In the scripture reading for the fifth Sunday of Easter, Jesus tells his disciples to keep his commandments, just as he had kept his Father’s commandments and remained in his love. He commands them to love one another as he has loved them. For there is no greater love than this, to give one’s life for one’s friends. He considers those who keep his commandments his friends.
The word love is most ubiquitous; it is the most common word that people hear. It is often the theme for songs, poems, books, letters, text messages and what-have-you. More than anything else it is a most noble sentiment. People learn to sacrifice for love. It gives people happiness and courage, to see beauty and remain positive even when in trouble. Often the heart sees what is invisible to the eye. As the cliché goes, love is a mystery; you never know where it will lead you. But as one pundit says, love is a fire. You do not know whether it will warm your hearth or burn your house.
Often, we associate love with filial love or love of relatives; or erotic love or love associated with sexual desire or attraction. But in today’s gospel, Christ is inviting us to share a different kind of love—divine love. It is the kind of love that is only possible if the spirit of God dwells in us. In which case, it is no longer the human being that loves but Christ who dwells in him.
Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta spent her life tending to the sick, the disabled and the most destitute, or the so-called dregs of society. She spent her life in sacrifice without asking for anything in return. St. Maximillian Kolbe offered his life in place of a Nazi concentration camp prisoner. This noble souls loved unconditionally, to the point of giving their own life for others just as what Christ did for humanity.
Christ is calling us ordinary mortals to do some impossible feat. Our human nature is inclined to self-preservation, selfishness, hatefulness and indifference. But as Christ said to his disciples, everything is possible with God. With Christ in us, we are capable of the most transcendent kind of love. We need not perform extraordinary feats to measure up to the love that Christ is commanding us to do. It is possible to attain this kind of love even in performing the most mundane of tasks, in doing the most ordinary deed in a most extraordinary way. The example of St. Therese of the Child Jesus inspires us to live each day with an unshakable confidence in God’s love.
“What matters in life,” she wrote in her autobiography entitled Story of a Soul, “is not great deeds, but great love.” St. Therese wrote once, ‘You know well enough that Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, nor even at their difficulty, but at the love with which we do them.” She lived and taught a spirituality of attending to everyone and everything well and with love.
This week, I am in Rome, Italy, for a pilgrimage that is about love—of God and of neighbor. I am here with my wife and many other Filipinos who walk the Neo-Catechumenal Way, an itinerary of faith and adult Christian formation.
As I have written in this column before, The Neocatechumenal Way began in Madrid, Spain in 1962 among the slum dwellers in Palomeras, Spain with Kiko Arguello and Carmen Hernandez. In 1968, 50 years ago, Kiko and Carmen moved to Rome to evangelize and establish communities in the eternal city and from here catechists were sent all over the world to invite Christians to walk this faith itinerary.
Since then, in the last five decades, the Neocatechumenal Way has expanded to more than 120 countries. Inspired from the catechumenate of the early Catholic Church, by which converts from paganism had to undergo some form of initiation before baptism, the Way post-baptismal formation to adults who are already members of the Church. It is an itinerary of Christian formation to discover once again our baptism. Presently, it runs more than 100 seminaries in many regions which has produced around 2,000 priests for the Church and is sending hundreds of “families in mission,” to live in many cities around the World in order to proclaim and be witnesses to the Gospel.
A Redemptoris Mater seminary was founded in the Philippine and its current rector is Fr. Paolo Benetton, an Italian priest. It has both Filipino and foreign seminarians, all of whom discovered their vocation through the Neocatechumenal Way. I tutor these seminarians in philosophy and I can attest to their passion to become servants of the Lord.
It was in 1975 that the Neocatechumenal Way reached the Philippines through a Spanish team composed of Fr. Miguel Suarez S.J., Gregorio Sacristan and Virginia Bacyens. The first parish that accepted the way in the Philippines was the Jesuit parish of Mary the Queen in Greenhill, San Juan. It was a Jesuit, Fr. Juan Andechaga S.J., parish priest at that time of Mary the Queen, which opened and accepted the way, Later on, Fr. Andechaga would himself become an itinerant priest catechizing communities in the Visayas. My wife and I walk in the second community of Mary the Queen and we are here in Rome with brothers and sisters from that community and other communities in the Philippines.
We are here for an encounter with Pope Francis in Tor Vergata, just outside Rome, this Saturday, May 5, where the Neocatechumenal Way will celebrate the 50th anniversary of its arrival in Rome. It was also in Tor Vergata, where the World Youth Day was celebrated in 2000 during the pontificate of Saint Pope John Paul II.
Some 150,000 people from around the world and from five continents will participate, including cardinals, bishops and other personalities. The meeting will also be a reason for thanksgiving for the love and fidelity of God in these years, Pope Francis will send 36 new missio ad gentes that, at the request of many other bishops, will evangelize in secularized areas or with little presence of the Church, in cities around the world.
Pope Francis will also send 20 communities from the parishes of Rome—which have completed this Christian initiation—to others in the periphery of the city whose parish priests have requested their help to call those who are far from the faith. The meeting, which will conclude with the singing of Te Deum as thanksgiving for these 50 years, will be led by the international team of the Neocatechumenal Way, Kiko Argüello, Fr. Mario Pezzi and Ascensión Romero, who recently joined the team after the death of Carmen last July 19, 2016.
Carmen will be remembered in a special way this Saturday, we are after all her catechumens. She was 85 years old when died at her family home in Madrid. Pope Francis described her life as one “marked by her love of Jesus and by a great missionary enthusiasm.” In a telegram to Kiko the pope expressed his spiritual closeness and affection to Hernandez’s family and all those who “appreciated her apostolic zeal,” saying “I give thanks to the Lord for the witness of this woman, animated by a sincere love for the church, who has spent her life in the announcement of the Good News in every place, as well as those far away, never forgetting the most marginalized people.” The pope encouraged “those who are part of the Neocatechumenal Way to keep her evangelizing eagerness alive, in an active communion with the bishops and priests, while exercising patience and mercy with all.”
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