May 11, 2025 - Pastor Message
May 18, 2025JUBILEE 2025 LUMEN GENTIUM
JUBILEE 2025
LUMEN GENTIUM
“You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a bushel basket. It is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house. Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and give glory to your heavenly Father” (Matthew 5:14-16).
We resume this week our jubilee year reflection on the four constitutions of Vatican Council II, which concluded sixty years ago. Having reflected previously on the constitution on divine revelation, Dei Verbum, we look now at the constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, “Light of the nations”. This document describes for us and for the world the Church’s “nature and universal mission,” in essence answering the question: What is the Church?
The Church is the world’s response to God’s revelation of himself and his saving will. In his Son, Jesus Christ, God called human beings together to love and serve him in a new way of being. Just as Jesus was a living sign of God in the world, or a sacrament, he established the Church to be a sacrament of himself in the world, continuing his saving work by drawing people from all times and places to him through their Christlike words and actions, ultimately, by the proclamation of his Word and the celebration of the sacraments.
To accomplish this task, Christ gave the Church the gift of his Holy Spirit as the soul living within and animating his Body, made up of many members with many different gifts but all coming together to serve our unity in Christ. This communion has been prefigured through all of history in such images as the kingdom of Israel, a sheepfold called together by the good shepherd, as a farm or field, a building, mansion, and temple, the heavenly Jerusalem, and a mother with her children.
But in the present age, begun 2000 years ago on the day of Pentecost, the Church takes shape as a visible, hierarchically organized community of missionary disciples. The mystical aspect of the Church, the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit, overflows and cannot be contained but spurs on the missionary work of the Church. That said, the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church” established by Christ subsists in the Catholic Church, where alone we find all the elements Christ entrusted to the world for our salvation - his Word, his sacraments, his apostolic ministry and teaching. That does not exclude the fact that some of these elements are found outside the Catholic Church, and to that extent we share communion with other churches and religions, but only in the visible institution of the Catholic Church are all of them found. It is therefore the Church’s mission to share those gifts with the world and to gather all God’s people into full, visible communion with him.
Fr. Marc Stockton
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