Address to Springtime of Faith Conference
Saturday, November 4, 2000

Most Reverend Edward J. Slattery
Bishop of Tulsa
Copyright. 2000, the Diocese of Tulsa

Twenty-one years on the Chair of Peter, and still, John Paul II breaks every rule!

Just when the journalists and the pope watchers of the world think they have the man figured out, His Holiness does them one better, exceeding their expectations and opening up new dimensions for the Church in the modern world.

It’s not just a matter that most world leaders his age are already writing their memoirs of things long ago and half-remembered. Rather it is that despite his physical limitations and the loss of his youthful energy, Pope John Paul II continues to do the unexpected, opening new initiatives for the Church of Christ in the third millennium.

Look, for example, at the travels of this "Pilgrim Pope." Journalists who were caught off-guard, but not really surprised by the Pope’s desire to visit Poland after his election as Vicar of Christ, would never have expected that a visit home would be the first of 87 trips to almost 125 countries. Now journalists expect the Pope to travel; they tick off the names of those countries where he has yet to make a pastoral visit.

It all seems rather ordinary, and so another itinerary published by the Vatican Press Office seems somehow routine. But as soon as the world grew comfortable with the idea of a Pope-at-home-in-the-world, His Holiness smashed through these new expectations, too, by changing the very meaning of his trips.

Let me ask you to consider for a moment the Pope’s 1998 trip to Cuba in the light of what I have just said. I trust that we will not be probing too deeply into our memories tonight, after all the Pope’s trip to Cuba was only three years ago, but I think this recollection will be instrumental in helping you to grasp the great paradigm shift to which I will later introduce you and which will prove the substance of my remarks here this evening.

In January of 1998, Pope John Paul II flew into Havana on what could have been considered another pastoral visit to part of his worldwide flock, albeit his first such visit to that island where 40 years of unremitting revolutionary fervor had demoralized the population, reducing the economy to the barest essentials and isolating the country from its democratic neighbors. But this trip was nothing like the other pastoral visits His Holiness had made in the course of his pontificate. This trip was different because it would have a radically different meaning.

That different meaning was expressed at the moment the Pontiff stepped off the plane at José Marti airport and kissed the ground of Cuba. It is a gesture he had used well over a hundred times before; it is his first action upon arriving in a new nation. In every other case, though, the gesture was used to express a certain intimacy between St. Peter and his faithful; a single mark of respect for the land on which Peter’s successor walks, since the very earth has become

"the tilled field of the Gospel." One hundred twenty-five nations and the same humble gesture, greeted 125 times with a reaction of national pride mixed with religious fervor.

But that reaction was not present in Cuba. It was a reaction not of pride nor of patriotism which surged through those who—because they were not allowed near the airport—had to watch Pope John Paul II’s arrival on old black and white television sets placed in the front windows of Havana’s barber shops and sandwich stands. No, it was a sense of solidarity and reunification—because by that one well-known gesture, Pope John Paul II, the universal shepherd of Christ’s flock, succeeded in ending Cuba’s isolation and breaking through the silence imposed by two generations of political sloganeering.

No one was ready for this. No one expected this. Cubans at home and in exile expected the Pope to confront Castro for his numerous human rights violations. Cuban nationalists hoped to hear something about the restoration of Cuban culture, while American politicians waited for a blistering attack on socialism. Instead the Pope kissed the ground and broke through the isolation of a failed revolution and a hopeless economic embargo. Before he even uttered a word, Pope John Paul II had already restored Cuba to the family of nations and reestablished solidarity between the Cuban people and the rest of the world.

Let’s investigate as well the way the Holy Father has changed the meaning of the millennium which we are celebrating this year.

Of course there’s nothing unusual in a great religious leader considering the future. We expect religious leaders to say something about time and the millennium, to link current events to long ago events, like a tailor seaming fabric. But Pope John Paul II does the unexpected. He sees in the new millennium the unfolding of a promise and he links it—not to an event, like the coming of the second millennium 1,000 years ago in medieval Europe, and not just to an event like the historic birth of Christ in Bethlehem, which however one considers it, underlies the current celebration.

No, Pope John Paul II links the turning of the millennium to what the Bethlehem event reveals: the interior communion of the Trinity_, our participation in it through the Incarnation and hence the exalted nature of man and our final destiny of union with the Trinity. In a word, the Pope links the celebration of the millennium to the fundamental reality of all existence and the celebration of the millennium becomes a reaffirmation of what man is meant to be when Christ becomes all in all.

His Holiness has been able to change the very meaning of the millennium celebration because he sees that the turning of the calendar page reveals not time, but the Author of time, and brings us not just another day in the history of created things, but one day closer to the day when all creation will be caught up in the revelation of God’s love and begin to shine with His perfect glory.

All of these reflections of mine lead us to the Holy Father’s 1999 Apostolic Letter Ecclesia in America. This is a teaching document prepared after the Synod of Bishops from North, South and Central America and delivered to the Bishops who were gathered in Mexico City to receive it; Ecclesia in America, or "The Church in America," is a document of startling dimensions and enormous ramifications for those who wish to involve themselves in various fields of lay ministry. But it will be helpful only if those who wish to commit themselves to the New Evangelization are at the same time willing to see America through the eyes of Pope John Paul II, and are capable of understanding how this one document summarizes a life-time of Papal teaching, catalyzes a hundred years’ of the Church’s social teaching, concludes the real work of the Vatican Council and changes the very meaning of the Church’s thrust in the modern world.

(What enormous hype I give to a document which most commentators failed to comment on a document which even the Catholic press largely ignored!)

I suspect that those among you who are most conscious of the teaching role of the Church might not be familiar with this document—and I say this fully realizing the determined way in which Catholics United for the Faith, since its inception, has upheld the authentic teaching of the Church regarding morals, doctrine, education and the liturgy, and how many of you may have suffered—even grievously—because of that faithful determination.

But judging from what I have seen in my own Diocese of Tulsa, in that area of our nation which we variously consider the easternmost edge of the American west, or the westernmost boundary of the Eastern seaboard, Ecclesia in America is a document which was delivered but unread, read but unstudied, studied but underappreciated.

And all I can surmise is that our commentators and analysts were lulled into somnambulance by the fact that there is a "ho-hum" similarity in language between this document and other recent Church documents. Certainly with a similarity in language comes a certain expectation as to what that language means so that commentators and churchmen failed to note the radical change in meaning, the great paradigm shift, which Ecclesia in America proposes for our efforts in the world.

Thus when you read Ecclesia in America, you will note that this document, as do many other Church documents, addresses the threats imposed upon the Church and society by a false proselytization, the loss of culture and the unequal distribution of wealth. The Pontiff warns against the "culture of death" with its false sacraments of abortion, contraception and euthanasia, its guiding principles of economic manipulation, human exploitation and racism and its clever appeal to individual liberty.

These are all things we have heard before, and would of course expect to hear in a papal document. But because we expect to hear them, we would also expect to know in advance what the Pope means to say, so that misled by this false assumption, we would miss the radical shift in meaning which this document proposes and would continue on business as usual, lay ministry compounding upon lay ministry with an inverse proportion of effort and result, until exhausted by our ministry and overwhelmed by the continuing secularization of our modern world, we are tempted to surrender the Kingdom.

Tonight, I want you to reconsider Ecclesia in America. I want you to pay close attention, with me to the kind of Catholic gesture with which His Holiness delivered this document, and what this gesture reveals about the New Evangelization. Then we need to investigate together how and in what diverse ways the New Evangelization has changed the meaning of what we do in the world: our work, our family life, and of course, all that we mean by "lay ministries." Finally I would like to propose for you a new thrust to your ministries, a new thrust in line with the New Evangelization.

At this point tonight, such an ambitious project seems a daunting task. Perhaps after having already spent the better part of two days in intense workshops and listening to stirring talks from Jeff Cavins, Scott Hahn, and my friend, Jesuit Fr. Joe Fessio, you would be more willing to sit back and be congratulated for your long record of vigilance and support during the 60s and 70s, and sadly enough, in some places, during the eighties as well. Such a congratulatory tone might well set the stage for the talk which follows mine tonight, "CUF, Past, Present and Future."

But I am so excited by what I perceive as Pope John Paul’s great paradigm shift and so convinced that this changes the whole meaning of the New Evangelization, that I want to see men and women equipped to evangelize in accord with the Pope’s wishes, and I want to begin tonight with you.

So let’s begin with the gesture. As we have seen with John Paul’s gesture of kissing the ground in Cuba, His Holiness is able to express a great deal with the simple gesture with which he initiates a larger action. Humble as they are, and often so unaffected as to appear spontaneous, his gestures are really the embodiment or the incarnation of what he hopes to teach. Another way of expressing the Holy Father’s modus tradendi is to say that he hands over his message after surrounding it with multiple images, each one of which conveys an essential aspect of the message.

The gesture, then, with which His Holiness delivered Ecclesia in America to the Bishops of North, South and Central America was to stand beneath the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. How simple and yet how utterly appropriate! Pope John Paul II calls us to a deeper unity of faith—and he does so at the spot where, in 1531, before the American continents were divided into countries or any national barriers erected, Our Lady promised "to be the mother of all who lived in peace in this land." He warns us against a culture of death—while standing in the shadow of a pregnant Madonna. He warns us not to misuse our liberty—while standing under the woman whose perfect liberty and complete freedom was never compromised at all by sin, neither by original sin nor by any actual sin.

But there is more to this gesture. In fact, the more you know the meaning of the famous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the more Pope John Paul’s gesture will allow you to penetrate his logic and grasp his vision of whole cultures converted to Christ.

You may already know, for example, that in 1531, the Aztecs whom Cortez conquered were planning a general uprising against the Spaniards. The Bishop-elect of Mexico City, Fray Juan de Zumarraga understood better than most of his compatriots that such an uprising would place the two people in a state of unresolved conflict for generations, and the bitter opposition which it would engender would poison every effort he and his missionary priests could make for the conversion of the native peoples.

Thus in early December Zumárraga found himself praying in particular for peace between the Natives and the Spaniards, not the administrative peace of the Palacio Real under the King of Spain, and certainly not a military peace under General Hernán Cortéz. Zumárraga prayed for peace between two distinct peoples, the preservation of twin civilizations and the elevation and purification of what was best in both. It would be a peace in which there were no winners and no losers; a Christian peace which would prove the foundation of a new people, united in hope and charity.

Of course, such a union in hope and charity would be impossible without faith, for such a kingdom in which men set aside the conditions of race and class and strive together for the common good can only be established under the Kingship of Christ. And unfortunately there was little faith in Mexico at this time. Conversions among the Aztecs were almost non-existent and the attitude and behavior of the Spanish conquistadors was so un-Christ-like that their example mocked the sermons and contradicted the catechesis of the missionaries. This situation could not have been more desperate for Zumárraga, and when on the morning of December 9th the Bishop-Elect got off his knees, after having begged the Virgin Mary to show him a sign that there would be peace with unity and charity, he must have concluded his petition with a bleak: "Amen." The sign he asked for, by the way, was a bouquet of Castilian roses, such as he had not seen since leaving Spain on the good King’s galleon.

It was exactly that sign which Juan Diego brought him in the early morning hours of December 12, Castilian roses, arranged with loving care by the Virgin’s own hands in the tilma of Juan Diego. But there was a second sign, too. (It always seems that God is so profligate with His love, that those who surrender to it become generous beyond their means and give all that they have, never counting the cost or squeezing the tally.)

And so Our Lady gave a second sign, imprinted on the cactus fiber tilma. It was her own heavenly image, conveyed in a manner beyond that of earth. A portrait of the Queen of Heaven painted with the brush strokes of a conquered people—and read by them as God’s promise of salvation written on every fold of her cloak.

To the western eye, trained to the classic beauty of Rome or Greece, the image on the tilma is beautiful in its own way, gentle like a Renaissance Madonna but without the distant elegance of a Botticelli or a Fra Lipo Lipi. But to the native eye, the eye of the Aztec, the Tarahumaras and the Zapotecas, trained as they were to the curls of the dragon god, their eyes fixed on the heart of an writhing victim, the image on the tilma was beautiful without conditions. Here was the image of mercy and the promise of compassion which was utterly lacking in their religious experience. Here was God’s love for them expressed in their own cultural images. And they responded with an enthusiasm unequaled in the history of the Church’s 2,000-year-old missionary effort.

Within 10 years, almost 8,000,000 conversions were recorded. Whole villages were baptized into the Body of Christ and whole tribes convinced that they would no longer need to sacrifice their sons in order to find God’s face, since God had sacrificed His Son to open their hearts.

Let me add that these mass conversions were unlike any others in the history of the Church. They were accomplished without the threat of a Clovis, the violence done a Boniface, or the coercion that caught King Steven. These conversions were spontaneous and genuine, prompted only by the image on the tilma and what it revealed, and so complete that not only was Zumárraga’s prayer for peace between the nations answered, but his metropolitan see, the first

Archdiocese in the New World, became the Bethlehem of the Americas, the spot whence the

Gospel traveled through the hemisphere.

There are three points to be brought out from all this:

First, it was to the Bethlehem of the New World, to the cradle of Christianity in the Western Hemisphere, that Pope John Paul II came with his call for a new Evangelization. Returning to the very spot where Our Lady directed that the work of the Gospel be accomplished with her image and under her gaze, Pope John Paul II initiated a new wave of evangelization which we expect to exceed even the success of the first.

Secondly, the image of the tilma, the sign of the roses and the beginning of the first evangelization in the New World were entrusted to a lay person, Blessed Juan Diego. He received the roses, and unknowingly the image, in order to deliver them to Bishop Zumárraga who recognized these extraordinary tools for what they were and surrendered himself entirely to directing, extending and bringing to fulfillment this extraordinary work of evangelization. But the first and in some way indispensable character in the initial evangelization of the New World was not the bishop but a layman.

The same must be said for the work of re-evangelizing the New World. Its primary and indispensable agents will be those people sitting right here this evening. Note well, that while the Pope delivered Ecclesia in America to the bishops assembled in Mexico City, he very consciously addressed this document to the entire church, beginning, yes, with the bishops, priests and religious, but including as well all the lay faithful in your encounter with the Living Jesus Christ. The Holy Father knows well that the work of the New Evangelization is to be your ministry, so that working together with your pastors, animated by zeal and strengthened by the Sacraments, you and your bishops will be able to preserve the unity and charity which are the infallible signs of the Church’s authenticity.

And thirdly, in delivering Ecclesia in America as he did to Bishops from the entire Western Hemisphere, the Holy Father recalled the historic unity of America in 1531. There were no nation-states, no national frontiers or borders; but a single entity, which in the name of an earthly king had been claimed for a heavenly King, Jesus Christ. That unity, the Pontiff insists, still exists in America, underneath the fragmented borders and competing economic schemes, because the original and fundamental identity of the New World was based on Christ and His Gospel.

Is this not an extraordinary statement? And who but Pope John Paul would have the insight to correctly recognize that all Americans share an intrinsic cultural unity since all the cultures founded in the Western Hemisphere after the Age of Discovery were Christian cultures, grafted on native roots and capable of a remarkable vitality and resilience? While the history of the people of the ancient world, the classical world, can be traced back to their pre-Christian cultures, the people of the New World came to be only in the blending of many races and traditions in a new culture and experience. And that culture and that experience were explicitly Christian.

Thus our common faith in Christ gives a profound unity to the people of North, South and Central America. Though we are divided by language, politics, national histories and animosities, we are in our origin one people, unified in our genesis—for our genesis is in Christ.

And the Church, present everywhere and faithful everywhere, is the living sign of that unity in Christ, for with her Sacraments and her long tradition of Christian education and charity, the Church gives hope and consolation to a hemisphere now grown deeply divided. The Church is a continuing reminder that mankind is meant to share in the life of the Trinity, to discover our ultimate destiny in that loving community of Divine Persons, so that not only is our genesis founded in Christ, but so also is our eschaton.

In Christ we come to be and in Christ we come to our final end. Apart from Him we have

Nothing, but with Him all mankind is mine and I belong to all mankind.

Thus when the Holy Father delivered Ecclesia in America while standing at the feet of Our Lady of Guadalupe, his gesture revealed these three components of the New Evangelization:

one, that it be seen as beginning only with a real encounter with the Living Savior; two, that it be understood principally as the work of the lay faithful; and three, that the world be able to recognize in this effort a real hope for unity and solidarity. Each of these components is intrinsic and thus necessary, because only by an encounter with the living Christ can an obedient heart be led to conversion. which leads then to true freedom and real unity. These Pope John Paul II calls communion and solidarity.

But these three components together point to the fundamental reality of the New Evangelization as an effort to bring about the Kingdom not just through the conversion of the individual but through the conversion of whole societies, indeed, through the sanctification of culture itself. Above everything else, what will distinguish the New Evangelization from the Church’s previous efforts to evangelize is that the transforming power of Christ must be brought to bear at the level of the whole of society, in order that Christ be made all in all.

Do not mistake the New Evangelization for a re-evangelization, nor a kind of second attempt to plant the Gospel. A "re-evangelization" would imply a different Gospel message and of course, we preach no Gospel but that of Christ, and Him Crucified. And if by the term "New Evangelization" we meant an effort to redo the earlier work of the missionaries, that would also be untrue, because it would mean that somehow the work of those missionaries had failed. But the contrary is true.

The first missionary efforts of the Church in the New World succeeded to a marvelous degree and we see the fruits of that effort all around us, in our thriving parishes, in our charitable institutions, our hospitals and nursing homes, in the care which we show to the sick and the poor and our efforts to save the unborn; in short, in a whole host of programs which have Christ at their center and His love as their guiding principal.

In fact, if the first missionary efforts of the Church in America had failed, then you, the members of CUF could never have loved the Church as you have loved her, nor been as motivated as you were to watch over her, to stand guard over the inestimable treasure of her doctrine and liturgical life. The whole effort of Catholics United for the Faith would have been a chimera, because that for which you stood united would have had no value, not if the first missionary effort of the church had failed and needed to be redone.

No, the New Evangelization is neither a new Gospel, nor a second attempt at evangelizing. The New Evangelization is far more audacious than that. It is nothing less than an attempt to bring the transforming power of Christ into the whole of society, to bring Christ’s light into the darkness of contemporary culture with all its dark values and hidden, suggested sins.

Remember that you are Christ’s light, for He says "You are the light of the world." You must bring that transforming power of Christ into society, to purify and elevate and sanctify and redeem and make holy all that is not yet touched by the grace of Christ. And nothing could be harder than this.. since our culture, forged in the twin furnaces of the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement, neatly divides faith from reason and elevates as unassailable the font of personal experience.

By the first of these twin forgings, our culture lost its former openness to the transcendent and by the second, we have lost any ultimate reference point beyond ourselves. American society is really ordered only to itself, with no reference to the divine. This leaves us woefully incapable of any real expressions of order, goodness or beauty. Our society for example, exalts science. We ourselves know that science can be useful and may be good, but if science is ordered only unto itself then it expresses neither the true good nor the beautiful. Our society celebrates technology which makes life easier and more enjoyable by producing things that mimic beauty, but if there is no reference point for it beyond the next technological advance, then technology also fails the good.

Contemporary art and music often deny the very possibility of beauty. Artists have often become the chief iconoclasts of this age and order themselves to the denial of the truth and the rejection of the good. One need only listen to five minutes of the latest hip hop gangsta hit to come away profoundly disturbed and convinced of the truth of what I have just said. Even church art and church music often fail to provide transcendence in our daily lives or a reference point for our existence beyond the banal assurance of "Yahweh, I know you are near." The words may be from the Scriptures, but the all too familiar melody lulls us away from the power of the prayer.

All of this is neatly compounded by what social historian Fr. Aidan Nichols calls the "new materialism" of bio-technology, theoretical physics, and applied chemistry, with its reductionist theory of being. In the New Materialism, the enlightened individual, already radically divided from himself and from his community because of the split of faith and reason, is further reduced until being itself become oblivious.

I am tempted to say that it is the New Evangelization of encounter, communion and solidarity against the New Materialism of reductionism, subjectivism and particularism. And in this slug fest, the lay ministry to which you have been called by any number of well intentioned but sometimes simplistic program directors or parish directors of ministry will be of almost no value.

I know that I need to be very careful here. I know that when I question whether or not what we call "lay ministry" has any real value in our effort to convert a society in love with itself I am walking a very thin, very tightly stretched high wire with no safety net beneath me and no balancing pole in my hands.

I recognize, as you must surely recognize, that beneath my bald-faced exaggeration, there lies the truth that every action of lay ministry since it is of service to the Church and the People of God has value. Furthermore, no ministry which is appropriately given in service to the Church’s liturgical life, such as reading at Mass, helping with the distribution of Holy Communion or preparing the faithful for the worthy celebration of baptism or confirmation, ought to be dismissed since these ministries, too, offer many valuable and necessary ways for the world today to have what His Holiness calls a "fresh encounter" with the living Savior.

But I have listened to innumerable discussions of lay ministry. I have heard countless explanations of that which is proper to the priest, but permitted; that which is intra-ecclesia, but still encouraged; and that which is extra-ecclesia and helpful. And I am convinced that as worthwhile as these forms of service are, they simply miss the mark.

Pope John Paul II’s call for a new evangelization has shifted the paradigm from exclusively evangelizing the individual to evangelizing the whole of culture, and unless we find a way to enter into the heart of culture and transform society from within, our ministry will never be able—apart from the certain effect of God’s good grace—to unify in a coherent and rational structure the Church’s argument against the absolute immanence of contemporary life.

Oh sure, we will help the priest and serve the people and feel good about all this activity, feel useful and religious, but we will never rise far enough above our activity as to be able to provide a challenge to the world’s demand for subjective supremacy. As long as it is an "I" which teaches catechism, prepares the liturgy, visits the sick, or consoles the dying, we are still caught in the fires of those twin furnaces I mentioned, the enlightenment and romanticism.

What we need for the field of our lay ministry is whatever will change the "I" to a "we" and force the subject individual to forego all that is ordered to the self in order to become a person-in-communion, a half of a whole, a person ordered by sacramental grace to the otherliness of another person.

What I mean is this: I am convinced that the kind of lay ministry which the New Evangelization urgently calls for is family life. Full, robust, religious family life in which every member plays a significant role and in which each person is valued for who he or she is and each person is expected to contribute what they can to the whole of family life.

Let me at this point anticipate, if I may, two objections. The first is that we could hardly contemplate a wholesale retreat from the ministerial areas of catechesis and liturgy without envisioning the collapse of a host of religious education programs, RCIA programs, CYO and Teen Club activities, homebound ministries, prison ministries, ministries to the bereaved, etc. These provide a real vibrancy to our parishes, link people together, form an interconnectedness between parishes at the level of community service and most importantly remind us that Jesus says "whatever you do for the least of my brothers, that you do unto Me."

Perhaps I need to stress here that rather than encouraging your retreat from these areas of involvement, I would encourage you to see them principally as areas in which your ministry—whether it is in liturgy, catechesis or formation—can strengthen your neighbors and fellow parishioners to fulfill well their primary ministry of family life.

This is certainly in accord with the Church’s traditional understanding of the family as the domestic church, and to consider your ministries as empowering the faithful whom you serve to better live their ecclesial and familial life can be a powerful incentive.

The second objection which I may need to anticipate here is that family life is better understood as an area of involvement rather than an actual ministry, much in the same way in which the liturgy and catechesis are areas of involvement for readers, extraordinary ministers of Communion, catechists and sponsors. This is an objection which I will readily concede if you will allow me then the opportunity to stress the important sacramental and vocational aspects of the ministry of family life.

The sacrifices which family life entails—and they are many and varied and, I suspect for some of you, unremitting—are still the very way in which you live out the sacramentality of your marriages, and your concomitant vocation of being a husband and a father, a wife and a mother. Moreover, the sacrifices involved in married life, the constant surrender, the constant forgiving, the self forgetfulness entailed in saying "we" rather than "I" are the very ways in which one daily actualizes the grace of the Sacrament.

I am not sure that the same can be said of other areas of ministry. I don’t believe, for example, that the sacrifices involved in proclaiming the Word on Sunday, perhaps driving to an earlier Mass or foregoing the opportunity to have a weekend completely free, are the means by which we actualize our Baptism, that is the grace of being united in the interior communion of the Trinity. Certainly these ministries flow from our Baptism (and Confirmation), and we do them well by the graces we receive from the Sacraments, but reading or ushering or welcoming visitors seems somehow less intrinsic, less fundamental to the living out of Baptism by the faithful.

Finally let me suggest three practical areas in which you might exercise the ministry of family life:

The first is this: exercise a stewardship of time and resources, a kind of frugality, with respect to what is available to the family. Without falling into a stinginess or a meanness, preserve what you have in common that your sharing may become a lesson to the world at large which is driven by competitiveness and the desire to possess. Recognize that not everything which is available to you is beneficial and that there are certain things—like violent videos and unrestricted access to the internet which are harmful in themselves and other things, which like movie rentals and personal televisions, stereos and walkmans, are legitimate in themselves, but might correctly be denied or restricted precisely because they tend to privatize and individualize the user.

Perhaps the development of your children’s athletic ability or socialization skills requires participation in Saturday morning soccer leagues and Wednesday afternoon brownies. But there is a critical need for you parents to exercise a vigilance here, a stewardship of their time and involvement, recognizing as you must that for families to grow together in a spirit of sacrificial love, it is necessary for them to be mutually involved—and that mutual involvement is impossible is everyone if committed to their own individual activities.

The second family life ministry is this: exercise a certain sacramentality in your time and resources. Our culture denigrates the time we spend at home in work. Vacuuming and ironing are the things of which sit-com comedies are made. We spend an enormous amount of money on dishwashers and other labor-saving devices, precisely because we have forgotten the value of work done well, done properly, done sacramentally, that is, done well and with a religious significance.

Sharing in the household tasks is a way of recognizing the needs of one another, and answering them in a practical, fundamentally human way that balances work with leisure, and makes them each a vital source of our joy. Unfortunately for us, we live in a world where the split between work and leisure is as carefully delineated as the split between faith and reason. We work until we are sufficiently remunerated and have the funds to go off in leisure, or we work compulsively until we lose the contemplation that comes from leisure time balanced with work. Either excess robs the household of a spiritual energy which we badly need. Your ministry of guarding the sacramentality of your family’s time and resources can restore it.

Thirdly, let me suggest that you exercise a ministry involved in being hospitable with your family's time and resources. Hospitality flows from a recognition that each person has an inalienable human worth, a dignity which cannot be eclipsed or occluded. To share the family resources with those who are less fortunate, and to share those resources as a family activity is a wonderful way to exercise a ministry of charity. To bake bread or serve soup, to provide meals as a family for those who are grieving or mourning, is to do enormous good and at the same time counteract the prevailing notion that charity is most effectively exercised on a governmental or institutional level. Institutional programs, of course, demand rules of accessibility and eligibility, and invariably some people will "fall through the cracks." It is for this reason that an exercise of hospitality can be a kind of antidote to our societal way of offering politics instead of charity.

In conclusion, let me first thank you for having extended to me this invitation to address you this weekend. I am grateful that the vigilance which you have exercised over the years and the concern for the renewal of the liturgical life of the Church has borne fruit in your own deeper involvement in the life of the Church, as evidenced by the publication of your fine catechetical series and the presence here this weekend of nationally known speakers, Archbishop Pilarczyk and myself.

Thank you and God bless you.

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