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God is Love: Pope Benedict XVI’s First Encyclical Part 1 of 3: Introduction Homily Sunday, February 6, 2006 St. Joseph Parish, Detroit
I have something very important to discuss today: Pope Benedict XVI promulgated his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, God is Love. Yet today is Super Sunday, when the 40th Super Bowl will be played [seven] [five and a half] hours from now less than a mile from here as the crow flies. So what am I to do… Encyclical… Super Bowl…? I know many of you today are very excited about the game – I to enjoy football probably too much for my own good – so I guess my first message for this homily is this one: everyone calm down, it’s just a game. A game comes and goes, and next year we’ll argue about who will win the 41st Super Bowl. But what happens today at Mass comes from everlasting and stays for eternity, for after listening to the Word of God, the Word himself, who is Jesus Christ, will descend upon this altar in the Eucharist as the one sacrifice that saves us from our sins. Today you can renounce sin and embrace love, the decision is yours, and the results of that decision are of the kind which no one can ever take from you. Indeed, the gloom of sin and death, of despair and hatred, were brought into the world by original sin, and are amplified and magnified by our own actual sins. No message is more important, no message more powerful, no message more crucial for the men and women of our time than this: God came to Earth sent by the Father, he is the eternal Son Jesus Christ born of Mary the Virgin, he came to give us the Spirit of the Father and the Son, and he rose from the dead! In a word, God is love! No message is more urgent for our day than the message of the Pope’s encyclical: God is love! Today I wish to introduce the encyclical to you; and since it has two parts, next Sunday I will teach the content of part one, and part two on the last week of February. Any guests here today who cannot join us later will have to go to the Vatican’s web site and read this encyclical on your own, and I encourage you to read it, to relish it, to put it into practice in you lives. The message of the Encyclical is this: that “in a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence, [the Pope] wish[es] in [his] first Encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes upon us and which we in turn must share with others.”[1] The Pope gives us a couple examples among the countless saints of the Church starting with St. Martin of Tours. He says, “let us consider the saints, who exercised charity in an exemplary way. Our thoughts turn especially to Martin of Tours († 397), the soldier who became a monk and a bishop: he is almost like an icon, illustrating the irreplaceable value of the individual testimony to charity. At the gates of Amiens, Martin gave half of his cloak to a poor man: Jesus himself, that night, appeared to him in a dream wearing that cloak, confirming the permanent validity of the Gospel saying: ‘I was naked and you clothed me ... as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’ (Mt 25:36, 40).” He also holds up Mary, the Mother of God, as an example of charity (divine love), when she went to assist Elizabeth while both were pregnant. The list of saints could go on, saints transformed by God’s love. Will you, too, allow yourself to be transformed by God’s love? Will you repent confess your sins? Will you receive communion worthily and devoutly? Will you serve your neighbor in body and in soul? The root of the breakdown of families, of the abandonment of the practice of the faith, of the scandals of sin, of the devastation of greed, of the superficiality of our culture, of the addiction to television and to alcohol and to drugs, the mindless failures of chastity, of human trafficking, of disobedience, all boil down to one thing: we refused to love, we refused to love God, we refused to love our neighbor, and we have set ourselves up as our own Gods, obsessed with pleasing only ourselves. Pope Benedict scored a touchdown, one could say, in favor of the Catholic Church and against the powers of hell. Or we can see him as the skilled quarterback who planned the play and made it work, for when he could have wrote his first encyclical about any topic, he chose that of Divine Love. The enemy team, moreover, has no chance of winning this game against us, for if the love of God is for us, who can be against us? Truly I promise all of you: no one can defeat God, for sin cannot conquer God’s love, death cannot conquer life, hell cannot conquer heaven. It’s up to you to choose what team you want to play on in this Super Bowl of all Super Bowls, where what’s at steak is not just a trophy and prize money, but eternal life and God’s grace. We will continue discussing God’s love, by the light of Pope Benedict’s first Encyclical God is Love, in the upcoming weeks. Let it not be just a study for our intellects, but also constitute a transformation of our lives, so we can be apostles of God’s love.
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