The eucharistic spirituality of John Paul II and Katharine Drexel yields a communio that has both a vertical and a horizontal reality and a visible and an invisible reality. Partaking of the Eucharist unites the communicant with God. It also unites the communicant with others who share in the divine nature, the anonymous and named saints in the communion of saints, the faithfully departed who enjoy the Beatific Vision no longer through a glass darkly as on earth, but face-to-face in heaven, and those who “will be incorporated in her [the heavenly church] after having been fully purified.”59 The horizontal reality of the Eucharist is that it unites the faithful into the Body of Christ. Each one becomes then an alter Christus, another Christ. To repeat the pope’s words, those who receive the broken bread become “the bread broken for others.” Through receiving Christ, one becomes another Christ with the commandment to do unto others according to Christ’s teaching and example. Thus, in participating in the Eucharist, one claims Christ and is compelled to proclaim him to others. In this way, “the Church is not a reality closed in on herself. Rather she is permanently open to missionary and ecumenical endeavor, for she is sent to the world to announce and witness, to make present and spread the mystery of communion which is essential to her, and to gather together all people and all things into Christ.”60 It is this fundamental link between a necessary eucharistic faith and a life of charity, or love, that Pope John Paul II makes so clear in his doctoral work on St. John of the Cross. Using one definition of faith as union with God, the young Karol Wojtyla wrote, “Love increases the union [achieved in the Eucharist], and it is likewise love which determines the degree of transformation.”61 It is the life lived in complete charity that is the most full measure of the quality of the individual’s faith.
It was not an arbitrarily used rhetorical tactic for St. Paul to teach that, of faith, hope, and charity, “the greatest of these is charity” (1 Cor. 13:13). The Gospel of John describes how Jesus washed the feet of his disciples in preparation for the Passover meal that was to be his last. Pope John Paul II, in his homily of March 3, 2002, taught:
As he finishes the washing of the feet, he again invites us to imitate him: “For I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done to you” (John 13:15). In this way he establishes an intimate connection between the Eucharist as the sacrament of his sacrificial gift, and the commandment to love that commits us to welcoming and serving our brothers and sisters. Partaking of the Lord’s table cannot be separated from the duty of loving our neighbor. Each time we partake of the Eucharist, we too say our “Amen” before the Body and Blood of our Lord. In doing so we commit ourselves to doing what Christ has done, to “washing the feet” of our brothers and sisters, becoming a real and visible image of the One who “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7). . . . The Eucharist is a great gift, but also a great responsibility for those who receive it.62
Jesus said, “He who does not gather with me scatters” (Matt. 12:30), and “Each branch of mine that bears no fruit, he [the Father] takes away” (John 15:2). The love inherent in the Eucharist must bear fruit. The person who does not bear fruit does not remain in the sacred communion, but becomes attenuated from the Body of Christ, and even lost to eternal life. But, “communion begets communion: essentially it is likened to a mission on behalf of communion. In fact, Jesus said to his disciples: ‘You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide’ (John 15:16). Communion and mission are profoundly connected with another, they interpenetrate and mutually imply each other to the point that communion represents both the source and the fruit of mission: communion gives rise to mission and mission is accomplished in communion.”63
Mission and Hope
Communion leads naturally to mission. To be in communion means to share in the imperative of evangelization. According to the pope, “Eucharist and Mission are inseparable.”64 While mission does not necessarily imply the mission of the missionary who goes to foreign territories and distant lands, the missionary life is perhaps the fullest expression of gathering and bearing fruit. The pope wrote that “the Church is missionary by her very nature”;65 “It is the primary service the Church can render to every individual and to all humanity in the modern world”;66 “It is the primary task of the missio ad gentes to announce that it is in Christ, ‘the Way, and the Truth, and the Life’ (John 14:6), that people find salvation.”67 The philosopher and systematic theologian Paul Tillich described the importance of missionary activity to the church as “an element of a living being without which he must finally die.” According to Tillich, the success of missions is proof for the universality of Christ’s message:
Missionary work is that work in which the potential universality of Christianity becomes evident day by day, in which universality is actualized with every new success of the missionary endeavor. The action of missions gives the pragmatic proof of the universality of Christianity. . . . Missions [also] bear witness on behalf of the Church as the agency of the conquering Kingdom of God. Only missions can prove that the Church is the agent through which the Kingdom of God continuously actualizes itself in history. Missionaries come to a country in which the Church is still in latency. In this situation the manifest Church opens up what is potentially given in the different religions and cultures outside Christianity.68
Mission is a multifaceted endeavor. The Church is about salvation and the building of the kingdom of God. Evangelization brings salvation to both the evangelizer and the evangelized. Mission and evangelization are primary forms of obedience to Christ’s commandment to love and to carry the good news to all nations. Pope John Paul II believed that all peoples are in need of evangelization — those in the Church who may only imperfectly know and understand the fullness of the gospel, those who have fallen away from Christianity due to the lure of secularity or the pull of other faiths, and those who have never heard the gospel. Katharine Drexel’s mission was to those who were not secure in their faith and to those who had never heard the gospel, the African Americans and Native Americans of the United States.
The pope wrote that the mandate for Christians to become missionaries stems not only from Christ’s commandment to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19), but also “from the profound demands of God’s life within us.”69 Christians must share the gifts and blessings they have received from God. God clearly intends for all to be invited to the heavenly banquet: “The Church, and every individual Christian within her, may not keep hidden or monopolize this newness and richness which has been received from God’s bounty in order to be communicated to all mankind.”70 In the pope’s analysis of faith in the works of St. John of the Cross, one’s charity is the measure of one’s faith and, as charity, builds one’s faith. Both Katharine and the pope who would canonize her held in common the belief that there is no more precious gift to share with others than one’s faith through missionary activity, and to them, it was a privilege and a duty. John Paul II saw missionary activity as essential to the Church.
From the beginning of his pontificate, he preached and taught in anticipation of the third millennium of Christianity. His essential rhetoric was always future-oriented. When he did recall the past, it was often to bring to mind the virtues of saints and the conversions of nations, such as when he recollected Clovis for the people in Rheims or St. Augustine in Canterbury. In his message for Mission Sunday 2001, the pope used the story of Christ’s direction to Peter to put out to sea to cast his nets once again after a fruitless night of fishing to direct the faithful to take part in and sustain the Church’s mission. He believed that people must always “remember the past with gratitude, live the present with passion, and look forward to the future with confidence. This tending towards the future, illuminated by hope, must be the basis of all Church activity in the third millennium. . . . It is time, indeed, to look forward, keeping our eyes on the face of Jesus. . . . Contemplatio
n of the face of the Lord leads the disciples to ‘contemplate’ the faces of men and women of today: the Lord identifies himself in fact with ‘the least of my brothers’ (Matthew 25:40 & 45).”71
The pope’s thoughts extended to the future with a palpable sense of urgency. He shared the Evangelist Matthew’s sense of urgency: “Go quickly and tell his disciples he has risen” (Matt. 28:7). Indeed, in the pope’s 1987 encyclical Redemptoris Missio, in talking about the need for missions, he employed the word “urgent” and variations of “urgent” ten times. The language the pope used in this encyclical is one indication of the great importance he placed on missions, for it is full of exhortatory and emphatic language; such words as “must,” “must not,” “necessary,” “demand,” “mandate,” “commit,” and “need” are used over and over again. In speaking of the importance of missions, he wrote in 1995, “As the year 2000 approaches, our world feels an urgent need for the Gospel.”72 In the 2004 papal message on World Mission Sunday, he returned to this theme of urgency as he looked to the future. His first sentences read, “The Church’s missionary activity is an urgency also at the beginning of the third millennium. Mission . . . is still only beginning and we must commit ourselves wholeheartedly to its service.”73
Here is a man with an eschatological sense of time, for he considers that something continuing for two thousand years is “only beginning.” He could think this way because on his pilgrim journeys he read the many negative signs of the times and knew just how much needed to be done to reconcile the world to Christ. As he entered into the third millennium, the pope sensed that the day of the Lord’s return was getting closer and closer. This was all the more reason to hold up Katharine Drexel for emulation. If the Church is “built [to be] as a new Jerusalem, [and] principle of unity in Christ between different peoples and nations,” then there is yet much to be done to achieve its ideal.74 If the parousia, the second coming of Christ, is drawing near, there is both great need and great urgency in the missionary field, yet the pope was always confident of ultimate success because it is Christ and the Holy Spirit who work through the missionary.
Let us go forward in hope! A new millennium is opening before the Church like a vast ocean upon which we shall venture, relying on the help of Christ. The Son of God, who became incarnate two thousand years ago out of love for humanity, is at work even today: we need discerning eyes to see this and, above all, a generous heart to become the instruments of his work. . . . Now, the Christ whom we have contemplated and loved bids us to set out once more on our journey: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (Mt 28:19). The missionary mandate accompanies us into the Third Millennium and urges us to share the enthusiasm of the very first Christians: we can count on the power of the same Spirit who poured out at Pentecost and who impels us still today to start out anew, sustained by the hope “which does not disappoint” (Rom 5:5).75
One way the pope encouraged missionary work and the vocation to the missions was to canonize and commemorate great missionaries of the past. For example, on the day that St. Katharine Drexel was raised to the altar, or canonized, the pope canonized not only three nuns, but also thirty-three foreign missionaries to China who gave their lives along with eighty-seven of their converts. The encyclical of John Paul II Slavorum Apostoli commemorated the eleven-hundredth anniversary of the evangelization of the Slavs by the missionary brothers Saints Cyril and Methodius. In an address to the European Ecumenical Symposium, October 12, 1985, the first Slavic pope gave his intentions in writing the encyclical: “I endeavored to portray the admirable charism and work of the two great evangelizers, convinced as I was that the entire Church, and especially those involved in evangelization today, can draw great profit from the example of their life, of their ecclesial sense, and their apostolic method.”76 Here the pope’s backward glance, in fact, looks forward. He held up examples from the past as inspiration for present and future Christian living and for carrying out the mission of Christ.
John Paul II explicitly turned to consecrated women as the ideal missionaries. In speaking to a large group of religiously vowed women in Buenos Aires, on April 10, 1987, the pope said:
Those who are called to this consecration, and who take their places within the Church’s dynamic action, are par excellence people who have volunteered to leave all and to go spread the gospel to the ends of the earth. You were called . . . to experience within yourselves and to live out in all its consequences the motto of St. Paul which becomes a daily examination of conscience: “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” Yes, woe to me, woe to us if we today do not preach the gospel to a world which, in spite of appearances, still hungers for God.77
He pointed out that theirs is a unique vocation that involves “a total commitment to evangelization, a commitment which involves the missionary’s whole person and life, and demands a self-giving without limits of energy or time.”78 By the Code of Canon Law, the body of positive church law that guides, among other issues, the rights and responsibilities of the clergy and the laity, consecrated men and women “have a special obligation to play a special part in missionary activity.”79 The pope wrote that “the Church needs to make known the great Gospel values of which she is the bearer. No one witnesses more effectively to these values than those who profess the consecrated life in chastity, poverty, and obedience, in total gift of self to God and in complete readiness to serve humanity and society after the example of Christ.”80 The pope went on in words that could have described Katharine Drexel and her sisters, who vowed to be as mothers to Native American and African American people:
I extend a special word of appreciation to the missionary Religious Sisters, in whom virginity for the sake of the Kingdom is transformed into a motherhood in the spirit that is rich and fruitful. It is precisely the mission ad gentes that offers them vast scope for “the gift of self with love in total and undivided manner.” The example and activity of women who through virginity are consecrated to love of God and neighbor, especially the very poor, are an indispensable evangelical sign among those peoples and cultures where women still have far to go on the way toward human promotion and liberation. It is my hope that many young Christian women will be attracted to giving themselves generously to Christ, and will draw strength and joy from their consecration in order to bear witness to him among the peoples who do not know him.81
Yet the pope and Katharine both knew that the life of a missionary was extremely difficult and demanding. John Paul II remarked of Saints Cyril and Methodius, “They undertook among these people [the Slavs] that mission to which both of them devoted the rest of their lives, spent amidst journeys, privations, sufferings, hostility and persecutions.”82 Katharine, too, spoke often of the hardships encountered in the missionary field. She instructed her sisters: “How do we get accustomed to seeing God in the neighbor? By repeated acts. Even in this life we shall have reward for we shall have Peace. True love of Our Lord does not shrink back from ugliness, dirt, misery, and sin. Such children should remind us of Our Little Lord Jesus, Who became a ‘leper’ for our sins. Let us do everything for the poor, in the Name of Jesus. Let us look upon them with the eyes of the soul, or put on saintly spectacles, that we may see in them the living image of Jesus.”83
Katharine personally visited each of her missions at least once every year, and between visits she wrote to them constantly, giving directions and succor. In a letter dated October 4, 1913, she wrote to her sisters in the Omaha, Nebraska, mission:
It is [Jesus] you serve in them [the poor and the unlovely]. You will do everything for them if you, your own selves are holy and united to God. If you give them good example by your patience with them, your acts of charity, by teaching them reverence to Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament by your reverence, and careful bow before the Tabernacle, by your own work perfectly done in each department — so that in you they see that perfection consists
in not doing extraordinary things but in doing extraordinarily well what each has to do, in fine by teaching as Our Lord, “And Jesus began to Do and teach.”84
Above all, the missionary must rely on God. Acknowledging this, Katharine wrote, “A missionary is one sent with the power of Christ. . . . We are incapable of bringing even one person to God. . . . It is God alone who has given each one. Thank Him. Bless Him.”85 The pope called the Holy Spirit “the principal agent of mission.”86 He also said those with a missionary vocation are “sent” as Christ was sent, that he will be present to them as they carry out his work, for “Christ . . . is with [the missionary] at every moment of life — ‘Do not be Afraid . . . for I am with you’ (Acts 18:9-10) — and [Christ] awaits [the missionary] in the heart of every person” she evangelizes.87
Mother Katharine Drexel Page 29
