9/30/2014

The Catholic Voice in Pro-Life



Annual Catholic Respect Life Gala
Diocese of Fort Worth
September 27, 2014


There are many voices in the pro-life universe. There are many distinct and important voices that speak for the good of human life. All of these are important and in need of respect, yet we are here tonight to speak and to listen to the particular voice that is the Catholic voice – a voice that during this past year I have personally become ever more responsible for articulating. Pope Francis told us recently ordained bishops last week to preach the Gospel – all of it!

The Catholic voice in the pro-life world views death not as the ultimate enemy – it understands that the status of the real enemy belongs to sin as authored by the prince of liars. The dignity of human life rests in its identity engendered in each person as being made in the image and likeness of God – a likeness that is to be revealed most fully when a human being freely acts in accord with his or her human vocation to love God and his neighbor. The ultimate end of the human person is to love God and our neighbor – the human being is always drawn into community with God and other human beings.

We as the Church have the responsibility today to proclaim this Gospel of the dignity of the human person in the midst of what St. John Paul II referred to as the culture of death. This culture is the intellectual and moral stance that so exalts the individual status of a human being, that it demands the resolution of society’s social problems by the killing of weaker human beings – for rape and domestic violence-it proposes abortion, for crime, it demands capital punishment, for limits in allocation of health care resources it proposes euthanasia and assisted suicide.

We must be very careful so as not to understand that at the heart of this culture is not the human and existential phenomenon of death; but rather at the heart of this culture is selfishness, it is sin. Sin – the willful refusal to love God and also to love my neighbor. It is sin – the great lie of the serpent in the garden; the arrogant boast of Lucifer – “I will not serve;” it is the cowardly abandonment of integrity of Adam, “the woman whom you put here with me – she gave me fruit from the tree, so I ate it;” the passive and arrogant mendacity of Cain – “Am I my brother’s keeper?;” and the cynical dishonesty of Pilate, “What is truth?” Sin, not death (its bitter fruit) is at the heart of this culture.

The Catholic response to this culture is never reactive – it is not primarily directed at the culture at all, it is directed at the persons most affected and attacked within the milieu of this culture – the weak, the unborn, their mothers and fathers, the terminally ill, the poor. Christ established us as His Church – not His culture. As His Church we are called to proclaim and to live His truth and His love – all of it – made manifest perfectly in the mystery of His Cross. As members of His Church, we are united with Christ and become truly the light of the world.

Such light recently shined forth when the Bishops of Texas, adamantly opposed to abortion as a direct assault on innocent human life and exercising our responsibility to teach authentically the Gospel (through the means of our conference) supported legal measures that respected the health and precious life of women by requiring that abortion facilities should meet the same rigorous standards of regulation as required by other ambulatory surgery centers. The opposition to these measures revealed that the health of women is not really a concern of abortion proponents.

We are reminded that in Christ we are the light of the world, not its heat. Light clarifies and helps all to see. Light drives away the darkness of fear, of hatred, of ignorance and of anguish. Christ tells us that we are called to be the Light of the World, that we might dispel fear, and anguish, and ignorance – each chief components of the culture of death.

We are the light of the world when we reflect Christ in our actions and in our words, when we are transparent and honest – in a word, truthful – so that He might shine through us. Yet, when we are not transparent – that is when we are not honest and merciful, permitting the love of God to shine through us in words and deeds, the Light becomes heat because it is turned inward upon ourselves and not outward in service to the weakest members of society, the unborn, the terminally ill, the chronically disabled. The Light becomes about us and not about the revelation of Jesus Christ that each of us is made in the image and likeness of God.

St. Paul writes to the Corinthians about just such an example of when light becomes heat. He writes about divisions within the community regarding who belongs to Paul and who belongs to Apollos. Paul reminds them strongly that they belong to Christ, and not to either of these men. Some in the Corinthian community were more concerned about the Church as a movement and means for a political agenda instead of about the work of love and the truth of the Gospel. They block the Light of Christ with this barrier of fear and insecurity and of sin, slandering each other with partial truths, instead of being transparent with love. This barrier causes heat, if you will, that creates divisions and foments discord and scandal among people of good will by employing an approach whereby the end justifies the means – a fundamental metric of immorality in the objective order.

As your bishop, I am deeply aware of my responsibility entrusted to me at my ordination and installation to speak the Catholic voice with clarity, resolve, and compassion. It is my responsibility to trust God’s Grace given to me to speak in this voice with avoidance of division and confusion.

One such area of confusion involves current Texas statutes governing end-of-life care. Current law contains definitions that could permit the withdrawal of basic care for vulnerable patients without notifying their proxy decision-makers or families. The Texas bishops, working through our conference, want to change this legislation.

Some voices in the arena of pro-life have misrepresented the Church’s position as favoring new legislation that would require the government to impose indefinite procedures on dying patients, even when such procedures would have no medical benefit and could be needlessly torturous. Such an approach reacts to one extreme that imposes the refusal or withdrawal of basic care by imposing a contrary extreme that demands burdensome procedures without medical benefit in the effort to prolong dying. Each extreme approach fails to respect the legitimate ethical judgment and decision-making of family members to be exercised prudentially on behalf of their incapacitated loved ones.

As your bishop I state that this reaction is not within the pale of orthodox Catholic teaching regarding legitimate care for the dying and terminally ill. Those voices that make claims to the contrary are misrepresenting the Church and causing division through fostering distrust of the integrity of the authentic pastoral teaching of the bishops in Texas as articulated through our state’s Catholic conference.

It is important for us as Catholics to be vigilant in our own examination of how we live our vocation in favor of life. When do our voices provide more heat than light? Where do we find the fruits of the Holy Spirit in the adherence of our position? If we are not honest and compassionate, we block and promote a barrier to the light that Christ shines on and through human life. We then can reduce the beautiful and mysterious truth about life to a political agenda that distorts the family and society into simply a group of self-interested individuals monitored by the government. The result is more heat than light; a furtherance of the violent values exhibited by the culture of death, and the abdication of our responsibility to our baptismal call – the call to preach the Gospel of Life – all of it.

9/11/2014

Homily for the Mass of the Holy Spirit

University of Dallas

Acts 2:1-11
John 14:15-16, 23b-26

Christ has called us by name at the start of this academic year to celebrate the Eucharist as instituted by Him at the Last Supper. Our Gospel reading, proclaimed in this celebration of the Eucharist, is taken from the Gospel of John, where the action represented occurs in the context of Christ’s Last Supper discourse whereby Jesus is teaching and instructing His disciples to remain in the way he has taught them – to remain in Him.

Christ promises an Advocate who will remain with them, with us, while Christ departs. The Advocate (parakletos) is the one who will remind them, intercede for them, and plead their case. It is a legal term; it means "lawyer," or as we used to say in my neighborhood “mouthpiece.” It is a term that connotes what a good defender would do for a client. So the disciples will not be lost when Jesus departs. Yet, what is this case and what is this needed defense that requires an advocate? The answers to these questions unfold in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles.

The events of Pentecost relayed in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles reveal God’s continued undoing of the effects of sin. In particular, it is the undoing of the sinful effects of Babel. There human beings sought to make themselves like God establishing their lives on their own autonomously selfish initiative and behaving as if God did not exist. The result was chaos and disorder from the confusion of speech – the fomenting of distrust, the systematizing of discord between and among human beings, resulting in violent injustice.

At Pentecost, the initiation of the Church’s life, it is the Divine initiative that compels the apostles to understand and to speak in the languages of the then known world. Each nation heard the Gospel preached by the apostles in their own particular vernacular. The understanding they receive comes from above and it involves the active and graced response of human beings. There is a divine condescension, and a human participation in God's activity of gathering into one; it is the blossoming of the flower of salvation from the Cross, the tree of life. As we read the prophesy that foreshadows this salvific event in the 45th chapter of the Book of Isaiah – "Let justice descend, you heavens, like dew from above, like gentle rain let the clouds drop it down; let the earth open and salvation bud forth." Or in the Vulgate, "Rorate Caeli desuper nubes pluant justum, aperiatur terra et germinet salvatorem."

That which humanity has previously inflicted upon itself as part of the chaotic result of the arrogant sin of Babel, the confusion of languages, is now redeemed by Christ’s victory over sin through the activity of the Holy Spirit in forming the Church. The unity of the Persons in love who pour out to each one all that each Divine person is, holds nothing back.

The Holy Spirit in animating the Church, unites each human person into the perfect love of the Divine persons of the Trinity. This is the authentic mission of the communion of the Church. So Pentecost is the righting of the wrongs of Babel – not simply forgiving the sins of Babel but rather redeeming them. In this we see the first mission entrusted to the Church as animated by the Holy Spirit: the drawing into the life of the Trinity in the unity that transcends distinction. So it is not humanly imposed uniformity based upon language, or culture, or any particular ideology; but rather our cooperation as the Church with the action of the Holy Spirit.

As then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote, "The Church does not begin, therefore, as a club; rather she begins catholic. She speaks on her first day in all languages, in the languages of the planet. She is first universal before she brought forth local churches. The universal church is not a federation of local churches but rather their mother. The universal Church gave birth to particular churches, and these can remain church only by continuously losing their particularity and passing into the whole."

The cause that the Advocate pleads is the mission of communion of the Church. The defense is against the return of the distrust, chaos, and violence of Babel. The Holy Spirit is the advocate that will not allow the chaos of Babel to return to human beings through their graced membership in Christ’s Church. Again as then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote, "Church is mankind being brought into the way of life of the Trinitarian God. For this reason she is not something that belongs to a group or a circle of friends. For this reason she cannot become a national Church or be identified with a race or a class. She must, if this is true, be Catholic in order to gather into one the children of God."

The same temptations of Babel remain in our fallen yet redeemed world of today. There are voices in education, politics, and the arts who reassert the arrogant claims of Babel as ideologies and programs that dehumanize persons by a systematized pretense that God does not exist. We are gathered here in this Eucharistic assembly to ask the Advocate again that we remain a stronger part of the Church’s mission through our educational endeavors; we seek the Advocate to protect us from the seduction of subverting the Church’s mission as our own selfish initiative – in the fields of our educational endeavors involving language, philosophy, theology, culture, literature, politics, and the arts. We pray that we be a part of Christ’s plan, not that He might be a part of our plan.

We have the guarantee of the defense of the Advocate who is given to us again in the same context in which He was first promised us by Christ in His Last Supper Discourse – the celebration of the Eucharist by which we share in Christ’s eternal sacrifice of redemption – the Eucharist – that makes all of us the Church.

9/02/2014

Homily for the Reception of Candidacy at Saint Mary’s Seminary

On August 24, 2014 I celebrated Mass and received the petitions for candidacy of the third year class of seminarians at St. Mary’s Seminary in Houston, Texas. Among these candidates, many of whom were my past students at Holy Trinity Seminary, is included Mr. Nghia Nguyen whom I hope to ordain for the Diocese of Fort Worth to the transitional Deaconate in the first part of 2015. It was also a special day for me personally because I spent my last 5 years of seminary formation (also 5 years as a faculty member) at St. Mary’s Seminary. Below is the text of my homily from this celebration.

+Bishop Michael F. Olson


Congratulations to Mr. Nghia Nguyen whom I formally received as
a candidate for priesthood for the Ft. Worth Diocese.

This year's candidacy class at St. Mary's Seminary in Houston.
I enjoyed celebrating Mass there with them all.



Homily for the Reception of Candidacy at Saint Mary’s Seminary
Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

Isaiah 22:19-23
Romans 11:33-36
Matthew 16:13-20

The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth possesses in its collection a painting by Nicolas Poussin. The painting depicts the very scene described in our Gospel reading from this Sunday; Christ entrusts the keys of the Kingdom to Peter. Interestingly enough, it is entitled The Sacrament of Ordination and is one of a series of seven paintings depicting the sacraments by Poussin. The artist presents this scene from the Gospel as representing Peter’s ordination by Christ. Honestly, upon initially viewing this beautiful work of art, I must state that I was puzzled over the choice of this passage of Scripture to present the Sacrament of Holy Orders. If I were able to draw or paint beyond stick figures, I would have selected the Call of the Apostles, or perhaps the Last Supper, or the Washing of Feet to represent Holy Orders. Not the entrusting of the keys of the Kingdom to Peter.

Yet, in a very profound way, this is what the Sacrament of Holy Orders brings about -- the bringing of order out of chaos. Just as God created the ordered Universe and all within it out of the primordial chaos of nothingness, and sin brought about disorder through abuse of all that is good, thus Christ restores order (beyond that of the original order of creation) sacramentally through the ministry of His priests in the pastoral care of His people -- as priests govern, teach, and sanctify.

The Rite for the reception of Candidacy is very simple. It seems to be so much of an understatement; it’s almost stark. There are two short and direct questions and an equally short declarative statement of reception made by the Bishop in the name of the Church. There is no Book of the Gospels; there is no Chrism; there is no imposition of hands. Yet, perhaps this simplicity is precisely the point.

The Rite is truly marked by the simplicity of faith; it is the faith required to hear the call and to say “yes.” It is the simplicity of faith that St. Paul reminds us comes from listening. The Rite is steeped in simplicity because our human condition encounters so many temptations to complicate the nature of our call, even to the point that a man can forget that he is here because he answered a call at Christ’s initiative, not because a man has undertaken a lifestyle choice of his own desires. Faith begins with listening to and for God, Who is incomprehensible.

In our second reading today, taken from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Paul abandons himself to the mystery of God, whose judgments are inscrutable and whose ways are unsearchable. While Paul is speaking particularly about the question of Israel’s destiny, his point is that only the truly wise and prepared are humble enough to acknowledge that they really do not know -- the “how,” the “why” and the “when” of God’s call to them. Paul faithfully trusts the One whom no one can comprehend. Thus, should our aspirants to candidacy (and each of us as well) believe that God is upright and will never reject us (His People, His Church) even when we cannot grasp the details of the entire picture. Perseverance is required and specifically sought from our aspirants in the Rite we celebrate in today’s Liturgy.

The first question seeks from the aspirant a declaration of resolute perseverance in preparation for ordination for ministry of the Church. The question specifically makes explicit the presupposition that the aspirant’s declaration is in response to Christ’s call to him. This presupposition is essential. It requires that a man has heard a call and has adequately discerned through faith and prayer that it is indeed the Lord who is calling him.

The second question seeks from the aspirant a declaration of resolute preparation for faithful and generous service to Christ and to His Church. The preparation does not simply involve external compliance to authority as delineated by a series of infantilizing imperatives. The preparation is of mind and spirit and involves intimately conversion of heart in loving one’s neighbor in the freedom of a disciple who knows himself, accepts himself, and gives of himself as one who is loved and redeemed by Christ. The response on the part of the aspirant does not declare that he is ready to complete a requisite course of study; it does not declare that he is always willing to please the whims of capricious power masked as authority. The response calls for a humble manifestation of faith in God, that all of this is mysteriously God’s work. Without the manifestation of authentic faith, the gift can be lost through a cloudy sense of entitlement.

In our first reading from Isaiah, we see that this is precisely what occurs to Shebna. He stops listening. He loses faith. He forgets that he has been entrusted with the keys of the Master’s Household; he stops letting the Master’s people into the Master’s House, which is the Master’s reason for so entrusting him with the keys. And at the time of crisis when the people most need to be brought into the security of the Master’s House, he refuses to do what he has been called to do, and instead builds for himself a majestic and expensive tomb. Perhaps this is a foreshadowing of the Scribes and Pharisees condemned as “whitened sepulchers” by Jesus later in Matthew’s Gospel, or even other more contemporary examples that might come to mind. The result is that the Lord thrusts Shebna from his office and instead entrusts the authority of office to Eliakim because Shebna has come to mistake the office as his entitlement.

In the Rite, it is the office of the Bishop to receive the declarations of candidacy. The statement of reception is short and to the point. It must not manifest entitlement to the declarations that are made freely. The reception is joyful; it is hopeful because through it the Church acknowledges gratefully the good work that God has both begun in these men, and that only He can bring to fulfillment. More so in this manner it is intended to manifest the fruit of listening -- of faith. The statement of reception is not made at the Church’s initiative; it is most certainly not made at the receiving bishop’s initiative no matter how insightful he might be; it is not made at the Seminary’s initiative no matter how trustworthy the program of formation might be. The statement of reception is the fruit of listening. It is made in the name of Christ with the same confident and humble declaration of faith in the mysterious workings of God as made by the aspirants, and not as the bitter fruit of self-serving arrogant judgment. The authentic authority entrusted to Peter to serve the Messiah’s House (that is, the Church) is the task of admitting the People of God into the Kingdom. This is carried on today through the sacramental ministry of priests. This provides order to God’s People and saves them from the chaos of the evil one.

Finally, it is important to note that in today’s Gospel passage from Matthew, Peter is addressed as “Simon bar Jonah.” The name “Simon” is derivative of the Hebrew word “shema” which means “to listen.” And “Jonah” is referent to the Old Testament prophet who precisely did not do that -- he refused to listen. The point is that the Church, and those who are entrusted with authoritative offices in service to Her, are called to listen first, and so to recognize that the authority is indeed entrusted to them and belongs more profoundly to Christ. It also means that conversion is a gradual endeavor that marks God's Kingdom. Patient perseverance must characterize our formation and pastoral ministry. The gift of rightly ordered authority by Christ to His Church underscores the need for rightly ordered servants who can only become so through the honest simplicity of faith. There is no lasting hope or legitimate charity without first entering through the door of faith. This simplicity of faith begins with listening. It then responds to the heard Word with perseverant service to those most in need. And those who are most in need are those to whom the Master sends us to save from the chaos of sin and selfishness and to admit them with His keys into His Kingdom and Household, the Church. Listen, have faith, be attentive.