The mercy of God and the pride of life

FATHER GEORGE W. RUTLER

The Second Sunday of Easter celebrates the many mercies our Divine Lord has shown to us and the whole world.

We continue to have a most glorious Easter. Many could not find room inside the church and stood outside like the am ha'aretz — the people who listened through the synagogue windows as the apostles first preached the Resurrection. I am especially grateful to the visiting priests who heard confessions non-stop, sometimes for as long as six hours.

The Second Sunday of Easter celebrates the many mercies our Divine Lord has shown to us and the whole world. This Sunday also is engraved in memory as the one-hundredth anniversary of the Titanic tragedy. In 1907, Captain Edward J. Smith, then captain of the Adriatic, and felicitously unaware that five years later he would command the largest moving object in the world, told a newspaper reporter:

"When anyone asks me how I can best describe my experience in nearly forty years at sea, I merely say, uneventful. Of course there have been winter gales, and storms and fog and the like. But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort."

While there have been disasters on an even greater scale, the sinking of the Titanic has become a symbol of human triumph and failure, engineered strength against the greater forces of nature, and the perils of self-confidence. Honest pride in human achievement is a form of thanks to the Creator who has made man capable of procreating, but sinful pride is the origin of all other sins when it becomes a mantle of arrogance, turning Te Deum into Te Meum. Cardinal Newman warned: "Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man."

To those who took pride in the temple of Jerusalem, Christ warned that it would be destroyed, but that He would rebuild it in three days. Those words scandalized the ones whose worship of God was distracted by the gold on His altar. But everything our Lord said came true. It may be that the unnamed "young man" who was seized by the guards along with Jesus in the Garden of Olives, but slipped out of his linen cloth and escaped naked, was Mark himself, who recorded the embarrassing detail. His world was as tumultuous as ours, with ships sinking and buildings falling, but he rejoiced to see his crucified Lord alive again and remembered that Jesus had said, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall never pass away" (Mark 13:31).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Father George William Rutler. "The mercy of God and the pride of life." From the Pastor (April 15, 2012).

Reprinted with permission of Father George W. Rutler.

THE AUTHOR

Father Rutler received priestly ordination in 1981. Born in 1945 and reared in the Episcopal tradition, Father Rutler was an Episcopal priest for nine years. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1979 and was sent to the North American College in Rome for seminary studies. Father Rutler graduated from Dartmouth, where he was a Rufus Choate Scholar, and took advanced degrees at the Johns Hopkins University and the General Theological Seminary. He holds several degrees from the Gregorian and Angelicum Universities in Rome, including the Pontifical Doctorate in Sacred Theology, and studied at the Institut Catholique in Paris. In England, in 1988, the University of Oxford awarded him the degree Master of Studies. From 1987 to 1989 he was regular preacher to the students, faculty, and townspeople of Oxford. Cardinal Egan appointed him Pastor of the Church of Our Saviour, effective September 17, 2001.

Since 1988 his weekly television program has been broadcast worldwide on EWTN. Father Rutler has published 17 books, including: Cloud of Witnesses - Dead People I Knew When They Were Alive, Coincidentally: Unserious Reflections on Trivial Connections, A Crisis of Saints: Essays on People and Principles, Brightest and Best, Saint John Vianney: The Cure D'Ars Today, Crisis in Culture, and Adam Danced: The Cross and the Seven Deadly Sins.