July 12,2020

“ For neither is there any god besides you who have the care for all,…. For your
might is the source of justice; your mastery over all things makes you lenient to
all. But trough you are master of might, you judge with clemency, and with much
lenience you govern us”. (Wisdom12:13,16,18)

This passage from Wisdom is one of my favorites in all Scripture. The Old
Testament author tells us how the power of God reveals who God is: how deeply
He loves us; how eagerly He forgives us when we repent; why we have reason to
hope in His mercy; and how our own acts of justice must always reflect His
clemency and love. The reading also shows why St. Augustine could later say so
truly for every Christian generation that, “our hearts are restless until they rest in
(God).” (Confessions, Book X, 167)

The passage from Wisdom also reminds us that God will not endure disbelief
forever. And when people who claim to know Him act in a foolhardy way —
ignoring His Commandments; compromising with evil; disregarding the needs of
the poor; forgetting their baptismal call to “make disciples of all nations” — God’s
love, like the love of any good Father, will take the form of His intervention to
teach, correct and renew His people by hard experience.

God always treats us with love. His mercy is everlasting. But His love and mercy
can sometimes seem to be formidable things — not for His sake, but for ours.
The last days of July offer us a good time to pray over these words from the Book
of Wisdom and their meaning for our own lives. If Christians have learned anything
from events in the public square over the last 18 months, it’s this: The age of
easy religious faith for people in our country is over.

Religious believers founded the United States. Our civil rights, and our public
ideals and institutions, are grounded in God as their guarantor. But across
American culture today — from our mass media to our courts — religious faith,
and especially Christians who take their faith seriously and try to live it, are
increasingly the target of criticism from groups who want no talk of God at all in
the vocabulary of our shared public life.

If we really believe that “there is no God besides you (Lord) who have the care of
us all,” then we can’t let that happen. The world of 2020 needs Catholic disciples.
It needs a new generation of missionaries to bring the world to Jesus Christ. And
that requires men and women who love God; love His Church; study and deepen
their Catholic faith; and then apply their faith to their personal lives and every
dimension of their public witness.

In an age when so much of the Church’s apostolic work depends on the laity, men
and women formed in the great moral and intellectual traditions of the Catholic
faith are especially vital. Laypeople on fire with the truth of Christ’s Church are the
vanguard of the Gospel in the modern world. Fr. Dan