Media

Follow us!

Fr. John Dougherty, CSC	Fr. Dennis Strach, CSC	Parish

Check out our other episodes!

Reflecting on Cardinal Müller’s Call to Hope from a Holy Cross Perspective
One highlight of being a seminarian at Moreau Seminary is that, with its location adjacent to the campus of Notre Dame, we are fortunate to host many visitors. One of the most memorable for me was a visit by then Archbishop, now Cardinal, Gerhard Müller. Not only were his words to us informative, perspicacious and motivating, but he was pleasant and affable, fielding the seminarians’ many questions with graciousness and a validating seriousness.
So when I saw online that Ignatius Press had just published an English translation of a 2016 interview given by the Cardinal when he was then head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, I ordered a copy without even reading a single review. Obviously modelled after the famed “Ratzinger Report” of his predecessor, I expected to find a commentary on the current state of the Church, given with the same frankness, directness and keen insight that the Cardinal had displayed in person at Moreau seminary. I had not expected to discover that the unifying theme of the book would be hope; the key question facing the Church today in the eyes of Cardinal Müller. As his interviewer, Fr. Carlos Granados, writes in the introduction;

“People today do not see their lack of faith as a tragedy, but what does worry them profoundly is their lack of hope, for which – making matters worse – they try to make up with substitutes like optimism. The key question, therefore, is one of hope…What is the foundation of Christian hope?”
As I read the Cardinal’s words I could not help but feel that he was once more speaking to the seminarians of Holy Cross and issuing a rallying cry to the sons of Bl. Fr. Moreau. Especially when one of the earliest questions in the interview discussed the symbolism of the anchor as expressive of Christin hope, it seemed as if the curial Cardinal was confirming the enduring validity of Fr. Moreau’s spiritual vision, and indeed its particular relevance for the Church today. For are we not the religious congregation whose motto is “Ave Crux Spes Unica”, symbolised by the cross and anchor medallions worn by professed members of the congregation?
The Cardinal’s interview prompted me to reflect once more one those words of our motto in this Easter season when we celebrate Christ’s paradoxical victory on the Cross. This time however, I was reflecting in the light of a hugely formative experience from last summer when I had the privilege of participating in the Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics programme (F.A.S.P.E.).

This inter-religious and inter-disciplinary programme brings students to Europe to examine the ethical crisis represented by the Holocaust. The intention is to examine how leaders and prominent voices in society were drawn into the web of Nazi evil. We focused on the role of theologians, pastors and ecclesiastical figures in the society that spawned this heinous crime and also investigated the nature of their response to history’s worst systematic murder scheme.
Without digressing into all the detail here, let me just say that I was led to the sad realisation that for every St. Maximillian Kolbe, there were far more Christians who either turned a blind eye, failed to forcefully speak out or even actively participated in the Nazi crimes. The Church, conceived thus as all the members of the Body of Christ and not just its institutional structures, failed miserably to live up to her moral code, summarised in the commandment to love God and one’s neighbour. Why?
I surmised that the ethical failure was inextricably interwoven with an ecclesiological failure. The Church failed to see that her security, her stability, her assurance of victory, her hope do not come ultimately from her institutions, her ecclesiastical structures, or any of her temporal dimensions. Hope comes from the Cross. She must announce the paradoxical victory of the Cross, not only in words, but by finding the crucified peoples of the world so as to be nailed alongside them, if she is to live her true identity. And what is true for the Church as a whole, is true for every individual Christian, for each must take up his Cross and follow Him. For as Cardinal Müller recognises in his words on the Cross, “where there seems to be nothing but irrelevance, failure, pain and defeat for a life structured by rational logic, it is precisely there that God’s limitless love is, which can save the lives of all”.

Therefore, under the patronage of Our Lady of Sorrows, who stood at the foot of the Cross, and with its spirituality rooted in the Mystery of the Cross, our congregation bears an opportune and prophetic message of hope; that Christ came, not to save us from the Cross, but through the Cross. For it is in the Cross that we find the perfect love of the other; a love that loves to the end, which is really a victorious beginning. This was the wisdom of the Early Church, which understood that its growth and success occurred not despite the fact that its churches were ransacked, catechesis disrupted, and meetings outlawed, while laity, priests, bishops and even popes were carted off by the secular powers to prison and death, but indeed that it was because of such martyrdom, or in other words, witness, that it grew and succeeded to the extent it did. Like the great St. John Paul II, we too are called to witness to hope, in a world that is despairing, which is to witness to the Cross. For as the Cardinal says,
“Placing our hope in God therefore does not mean the elimination of suffering but, rather, opening it to a horizon of understanding that in any situation, however difficult and tragic it may be, there can be a fertility, a fruit, because suffering, having been shouldered once and for all by Christ, can awaken and ripen love”.