus was wrapped before he was laid in the tomb. A whole field of scientific research, sindonology, has grown up around it and numerous scientists have devoted their lives’ work to trying to work out the mysteries presented by this cloth. Carbon-dating tests carried out in 1988 concluded that the Shroud was a medieval forgery, yet work since then, including an exposé of the way in which the various laboratories conducted their experiments, have now discredited the results. According to the sindonlogists there is a wealth of evidence to support the theory that the Shroud may indeed be genuine. One sindonologist in particular has said that there is now more evidence to prove that the cloth is in fact the Shroud of Christ than there is to say it is not: the burden of proof now falls on the critics and so far they have not yielded one piece of scientific evidence which can question in any meaningful way the cloth’s authenticity.

If this cloth is the actual Shroud of Jesus we do indeed have a most precious object. We have a relic of immense proportions, we have an image of Jesus - science still cannot explain how the image was impressed on the cloth; we also have an important Christian ‘document’, one which testifies to the crucifixion of Jesus, and also, to the Resurrection since it is believed that the event of the Resurrection imprinted the image of Jesus on the cloth. If this Shroud is genuine the negative image of the Body of Jesus is a photograph of that Body a millisecond before the Resurrection, or indeed as it was happening. To come into the presence of this relic is to come to an icon of the death and Resurrection of Jesus, to touch, in some tangible way, the great mystery of our faith. What cannot be explained outside the realm of faith can be seen, touched and indeed explored in this piece of linen. Interestingly the shroud in its mystery unites the realms of faith and science and both need each other in order to understand this venerated object.

Now that our Lent is over, the intense period of prayer, fasting and almsgiving has given way to the festival of salvation and we turn to reflect on the most mysterious event in all of history. We begin to celebrate that great Mystery of Christ’s rising from the dead, but not just to celebrate it in the sense of mere remembrance and commemoration: our celebration is more profound - we actually participate in it -touch it, come into its presence, enter it. In these last three days time and space have been, in a sense, suspended, and we have lived the passion and death of the Lord minute by minute, at the Easter Vigil and in the Masses of Easter Sunday and of the season, we experience the great liturgy of his Resurrection as we participate in his rising from the dead. At the great Easter Vigil, the most solemn of the Church’s yearly liturgies, the proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection is sung and the whole Church rises in exultation. Our thoughts turn to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, to the empty tomb which stands as the symbol of the Resurrection and still exists as a signpost to the world - the place and symbol of death has now become the place of new life, a new womb from which the glorified Lord has emerged. Countless pilgrims over the centuries have come to this holy place to experience what the first disciples experienced on that bright Sunday morning - to see that he is not there, he is risen. Like the Shroud the tomb is also an important ‘document’ for us Christians.

Our Lenten observance comes to an end with these solemnities and now we see the reason of our prayer and penance. As the renewal of our baptismal promises takes place at the Easter ceremonies, our efforts to conform more closely to Jesus Christ are crowned with the public renewal of our commitment to him. At the moment of our baptism we were incorporated into Christ and his Church, the Body of Christ. As we are reminded in the ceremony of baptism which itself quotes St Paul, in our baptism we descend into the tomb with Jesus to rise out of it with him into new life. This is why the call for us as Christians to live the Gospel as well as we can is so urgent. We are not ordinary people; we are men and women whose earthly lives have been transformed through baptism. Yes, there is a commitment which must be met. If we call ourselves Christians, then we cannot live spiritually careless lives; to do so is to contradict the very sacrament of Baptism. We must live our Christian faith not in an à la carte manner, but in a way in which we are one with the heart, mind and action of Christ’s Church. According to the custodians of the Tomb of Our Lord in Jerusalem, each year a miracle takes place within the chamber. A mysterious fire, a flame called the “Holy Fire”, is said to appear on the marble which covers the ledge on which Jesus’ body rested. The fire begins as a mysterious light rising up out of the stone, sometimes just covering the stone, at other times lighting the whole Sepulchre. It then rises into a column and forms fire. In a ceremony of light, the priests light their candles from this mysterious fire and then pass the light on - it is in essence the ceremony of light which is part of the Easter Vigil. I will not speculate on whether this is a miracle or manmade, but the symbolism is important and helps us understand the nature of our commitment to Christ. On that first Easter Sunday a tremendous fire was lit in the tomb - Christ himself, and it was passed on to his disciples and in turn has been passed on down the centuries; it has been given to us and now we are called to live in the midst of that fire the intensity of the Christian faith, not only for ourselves and our own sanctification, but for the generations yet to come. As the disciples of Jesus today we are to take this flame and help transform the world. In the Gospel Jesus speaks of a fire which must be kindled in the world and he longs for it to be already blazing. This is the Lord’s desire, we must fulfil that desire for his sake and it begins now, with us.

One of the events in the Gospel which sheds light on this is the meeting between Jesus and Mary Magdalen on Easter morning. This is a formal proclamation on Jesus’ part - St Mary has been chosen as the one to announce the Resurrection to the Apostles, but it is also a very personal encounter. The scene has inspired numerous artists (one of my favourite paintings of it is Titian’s Noli Me Tangere). If we pause to think about it for a moment we come to see that the Resurrection of Jesus is a personal event for each one of us. In her encounter with the Risen Lord Mary’s life changed - for a second time. When she first met Jesus he healed her and exorcised her of seven demons. Now in the garden her life must change again, or more correctly, she must enter further into the transformed life Jesus offers her. She reaches out for him but he draws back - “Do not cling to me,” he tells her, “for I have not yet ascended to the Father”. What does this mean? Mary had been deeply concerned about him during the years of his ministry and during his passion. She had accompanied Our Lady and St John on the road to Calvary and stood beneath the cross. During the years of his ministry she was one of the holy women who looked after him and his disciples. Now the miracle of the Resurrection is revealed - Jesus is alive, and so, as was her custom, she reaches out to him to look after him, to console him, to render him the affection of her discipleship. But this was to be no longer -everything has changed: not for the worst, but for the best. Mary’s relationship with Jesus must also change; it must mature as she now sees his glory unveiled before her eyes. She cannot cling to the “old days”, a new life beckons; she must embrace it and receive from him the mission he is about to entrust to her. Christ will ascend to heaven and she, the Apostles and all the disciples must begin the great evangelisation. The relationship these first followers had with Jesus must change, for now they see him as he really is - the Son of God, and while before they struggled to believe it, here he is now, triumphant over death, living proof that everything he said is true. St Paul says in his letter when he was a child he spoke like a child but now that he is a man he must act like a man, so too in the disciples’ relationship with Jesus - in spiritual terms, they have passed from childhood to maturity: if they are to move forward they cannot cling to who they thought he was but embrace who he truly is. This is as true for us as it was for Mary and the first disciples. In this episode Jesus, then, speaks to us - at the moment of your baptism everything changed, we are told through the grace of the sacrament; at that moment a new life beckoned, not an earth-bound life but a grace-filled life, a life to be devoted to Christ, lived in his Heart and following in his footsteps, a life in which we play our part in the evangelisation of the world; a life of sanctification, one oriented towards the life to come.

I have often said that we are living in extraordinary times. In the West we are trying to cope with a militant secularisation which is even brimming over into persecution. Yet there has never been a time when the Church had such opportunities to preach the Gospel as now. We are told that the world is no more than a global village: with the advance of communications most of the people in the world can be reached in a short time. Blessed James Alberione, the founder of the Pauline Family, one of the saints of our Fraternity, recognised this and formed his spiritual children to take this tremendous opportunity and bring Christ and the Gospel to all the people of the earth. Pope Benedict is very much aware of such possibilities, of the power of the media, for example (and also its dangers). Pope John Paul II, seeing these possibilities also, and recognising the state of man at this present time, declared the New Evangelisation. Many within the Church will tell us Catholicism is finished, that we must begin to compromise with the world and embrace its values as the only way forward, yet the saints of our times preach a different message: convert the world to Christ; through their vigorous lives and counsel they have told us that we are about to enter into the one of the greatest periods of evangelisation the world has known. As modern men and women enter into a spiritual famine, the Church hears the urgings of the Holy Spirit and is pushing out into the deep, set on fire with Christ, and heralding in a new era or missionary activity.

Risen Christ,
Make all Things New!

The Resurrection

Pope John Paul II prays before the Shroud of Turin
Detail of the Shroud (right)

The 'Miracle of the Holy Fire'

Noli me tangere,
The Risen Jesus appears to St Mary magdalene

Blessed James Alberione,
Apostle of the Media

Fr John Hogan,
Father Director,
The Fraternity of St Genesius,
Easter Sunday,
12th April 2009