语言

Franciscan at Home

Forming those who form others

Editor’s Notes: Loving the Church

We have just finished celebrating the Year of St Paul, and it is fitting that the theme for this issue of The Sower is ‘Loving the Church’, for that is a wonderfully succinct way of summing up the essence of Saul’s conversion and of his receiving a new name rooted in a new calling. Saul was converted to an abiding love for the Church.

After all, what was Saul before his conversion? He was one who loathed the Church. He found the Church not so much irrelevant or simply unattractive, as deeply offensive and hateful—to himself and, he was convinced, to the God of his fathers. Saul, we know from the Acts of the Apostles, was present for the stoning of Stephen: those who had acted as the witnesses against Stephen, the first Christian martyr, ‘laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul’ (Acts 7:58). ‘And Saul was consenting to his death’ (8:1). Following the death of Stephen, Acts describes how Saul ‘laid waste the Church’ (8:3). He ‘dragged off men and women and committed them to prison’ (8:3), ‘breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord’ (9:1).

Saul’s conversion was a complete turning around, a total change of direction, so that what was hated now became the occasion for his deepest and most ardent love. The Risen Jesus appeared just as Saul had apparently gained new powers for persecution of these followers of ‘the Way’ (9:2). After this meeting, Saul completes his journey to Damascus, no longer seeking those whom he might imprison but, in his own words, ‘a prisoner of Christ Jesus’ (Philemon 1). The capturer has been captured. His physical journey and destination is unchanged, but he has undergone a dramatic spiritual reversal of direction. He receives a new name, Paul, and a new vocation. There is a ‘new creation’ and now nothing else is to count for anything apart from this new reality, this new love (see Gal 6:15).mHis persecution of the Church is now to be remembered as his most reprehensible activity: he is ‘the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God’ (1 Cor 15:9).

The rest of this online article is available for current Guild members.

Join the Guild today!

Dr. Petroc Willey BD, STL PhD, PhD (Lateran) studied theology at King's College, London and Maynooth in Ireland and philosophy at Liverpool University in England and the Lateran University in Rome. From 1985-1992, he was Lecturer in Christian Ethics at Plater College, Oxford. From 1992 until October 2013 he worked at Maryvale Institute, Birmingham, where he was Dean of Graduate Research overseeing a doctoral program in Catholic Studies at the Maryvale Institute, offered in collaboration with Liverpool Hope University. He was appointed by Benedict XVI as a Consultor for the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelization and is currently a Consultor for the Dicastery for Evangelization. He is a professor at Franciscan University for the Office of Catechetics. His publications include Become What You Are: The Call and Gift of Marriage (with Katherine Willey), and The Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Craft of Catechesis (co-authored with Professor Barbara Morgan and Fr. Pierre de Cointet, and with an introduction by Cardinal Schonborn), and has articles in collections of essays and in journals such as The International Journal for Catechesis and Evangelization, New Blackfriars, Faith, The Nazareth Journal, The Catholic Canadian Review. He was the Host of the EWTN series Handing on the Faith (2007).

This article is from The Sower and may be copied for catechetical purposes only. It may not be reprinted in another published work without the permission of Maryvale Institute. Contact [email protected]

Categorized Under
Issue: 

Current Issue: Volume 10.4

Designed & Developed by On Fire Media, Inc.