Preacher of Truth to the Whole World

 

Today, Saint Paul the Apostle parish and the Society of Missionary Priests (The Paulist Fathers) who have staffed it since their joint founding in 1858 celebrate their patronal feast day of the Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle.

On July 7, 1858, Servant of God Isaac Hecker, along with fellow former Redemptorist priests Augustine Hewit, George Deshon, and Francis Baker, founded the Society of Missionary Priests of Saint Paul the Apostle, known ever since as “The Paulist Fathers.” Three days later, they were assigned by Archbishop John Hughes to the pastoral care of a new west-side parish named for Saint Paul the Apostle. For almost 170 years, this parish - together with the Paulist Fathers’ life as a religious community in the Church and their wider missionary outreach - have been blessed by the patronage of Saint Paul the Apostle, the feast of whose Conversion we celebrate today.

That great event, monumentally portrayed by Lumen Martin Winter (photo) outside over the main entrance to the church, transformed Paul from an opponent and persecutor of the new Christian community into a disciple of Jesus and put him on an equal footing with the others to whom the Risen Christ had appeared. Now as then, that event highlights for us what it means to be converted to Christ, to become a disciple of Jesus, his witness in the world, and an apostle sent with mission to evangelize, to make disciples of all peoples.  Paul became what the beautiful floor mosaic at the entrance of the church's sanctuary calls “A Preacher of Truth in the whole world.” No wonder Isaac Hecker and his associates chose Paul as their patron!

To understand Paul and appreciate his impact, however, we must begin with the fact that Paul was, first and foremost, a devout Jew, well educated in the Mosaic Law, a Pharisee, that is, a member of the 1st-century group most zealous about religious observance. But he was also a Greek-speaking Jew, from what we call the Diaspora, that is, those living outside the land of Israel. He grew up in what is today Turkey, in a Greek city, and enjoyed the great privilege of Roman citizenship.

All this complexity was very important, because one of the great issues which confronted the apostolic Church was figuring out how Jews and Gentiles were connected in God’s plan for the salvation of the world through Jesus Christ – and how Jews and Gentiles should relate to one another within the one community of the Church. The way this issue was eventually resolved (thanks in no small part to Paul) helped transform what would otherwise have been a small Jewish sect into the biggest and longest-lasting multi-cultural institution in the world.

What Paul experienced when he met the Risen Lord on the way to Damascus was a revelation of God’s plan to include all people in the promises originally made to Abraham and his descendants and now being finally fulfilled in Jesus. The God who revealed himself to Paul in the person of Jesus was the same God whom Paul had always served so enthusiastically as a Jew. What changed was that now Paul recognized Jesus as the One, though whom all people are included in God’s plan of salvation.

And because Paul now understood that it was Jesus who ultimately made the difference, he also recognized that there need be no necessary conflict between Gentile culture and faith in Christ. For the pagan peoples of the Roman Empire, that was good news indeed. It’s easy to see why Paul’s mission was so successful among different types of people and why he appealed to Hecker as a model – Hecker who was so convinced that the Catholic Church was just what American culture needed. The world has changed a lot since Hecker’s time (not to mention Paul’s time), but the Church’s mission remains the same.

Paul had what Hecker so much wanted his Paulists to have, what Hecker called “zeal for souls.” Paul was not one of the original 12. He wasn’t there when Jesus said to his disciples: Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.  But he absorbed those words as surely as if they had been initially addressed to him – as we also must do.

In this era when so. much of religion suffers from being reduced to politics, our time calls for  renewed attention to an unambiguously religiously (rather than politically) formed understanding and experience of mission rooted in that ancient command:  that is to say, evangelizing (proclaiming the Gospel) to all (no exceptions or political priorities) incorporating them fully and visibly into the life of the Church (the continuation of Christ’s life and mission in the world) and living a truly transformed (grace-filled) way of life.

Isaac Hecker had an unwavering commitment to building the Catholic Church, as the extension of the Christ’s Incarnation, in what he (in his time) perceived to be the fertile soil of American society. That same commitment must continue to motivate us, augmented as it must now be by our realistic recognition that our American soil may be less fertile than was once imagined and that making it more so may itself be a crucial component of contemporary mission.