We have no evidence that Pope Benedict XVI had Australia’s Year of Grace in mind during his weekly general audience in St Peter’s Square on Wednesday, April 18 this year, but he might have done.
In it, he went back to the earliest Christians to tell us how Christians have always dealt with life.
“When the first Christian community is confronted by dangers, difficulties and threats it does not attempt to work out how to react, find strategies, defend itself or what measures to adopt; rather, when it is put to the test, the community starts to pray and makes contact with God.” (Reported in The Record, May 30.)
This Christian custom has been evident in the life of the Church around the world in big things and in small ever since.
One example has a particular Australian connection.
In 1571, when Italy and Europe seemed hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned in the pending naval battle at Lepanto against invading Turks, Pope Pius V filled the churches of Rome with Christians praying the Rosary non-stop.
After Christian forces had won an astonishing victory, Pius V added the invocation “Help of Christians” to the Litany of Our Lady. Around three centuries later, Our Lady Help of Christians was named Australia’s principal patron.
The Lepanto story is a clear illustration of the depth and diversity of meaning in the words of Archbishop Costelloe: “The Year of Grace is not so much a call and an invitation to do something as it is an invitation to be something – more and more a disciple of Christ.”
That invitation includes the invitation to make your prayer life such that Christ’s presence in you will become visible and attractive to others.
How that will happen is God’s business. He has his own ways of making his presence in us visible to others.
For example, another one of the Patrons of Australia, St Therese of the Child Jesus, was barely known outside her Carmelite Convent at Lisieux when she died at the age of 24 in 1897.
Within a few years her miracles and writings were known around the world.
During World War I, she became known as the Soldiers’ Saint, and there was a photo of her pinned up in many an Australian tent on the battlefields of France.
She was beatified in 1923 and canonised in 1925, with half a million people present in Rome for the occasion.
She lived a short, silent life of great prayer and love, but God chose to make her known after her death.
St Josephine Bakhita was born in Sudan in 1869. At the age of six she was kidnapped and sold into slavery, and then bought and sold numerous times before being bought by an Italian Consul whose family treated her with kindness and eventually took her to Italy.
Circumstances led her into the Convent of the Canossian Sisters where she came to know about God whom “she had experienced in her heart since she was a child without knowing who he was”.
After her Baptism she joined the Sisters on December 8, 1896 and spent the rest of her life in service of God whom she fondly called “the Master”.
Her humility, simplicity and constant smile won the hearts of all who met her because of her exquisite goodness and deep desire to make the Lord known. When she was dying in 1947, Our
Lady came to take her to heaven. St Josephine is the patron saint of the Sudanese Catholic Community in Perth and other parts of the world.
There are thousands upon thousands of saints from every part of the globe whose lives are testimony to the power of prayer and millions more who are not known as saints but whose lives have been enriched by prayer and whose example has inspired others.
The Year of Grace will be successful and a blessing to others according to the extent to which we take up a life of prayer.
People in religious life have patterns of prayer they share in community and there is no better way for lay people than to develop a habit of prayer individually or in family.
A habit is something we do on a regular basis and it quickly becomes something that reminds us of itself and demands it be satisfied.
Blessed Mother Theresa of Calcutta used to insist her Sisters complete their prayers as the priority above all the calls of their work, because she knew if they did not pray they would not be able to do the work.
Our demands are not as great as theirs, but our need for prayer is because our lives distract us from God more than theirs do.
Find something, no matter how small, that you will do in prayer each day, and by the end of the Year of Grace you will be astonished how much God has done for you.