Wednesday 23rd Week Year I
USCCB Administrative Committee
Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception
September 11th, 2024
9/11
All of us can remember where we were and what we were doing on that fateful day known forever as 9/11. It was during an Administrative Committee Meeting that the Pentagon was struck. I was the recently installed Bishop of Bridgeport, not far from Manhattan. Many members of my former diocese lost their lives that tragic day.
The giant American flag on the Knights Tower of this Basilica reminds us never to forget but rather to commemorate in our prayers those who died in the attacks and those who died trying to save lives. So too, let us remember in our prayers so many people who still bear the scars of that fateful day Remembering, let us draw a brief reflection on that day as illuminated by today’s Scripture readings.
Fragility
When St. Paul advised the Corinthians that “the world in its present form is passing away,” he could not have imagined an event like 9/11. But he can help us to come to terms with that event and many others that reveal how fragile and ephemeral is the world we’ve built for ourselves: its landmarks, its technology, its wealth . . . its certitudes.
After 9/11 there was a surge in church attendance and national unity. It didn’t last. As pastors, we know it is up to us to bear witness to that which is lasting, right in the heart of this passing world groaning for redemption. Put another way, we are to bear steadfast witness to the permanence of God’s love in our midst, and to do so in season and out of season. Or, as St. Bernard of Clairvaux urges us in today’s Office of Readings, “Let us take our stand on secure ground, leaning with all our strength on Christ, the most solid rock.”
Building a Better World
For in Christ, we have something to offer a world in travail. Indeed, the Lord has shown us a better way: “Blessed are you who are poor, the Kingdom of God is yours. Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied…” ‘Blessed are you who weep, blessed are you, the persecuted…’
Building a better world—protecting innocent human life, caring for our common home, overcoming divisions, defeating evil with good—this can come about, and only then partially, when we as a community of faith, journeying together, embrace the reversal of values that Jesus lays out for us in the Beatitudes, not only by his words but by his life. If we would be leaven in the lump of dough, we must in God’s grace strive to be ‘the Church of the Beatitudes’.
Magnificat
Every evening, we pray the Magnificat. In Mary’s hymn of praise we have a forecast of the Beatitudes: “He has cast down the mighty…lifted up the lowly…He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty…”
In this house of prayer dedicated to Mary Immaculate, let us ask her intercession: that Christ’s self-portrait, the Beatitudes, might be reflected more clearly in us and in those with whom and for whom we serve. May we indeed “live n this passing world” and contribute to its reconciliation and upbuilding, precisely because “our hearts are set on the world to come.”