Special Mass for the Knights of Columbus
Santo Niño Shrine
August 26, 2024
Introduction
It is a special honor and a joy to join with you, Archbishop Palma, and our Worthy Supreme Knight, as well as his wife Vanessa and their daughters for this Mass – together with so many Knights of Columbus and their families. We are grateful for the hospitality of the Church in the Philippines and the warm welcome of the Knights of Columbus in the Philippines that we have encountered everywhere we have visited – Salamat!
Our sojourn brings us now, happily, to the Santo Niño Shrine and to visit as well the Magellan Cross. Allow me to reflect briefly on what this visit means to those of us who have come from afar but also what it means for Knights of Columbus throughout the world.
Santo Niño
In gazing up the image of Santo Niño, the Holy Child, we, your visitors, come face-to-face with a most precious treasure. Not only is it one of the oldest surviving religious artifacts in the Philippines – a sacred image that has outlasted the ravages of time and history – it is also the object of great and beautiful devotion – For in gazing upon this image, our hearts are stirred with love for the Eternal Son of God – the Word who became flesh and was born of the Virgin Mary.
Looking at the splendor of this image, we are reminded that the Incarnate Lord Jesus, even as a child, even in his smallness, was and is “the splendor of the Father” – “God from God, light from light, true God from true God.” Yet as we behold the face of child Jesus and the smallness of this venerable statue, our hearts are stirred to wonderment that the God of glory and majesty would draw so near to us, make himself so accessible to us, by becoming one of us.
As we gaze upon this image, the Magellan Cross cannot be very far from our mind’s eye. For “a Child is born, a Son is given,” the Son in whom the Father was well-pleased, for came into the world to suffer and die for our sins, to lay down his life for us, to give himself completely to the Father for the sake of our salvation. The image of the Holy Child, the Child whom Mary held in her arms with love beyond all telling – this Child was, as Simeon recognized, the long-awaited Messiah who would save his people from their sins.
Like a Child
Indeed, the Gospels and ancient Christian writers sometimes refer to the Christ as “the Child of God”, and in today’s Gospel Jesus shows his affectionate love for children. In doing so, Jesus teaches us that we cannot enter the Kingdom of God unless we become like little children.
Of course, Jesus doesn’t mean that you and I should be childish, immature. Rather, he means that our hearts should be pure, open, receptive to his Word proclaimed and to his love outpoured in the Sacraments. For our greatest calling, received in baptism, is to be the adopted children of God, the sons and daughters of the heavenly Father. We can acquire all kinds of titles in life – some of us can even be known as archbishops – but our greatest dignity and calling is to be adopted children of God, those whom the Father loves and cherishes beyond all measure because he sees and loves in us what he sees and loves in Christ.
And what the Father sees and loves in his Son and looks for in the depths of our hearts is something of Jesus’ simplicity, humility, meekness, his hunger and thirst for holiness, his purity of heart, his readiness to suffer even persecution. In a word, the Christ Child is the Christ of the Beatitudes and in living the Beatitudes we show we are truly children of God.
The Role of the Knights of Columbus
Blessed Michael McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus largely out of his concern for the spiritual well-being of the men of his parish. He wanted to ensure that they would not lose their faith, stop practicing it, and stray far from the Church and her teachings. In a word, he wanted them to live up to their baptismal calling as the adopted sons of the heavenly Father. These days, Father McGivney’s vision lives on in the Cor Initiative. “Cor”, as you know, is the Latin word for “heart” and the goal of Cor is to help Knights and indeed all Catholic men to encounter Christ through fraternal friendship – in the study of Scripture, in deepening one’s life of prayer, in appreciating more completely the Eucharist and sacraments, in discovering how better to live the vocation of marriage and family.
In a sense, the goal of Cor is to help men have hearts like that of Christ so that the Father may see and love in them what he sees and loves in his Son. This includes a readiness to be sent on mission, to engage in the Church’s mission of evangelization, to be Knights of the Eucharist, and to practice what St. John Paul II called, “a charity that evangelizes”.
In this way, we are true to the love we see on the face of Santo Niño and the still greater love to which the Cross of Magellan witnesses – that love in which we share most fully on earth in the Eucharist. Through the intercession of Our Lady of Guadalupe, St. Joseph, and Blessed Michael McGivney, may the Father see and love in us what he sees and loves in his Son, Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with him in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever! Amen!