Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Cardinal Collins will be hosting a webinar for priests of the Archdiocese of Toronto this week to talk about plans for reopening. If it is anything like the previous webinars, the answer to every question will be, “We don’t know.” In fact, we are waiting for the government to lift or modify the emergency measures which they have imposed.
I am not happy with the restrictions that have been placed on us. It can be argued that they are overly strict and pointlessly prolonged. My attitude during this lockdown is based on my many years experience as a professional engineer. There were times when I disagreed with design decisions taken by the project manager. However, he was the one ultimately responsible for the overall success of the project. If something went wrong, he was the one who was going to take the blame, not me. With responsibility also comes authority. So, I would give him my best advice, and if he decided to go another way, then I did my best to carry it out his directions and make them succeed. In the same way, Cardinal Collins is my boss. It was Cardinal Collins who ordained me to the priesthood and he placed me here in Alliston as Pastor to serve you. He is doing what he thinks is right in these difficult circumstances based on the best advice that he is given. Throughout the Wuhan pandemic, his overriding concern has been the well-being of the faithful in his charge — both their spiritual and physical well-being.
Seeing the events in the U.S. and during the past week, the words of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats come again to mind:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Those words were written in 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War, but they express a human truth that applies to all times. Is it not always the case that things fall apart? Does not every system inevitably deteriorate from order to disorder? Yet, Yeats is wrong when he says that ‘the centre cannot hold.’ Amid the chaos of anarchy it is precisely the centre that does hold. Stat crux dum volvitur orbis — ‘the Cross stands firm while the world turns.’
Consider all the turmoil of the past twenty centuries, including the rise and fall of world empires. Throughout all that time, Christ is the centre that has continued to hold. In every age we may experience tribulation and distress; that is the nature of the world. We know that this present crisis will pass. We also know that there will be new crises to come, both outside and inside the Church. But the Cross stands firm. As St. Augustine has said, “The Church will totter if its foundation shakes; but how can Christ be moved? Christ remaining immovable, the Church shall never be shaken.”
