Now the Lord saw him go forward to look, and God called to him from the
middle of the bush. ‘Moses, Moses!’ he said. ‘Here I am’ he answered. ‘Come no
nearer’ he said. ‘Take off your shoes, for the place on which you stand is holy
ground. I am the God of your father,’ he said ‘the God of Abraham, the God
of Isaac and the God of Jacob.’ At this Moses covered his face,
afraid to look at God.
Exodus 3:4 - 5
My sister DonnaLynn is the last of
my 10 siblings to become a grandparent. Last weekend her daughter gave birth to a
handsome young lad named Hohepa (a Maori transliteration of Joseph). Hohepa is
named specifically for his dad's great grandfather who brought him up, but by
chance, this young fellow also bears our own father's second name, Joseph, and
was brought into the world a day after the feast of St Joseph.
Choosing names for children is rife
with difficulties. Today we are less likely to burden our children with the
names of grandparents, uncles and aunts. There are mercifully few Arthurs,
Archibalds, Basils, Beryls, Gwendolines, Cynthias, Dorises in schools today,
though they too were popular in their day. There are even websites today for
those who want to make up names – there is an apparent ‘science’ to it.
My own children were blessed (or
cursed) with Lebanese, Polish and Maori names after endless debate and
reflection. They’re still unusual, and in my sons’ cases, somewhat rare.
The Hebrews chose proper names that
were descriptive or prophetic, they often carried a sense of the spiritual,
capturing something of their dependence on God (e.g. Joshua/Jesus means the
Lord is our salvation).
In days gone by, we only knew adults
– other than relatives – by their surnames. Everyone was a Mr or Mrs. Only
relatives or intimate friends called adults by their first names; so it was
always a privilege to be invited to call an adult acquaintance or senior staff
member by their first name. Addressing others required deference and respect.
When
Moses encounters the burning bush (Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15), he hears a voice
calling out to him. The voice announces that it is the God of Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob. God then calls and sends Moses to free his people from the hands of
Egyptians. When Moses asks by whom he should say he was sent, he is told, “I am who am” – Yahweh – has sent you.
Thus
the God who had been revealed himself to Abraham a half millennium earlier, now
discloses his own name, and such is the
respect for this name, it is still considered holy and unutterable by the Jews
and for most Christians to this very day. Where Yahweh is found in the
scriptures it is usually replaced by THE LORD (in capital letters).
And
this is the intimacy to which you and I are also invited: for while his name
may be unutterable, we know it; and this God continues to speak to us through
the burning bushes of our everyday life. You and I too are called and sent by
this same God to rescue the poor and suffering, to be compassionate.
The
names we give our children must last a lifetime and be remembered by the
generations yet to be born. Choose carefully! This Lent remain vigilant to the
voice of God: he will call you by name.
Peter
Douglas
Act of consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary: Full text
Here is the Vatican text of the Act of Consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, sent by the Vatican to bishops throughout the world. Pope Francis has invited bishops and the rest of the world to join him when he recites the prayer March 25 in St. Peter’s Basilica.
-----------------
Act of
Consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary
Basilica of St. Peter
March 25, 2022
O Mary, Mother of God and our mother,
in this time of trial we turn to you. As our mother, you love us and know us:
No concern of our hearts is hidden from you. Mother of mercy, how often we have
experienced your watchful care and your peaceful presence! You never cease to
guide us to Jesus, the prince of peace.
Yet we have strayed from that path of
peace. We have forgotten the lesson learned from the tragedies of the last
century, the sacrifice of the millions who fell in two world wars. We have
disregarded the commitments we made as a community of nations. We have betrayed
peoples’ dreams of peace and the hopes of the young. We grew sick with greed,
we thought only of our own nations and their interests, we grew indifferent and
caught up in our selfish needs and concerns.
We chose to ignore God, to be satisfied
with our illusions, to grow arrogant and aggressive, to suppress innocent lives
and to stockpile weapons. We stopped being our neighbor’s keepers and stewards
of our common home. We have ravaged the garden of the earth with war, and by
our sins we have broken the heart of our heavenly Father, who desires us to be
brothers and sisters. We grew indifferent to everyone and everything except
ourselves. Now with shame we cry out: Forgive us, Lord!
Holy Mother,
amid the misery of our sinfulness, amid our struggles and weaknesses, amid the
mystery of iniquity that is evil and war, you remind us that God never abandons
us, but continues to look upon us with love, ever ready to forgive us and raise
us up to new life. He has given you to us and made your Immaculate Heart a
refuge for the church and for all humanity. By God’s gracious will, you are
ever with us; even in the most troubled moments of our history, you are there
to guide us with tender love.
We now turn to
you and knock at the door of your heart. We are your beloved children. In every
age you make yourself known to us, calling us to conversion. At this dark hour,
help us and grant us your comfort. Say to us once more: “Am I not here, I who
am your Mother?” You are able to untie the knots of our hearts and of our
times. In you we place our trust. We are confident that, especially in moments
of trial, you will not be deaf to our supplication and will come to our aid.
That is what you did at Cana in Galilee,
when you interceded with Jesus and he worked the first of his signs. To
preserve the joy of the wedding feast, you said to him: “They have no wine” (Jn
2:3). Now, O Mother, repeat those words and that prayer, for in our own day we
have run out of the wine of hope, joy has fled, fraternity has faded. We have
forgotten our humanity and squandered the gift of peace. We opened our hearts
to violence and destructiveness. How greatly we need your maternal help!
Therefore, O Mother, hear our prayer.
Star of the Sea, do not let us be
shipwrecked in the tempest of war.
Ark of the New Covenant, inspire
projects and paths of reconciliation.
Queen of Heaven, restore God’s peace to
the world.
Eliminate hatred and the thirst for
revenge, and teach us forgiveness.
Free us from war, protect our world
from the menace of nuclear weapons.
Queen of the Rosary, make us realize
our need to pray and to love.
Queen of the Human Family, show people
the path of fraternity.
Queen of Peace, obtain peace for our
world.
O Mother, may your sorrowful plea stir
our hardened hearts. May the tears you shed for us make this valley parched by
our hatred blossom anew. Amid the thunder of weapons, may your prayer turn our
thoughts to peace. May your maternal touch soothe those who suffer and flee
from the rain of bombs. May your motherly embrace comfort those forced to leave
their homes and their native land. May your sorrowful heart move us to
compassion and inspire us to open our doors and to care for our brothers and
sisters who are injured and cast aside.
Holy Mother of God, as you stood beneath the cross, Jesus, seeing the disciple at your side, said: “Behold your son” (Jn 19:26). In this way, he entrusted each of us to you. To the disciple, and to each of us, he said: “Behold, your Mother” (Jn 19:27). Mother Mary, we now desire to welcome you into our lives and our history.
At this hour, a weary and distraught humanity stands with you beneath the
cross, needing to entrust itself to you and, through you, to consecrate itself
to Christ. The people of Ukraine and Russia, who venerate you with great love,
now turn to you, even as your heart beats with compassion for them and for all
those peoples decimated by war, hunger, injustice and poverty.
Therefore,
Mother of God and our mother, to your Immaculate Heart we solemnly entrust and
consecrate ourselves, the church and all humanity, especially Russia and
Ukraine. Accept this act that we carry out with confidence and love. Grant that
war may end and peace spread throughout the world. The “fiat” that arose from
your heart opened the doors of history to the Prince of Peace. We trust that,
through your heart, peace will dawn once more. To you we consecrate the future
of the whole human family, the needs and expectations of every people, the
anxieties and hopes of the world.
Through
your intercession, may God’s mercy be poured out on the earth and the gentle
rhythm of peace return to mark our days. Our Lady of the “fiat,” on whom the
Holy Spirit descended, restore among us the harmony that comes from God. May
you, our “living fountain of hope,” water the dryness of our hearts. In your
womb Jesus took flesh; help us to foster the growth of communion. You once trod
the streets of our world; lead us now on the paths of peace. Amen.
A Ukrainian Jesuit's war diary
Andriy Zelinskyy SJ
I find myself moved by a bright star in
the deep, dark sky over the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. One tiny but very
bright light sparkling through the cold night over the city I moved to because
of Russian airstrikes on Kyiv, where I have been living and serving for the
last 10 years.
I love Kyiv, one of the greenest, most
pleasant and peaceful capitals in Europe. On Feb. 24, I woke up in a completely
different world.
The peace was obliterated by the
Russian bombs dropped on my city and so many other Ukrainian cities. Since that
first morning, the Russians have not, even for a single day, stopped bombing
and shelling our cities and villages.
Only a couple of weeks ago,
Volnovakha, near Donetsk, was a town I visited many times, with people in
the streets and hope in their eyes, with children going to school and parents
thinking of their future. And now, like other cities under Russian bombardment,
it doesn’t exist—neither the town nor the future for so many of its
inhabitants. They have been killed by war.
During these first three weeks of
Russia’s invasion, more than 900 rockets and missiles have been launched
against Ukraine; more than 300 per week or almost 50 air attacks daily. In the
city of Kharkiv alone, with a population of 1.5 million people, more than 600
buildings have been completely destroyed. The city of Mariupol, located on the
northwestern coast of the Azov Sea, has been under siege for more than two
weeks.
Similar stories can be told about the
cities of Isyum, Irpin, Bucha, Chernihiv and many more.
Witnessing the level and scale of
violence throughout these past days, I still can’t understand its source. The
bombing of pediatric and maternity hospitals, of schools and churches, of a
bread factory and residential apartments, has no strategic goal whatsoever. It
is violence without reason, senseless cruelty.
Obviously, you can’t just start a war
without a reason. And if there isn’t a legitimate one, you have to make one up.
In his official declaration launching the “special military operation” against
Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia’s two major goals
are “demilitarization” and “denazification.”
We Ukrainians know well that the
Russian military aggression did not start in February. It began in 2014 with
the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of pieces of two eastern regions of
the country where Russia has installed quasi-governments. The West made a
strategic decision not to notice that war in Ukraine. Before this total war on
Ukraine began in February, the lives of 14,000 civilians and more than 4,000
military personnel had already been lost fighting the Russians since 2014, and
more than 1.5 million people had already been forced to leave their homes and
seek refuge in other parts of the country or abroad.
The response of the international
community to the seizure of Crimea and aggression in the Donbas region did not
seriously affect Russia.
Now what Mr. Putin means by
“demilitarization” is to deprive our armed forces of any capacity to defend
Ukraine from this ongoing Russian military aggression in the east.
Even more problematic is Mr. Putin’s
term “denazification.”
To give that effort any credibility, it
is necessary first to find a “Nazi” in the Ukrainian government, which is
headed by President Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, in a country that lost around 9
million lives in its fight against the Nazi army during World War II. Everybody
in Ukraine understands very well that Mr. Putin’s mission cannot be
accomplished: you can’t find that which doesn’t exist.
But Russia’s authoritarian tradition
makes it easy to undermine reality: You can always make something up. Most
Russians have accepted the claims of their president about the threats coming
from Ukraine or about the necessity of the military means used in the
operation. With few exceptions they have not displayed the courage required to
question the legitimacy of Mr. Putin’s justification for this war. In
authoritarian societies, reality is dictated, not discovered, and the truth is
constructed, not received. A “real” truth is dangerous. It sets people free.
Where there’s fear, there’s always room
for shame. And shameful in this whole story is the official position of the
Russian Orthodox Church.
The church of Christ has had the same
mission through long centuries of human history: to announce, in words and
deeds, to all people the healing truth of our Lord and savior Jesus from Nazareth,
in whom eternal God manifests boundless love to humanity, that makes us all
brothers and sisters in Christ, recipients of his eternal mercy.
After three weeks of ferocious
bombardments, after so much suffering on the part of innocent civilians, most of
whom consider themselves the faithful of the Orthodox Church, the patriarch of
Moscow has not said a word in their defense. Instead he makes loud political
statements accusing those countries that provide the means of defense to the
Ukrainian people of somehow provoking or prolonging the war.
To make his arguments more “credible,”
the patriarch focused the attention of his flock on the proliferation of gay
pride parades that supposedly are a “test to enter the club of these powerful
countries.” But he has said not a single word about innocent victims of the
Russian air and artillery attacks, not a word of consolation for those whose
houses and lives were cruelly destroyed.
This is what happens when the church
preaches not the Gospel, but state ideology; when the value, significance and
dignity of a human being vanishes before the shadow of a “great culture”; when
the obligation of political authorities to serve the needs of their people is
replaced by an insatiable desire to satisfy their own interests at the cost of
the governed; when personal responsibility gives way to exaggerated national
pride and reality to nicely decorated mental illusions.
The concept of the “Russian world” is
often defined by the representatives of the Russian elite, especially by Patriarch
Kirill and Mr. Putin, as the “Holy Rus,” a transnational “Russian
civilization.” It includes the nations of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, as well
as territory occupied by ethnic Russians and Russian speakers all over the
world.
According to this ideology, the
“Russian world” has one political center in Moscow and one spiritual center in
Kyiv, with one Russian language as a means of communication and the propagation
of Russian culture. The Russian Orthodox Church is its single dominant
religious institution, and the patriarch of Moscow its primary religious
leader, now acting in a complete spiritual symphony with the president of
Russia, the political leader of this vast social, spiritual and cultural realm.
Russian leaders position the collective
West as an opponent to this political and spiritual civilization, arguing that
Western “liberalism,” “globalization,” “militant secularism” and “gay pride
parades” are its antitheses. The “Russian world” has been used throughout the
past decades as an ideological cover for the high degree of social injustice in
Russia, to prevent citizens from sympathizing with Western democratic
institutions and to legitimize the imperialistic ambitions of the Russian
political establishment. State propaganda based on the tenets of this ideology
have for years distorted citizens’ perception of reality by describing anything
and everything that would stand against the autocratic regime of Mr. Putin as
“Nazi” or “fascist.”
The problem with this ideology of the
“Russian world” is that it simply doesn’t exist. The Russian war against
Ukraine proves this better than anything else. When you see a Russian tank blowing up an elderly man in Mariupol or
Russian soldiers killing civilians standing in line for bread in
Chernihiv, and when you hear not a single word against this diabolic
violence from the spiritual leader of the ”Russian world,” you understand that
it simply has nothing to do with spirituality, humanity or reality.
When you see Russian bombs destroying
Orthodox churches, and Russian-speaking Ukrainian soldiers sacrificing their
lives in a courageous fight against the Russian army, and when you listen to
Ukrainian mothers who have lost their sons, cursing Russian invadors in
Russian, you realize that no spiritual or cultural unity provided by the
Russian language or the Russian church really exists.
The “Russian world” appears to be no more than a mental construct, a nicely decorated illusion, cultural cover over a dangerous antihuman political core. It’s a fake.
That bright sparkling star in the cold
night sky absorbed my whole attention for a minute. It was a beautiful and
peaceful sight, an alternative to the world destroyed by war that I had been
living in for some days.
But no matter how peaceful and
beautiful it appeared, I know it inhabited a far-off space that was probably
not fit for human life. Like the shiny idea of Holy Rus, it was sparkling and
appealing, but it offered no safe place for human life to carry on.
People fall prey to illusions. They
seek to create a significance that will outlast their lives. A social class, a
political nation, a biological race or a cultural identity—all of them may seem
bright enough to capture our imagination, offering a belonging to something
greater than ourselves. Yet just as bright, remote stars in cold space, these ideologies
cannot sustain human life.
We have already experienced this a
number of times in this last, bloody century. It looks like we have not learned
the lesson yet.
Maybe it’s still not too late.
Father
Zelinskyy SJ is the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church’s chief military
chaplain.This article was published in America on 22 March 2022.
