Jesus says to the disciples, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.”
Pietro di Morone (1209-1296), whose feast day was recently celebrated, was a peaceful monk who had both retreated from the world yet was intimately connected to the world. Many living in the troubled and fearsome world came to him seeking peace. The institutional church, showing a disregard for Jesus’ Way, especially through its militant Crusades, was causing some of the troubles of the world. Many church officials were members of rich families who used the institution for political and financial gain. The men kept mistresses and surrounded themselves with riches and opulence. They appointed family and friends to offices for which they were not suited, being incompetent and/or corrupt. They targeted rivals with vengeful violence, having them jailed and eventually killed. For 27 months, factions would not agree to a Pope. Troubled by it all, Pietro wrote a letter to the cardinals. He invited them to follow Jesus’ Way of Peace. Upon receiving the monk’s letter, the cardinals chose Pietro as the new pope. Pietro, renamed Celestine V, was an old man, 84. He apparently concluded no amount of reform could change a violent and corrupt institution and resigned four months later. His successor, Pope Boniface VIII was a violent corrupt dictator who epitomized the troubled world and its institutions. He issued a papal executive order, Unam Sanctam, making himself dictator of the world, by order of God, “Whoever resists this power thus ordained by God, resists the ordinance of God [Rom 13:2].” “We declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” The Church’s troubles had actually begun about 1,200 years earlier as detailed in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Men who mistakenly believed they were ruling saviors began to dictate troubling rules about salvation. They set aside Jesus’ Way of Peace. It is predictable that such ruling saviors and their institutions – like the military, certainly empires like the U.S., are presently a consummate fit for all the aforementioned descriptions. They have devolved into social ‘hearts that are troubled and afraid.’
“I learned to look back into the world with greater compassion, seeing those in it as not alien to myself, not as peculiar and deluded strangers, but as identified with myself. In breaking from ‘their world’ I have strangely not broken from them… from their struggles… precisely because I am identified with them, I must refuse all the more definitely to make their delusions my own. I must refuse their ideology of … force. I reject this because I see it to be the source and the expression of the spiritual hell which man has made of his world: the hell which has burst into flame… This I can and must reject with all the power of my being.” (Thomas Merton)
Prayer: Spirit, keep my heart peaceful.
Question: How am I keeping my self from being troubled or afraid?
May 25, 2025 Gospel John 14:23-29 Sixth Sunday of Easter