The jubilee year to the apostle Paul began at a Vespers service in Rome this past June 28, the vigil of the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. It was one year ago that Pope Benedict XVI announced this special jubilee year. Historians have placed the birth of St. Paul somewhere between the years 7 and 10 AD. Hence the jubilee year marks the bi-millennium of St. Paul’s birth.
Every year we celebrate two major feasts in honor of St. Paul. The first always takes place on Jan. 25, the Feast of Paul’s Conversion. Saint Paul is often described as the Apostle to the Gentiles. A Jew by birth, but a Roman by citizenship, Paul went out to proclaim the truth of Christ to the entire world. Before his own conversion he had actually been persecuting the early Christian community. During this jubilee year the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul falls on a Sunday, Jan. 25, 2009. That Sunday will be the third Sunday in Ordinary Time. But the Pope has granted permission for and is encouraging the celebration of the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul on that day. The second reading for that day, since there are only two readings for the Feast of the Conversion of Paul, is to be taken from the third Sunday of the year. Because it is a Sunday the Creed will be recited.
The other feast in honor of St. Paul, a solemnity, is observed on June 29, which will be a Monday in 2009, concluding the jubilee year. Together with St. Peter, St. Paul is a principal patron of the Church of Rome. Each year on June 29, a Mass in the Vatican Basilica is celebrated during which the Holy Father bestows the pallium (a circular band of wool worn around the neck and over the shoulders) on recently installed metropolitan archbishops as a symbol of jurisdiction and authority. I received my own pallium on this feast back in 1998.
The Roman Missal includes a Votive Mass for St. Paul. I am asking our priests to celebrate that Votive Mass frequently during the jubilee year on ferial days when no memorial, feast or solemnity is required. I also hope that many of our parishes will provide holy hours in honor of St. Paul the Apostle. An outline of such a holy hour is available on the USCCB website. It includes Benediction of the most Blessed Sacrament. A holy hour would seem especially appropriate in the month of October when we pray for missionaries the world over, in January near the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul and again in June at the conclusion of the Pauline Year.
Shortly after his election as the successor of St. Peter, Pope Benedict the XVI made a visit to the major basilica of St. Paul outside the walls of Rome. During that visit he pointed out that our church is by nature missionary with a very urgent duty to evangelize. In secular times, that missionary mandate, the Pope stated, is more timely than ever. Paul’s conversion took place on the road to Damascus thwarting his goal to destroy the Christian community. Ironically, that aborted journey led St. Paul to make Jesus Christ the very center of his life. Paul’s conversion was rather dramatic, to say the least. He was literally knocked off his horse and blinded by the light of truth. Once God restored his sight he never faltered in his mission of bringing the gospel to the world as he knew it then.
I find it interesting that a complaint I sometimes I hear about some of our priests is much the same as the complaint that was made about Paul. Even though he was sent by Christ to preach the good news, Paul, it seemed, was far from being a good speaker. We are told in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians that his adversaries said “his bodily presence is weak, and his speech has no account.” The success of his mission obviously cannot be credited to his own personal talents. But rather it depended, as Pope Benedict XVI observed last year, on his own “personal involvement in proclaiming the gospel with total dedication to Christ, a dedication that feared neither risk, difficulty nor persecution.”
Perhaps there is a very good lesson in all of this for us today as we are sometimes frustrated by our own efforts to bring the good news to a world caught up in itself and its own personal agenda. What is that lesson? Pope Benedict says, “The Church’s action is credible and effective only to the extent to which those who belong to her (you and me) are prepared to pay in person for their fidelity to Christ in every circumstance. When this readiness is lacking, the crucial argument of truth on which the Church herself depends is also absent.” My friends, therein lies the real challenge before us during this year of jubilee dedicated to St. Paul. If our faith is simply a matter of private practice and merely an outpouring of words, there will be no change of heart and no moving away from sin to virtue.
When I first heard about this Pauline year in the summer of 2007, I especially noted one aspect that the Pope underlined in his announcement of the year of jubilee. It was the ecumenical dimension. At the very beginning of the proclamation of the good news, there was only one Christian community. But today there are many, unfortunately separated, because of divisions and misunderstandings over the centuries. This year of St. Paul seems to be the perfect opportunity for Catholic parishes to reach out to their neighboring Christian churches and come together in prayer, study and good works in a realistic effort to promote unity and harmony among all the followers of Jesus Christ.
There is a very ancient tradition about the last meeting of St. Peter and Paul before their martyrdom. It would seem that the two great apostles met not far from the present day Basilica of St. Paul where they embraced and blessed each other. Christians from the earliest times considered Peter and Paul inseparable, even if each had a different mission in life. Peter established the first community of Christians from the Jewish people. Paul was sent to the gentiles for the purpose of spreading the gospel far and wide. Even though they had different charisms they both worked for the same cause, the building of the church of Jesus Christ.
Here in the Archdiocese of Portland we are blessed with three churches dedicated to St. Paul, one in Eugene, another in Silverton and the third in St. Paul. In fact, it was in St. Paul, on Jan. 6, 1839, a Sunday and the feast of the Epiphany of Our Lord, that Fr. Francis N. Blanchet, the priest who became our first archbishop, celebrated the first Mass ever in the Willamette Valley. The jubilee year provides all us here in Western Oregon with an opportunity to thank God for the gift of the Eucharist in our communities, a gift in which Catholics of Western Oregon have shared for 170 years, a gift that continues to empower our own evangelizing mission as it did for the Apostle to the Gentiles.
