Fr. Romanus Cessario, O.P., preached the following homily earlier today at St. John Seminary in Boston, MA.

Homily for Friday of the Third Week of Easter
April 23, 2010

The conversion of St. Paul affords us the opportunity to reflect on the working of divine grace in human lives. During the Year for Priests, this theme takes on a special importance. Since priests must teach others how to sustain a life of Christian conversion, they find themselves under a special obligation to surrender their own lives to the rhythms of divine grace.

There are three lessons that St. Paul teaches about conversion. First, the start of conversion. Second, the sustaining of conversion. Lastly, the threat sin poses to the converted life.

We learn about the start of conversion from the account of St. Paul's own conversion. In a word, initial conversion remains God's work and God's work alone. "It depends entirely on God's gratuitous initiative, for He alone can reveal and give Himself" (CCC 1998). Theologians speak about operative grace. An operative grace is one that works in us without us. The Church discovered the model for operative grace in St. Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. "Saul, still breathing murderous threats against the disciples of the Lord," etc. "On his journey, a light from the sky suddenly flashed around him" (Acts 9:1-2). No preparation. No disposition toward grace. In fact, just the opposite. No precautions. Just grace. Pure grace. God's grace. What is the lesson? Christian life comes as a divine gift not as the result of a human choice.

St. Paul also teaches the Christian Church about how to hold on to the grace of conversion. We find the formula expressed succinctly in 1 Corinthians: Qui stat, caveat ne cadat! "Whoever thinks he is standing secure should take care not to fall" (1 Cor 10:12). The Council of Trent chose this text to express authentic Catholic doctrine about human freedom and divine grace [Decree on Justification, 1, chap. 12]. Since conversion comes to us as a gift, we should take care not to loose the gift. St. Paul however does not intend to frighten us. His writings announce the abundance of divine grace that Christ introduces into the world. So much so, in fact, that the sixteenth-century Reformers concluded (wrongly) that lifelong conversion depends on grace alone. It doesn't. Sustaining conversion requires the deployment of human freedom. Otherwise there would be no merit on our part. Bad consequences follow the denial of meritorious actions: We find ourselves observers of the divine life instead of participants in it. The sanctifying mediations of the Church fall into disuse. The priest becomes a civil servant. The Church, as Father Kennedy likes to observe, marks the last outpost of humanitarian values. Instead of these radical reductions, we read in Dominus Iesus 22 that "in the Church, [we] have the fullness of the means of salvation [cf. Pius XII, Encyclical Letter Mystici corporis: DS 3821]." The fullness of the means of salvation are meant to sustain lifelong conversion. The "means" refer mainly to what priests do: teach, govern, sanctify. It is the priest's job to ensure that the Christian people understand St. Paul's injunction in 1 Corinthians: Qui stat, caveat ne cadat! It falls to priests to sustain lifelong conversion in the members of the Mystical Body.

The third lesson that St. Paul teaches the Church pertains to sin. Proverbs 24: 5 sums it up: "For the just man falls seven times and rises again, but the wicked stumble to ruin." Who is the just man? St. Paul leaves no doubt. The just man is he who lives by faith. How does the just man live by faith? The answer is simple. He takes Christ as his best friend. Better put, the just man welcomes Christ as his best friend. In any case, the important truth of Catholic life is that one "rises again." The priest enables this rising. He exercises this mediation especially in the confessional. That's where the just man rises. What happens when the priest sins? He avails himself of the same means. That's why rectories and religious house always reserved special places to hear the confessions of priests. Today we recognize that the people judge harshly the sins of priests. It has always been the case. That's why the Church does not advertise priests' sins. An adversarial culture does not want the priest to rise. It wants him to "stumble to ruin." So the priest of today must appropriate the lesson of St. Paul's conversion. He must learn to recognize the rhythms of grace operating in his own life. In a word, he must discover what it means to be, like St. Paul, "a chosen instrument" of divine grace operative in the world. The more the priest realizes this rule of life, the less he will fear stumbling. In fact, temptation--so St. Paul teaches--can become the occasion to renew our friendship with Christ.