To live the beauty that we have been given

I was one of 15 bishops of Eastern Catholic eparchies in the U.S. making our visit ad limina apostolorum, “to the threshold of the apostles,” in February. All bishops in the Catholic Church are required to submit a report and to travel to Rome roughly every five years to celebrate the Eucharist at the tombs of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, to visit a number of the dicasteries, or departments, of the Roman Curia, and to be received in audience by the Pope. This was my fourth ad limina visit, and by far and away the most profound. Having visited Rome, indeed the Apostolic Palace, more than once, I found myself less distracted by my surroundings and more focused on what the visit could mean to me and to my Church. A persistent, disabling backache meant that I could not do any of the wandering about that you normally do when you visit Rome. It also gave me a little extra time for reflection.

I was fortunate, I think, to have been able to do some of my reflecting out loud in response to the probing questions posed by several journalists of my acquaintance. I say giving these interviews was fortunate because some of what I talked about became public. People repeated back to me things that I’d said that caught their attention, but which I, for my part, had simply forgotten. For example, when speaking of the place that Eastern Catholics find themselves in the polarization and controversies roiling Church and society today, I had said, “We just want to live the beauty that we’ve been given.” I was thinking, of course, of our liturgy and its beauty, our traditions of iconography and music, all of which put flesh upon our faith and keep it from becoming a lifeless abstraction.

“Beauty will save the world,” Dorothy Day, quoting Dostoevsky, was fond of saying. I believe that. Whether it be the beauty of a breathtaking natural landscape or that of a human’s work of art, beauty’s power to silence the mind and render the heart open to the sheer magnificence of existence is, to me, a demonstration of its divine origin. The voices of the seminarians singing the Armenian liturgy at the tomb of St. Peter and the Indian nuns singing the Syro-Malabar liturgy at the tomb of the Apostle Paul, in the context of the imposing architecture and majestic art of the basilicas housing these sacred remains, will be enduring memories for me. But it also occurred to me that the beauty of our own parish liturgies is no less capable of bringing us face-to-face with Jesus Christ, whose icons remind us that He is the One-Who-Is, the original Beauty, the very face of God.

I believe that this is what we Eastern Catholics are called to do in our time and place today. Simply by being who we are, by being faithful to our liturgy and to our spiritual and theological traditions, we stand as a reminder to our fellow Catholics that there is so much more to the faith than the crises and controversies that take up entirely too much attention these days. I do not want to minimize the problems that exist, and the failures that the Church must confront, but it is critical to remember that there is so much more to our life than this. The Church, the Bride of Christ, has captivated the Divine Bridegroom’s heart, and He longs to tell her of His love. The liturgy is just this: Christ and His Church singing their love for one another.

The liturgical life of the Eastern Churches is indeed a thing of rare beauty, and it is our privilege, our task, and our joy as Eastern Catholics to be able to bring this into the very heart of the Catholic Church. Particularly now, when crisis and controversy seek to tear us apart, we, by simply living the beauty that we have been given, bear witness to the love that is the very foundation of all that is.