I have found that one of the most edifying, if obvious, perks of priestly life is our frequent close contact with the sacred. Beyond just the Church’s liturgical celebrations and prayers, my life is often filled with so much of the small stuff that gives our faith its human texture: odd sacramentals, ecclesiastical knick-knacks, and—on the most special occasions—a few precious relics that find their way to my parish office. As pastor of a rural and historically non-Catholic community, my own collection of such mementos is small, and my collection of Pauline relics even smaller. There’s at least one notable exception, however, which I’ve come to consider one of my most precious possessions: an Easter season holy card, significant only insofar as it was signed and underlined by our own founder, Blessed James Alberione.
One of Father Alberione’s biographers recalls that in the final years of his life, visitors to his apartment in Rome would often receive such a card, personally autographed whenever his health and energy permitted. On this particular holy card, the Founder also underlined a handful of words; after his promises of prayer and remembrance at Mass, he highlighted the phrase, “I wish you a joyful and holy Easter. In faith and joy!” The lines that follow, added by typewriter, are the most characteristically Pauline: “I think of you as constantly making progress: [in] sanctification and apostolate.”
Revisiting this simple relic in the final days of another Easter season as we enter once more into Ordinary Time, I am struck by the necessary and integral relationship between these themes, between joy and progress, and by extension, between sanctity and the apostolate.
“Progress” itself is a multivalent idea in the Founder’s thought, depending on whether one is referring to personal progress or the progress of humanity writ large. In the first week of his 1960 Instructions to the Pauline Family, now collected as Ut Perfectus Sit Homo Dei (UPS), Father Alberione captures the notion of progress in sanctity in his description of life for the consecrated religious as a “novitiate for eternity,” adding further, “This was the way of the saints. Not to advance is to fall back.”
In a later instruction of the same week, he would address the corresponding idea of progress in the apostolate with the means of social communication, commenting, “When these means of progress are used for evangelization, they are ennobled. The writer’s office, the machine room, the book center become church and pulpit.” This kind of progress, whether of mankind or media, aims toward that definite and ultimate end captured in the phrase which Father Alberione called “redemption’s program” and adopted as his motto: “Glory to God and peace to men.”
Five years after Father Alberione’s writings in UPS, the Second Vatican Council would further underscore the universality of this integral call to sanctity and apostolate in its Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, Apostolicam actuositatem:
“The Church was founded for the purpose of spreading the kingdom of Christ throughout the earth for the glory of God the Father… All activity of the Mystical Body directed to the attainment of this goal is called the apostolate, which the Church carries on in various ways through all her members. For the Christian vocation by its very nature is also a vocation to the apostolate.”
Simply put, no Christian is exempt from either side of this reality; as one is drawn ever deeper into the heart of Christ, so too that person is impelled outward on mission to live the apostolate in all its inspired forms. And, returning to that theme of Fr. Alberione’s Easter card, it is the joy of the Resurrection that gives the apostolate its most compelling and attractive efficacy, just as it animated the preaching of the Apostles on the day of Pentecost and beyond.
It stands to reason that the same joy and sanctity, the same holiness and apostolate, are just as much within our reach today. In fact, as Father Alberione understood so well, these qualities are really inseparable, each growing in proportion to the progress of our vocations from the day of our baptism to the moment our novitiate for eternity has reached its conclusion.
The question we must each consider, then, is nothing less than an examination of conscience:
- Is this the kind of progress we see in our own lives?
- Is it constant or hesitant progress? Courageous, or timid?
- Do we see it in our prayer as much as in our work?
Even if the way the Lord sets out is challenging—which it will be, as it is the Way of the Cross—we must not forget how the journey ends, for it ends in the heart of the One who is the reason for our joy, our Risen Lord, who is ever our Way, our Truth, and our Life.
Father Cassidy Stinson is a member of the Union “Jesus the Priest,” one of the 10 institutes of the Pauline Family founded by Blessed James Alberione.