I Have My Mission

Monday of the Thirty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time C-2

Entrance Antiphon Cf. Ps 85 (84):9 The Lord speaks of peace to his people and his holy ones and to those who turn to him.

Collect Stir up the will of your faithful, we pray, O Lord, that, striving more eagerly to bring your divine work to fruitful completion, they may receive in greater measure the healing remedies your kindness bestows. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Scripture today: Revelation 14:1-3, 4b-5; Psalm 24:1bc-2, 3-4ab, 5-6; Luke 21:1-4

When Jesus looked up he saw some wealthy people putting their offerings into the treasury and he noticed a poor widow putting in two small coins. He said, “I tell you truly, this poor widow put in more than all the rest; for those others have all made offerings from their surplus wealth, but she, from her poverty, has offered her whole livelihood.” (Luke 21:1-4)

I Have My Mission Recently there was a video footage released on the media outlets showing a Russian journalist being set upon by two assailants. He was suddenly attacked, felled to the ground, and then kicked and stamped upon till he was near death. Something similar happened to the Catholic Church in England during and following the reign of Elizabeth I. For nearly two hundred and fifty years, England choked the life of the Catholic community till by, say, 1790, the Catholic Church in England had a fraction of its numbers and strength from what it had been at the beginning of the sixteenth century. That is not to speak of the quality of many of its members. Bishop Richard Challoner, Vicar Apostolic of the London district at the time of Wesley, was a grand and saintly Bishop, but there is no doubt that by the time of his death (1781) the Catholic community was well and truly weak and on its knees in England. Within seventy years all had changed and the Catholic Church in England was in a tremendous resurgence. What caused this? Many put it down primarily to the spectacular entry into the Church of Anglicanism’s leading theological light at the time, John Henry Newman, and those influenced by him. But there was another factor, perhaps much more important. Challoner, the man who held the candle alight at the lowest point, predicted that a new people would come. A new people did come, but from a quarter that Challoner would not have expected — the Irish poor. The Irish poor poured into England following their catastrophes and famines, and this gradually changed the demography of religion in England (and Scotland). The Irish poor treasured their Catholic faith. Across the channel in the United States a strident Catholic voice was being heard — the convert Orestes Brownson. In a book review written in 1849, Brownson wrote that “If, then, we mark a decided improvement in the tone and feelings of Catholics in England and in this country during the last half-century, let us, who are of the old English stock, not forget to give the honour where, under God, it is due,- to the piety, the zeal, and the steadfastness of the poor Irish emigrants.”

I mention all this as an example of a general point arising from today’s Gospel passage (Luke 21:1-4). Our Lord is seated in the Temple, and he is watching those putting money into the Treasury. This included the rich. But then our Lord saw a poor widow approach the Treasury, and put in a negligible two tiny coins. Let us imagine her! Unnoticed, a widow — and therefore presumably without a secure income — clutching her two coins. Our Lord tells his disciples that those two coins were all she had to live on, but she put them into the Treasury. Our Lord tells them that in actual fact she put in more than all the others because she put in all she had to live on, whereas they put in what they had left over. That should tell us what counts before God. What counts in the working out of his Providence is that we give all to him, whether we are people of talent or not. Newman and his earnest followers did indeed give all they had to God, and Newman is the first to be beatified following the martyrs of the English Reformation and its aftermath. But Brownson had a very perceptive point when he brought forward the Irish poor as a factor in the flourishing of the Catholic Church in England and the United States following the long penal period in England. Not all the Irish poor, by any means, treasured and lived their Catholic faith — but a great many did. They were like the poor widow of our Gospel passage, who, having little talent and opportunity, put in for God all they had. They were not afraid to practise their Catholic faith, which meant the Mass, their beads, invoking the saints, and venerating sacred images and relics. They were a vast concourse, very many of whom were, we might say, poor widows of today’s Gospel. All this is to say that every single person counts in the plan and the Providence of God. No matter how much we might be a “nobody,” there are no “nobodies” in the sight of God. Each, no matter how obscure and unnoticed, has his mission in life. That mission is irreplaceable.

In his posthumously published Meditations and Devotions, Blessed John Henry Newman wrote: “God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission--I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. Somehow I am necessary for His purposes, as necessary in my place as an Archangel in his--if indeed, I fail, He can raise another, as He could make the stones children of Abraham. Yet I have a part in this great work: I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling.” His words apply to all, including the widow.

(E.J.Tyler)

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