Fr. Don’s Weekly Letter ~ 8 June 2025

Dear Good People of Saint Bernadette,

One sad effect of moving Ascension Thursday to Sunday is that we don’t hear the Gospel from the Seventh Sunday of Easter, when Jesus’ last prayer to the Father before his arrest is that we be one as they are one. Pope Leo gave a beautiful homily about it last weekend:

“The Gospel we have just heard shows us Jesus, at the Last Supper, praying on our behalf (cf. Jn 17:20). The Word of God, made man, as he nears the end of his earthly life, thinks of us, his brothers and sisters, and becomes a blessing, a prayer of petition and praise to the Father, in the power of the Holy Spirit. As we ourselves, full of wonder and trust, enter into Jesus’ prayer, we become, thanks to his love, part of a great plan that concerns all of humanity.

“Christ prays that we may ‘all be one’ (v. 21). This is the greatest good that we can desire, for this universal union brings about among his creatures the eternal communion of love that is God himself: the Father who gives life, the Son who receives it and the Spirit who shares it.

“The Lord does not want us, in this unity, to be a nameless and faceless crowd. He wants us to be one: ‘As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us’ (v. 21). The unity for which Jesus prays is thus a communion grounded in the same love with which God loves, which brings life and salvation into the world. As such, it is firstly a gift that Jesus comes to bring. From his human heart, the Son of God prays to the Father in these words: ‘I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me’ (v. 23).

“Let us listen with amazement to these words. Jesus is telling us that God loves us as he loves himself. The Father does not love us any less than he loves his only-begotten Son. In other words, with an infinite love. God does not love less, because he loves first, from the very beginning! Christ himself bears witness to this when he says to the Father: ‘You loved me before the foundation of the world’ (v. 24). And so it is: in his mercy, God has always desired to draw all people to himself. It is his life, bestowed upon us in Christ, that makes us one, uniting us with one another.”
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We celebrate today the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost when the Apostles (and us, by inheritance through them and their successors, the bishops) receive the Holy Spirit in his fullness. Notice, it is an event separate from their baptism. In many traditions this is equated with baptism in the Holy Spirit, when you must be born again. For this reason, for centuries Christian churches were divided over the issue of rebaptizing “converts.” A little less than 20 years ago this was still sometimes the practice.

The idea that you must be born again is complicated by the practice of infant baptism, because an infant clearly cannot make this commitment to embrace the faith and the way of life that comes with it. With the Reformation Protestants no longer considered Confirmation a sacrament as such. This later, formal renewal of our baptismal promises witnessed by the assembly disappeared, when the profession of faith no longer is made for us, but by us.

This was complicated in the Roman Church when the continuous celebration of all three sacraments of initiation no longer happened all at once (as still is practiced in Eastern Rite and Orthodox churches) due not to theological reasons, but practical: in the west, only bishops can confirm (priests can in the east) and as the Church grew there just weren’t enough bishops to do it all every week.

The charismatic movement emerged from the holiness movement within Protestant and Pentecostal churches, which emphasized a second experience of spiritual transformation after conversion. Infant baptism grew to be seen as defective.

This Pentecost, intentionally embrace your Confirmation. Renew your baptismal promises in your heart and be strong in the knowledge that by these sacraments the Holy Spirit truly, fully dwells within you. It is easy, as days get busy, to forget the absolute love of God that the gift represents.

The Lord be with you.