Pentecost Sunday

"And when the days of Pentecost were drawing to a close, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a violent wind coming, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them parted tongues as of fire, which settled upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in foreign tongues, even as the Holy Spirit prompted them to speak" (Acts 2, 1-4)

From the Pastor - A Red Letter Day

A weekly column by Father George Rutler.

The term “Red Letter Day” goes back to 325 AD when the First Council of Nicaea decreed that great feasts be marked in red on the calendar. Pentecost is quite literally a Red Letter Day since its liturgical color is red, to match the fire that came down on the apostles fifty days after the Resurrection remade the world.

Saint Augustine said that God made us without our help, but He will not remake us without our cooperation. We did not invent the biological process by which we were conceived and, as zygotes, given the 38 chromosomes that encode the physical nature we have throughout life, but we do have a moral freedom to decide how we are going to use that physical life. The Holy Spirit gives each of us in Confirmation, as he gave the whole Church at the first Pentecost in Jerusalem, seven powers to enable God to make us what He wants us to be: Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety, and Fear of the Lord.

It is good to study the subtle differences between these gifts. This can easily be done by reading the Catechism, and praying daily for their increase. This is what Blessed Teresa of Calcutta meant when she used to say so often, “Just give God permission.”

There is no need to regret lost opportunities when we still have the breath of life, if we let the Holy Spirit breathe into that life the love that made us. What you might have wanted to become does not matter, so long as you let God make you what he intends you to be. Thomas S. Jones, Jr., a New York poet who died in 1932, wrote a gentle poem that still crops up from time to time:

Across the fields of yesterday
He sometimes comes to me,
A little lad just back from play –
The lad I used to be.

And yet he smiles wistfully
Once he has crept within,
I wonder if he hopes to see
The man I might have been.

We would be condemned to perpetual wistfulness at the contemplation of unfilled promise, were it not for what the Holy Spirit can still make us with our consent. Aristotle taught that the qualities of a good rhetorician are Ethos (talents and integrity of character), Logos (right use of the mind) and Pathos (sharing a sense of the challenges of life in a difficult world). The Holy Spirit shifts this to a formula for holiness by an Ethos that shares the heritage of the saints, a Logos which is God's own truth, and the triumphal suffering of Christ who died and rose again so that we might live forever with Him. So Pentecost is the reddest of Red Letter Days.

From the Pastor - Come, Holy Spirit

A weekly column by Father George Rutler.

The great feasts of Christmas and Easter have their Advent and Lent for preparation, but there is little of the sort for Pentecost, which is celebrated next week, although the liturgies of the week before are filled with anticipation. The Resurrection of Christ and the bestowal of the Holy Spirit on the Church fifty days later are inseparable, and there was what we might call a Pre-Pentecost on Easter itself when Christ breathed on the apostles and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and who sins you retain are retained” (John 20: 22-23). On the actual Pentecost, the whole Church would be inspired with fire from Heaven.

The hymn “Veni Creator Spiritus” invoking the Holy Spirit is sung at the Church’s important events, and most fervently at the conferral of Holy Orders. I remember Archbishop Dominic Tang Yee-min of Canton preaching to American seminarians and saying three times: “No pope, no Catholic Church!” He had been confined to a Communist prison for twenty-two years for loyalty to the papacy. We can also say, “No priest, no Catholic Church!” Every Christian is imbued with the Holy Spirit in Baptism, and the priest has a special measure of that gift so that he might serve the people. For many years in our country there has been a deafness to the Holy Spirit’s call to priestly service, for we hear Him with our hearts, and hardness of heart is the spiritual equivalent of hardness of hearing. Happily, invocations of the Holy Spirit seem to have stirred up solid vocations recently, and the present number of 3,723 seminarians in our country is the highest in nearly twenty-five years.

Among the young men from our own parish studying for the priesthood, three hope to be ordained to the diaconate later this year. This past week I had the privilege of giving the annual retreat at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers for those preparing for ordination in our archdiocese. I’d have to say that all of them seem more certain of what is the solid meat of doctrine than was the tone when I was in seminary, and they are very much in the mold of the present Pontiff as shepherds of souls. God willing, they will be priests in one of the most challenging times in Christian history, and our culture will not afford them the perquisites and comforts that an earlier and more Christian culture provided, but that circumstance will also make for stronger hearts and voices for the conversion and care of souls.

Everyone has a vocation to some state of life and some particular service, and the Holy Spirit guides each in discerning what that is. In this season, then, it is especially fitting to pray, “Come Holy Spirit. Enlighten the hearts of the faithful, and kindle in them the fire of Your love.”