Joy is more than happiness if you take happiness to mean feeling good. Joy is a fact beyond feeling, and the fact is the actual possession of what is good. As only God is good, true joy is being with God. Because “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself,” only Christ can make our joy “full” (2 Cor. 5:19; John 15:11). Gaudete, or “Rejoice” Sunday is, like Laetare Sunday in Lent, a glimpse of joy along the way to joy.
C. S. Lewis called his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy because, I think, he was brought up in a Calvinist atmosphere which had a pessimistic view of the world. Saints are grateful for joy, but they are not surprised by it. They expect it because Jesus promises it. For the martyrs, their most joyful moment in this world was their physically painful death, because they were not sentimentally motivated by feelings. St. Stephen rejoiced as he was being stoned, for he could see the heavens opened.
Cardinals of the Church wear red as a sign of their joyful willingness to suffer for the Faith and for the Pope who is guarantor of that Faith. In modern times, Cardinals like Mindszenty and Kung and Van Thuan did that vividly. Sometimes that suffering is more subtle. Earlier this month, the Archbishop of Madrid, Cardinal Antonio Maria Rouco Varela, was threatened with physical violence by students at the Autonomous University of Madrid if he gave a lecture there on the subject “The God who is unknown to 21st century Spaniards.” A laureate of the universities of Salamanca and Munich, Cardinal Varela is a finer scholar than the sophomoric hypocrites who would not let him speak. So God remains unknown to them, and they remain deprived of God’s joy. The Spanish radio network COPE remarked that “freedom and truth have become a nuisance at the place which is supposed to be the pillar of knowledge—the university.” Compounding the scandal were the weakness of the faculty in protecting free speech and the Spanish government’s claim that it could not guarantee the Cardinal’s security. In 2008, the Pope himself was threatened if he spoke at the University of Rome. The Prince of Lies hates places dedicated to the pursuit of truth and so he screams when the truth is spoken, and he becomes most agitated in those places once thought to be most Christian.
Secularism” is not just a cultural fashion. It is the world’s worship of its worldliness, the most degrading kind of narcissism. By its self-hypnosis, it is more subtle and thus more lethal than other heresies and tyrannies. All this was foreseen by Christ when He fortified his disciples with joy as he warned them of obstacles and obscurantists to come. “Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you” (Matt. 5:12).
Fr. George W. Rutler is the pastor of the Church of our Saviour in New York City. His latest book, Coincidentally: Unserious Reflections on Trivial Connections, is available from Crossroads Publishing.
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