Rev. Mr. Roger J. Landry
Pontifical North American College
Holy Hour for 1999-2000 Orientation Team
May 11, 1999
1 Cor 13; Mt 25:31-46
1Cor. 13:1 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body to the torturers, but do not have love, I gain nothing. 4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never ends. … 12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
This orientation that you are getting ready to run is a preparation for another, much more important orientation in which you yourselves will be New Men once again. For that orientation, you will take a trip far longer than from JFK to Fiumicino. The Knights of Columbus will probably not be there to wish you Buon Viaggio. You definitely won’t be able to take any luggage with you. And rather than being greeted by Monsignor Dolan and members of the orientation team, you will be encounter face-to-face Him whom we now behold under a veil in this monstrance. He will orient you either to His right or to His left. I’d suggest for your own sakes that you now start leaning toward the right…! If you’re lucky enough to end up on his right side, he’ll then turn to you and address you, in these or similar words.
“Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was lost and you showed me the way to my room, I was hungry and you opened the lounge for me, I was exhausted and you transported my luggage and trunks, I was cranky with fatigue and you were patient with me, I had forgotten that other seminarian’s name — again — and you casually worked it into conversation so I wouldn’t be embarrassed.” Then you and others will reply, ‘Lord, when was it that we did these things? And the king will answer you, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of my brethren, you did it to me.’” Your fertile imaginations can finish the rest of the story.
I am now a veteran of four NAC orientations, the first when I was a New Man, the second when I was on the orientation team, and the third and fourth while I happened to be around giving Scavi tours, helping out with computers, etc. These last three years in particular have shown me the extraordinary sacrifices and lengths members of the orientation team will go through to help out the New Men. The focus is all on the New Men, praying for them, learning their names and dioceses, making sure they’ve got everything they need, and so on. And, in many ways, this is as it should be. But I would like to spend a little time meditating this afternoon, rather, on two other people. First, on the New Man, literally the New Adam, whom you are serving in others; and then on You, whom that New Adam is continuing to orient through this good work you’re already doing and intend to continue to do.
“Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, you do to me.” So Jesus said to the disciples in eschatological discourse, and so he says to you today. We’ll tackle the objects of each clause of our Lord’s statement independently. First, “least of brothers.” How easy it is to see the New Men from this perspective! They’re coming here not having any idea what to expect, low-men on the totem pole, in many ways extraordinarily dependent, at least at the beginning, on your guidance. If seminarians as a whole are the bottom rung of the Church lower-archy, first theologians, New Men, can sometimes feel that they’re the naval lint on the mystical body of Christ, with all of the obligations of a cleric, but none of the rights — and even few of the rights of the laity. And this is before they get pummelled in the Spaghetti Bowl…
But you will welcome them with the term of brother, brother in Christ, and try to live up to it. I’ll never forget the last line of Msgr. Yarrish’s homily during the Mass on the night of the 1995 Orientation Banquet. He was speaking not only on behalf of the orientation team, but the faculty as well. Addressing the New Men, he said, “We call you brothers and we pray that we will be worthy enough to have you accept us as your brothers.” I couldn’t believe I was hearing that from a faculty member. Imagine. While I was trying so hard to make friends and fit in, the faculty and the orientation staff were praying that they would be accounted worthy by us of the term brother. They more than earned that title.
The second clause. Jesus tells us that whatever we do to them, the least of our brothers, we do to him personally. You will indeed be welcoming Jesus this August in the disoriented disguise of each New Man. None of us is worthy for such a task. None of us. Yet God can make us worthy. There will doubtless be times when seeing Jesus in these new men will be difficult. Just like us, some will have idiosyncrasies, bad habits, and imperfections. Perhaps, on these occasions, it might help to remember not only Matthew 25 and this statement of the Lord, but the fact that most of these New Men — dare we hope all of them? — will one day say, as all of us hope to as well, “this is my body,” “I absolve you from all your sins”; they, perhaps with the same characteristic flaws they had as New Men, will literally act in the person of Christ. One — even the most difficult to like of the lot — may be that very alter Christus, other Christ, who hears your deathbed confession and gives you as viaticum the Body of Christ whom he made present that morning through the power of the Holy Spirit. The Cure D’Ars once said in a catechesis: “If I were to meet together a priest and an angel, I would great the priest first. The Angel is merely the friend of God, but the priest takes God’s place.” Considering that most of the new men who are arriving probably do indeed have destiny of ordination as a priest, try to welcome them with the same fervor that Jean-Vianney would.
But this orientation is not just about the new men. It’s not just about welcoming Christ. It’s at least as much about you. God will use this time to help you grow in true fraternal love. True Christian love is more than a feeling. It is a true self-giving, but a self-giving in which the giver receives so much more than he gives. This type of true sacrificial love, however, takes practice. And Orientation is great practice. What a great opportunity it was for me to be a member of the 1996 orientation team, because it allowed me, first, to get know my classmates so much better and learn to love them more, and, second, to have the chance to grow in the love of the Lord through service to the New Men. I pray it will be the same for you.
And love is what it’s all about, as St. Paul describes in the letter from the Corinthians. The New Men probably will already know that the NAC can churn out preachers who speak in the tongues of mortals and angels. They probably already are aware that some NACers are so smart that they at least seem to understand all mysteries and have all knowledge. They’ve doubtless heard of some NACers with great, great faith, the faith to move mountains. (And those who haven’t read Brian Murphy’sThe New Men! will see those qualities in you as soon as they arrive!) But as the Corinthians heard, none of these these things amounts to anything without love. To grow in love, we need God’s help and he’s giving you this time of Orientation as a concentrated course. Thank him for it. It is excellent preparation for that final exam that will occur when we behold Jesus without the monstrance.
As we pray in front of him now, let us ask him to use this time to help us grow in love, to be set ablaze with love for Him and for these new men, whom He not only died for, but most of whom he is calling to share in his work of saving the world. We pray for all their intentions and needs. But we also pray for all the members of the NAC, that we may grow in the virtue of love which will be the only thing that will make the orientation successful, for the New Men, and for us Old Men. As an examination and indication of how much help we need, we can finish by returning to St. Paul’s list of the qualities of love. Love shows itself in the following ways: in patience, kindness, lack of envy, the lack of arrogance, the lack of rudeness, not insisting on our own way, not being irritable or resentful, bearing all things, and rejoicing, not in wrongdoing, but in the truth. If we’re coming up short on any of these, we can ask our Lord, who has each of these qualities in abundance, to give them to us, beginning here and now during this holy hour.
God bless you and the work you’re doing!