Cardinal Thomas S. Williams, D.D.

Convocation Mass

Homily

October 23, 1999

Burlingame, California

May I use this privileged homily time to develop two themes I referred to in my address this morning.

The two points I wish to speak on: INTEGRITY and CONFORMITY.

The first is prompted by the Biblical imperative: "Thus says the Lord: have a care for justice, act with integrity".

To explain what integrity is, let me draw on a television program some years ago now based on Evelyn Waugh’s novel, "Brideshead Revisited". One of the protagonists, Julia, speaks of her husband:

"You know, Father Mowbray hit on the truth about Rex at once, that it took me a year of marriage to see. He simply wasn’t all there. He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed: something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something so absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole."

That description fits far too many people in this material-minded world. Integrity means wholeness. We cannot be whole human beings, complete human beings, fulfilled human beings . . . we cannot be persons of integrity . . . unless we know who we are and what we are for.

Integrity just isn’t possible unless we recognize the truth about ourselves: That God made us. That He keeps us in being. That we are destined for union with Him. That He has given us His Son, Jesus Christ, for our ideal and model.

Integrity just isn’t possible unless we are prepared to live our lives in the light of those truths. Leave God out, ignore Christ, and we are diminished human beings. Leave God out, ignore Christ, and we are dwarfed, stunted, un-whole, un-integrated, bits of men, bits of women, bits of human persons.

The whole person, the integrated person, needs a union with God, a relationship with God through Christ. Much of modern human life can hardly be called human. Indeed, there are elements that are sub-human. Not even animals treat one another as we sometimes do. Newspapers, radio and TV provide ample evidence of that. Yet Christ became man "to create one single new person in Himself" (Ephes.).

The basis of a new humanity is Christ bringing unity, reconciliation, piecing together, destroying hostility and division, offering wholeness, integrity.

What is man? (Psalm 8). Only God knows, and he gave the answer when he revealed man fully, perfectly, in the life of his Son, Jesus. Whoever refuses to learn from him what human life is all about will be less a person, less a truly human being.

There are plenty of people trying to dictate what others should be: advertisers, psychologists, socialists, secular humanists, anthropologists, pragmatic educationalists, etc. The end result if we accept their dictates, is like looking into a shattered mirror . . . we find only a distorted and meaningless picture reflecting nothing.

We have to fix on Christ – the full and perfect image of the human person. Christ is the only complete source and goal of humanity. The perennial task of the Church is to proclaim Christ, to give us a right vision of life. To set before us the only true model. To help us become complete human beings, men and women of integrity.

I’ve already said there is much in modern life that is unhuman . . . sub-human. Many people sum it up by speaking of life as a rat race. It isn’t a bad description. One thing is for sure, the pace of the rat race, now that economic liberalism and market forces have taken over, has quickened.

A very real tragedy of our times is that many of our educational, social and political institutions appear to be doing little more than turning out a more sophisticated breed of rat. Particularly tragic is that the life-giving liberating integrating Gospel of Christ is being abused or ignored in the search for more efficient rats. The emphasis is on conformity . . . fitting in. . . becoming like others the better to compete.

The task of the Christian, the Catholic, the whole person, is not to conform with the standards of others, but to transform. Catholics are not called left-footers for nothing.

If the standards of our society are wrong, then we should be out of step. We should want to be out of step. Does it matter if we are different? Does it matter if others count us fools? Our call is not to be afraid to be different . . . to be fools for Christ’s sake . . . to march to the beat of a different drummer, and ignore the world’s deafening beat.

The weak and the self-centred, and the over-ambitious, and those who seek power or possessions for their own sake, are embarrassed by Jesus who talked and practiced such absurdities as loving enemies, cherishing the unlovely, matching love against hatred and hostility, hobnobbing with social outcasts.

Men and women of integrity won’t worry about conforming. Our goal is to be servants–to imitate Christ’s reckless generosity. We don’t value ourselves less . . . we value others more. We offer an alternative to the rat race. Even to run in God’s race is to become a Saint, whereas the winner of a rat race is always a rat.

Jesus is the greatest fool or clown the world is ever likely to know. The great Saints, like Paul, were proud to declare themselves fools for the sake of Christ. Thank God, fools like that we have with us always: Mother Teresa, Maximilian Kolbe, Tom Dooley, Helder Camara and Oscar Romero, Jean Vanier . . . They were fools who refused to conform with the standards of their age, so that they could be transformed and fitted for the Kingdom of God.