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St. Mary Roman Catholic Church
New Britain, Connecticut |
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By Fr. Salvatore Rosa Today we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Saint Mary’s. You are all here today because your lives have been and are, deeply involved in the parish. You love Saint Mary’s and are grateful to the part the church has played in your lives. Some of you were baptized there, went to school there years ago, made your Communion and confirmation, got married in the church, buried loved ones in Saint Mary, and probably will have your funeral at Saint Mary as well. All of that is part of our celebration today. Last Sunday I spoke about the situation of the Irish Catholics when they came to the United Sates in 1848. Please bear with me today, as I talk to you a bit more about Ireland and its importance in the life of the Catholic Church. How did the Church get to the United States? Most of us would say, “The people brought it with them.” The Italians came over with their clergy and set up Italian parishes. The Polish and their priests set up Polish Parishes. The French, the Irish, the Germans etc. - all did the same. That’s how Catholicism came to America. That’s true as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. How did Catholicism get to Italy, to Poland, to France, to Germany, to all of Europe? Most of us would say the answer is Rome. Once Rome became Catholic, and the Roman Empire spread all over, the Church just naturally grew up all over Europe. But history shows us that our common impression is wrong. Roe was sacked by Alaric in 410 AD. That was the beginning of the end. After Alaric came the rest of the barbarian hordes in wave after wave, for the rest of the century: the Vandals, the Goths, the Huns, the Angles and the Saxons. By the end of the 400’s Roman Civilization had been wiped out, and all the territory we call Europe had entered into what history calls the Dark Ages. What does that mean? The barbarian hordes pillaged and burned everything, everywhere they went. All the libraries were destroyed, all the manuscripts, all the books, all gone. All the great literature of Greece and Rome - Virgil, Homer, Cicero, Demosthenes, Euripides, Socrates, Aristotle, Plotinus, Heroditus, Tacitus, all gone. The Bible, the Jewish Scriptures in Hebrew, the Greek Scriptures of the New Testament, all destroyed. Everything that had made up Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian civilization to that point just disappeared. Learning, culture, civilization, no longer existed. There were no books to read and even if there had been, no one knew how to read them. Illiteracy became normal. Europe was a tabularasa, a blank slate. It really was the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages would last from 400-600 AD.
Except for Ireland. We all know about Saint Patrick. During these same 400’s while the barbarians were destroying the Roman Empire, Saint Patrick arrived in Ireland and made it thoroughly Catholic. And in Ireland, in this small flyspeck of an island, learning, culture, and civilization continued to exist. In monasteries throughout the land, monks preserved and copied all the great works of the past, literature, philosophy, religion, theology. The monk who took his quill pen and everyday copied a couple of more pages out of a Hebrew or Greek or Latin manuscript, had no idea how important his work was, but it would change the course of history. All of this is due to two great missionary saints who followed Patrick, and who unfortunately haven’t received the fame and recognition they deserve. The first is Columkille. By 560 Columkille had established 41 different monestaries all over Ireland. Then he took 12 followers, got in a boat and went to Scotland. There he worked for the next 40 years and set up 40 more monasteries in the jagged mountains of that country before he died. In the 600’s, a follower of his named Columbanus set out from Ireland and began to re-evangelize all of Europe. In the areas that are now called France, Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Bavaria, and Belgium, Columbanus set up monastery after monastery and built church after church. With all the books and manuscripts he brought from Ireland, he set up monastic foundations in Paris, Reins, Verdun, Amines, Ghent, Leige, Cologne, Fulda, Mainz, Wurzburg, Vienna, Salzburg, Milan, Verona, Florence, Rome, Naples, and Taranto. Literacy, learning, culture, civilization was once again established in Europe after the 2 centuries of the Darks Ages. It’s an accomplishment that staggers the imagination when we think of all the travel involved, of all the physical labor in setting up the monastery enclosures and church buildings, and of all the preaching and teaching in winning the local populations back to Christianity and gaining vocations to the monasteries. But it was all part of God’s providential plan. Chesterton once said “How odd of God to choose the Jews.” We should be equally amazed at the way God has used the Irish. Without the incredible heroism of the Irish missionaries in the 600’s the history of Europe would have been vastly different. If your parents or grandparents came to the U.S. from Europe, and brought the Catholic faith with them, it was because of the work of Columbanus in the 600’s, replanting the faith in their country. Why go into all of this on Saint Mary’s 150th anniversary? 150 years is a long time. It’s longer than any one of us is going to live. The anniversary makes us see that we are part of something that is bigger than we are. We belong to a church that is bigger than we are. We belong to a God who is much greater than we are, a God who works in History, and is guiding our lives, and our world to Himself. History is important because it enables us to see not only what man has been doing , but what God has been doing in the world. The works of the Irish monks in evangelizing Europe was part of God’s providential plan for the world. We live our lives forward, but we understand them backward. The monks who day by day copied over manuscripts with their quill pens - they didn’t know how important their activity was. They probably thought that their individual lives were small and insignificant. Yet they were part of something greater then themselves. Even though they could not see it at the time. They lived by faith. We who are alive right now lack the perspective of history which would enable us to say what God is doing in our country and in our world today. Perhaps when Saint Mary’s celebrates its 500th anniversary in 2348, a priest will be speaking to a group of Saint Mary parishioners about our times, and interpreting our times for them. He will explain to them how God was doing this or that as the year 2000 approached, and the III Millennium began. Like Catholics of every place and age, we have to live by faith, hope, and love. Faith, hope, and love plug us into the bigger picture that escapes us in the present. Faith: I believe in a God who is greater than I can understand, and whose ways are beyond my comprehension. By obeying him out of faith I let Him make use of my life according to His purposes. Hopes : I trust in his promises. He will make all things work to the good of those who seek Him, even tragedies and disasters. Love: I will do the good I can even though I may never see its results. I will leave the good I do in God’s hands and let him draw fruit from it in his way and time. Faith, Hope, and Love plug us into the bigger picture that we are part of but cannot see or understand. It’s lives of faith, hope, and love, that make us part of the church, and set us on our way to God. Saint Mary’s 150th anniversary calls us to see that the full meaning of our lives, their real significance, is found beyond us, in the God of History.
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