Chad Pecknold

One day former classmate and fellow Franciscan Friar Francisco Palou approached Junípero with the same burning desire, and a plan to make a great missionary to “New Spain” (what is now Mexico). When his confrere asked the learned professor, unaware of his own secret longing, to accompany him on the journey, Fray Junípero wept tears of joy. Together they had the courage to go to the peripheries of a new world to conform themselves more fully to God’s will, to preach the Gospel, and in doing so bring every soul to Christ.

When in Mexico, Junípero gained a reputation for preaching even when no one was around. At Mission San Antonio, the small brown-habited friar was once spotted ringing a great bell that hung from a tall tree, shouting: “Come you pagans; come, come to the Holy Church; come, come to receive the Faith of Jesus Christ.”

When one of his confreres found him, he kindly pointed out that there wasn’t a pagan in sight. Quizzically he asked, “We haven’t even built the church yet? Isn’t the bell ringing a bit much? A bit pointless?” Fray Junípero answered joyfully, “[A]llow my overflowing heart to express itself!” And added, “I wish this bell could be heard throughout the world … or at least by every pagan who inhabits this sierra.” For Junípero, it was the bell of freedom, the bell that called the world to know and love the source of all happiness and joy in Jesus Christ.

Junípero Serra never stopped ringing that bell.

For nine years with the Pame Indians he rang that bell by learning their language — with which he would preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to them — and by teaching the natives agricultural skills — with which they could grow the wheat to make the bread that he would consecrate in the Holy Eucharist.

In 1767 he was asked to ring that bell in Baja California, overseeing 13 missions there that had been established by Jesuits but then abandoned when they were recalled to Spain. Very soon after arriving in Baja California, however, a new Spanish plan was conceived for Alta California. This would entail a two-pronged endeavor, combining colonization and conversion. The new plan was to colonize the new territory and spread the Christian faith to its pagan inhabitants. Junípero Serra was asked to help with the latter. He was sent to the northernmost mission, San Diego, in 1769.

Dotted along the coast of California today, like beads of the rosary he prayed, remain the 21 missions he founded successively from 1770 to 1782. Even before the New England colonists declared their independence from another imperial power, Californians were turning towards Christ — and they were doing so because a small-statured theology professor rang that other liberty bell, which shouts in the public square, “Come to the Holy Church! Come to receive the Faith of Jesus Christ!” For this freedom is not simply the freedom from the tyranny of evil, but freedom for the highest Good: to know and love God with all your heart, soul and mind, and your neighbor as yourself.

Blessed Serra wasn’t perfect. He was well aware of his own limitations, imperfections, and failings. In truth, and in humility, Serra wrote,  “There is no reason why my name should be mentioned, except for the blunders I may have committed in doing the work.”

But the Church does not remember his name because of his blunders. We remember his name because his heart was overflowing with a zeal for Christ that did not count the cost and a love of his neighbor’s soul that looked not upon borders. On Sept. 23, 2015, Pope Francis, as supreme pontiff, will canonize him as Saint Junípero Serra, with a holy confidence that his life itself is a kind of bell, which rings for our highest freedom, the freedom of eternal life.

—    Chad Pecknold is an associate professor of systematic theology at The Catholic University of America School of Theology and Religious Studies.

Chad Pecknold

Perhaps someone will say that the most amazing thing that Pope Francis will do is to declare Blessed Junípero Serra a holy saint, which he’ll do right here at Catholic University. It’s hard to beat declaring a human person a holy saint! But more amazing than making saints is the power by which saints are made. And this is the power of Jesus Christ, whose power is present to us in Mary’s womb, in his Church, in his Vicar, and preeminently for us in the Most Holy Eucharist.

In his Angelus address this last Sunday, Pope Francis reminded us that the Eucharist is not a private prayer, nor is it a spiritual experience, or a mere symbol of that experience. The Eucharist is a public act. It is for the life of the people, the nations, the world. The Eucharist is Christ’s body and blood, soul and divinity, the whole of Jesus Christ truly and substantially present to his people.

Preaching on the “Bread of Life” discourse of John 6, the Holy Father taught that the Eucharist “actualizes and makes present the event of the death and resurrection of Jesus: The bread is truly his Body given, the wine is truly his Blood poured out.” Jesus is really on earth in the Eucharist. When Pope Francis celebrates Mass here on the steps of the Basilica, overlooking the campus of Catholic University, Jesus will be present. The Pope will do the same before hundreds and hundreds of thousands in Philadelphia too. In the Pope’s own words, “with the Eucharist, heaven is on earth.” And what is more amazing than this?

This is what it means for the Pope to say that “Love is our mission,” because the most amazing thing Pope Francis will do is celebrate the Most Holy Eucharist. As he says, “The Eucharist is Jesus Christ who gives himself entirely to us. To nourish ourselves with him and abide in him through Holy Communion, if we do it with faith, transforms our life into a gift to God and to our brothers.” Pope Francis comes to increase our faith, which can see what our senses cannot perceive. He comes to us because he has been sent by Christ, and he comes to bear witness to the truth that in Christ, the most amazing thing is that we can be transformed, and made holy through communion with his real and present love.

Jesus Christ chose St. Peter to be his rock and gave him the keys to the kingdom, which is to say the keys to himself. And in the person of Pope Francis we see the successor of St. Peter, and he also has the keys to the kingdom, and he comes to America to open wide the doors to Christ, and to invite us to share in his life. This is amazing!

—    Chad Pecknold is an associate professor of systematic theology at The Catholic University of America School of Theology and Religious Studies.

Chad Pecknold

There is a kind of freedom which might have “whatever” as its motto. This “freedom of indifference” can sometimes be heard in those kinds of sarcasm meant to insulate us from every morally serious claim put to us. This is actually only the appearance of freedom, or a kind of fake freedom that enslaves us to our enthroned desires. This kind of freedom sets up a series of buffers around ourselves, so that nothing can make any real claim upon us. If we think we are free in this way, we will scoff at the wisdom of tradition, we’ll dismiss rational claims that contradicts our desires, we’ll pretend our actions do not arise out of a past and we’ll pretend they don’t have future consequences. Even in this “social media age,” such freedom isolates us.

Pope Francis says this false freedom affects all of us: “The world tends to withdraw into itself and shut that door through which God comes into the world and the world comes to him. Hence the hand, which is the Church, must never be surprised if it is rejected, crushed and wounded. God’s people, then, need this interior renewal, lest we become indifferent and withdraw into ourselves.”

This kind of freedom pretends to make love supreme, but in the end it just makes our desires king. Our liberty will be nothing other than stated expressions of our whims, which means that liberty can only be secured by force, power, and coercion since it is detached from beauty, truth, and goodness.

The freedom of indifference makes our desires mysteriously rootless, detached from any proper sense of who we are as rational creatures. The Holy Father might suggest it is only the devil who would tell us that indifference is freedom, since it is through indifference to truth that we become slaves of infinite desire. Instead of a freedom which flows from the unity of intellect and will ordered to our Final Good, indifference makes us slaves of our own capricious will.

And this indifference is most likely a cipher for who we think God is too.

Yet God is not a distant, capricious commander. Pope Francis reminds us that, “He is not aloof from us. Each one of us has a place in his heart. He knows us by name, he cares for us and he seeks us out whenever we turn away from him. He is interested in each of us; his love does not allow him to be indifferent to what happens to us.” God tells us we are “no longer slaves.” God wants true freedom for his children, the freedom to live in accordance with truth, beauty, and goodness. God wants us to become his friends.

Again, Pope Francis: “The love of God breaks through that fatal withdrawal into ourselves which is indifference. The Church offers us this love of God by her teaching and especially by her witness….This happens whenever we hear the word of God and receive the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. There we become what we receive: the Body of Christ. In this body there is no room for the indifference which so often seems to possess our hearts.”

There is no room for indifference with respect to the cries of the human person, in the womb, or on the border, and there is no room for indifference with respect to God, and the cross of Calvary. When God’s love breaks into our hearts, through all our sarcastic buffers, through the “whatevers,” through the guardsmen of our capricious desires, we become truly free for the one friendship that will make us happy. When our will is joined to God’s will, when our minds are renewed and conformed  to Christ our head, the midnight shackles of indifference crack open, and the freedom for truth and goodness dawns. Our hearts are made for eternal peace, which is to say the eternal happiness of friendship with God. Indifference makes this impossible. Indifference is not our friend.

— Chad Pecknold is an associate professor of systematic theology at The Catholic University of America School of Theology and Religious Studies.

I’ve never told anyone this before, but going to confession as a family heightens my sense that there’s a kind of thrill in it, like diving into the deep end for the first time. We sometimes joke that it is like “spiritual bath time” in which we confess the filth we’ve brought upon ourselves, and Christ washes us with his Word. The kids get the point, but that metaphor doesn’t fully capture either the dread or the thrill of confession.

Chad Pecknold

Last February, Pope Francis asked us all to ask ourselves: “‘When was the last time I went to confession?’ And if it has been a long time, don’t lose another day! Go, the priest will be good. And Jesus will be there, and Jesus is better than the priests — Jesus receives you. He will receive you with so much love! Be courageous, and go to confession.” Pope Francis understands the dread and the very thrill of it because he understands that Jesus is there in the sacrament of confession.

When Pope Francis says “Be courageous, and go to confession!” he captures the way in which it is a sacrament of conversion, “a radical reorientation of our whole life, a conversion to God with all our heart, an end of sin, a turning away from evil, with repugnance toward the evil actions we have committed.” (Catechism, 1431) It is a journey out of a dangerous place, which has been set up in our souls, through what we have done and what we have failed to do. And it feels precarious.

To switch analogies, the sacrament of confession is like a heart transplant. As the Catechism also states, “The human heart is heavy and hardened. God must give man a new heart.” Just to examine our consciences, to tell the truth about ourselves can quake our hearts. In the recent revelations about Planned Parenthood, we have all been horrified at the callousness of the human heart towards America’s secret Holocaust. Every heart should be shaken, every person moved by the horror and weight of this terrible sin upon us. As we watch the videos, many of us might not be aware of how personally this affects millions of women, millions of mothers whose own souls have been “war torn” by the scourge of abortion. But for them, as for all of us, there is hope. “The human heart is converted by looking upon him whom our sins have pierced.” (Catechism 1432)

Abortionists call the baby’s head a “calvarium,” or skull in Latin. In this way, every aborted baby points us to Christ our head, crowned with thorns. As Pope Francis says, “Every child not allowed to be born, but unjustly condemned to be aborted, has the face of Jesus Christ.” It’s understandable that people would want to look away from the horror and weight of this terrible sin of abortion. But looking away only seizes up our hearts further, drags us deeper into a heart of darkness. Rather, to those whose hearts ache from the sin of abortion, Pope Francis will also say to our sisters in pain, “Be courageous, go to confession!” There is hope after the sin of abortion, just as there is hope for all of us whose hearts have been scourged by sin. To be a Christian is to confess, “I am a sinner.”

And confession is simply telling the truth about ourselves before God. What’s both dreadful and thrilling about confession is that we become our own prosecutors, and God hears our case. Weighed down by our sins, aware of the damage they do, our hearts are contrite, and we suddenly hear something amazing breaking through the screen. Through a priest of Jesus Christ we hear words flowing from Calvary: Holy words of forgiveness, divine grace, and mercy flow into our souls so that our contrite hearts can be raised to new life for friendship with God and our neighbor.

Pope Francis tells us not to grow weary of going to confession. Whatever we have done, whatever we have failed to do, something radical happens in confession: “God always forgives us [there]. He never tires of this. It’s we who get tired of asking for forgiveness. But He does not tire of pardoning us.”

Don’t be surprised if the Holy Father brings with him a sense of danger and adventure. And don’t be surprised if he tells you to “Be courageous!  Go to confession.”

—    Chad Pecknold is an associate professor of systematic theology at The Catholic University of America School of Theology and Religious Studies.

Chad Pecknold

In his “Meeting with Families Address” at the Mall of Asia Arena last January, Pope Francis reminded the people of the Philippines that the family is a gift from God, and gifts from God are often threatened. He spoke to the people of the Philippines of the dangers which threatened Jesus and Mary, and how Joseph gathered up his young family, and fled to Egypt, finally settling in Nazareth. “So too, in our time,” Pope Francis told the crowd, “God calls upon us to recognize the dangers threatening our own families and to protect them from harm.” And then the Holy Father gave one of his most profound and penetrating warnings yet about America’s own struggle to understand the nature and meaning of marriage and the family:

“Let us be on guard against colonization by new ideologies. There are forms of ideological colonization which are out to destroy the family. They are not born of dreams, of prayers, of closeness to God or the mission which God gave us…they are forms of colonization. Let’s not lose the freedom of the mission which God has given us, the mission of the family. Just as our peoples, at a certain moment of their history, were mature enough to say “no” to all forms of political colonization, so too in our families we need to be very wise, very shrewd, very strong, in order to say “no” to all attempts at an ideological colonization of our families. We need to ask Saint Joseph, the friend of the angel, to send us the inspiration to know when we can say “yes” and when we have to say ‘no.'”

Later he identifies the threat to the family as coming from those who would “redefine the very institution of marriage.” And the pope says that these efforts are in turn fueled “by relativism, by the culture of the ephemeral, by a lack of openness to life.” There is, in other words, a kind of atheistic materialism which absolutizes relativity, and relativizes truth; which considers every standard arbitrary except the one it chooses for itself. Yet this strikes at the heart of the American experiment in “ordered Liberty.”

When liberty means the unfettered pursuit of anything we desire, the human soul is not liberated. It is merely enslaved by infinite desire. And this is what Pope Francis means by “ideological colonization.” In the context of the Philippines, whose people understood the ways in which political colonization had amounted to a kind of enslavement, so with the ideological colonization of the family.

America needs a similar message. Our very origins as a nation are bound up with the idea of an unjust colonization. But now the colonization is not political. It is ideological. Pope Francis says we must be “very wise, very shrewd, very strong, in order to say ‘no’ to all attempts at an ideological colonization of our families.” The very idea of an “ideological colonization of our families” is very wise, very shrewd, very strong. I expect it is an idea we will hear more about this fall.

—     Chad Pecknold is an associate professor of systematic theology at The Catholic University of America School of Theology and Religious Studies.

Chad Pecknold

To provide some context for why Pope Francis wants to tie together climate change and “modern day human slavery,” recall that last year the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child urged the Catholic Church to change its positions on contraception and abortion, and it also advocated that the Church support “diverse forms of family.”

The Vatican provided its own strong reply, which reminded the United Nations committee that it had overreached its mandate. The official reply reaffirmed that the Church’s teaching is based on divine law, and cannot be changed on the dignity of human life, pre-natal or post-natal, nor could the Church change her teaching on marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

This is where the Holy Father’s “integral ecology” begins to look interesting as a response not only to the United Nations, but to all local cultures, cities, and countries which may make urgent pleas concerning an ecological crisis, but then fail to see the human crisis. Pope Francis sees this failure to see the whole picture manifested precisely in our “throwaway culture” which wastes human life, especially the weakest and most vulnerable among us, the unborn, the refugee, the elderly, and the poor.

The U.N.’s new “Sustainable Development Goals,” which are set to be finalized this fall, will center on climate change. Pope Francis wrote Laudato Si’, in part, to influence global thinking on “our common home” in a way which showed that the commitment to the environment also demands a commitment to all life, but especially human life. This is why in the encyclical he says: “At times we see an obsession with denying any pre-eminence to the human person; more zeal is shown in protecting other species than in defending the dignity which all human beings share in equal measure.”

Pope Francis wants us to think about the ways in which the fundamental things of life, such as a baby in the womb, a family without a country, or the health of our planet on which we all depend, have to be considered together. Since everything is interrelated,” Pope Francis writes, the U.N.’s concern for the protection of nature, or Planned Parenthood’s concern for women’s health, is “incompatible with the justification of abortion.” The Holy Father asks, “How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates difficulties?”

This is why he spoke to the mayors this week not only about climate change, but also human trafficking and modern-day slavery: The love of creation is inseparable from the love of the human person. The more we become numb to the evil of abortion and fetal organ trade, to human trafficking and even the slavery of persons, the more our regard for the dignity of all human life withers. Jesus Christ came into “our common home” as an unborn child — truly human, truly divine in the womb of Mary to reveal to us the depths of God’s love for what he has made. It is for this reason that Pope Francis continues to surprise us with his integral ecology, good news which helps us to see that our common home is worth caring for because the human person who inhabits it is the image and likeness of the God who made it good.

—     Chad Pecknold is an associate professor of systematic theology at The Catholic University of America School of Theology and Religious Studies.

Chad Pecknold

By now everyone should have read, or at least read about, Laudato Si’, the Pope’s latest encyclical on “Our Common Home.” I think we see here some important themes that have already come up on the Holy Father’s Latin American mission, and are likely to resurface when he visits us this September. Five stand out:

1. Pope Francis likes to invoke personal images. The encyclical wasn’t officially on the environment or climate change, but on “our common home.” This powerfully evocative image of the home recalls Pope Benedict’s frequent proclamation that nature is something prior to us, a gift which has been given by God, and which we can’t simply manipulate or abuse. The image of the home makes this theme more personal, but it achieves the same end. Whenever you hear Francis talk about “our common home” you should be hearing a challenge to relativism. Francis speaks less to climate change skepticism than to common-good skepticism. I expect we’ll hear this theme again in September, especially when he addresses a politically divided Congress.

2. The theme of conversion is also prominent in Laudato Si’. Fundamentally, Pope Francis believes that it is the turn away from God that causes all our self-destructive habits, and what we most need is to return to God. He first calls us to an existential/metaphysical conversion to recognize our common home as a gift of the Creator, then he calls for conversion to God as Father, conversion to Christ and his saints who show us how to participate in the harmony between God and creation, and conversion in and through the Most Holy Eucharist, which unites the created world to the heavenly home, and forms us to think about the universal destination of goods. Listen for these calls for conversion this fall.

3. In Evangelii Gaudium, the Holy Father stressed (perhaps subtweeting American Conservative senior editor Rod Dreher!) the need for Catholics to follow “the missionary option.” This is the message which is also being enacted by Pope Francis’s mission to the Americas: Every Catholic is sent into the world to preach good news to the poor, not only the materially poor, but also the spiritually destitute, those who are lost without God.

4. A “culture of encounter” is often how Francis translates mission. For the Holy Father, “dialogue” is tied to mission. We can see this in the way he always has an eye on God as Father, and Mary as our Mother — for he consistently proclaims that all people have God as their Father, and then invokes Mary as the Mother we all need. This is the spiritual context for encounter, a word which should always be heard as an invitation to participate in Mary’s Yes to God, and as a call to be enfolded into the saving arms of Holy Mother Church.

5. This Holy Father is a master of gestures. Everyone saw, and immediately understood, his look of disapproval when Bolivian President Evo Morales gave him a hammer and sickle crucifix. These are the small, powerful, even prophetic gestures the Pope is now known for, but we should be careful to interpret them well.

Together, Laudato Si’ and the Latin American mission give us some clues for what to expect from the Holy Father’s mission to the people of the United States of America…

– Chad Pecknold is an associate professor of systematic theology at The Catholic University of America School of Theology and Religious Studies.