My fervent hope and prayer is that you, my Grandchildren, receive...from your parents, our family, us grandparents...our Catholic faith in its integrity, including four key foundations.
Eucharist, Sacramental and Liturgical Life.
Catholic faith and life is a full package: it is a dense, profound "gestalt" or "interior form" integrating in symphonic unity a universe of meaning: belief, prayer, personal and social morality, a heritage of beauty and holiness. Our faith is not a buffet or cafeteria in which you can choose some parts and reject others. It is true that some parts may make more sense to you than others; some are more important; some may even change with time. But it is nevertheless a unity, a harmony, a symphonic integrity that demands to be embraced in its totality.
Pride of place goes to the Eucharist in which we directly, body and heart and intellect and will and soul, unite ourselves with Christ and others in Him. Love for Christ in the Eucharist is THE distinguishing mark of the Catholic. I hope that you would NEVER miss Sunday mass. Not even tolerate the thought of missing it. Of course there are times when you cannot make it: eg. you have no car, your leg is broken, the Church is 15 miles away, over a mountain and through a river. (LOL!)
Sunday mass is, of course, the bare minimum. It would be the equivalent of eating one good meal a week; or taking a shower one day a week whether you need it or not. Hopefully, you are every day in a prayer routine, reading the mass scriptures, finding opportunities for daily mass or adoration, confession, and the entire sacramental life in which Christ comes to us directly.
Intimacy with Jesus Christ
Our Catholic faith is a moral code, a system of belief, a way of prayer and worship...but it is much more. At its core, it is: intimacy, encounter, engagement with the person of Jesus Christ. He is your best friend and brother, your Lord and Savior, your protector and provider, you God even as he is man. It is the person of Jesus who radiates into our personal and social lives, our intellectual beliefs, our style and manner, our prayer and holiness, all that is True and Good and Beautiful in our lives.
So many of my generation were moralized, dogmatized, sacramentalized but never really encountered Jesus our Lord personally. Eventually they rejected their Catholic faith. They never really engaged it in the first place.
Just 50 years ago, in 1973, your Grandmother and I were blessed with a deepening, a clarifying of our faith in a Cursillo weekend retreat in which we really met Jesus personally and than involvement in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal where we experienced the direct work and presence of the Holy Spirit. This immensely enriched our Catholic faith. It also gave us a fierce sense of communion with Evangelicals and Pentecostals who shared this reality.
Our very first and foremost hope for you is that you draw close to the Merciful Heart of Jesus and come closer to him every day of your life.
Chastity, Marriage, Vocation
Our most precious, sacred physical-emotional gift is our sexuality as man or woman: our gendered ability to give of ourselves, in spousal communion open to life, in family or the virginal-celibate life of the religious and priest. This means that we reserve our sexuality for our spouse or our vowed, chaste life. This Catholic understanding of marriage and family has been under attack now for over 50 years since the sexual revolution of the 1960s. It is the inner core of our life: loyalty to our marriage or vow. May you always cherish your masculinity and femininity as iconic of God and your body as a Temple of the Holy Spirit.
Closeness to the Poor and Suffering
From all the saints we learn that those who are afflicted are the special presence of Christ for us. To be close to them is a singular blessing. While the bourgeois aspires to rise up the social scale to a position of comfort, status and privilege, the Catholic yearns to descend to be close to those who suffer. This can take many forms of course. Wherever you are, even at the top levels of society, there are those afflicted. Often emotional and spiritual anxiety and despair are worse than physical deprivations. The people of Haiti are financially destitute but spiritually strong. May your political thinking always consider the poor, although not in an ideological way. But may you be always sensitive to those in your own world who are afflicted. And may you respond with the heart of Christ.
Thank you for reading this!
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