Loving Others Enough to Give Fraternal Correction, 19th Wednesday (II), August 12, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Saint Jane Frances de Chantal
August 12, 2020
Ezek 9:1-7.10:18-22, Ps 113, Mt 18:15-20

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Jesus had come to found a family, to bring us through the communion of saints somehow, mysteriously, according to our condition as creatures, into the communion of the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. During the Last Supper he prayed repeatedly that we might be one as the Father and He are one, so that the world might believe that the Father sent the Son and loves us like he loves the Son (Jn 17). Jesus’ plan is always for unity, for communion, for a love that binds. At the end of today’s Gospel Jesus speaks about the power of that unity with Him and with others. He tells us whenever just two or three gather in his name, he’ll be present in the midst. When we pray in his name to the Father, the Father is guaranteed to hear it. When we together with the whole Church in his name bind something on earth it will be bound in heaven, and when we loose something on earth in his name, it will be loosed in heaven. In order for this to occur, we need to do so, he tells us, “in his name,” which in the Biblical understanding of name means in his person, in total communion with him, asking for what he himself could and would ask for. We can specify it a little by remembering his names, “Emmanuel,” “Jesus” and “Christ.” To pray in Jesus’ name means to pray conscious of the fact that God is with us, that he is with us precisely to save us, and through that salvation he seeks to make us “little Christs,” anointed by the same Spirit who anointed him. God is with us to unite us, to save us from rupture and division, to help us to follow him and to become his icon in the middle of the world carrying out God’s plan to restore and unite all things in Christ. The devil’s plan, on the other hand, is always to divide. The word diabolos in Greek signifies one who attempts to throw off course. The consequences of sin are always a triple division, a division from God, a division from others, and a division within ourselves. The devil’s work is to get us to try to make a name for ourselves, rather than hallow and pray in God’s name. He wants to frustrate God’s plan of salvation and to get his to live according to the flesh rather than according to the Holy Spirit.
• What happens when we’ve succumbed to the temptations of the great Divider and experienced this division he seeks to provoke? We need conversion. Jesus, greater than Jonah, came to call us to conversion. His first public words were, “Repent and believe.” He called us to pluck out eyes and cut off body parts if they led us to sin. He corrected St. Peter and called him “Satan,” when he was trying to oppose Jesus’ messianic and salvific mission. He repeatedly called the Scribes and the Pharisees to let go of their false interpretations of the law. He called all of us to a higher set of standards that the most righteous Jews and Gentiles, to become Good Samaritans, to wash the feet of others, to care for the poor and needy, to love even our enemies. But that was just the supreme expression of God’s lovingly calling us to conversion. Throughout the Old Testament, God sent his prophets — like we see with Ezekiel in today’s first reading — to call us to repentance, to give us another chance, to lift us up out of our pigsties, and to be bathed in the mercy of God’s covenant. Just as much as he sent Moses to free the Jews from physical slavery in Egypt, he sent his prophets to free us from self-imposed moral slavery. He himself came and sent out the Church to continue that mission of holiness.
• And so today in the Gospel he has us focus on a very important part of the Church’s mission, of our mission as Jesus’ disciples and apostles, what Christian tradition has called Fraternal Correction. It’s key for us to grasp Jesus isn’t giving this as “good advice” but as a series of imperatives. He commands us to do fraternal correction, so important is it within his saving plans. Today we can ponder the steps he gives us and why each is important.
• The first step involves a one on one encounter. Jesus says, “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother.” Notice that Jesus says, “If your brother sins against you.” He’s telling us if we’ve been hurt by a brother, he wants us not to sit in the corner stewing and sulking as the aggrieved party, but to take the initiative to let the other know the way he has sinned and provide an occasion for reconciliation and restoration of unity. Jesus doesn’t command us, “Wait until your brother comes to his senses, repents and crawls back humiliated to implore your mercy.” He wants us to make the move. This is, of course, what God has done for us in Christ. Even though we sinned against him, he took the initiative in coming to bring about a reconciliation. Do we love our wayward brother or sister enough to make such an intervention? We’re presently living in an age in which some people think that the greatest commandment is to be “nice,” to “live and let live,” to be “tolerant” of others’ sins, and never to confront someone or risk making them feel unhappy. We live in an age in which cowardice in failing to try to help someone correct a bad habit is considered “not disturbing the peace,” forgetting that we’ll never have peace as long as someone is dividing himself from God, us, and within himself. We’ve got to overcome any aversion we have to conflict and take the risk.
• We can say two other things here. First, if we are the party who has wronged the other, then Jesus presumes that we would go to our brother one-on-one and confess our fault and beg for forgiveness and reconciliation. We shouldn’t always wait for the aggrieved to make the move! Part of repentance is saying sorry. Second, Jesus presumes that if we’re going to our brother, we have already followed the advice he gave us earlier in the Sermon on the Mount: “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove that splinter from your eye,’ while the wooden beam is in your eye? You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye.” Jesus wants us going to correct our brother out of charity not in order to make ourselves feel better by lifting ourselves up by stepping on them. He wants us not to criticize them for a fault we see in ourselves, but, first to work on our own conversion before we go to call others to conversion. Sometimes removing the plank doesn’t mean totally overcoming the bad habit, but, minimally, recognizing we have it. If we’re in that circumstance, we can say to our brother that we’re guilty of the same fault, which has made us even more sensitive as to how it can harm both the doer and others. What we can’t do is to deflect the attention for correcting ourselves by correcting others, for that never really works on either end.
• Jesus tells us clearly that such a one-on-one intervention may not always work. We may not “win over our brother” to unity. He may remain divided. Jesus doesn’t tell us that we can then wipe our hands of the situation and say, “Well, I tried…” No, winning our brother back to communion is so important that Jesus then turns to a second step: “If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you” to make the same correction. Jesus doesn’t want us spreading it to everyone, ruining our brother’s reputation, but he recognizes that sometimes the person, out of defensiveness, pride or weakness, won’t change at just one person’s word, but may change if two or three people he or she respects comes, because then it might seem so personal. This is what normally happens in an “intervention,” like with addicts, when several people the person respects convene to convince the person that he has a problem and out of love want to help him get help. The person often doesn’t like to hear it, but he recognizes that the people in the room love him and he grasps that he can’t remain in denial about his problem. We need to be willing to do this when others are addicted to serious sins as well.
• But Jesus prepares us not to quit even if the second step fails. Love for bringing our erring brother or sister back to communion leads us to the third step: “If he refuses to listen to them, tell the Church.” We bring it to the leaders of the community to ask for their assistance, hoping that our brother will recognize it’s serious if representatives of the whole community come to them. It’s also a direct request for the prayers of the whole community, including those in charge, who can speak with God’s authority about the seriousness of the sinful path someone is on.
• If the person refuses to correct even at the assistance of the leaders and members of the Church, if the person thinks he knows even better than the Church and the Holy Spirit working through the clergy and all the faith, Jesus gives us a fourth step: “If he refuses to listen even to the Church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector.” Jesus tells us to recognize that they’re not in communion, just as the Gentiles and tax-collectors were not in communion with the Jews, and treat them accordingly, so that they may know they’re out of communion. But treating them like a Gentile and tax-collector doesn’t mean writing them off. Jesus, after all, was a “friend of tax collectors and sinners” and sought to bring the light to all the Gentiles. To treat them in such a way means acknowledging clearly they’re not living as a member of the community, while at the same time insistently praying for their conversion and the overcoming of their obstinacy.
• And these points about giving fraternal correction also apply to receiving it. When we err, it’s a great grace when others, in the name of the Lord, come to us one-on-one to speak about it. They may be slightly off in the correction, they may not do it with the best possible words, they may be guilty of the same bad habit, but if they take the risk to come to call us to conversion, we should receive it with gratitude and humility. These are the people who really love us. This will often happen through superiors, but it should also happen from our friends and peers, and it should also happen to superiors, out of humility, when they need it. It’s a basic part of the Christian life.
• Someone who shows us how to live this well is Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, whose memorial the Church celebrates today. She was the daughter of the President of her region of France and was married at the age of 20 to a baron in the late 1592. She had 7 kids in 8 years, though she needed to mourn the death of three of them soon after childbirth. When he was 28, her husband was killed in a freak hunting accident by a friend, which devastated her. But in her grief she turned like a child toward God. She begged him to send her someone to guide her and God allowed her in a vision to see the person who he would send to be her spiritual director. She had never seen the person before but a couple of years later, at the invitation of her father, she returned to her hometown to hear the celebrated preacher and bishop of Geneva, the future St. Francis de Sales. She recognized him as the one in her dream, dressed exactly as God had shown her. He took her on as a directee, helping her grow in faith and piety, dealing with the situation of living with her difficult father-in-law, advising her about raising her kids and more. In spiritual direction he gave her plenty of fraternal corrections out of love, doing so — as he always sought — with tenderness and meekness, putting into practice his famous aphorism that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. From him she learned how to give fraternal correction in a truly maternal way, one that builds others up through warm love, helping them to live up to the standards Christ sets. In her we can see the importance of spiritual direction, and the fraternal correction integral to it, because she not only had St. Francis de Sales, but after he died, St. Vincent de Paul, to guide her soul to sanctity. We also see in her the importance of coming together with others in the name of the Lord in order to help us live a holy life. With St. Francis, St. Jane founded the Order of the Visitation where she would, as a childlike daughter of God, spiritually mother many others on the road to the Kingdom. There are two distinctive things I can point out today. First is that it was designed to be modeled on the mystery of the Visitation, just like this convent and apostolate of the Sisters of Life, going out to others like Mary to care for them in their need. And that’s what they did for the first eight years of their existence, until there were too many objections in the day to women getting into the difficult and occasionally dangerous work of ministering to the poor, the sick, and those who might take advantage of them. St. Francis de Sales then reluctantly had them enter a cloister, like all of the other female religious orders of the time. The other thing is that St. Francis founded them with an aim to receive women into religious life who wouldn’t be able to get into other Congregations because of age or poor health. Today many great religious communities — just like many Dioceses, including my own, used to — have as part of their rules something I do not believe comes from God, that if a woman is older than 30, or 35, or has some illness, or wasn’t born of married parents, etc., they’re not able even to apply to that Institute, as if God could never call anyone to their community who was a month, or a year, or a decade older, or who was ill, or whose parents had sinned. There’s no question that age can, or illness, or some family of origin issues make it harder is to adapt to religious life. There’s no doubt that communities can’t have a special postulancy or novitiate in the infirmary with sick sisters. But there’s no doubt that God does call older women (like St. Jane!), or sickly women (like so many saints we cover over the course of the year!) to serve him in religious life and the Visitation Nuns have always been open to receive the spiritually childlike applicants in Christ’s name as if they were receiving Him. Part of building a culture of life is that we accept persons as infinitely loved by God, we see in them great potential, and we help them fulfill their vocations, and it’s contrary to a culture of life when those directing religious life or running Dioceses reject out of hand those who don’t meet their human criteria, as if God would never call somebody outside of their criteria.
• Wherever two or three are gathered in Jesus’ name, he promises to be among us. Today we’ve gathered in his name and he comes in the continuation of the Last Supper to try to fulfill his prayer to the Father than we might all be one. By entering into a Holy Communion with Him, he seeks to make us one Body, one Spirit with each other. Let us ask him to fill us with so great a desire for this unity that we may seek to do all things in his name with others and go out to bring others into this same life-saving, holy communion, so that, marked with the Thau on our forehead through the sign of the Cross in baptism, we may in fact fully convert, and like St. Jane, St. Francis, and St. Vincent de Paul, come to help others come to be with us on the path of conversion and holiness until that place where everyone will be gathered in God’s name forever.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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