The Cross: Our hope

(Dear Reader: A central sign of our Catholic faith is the cross. It is a prominent feature in Church architecture and in the Church’s liturgy, indeed in the Church’s life. What follows is my own meditation on the cross for the recent feast of the Exaltation of the Cross and how it connects with our daily lived experience.  Bishop Lucia)

A few years ago, the Christian Century magazine ran a short article about a North Carolina priest and his church. As part of their Holy Week observance, the parish placed three crosses in front of the church and draped them with black cloth. Shortly afterward, he got a phone call from the North Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce. The caller informed the priest: “We’ve been getting complaints about those crosses. … The tourists will not like them. … It will not be good for business. People come down here to get happy, not depressed.”

Now I don’t know about you, brothers and sisters, but it is no cross that is getting me depressed these days — school shootings, political violence, Congress and Parliaments fighting over praying, families being torn apart, the lack of civility and care for one another — now that is downright depressing! Actually, in my own prayer, I have been focusing on the cross as a means to lift us out of such madness and despair. That was the nub of my prayer late Wednesday afternoon in the Interfaith Chapel at LaGuardia Airport, waiting for a late flight to Syracuse after hearing the news of the shooting in Utah of Charlie Kirk. I sat in that space trying to make sense out of the senseless, thinking of the one “though He was in the form of God … emptied Himself … taking the form of a slave” (Phil 2:6-7).

A ‘fruitful heritage’ in Ordinary Time

By Lucia A. Silecchia

As September dawned, eyes turned to Rome with joy to celebrate the canonizations of two young men — Saints Pier Giorgio Frassati and Carlo Acutis. In a particular way, many hoped that the holy lives of these two new saints would have a special appeal to young people who would see in them examples of lives well and faithfully lived.

Merely a week later, September 14 marked the 50TH anniversary of the canonization of another young saint, Elizabeth Ann Seton. I dimly remember this event from my early childhood, and recall similar excitement that she would inspire a world hungry for good examples of faithful lives.

Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton was the first American-born saint to be canonized, a sign that our still-young nation can be the soil from which holy lives spring forth for the glory of God.