On Friday night, Dominican priests welcomed young men for a vocation weekend in Washington, D.C., beginning with a Mass in the chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, where Pope Francis will be tomorrow. Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P., took this picture during Mass, highlighting the walk all are called to: holiness. (The Second Vatican Council talks about this, Pope John Paul II talked about this. Pope Francis talks about this. Jesus showed us this. It’s not breaking news. And yet …. How many professed Christians don’t realize we’re called to be saints? How much of the rest of the world doesn’t see such witness? If everyone lived next door to a saint, it would be a different kind of world.)
Mass in the Our Lady of Guadalupe’s chapel @MarysShrine: Making visible the Communion of Saints https://t.co/g659MXNbaG
— Fr Lawrence Lew OP (@LawrenceOP) September 19, 2015
The image captured what Pope Francis described during a Mass with American seminaries in May: some of the saints of the Americas, a litany of the saints of the Americas, if you will. He named:
• contemplatives like Rose of Lima, Mariana of Quito and Teresita de los Andes;
• pastors who bear the scent of Christ and of his sheep, such as Toribio de Mogrovejo, Francois de Laval, and Rafael Guizar Valencia;
• humble workers in the vineyard of the Lord, like Juan Diego and Kateri Tekakwitha;
• servants of the suffering and the marginalized, like Peter Claver, Martín de Porres, Damian of Molokai, Alberto Hurtado and Rose Philippine Duchesne;
• founders of communities consecrated to the service of God and of the poorest, like Frances Cabrini, Elizabeth Ann Seton and Katharine Drexel;
• tireless missionaries, such as Friar Francisco Solano, José de Anchieta, Alonso de Barzana, Maria Antonia de Paz y Figueroa and Jose Gabriel del Rosario Brochero;
• martyrs like Roque Gonzalez, Miguel Pro and Oscar Arnulfo Romero;
Coming here, he seeks to lift us up out of the deluge of the every day and encourage all of us to pursue and fulfill our calls as the missionaries and the humble workers and the pastors. He gives us the courage to see the faces of the martyrs – martyrdom happening in our world today. He comes here to remind us who we are.
Specifically at the aforementioned shrine by the Catholic University America, he will canonize Junípero Serra, the founder of the California missions. About this, Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez writes:
With Junípero Serra, Pope Francis is holding up a saint who was a pioneer of the American spirit.
A man of prayer and a lover of nature, Serra preached God’s compassion, fought for the dignity of women, and may have been the first person in America to make a moral case against capital punishment. Three years before the Declaration of Independence, Father Serra had already written a bill of rights for indigenous Californians.
Serra’s canonization is more than a religious event for Catholics. For Francis it is an invitation for Americans to recover their history and identity—and to embrace the challenge of national spiritual and moral renewal.
Taste and see the goodness of the Lord, Junípero Serra urged in a homily, very much in the spirit of Pope Francis, who follows Jesus Christ. Remember the good that we are called to — as men and women, as a nation — a good that our souls and the world needs.