Friday, 19th Week
Feast of St. Stephen of Hungary
Knights of Columbus Visit to the Philippines
August 16, 2024
The Big Tent
Sometimes we use the image of “the big tent” to describe an organization that brings together a broad spectrum of people, beliefs, and causes. Usually this term is applied to a political party – but as we know – politics is a rough game and often the tent isn’t as big as one might think.
The truly “big tent” is God’s love for his people. This is what we see in the reading from Ezekiel. God found his people destitute, wandering in trackless wastes. In his goodness, he “married” this people, took them to himself as a spouse marries his bride and loves her for better or for worse. The reality of God’s spousal love is mirrored, above all, in the Gospel where Jesus speaks of the life-long fidelity that spouse owe to one another, thus setting in place the foundation of the Church’s teaching on the indissolubility of Holy Matrimony. The marriage of husband and wife, “God’s invention” as one author calls it, is the sign of God’s faithful love for us his people, his covenant, indeed the new and eternal covenant sealed in the Blood of Christ.
Every Vocation
Within the “big tent” of God’s covenantal love, every person finds his or her vocation and the path to holiness and joy. St. Stephen of Hungary, whose feast day we celebrate today, found his unique vocation as the first king of Hungary. Baptized in the year 1000, he demonstrated how, even a very powerful person can rule in justice and love, and advance the cause of Christ and the mission of evangelization. In a sense, Stephen was “married” to his people whom he served as spouse and whose future he engendered.
Surely the vocation of marriage and family shines forth in our readings. To be sure, the family is the most fundamental cell of any healthy society. Stable marriages contribute greatly to the common good and we have a duty, as citizens and believers, to defend family life. Yet, the deeper reality is that God is indeed the author of marriage and family and he made it the prime analogue for his own love for his people, the people of the Old Covenant and the people of the New Covenant. In striving with God’s grace to mirror God’s covenantal love – amid all the challenges of life – married couples find the path to holiness.
Even though I am unmarried, I find my vocation in the same big tent. A priest is fruitful only he participates in a deep and personal way, in God’s spousal love for his people – only if he is married to the Church – and not an abstract Church, but the people to whom he is sent and to whom he is to minister in the Person of Christ.
Finally, it should be said that all the baptized find their vocation in God’s spousal love for his people – for God loves each of us so deeply that it can be described as marriage. It is within this “big tent” that all the baptized receive their call to holiness and their missionary mandate to bring the Gospel into the world. It is here that the Knights of Columbus finds its foundations, for our charity, unity, and fraternity has its origins in God’s spousal love for us. Blessed Michael and his successors didn’t “invent” these principles – they flowed from Christ’s love for his people the Church.
Conclusion
So in these days when the Supreme Knight and his family as well as yours truly, have the privilege of being with the family of the Knights of Columbus here in the Philippines, let us ask for the grace to be renewed, endlessly, in the love God has for us his people, and within “the big tent” of his love, find our path to holiness, apostolic fruitfulness, and joy. Vivat Jesus!