The Holy Great-Martyr and Healer Panteleimon (286-305); Our Holy Father Clement the Wonderworker, Archbishop of Okhrid (910)
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2 Timothy 2:1-10; John 15:17-16:2
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
To be a faithful Catholic has never been easy. There are some of us, who, in the midst of the current anti-Christian attitudes of our secular society, may believe that there was once an ideal age in which to be a Christian. Perhaps we think that era was the fourth century when Roman persecution ended and the first great flowering of monasticism took place. But then there was the great heresy of Arianism that undermined the Church and challenged the orthodox and catholic faith. Perhaps we think the great age of Christianity was the Middle Ages -that great age of learning when monasteries dotted the landscape of Europe and all the western Church was united under the Pope. But wait, this was also the era of the Fourth Crusade in 1204 when Christians killed Christians at the Sack of Constantinople and the schism between East and West deepened. Perhaps we believe it to be the immediate post-war period of the 1950s in North America when the Catholic family and the family, in general, was secure with no widespread access to abortion, no debates over so-called gender fluidity, and no no-fault divorce. Yet, this was also the era of Soviet Communism in which our beloved Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church was brutally suppressed and became a church of new martyrs. In short, to be a faithful Christian brings with it struggles and at times great persecution in every age.
On the one hand, we might say there has never been an ideal Christian age since there is always suffering for the faith. But this would be perhaps too much of a worldly view. Our Lord would have us see every age as the ideal age in which to proclaim the Gospel since every age needs to hear the Good News and encounter Christ the Word of God. To be a member of the Body of Christ and to faithfully live our baptism means to serve Our Lord by living our faith openly and bringing to those around us the truth of the Gospel and therefore the truth about God and the human person and all the moral implications that truth carries with it. There will always be people who will hate the Church for this truth, but there will also always be those who yearn for that truth and the salvation it brings. Our Lord in today’s Gospel calls us “witnesses” because we are with Him in and through our baptism. In witnessing to this truth of Jesus Christ we witness to His self-sacrificial love -the very love that He commands us to share with one another and with the whole world so that our witness might be true.