Happy Birthday to the Catholic Church

Once again it is the Feast of Pentecost, the anniversary of the birth of the Church that Jesus promised before His death, resurrection and ascension to the Father.


Today's Liturgy of the Word celebrates this monumental event first with a reading from Luke's Acts of the Apostles (2:1-11), in which he recounts what happened on that day sometime after Jesus' ascension to His Father when His promised Holy Spirit baptized Jesus' Apostles and first disciples with His fire and Spirit as John the Baptist had predicted three years earlier: "He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire" (Matthew 3:11b).


The Responsorial Psalm for this Feast exclaims with joy, "When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the earth. May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord rejoice in His works" (Pslam 104:30-31).


In the epistolary reading of St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (12:3-7, 12-13), tells the Church at Corinth that 'no one can say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit and that through the gifts of the Holy Spirit "to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good". The reading closes with the beginning of Paul's vision of Christ's universal Church as the Mystical Body of Christ: "For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body . . . and we were all made to drink of one Spirit."


Finally, in the gospel reading (John 20:19-23), John recalls Christ's first appearance to the Apostolic gathering on the evening of His day of resurrection. After appearing to them in the locked house where they were staying, he showed them His wounds of crucifixion, "He breathed on them and said to them, 'Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.'"


All of this is particularly poignant to my wife and me this year because we learned this past week that our daughter and her non-Catholic husband have reneged on their pre-marriage promise to have their children baptized and raised in the Catholic faith. After many prayers and much effort on our part to overcome their fears and prejudices throughout the Church's pre-baptismal processes, they confirmed indirectly, through our priest friend and our daughter's older sister, their decision not to baptize our beloved grandson.


Our priest friend, knowing the grief we are feeling, has asked us to have greater faith in the goodness of divine providence, to put aside our feelings of grief at our daughter's loss of the faith and our grandson's loss of the sacramentally engendered supernatural life in the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and to go on loving them as if nothing has happened. He's right of course, but right now it is so difficult to let go and to accept this as God's will.


Right now, all I can do is ask God's mercy while begging Jesus and His Holy Spirit, who guide and sanctify the whole Church, to inspire our daughter and her non-Catholic husband not to withhold the Holy Spirit's indwelling from their son's immortal soul. In fact, in the Spirit of Pentecost, I offer all my prayers, sufferings and good works for the benefit of all fallen Catholics as well as non-Catholics that they might discern God's will for them by following the Spirit's promptings to Christ's true Way, Truth and Life in the faith His teachings, which was born of the Holy Spirit on that first Pentecost Sunday.