An Inconvenient Man

I think we can say that St John the Baptist would not be a popular man today. Our Lord said that a prophet is not accepted in his own land; given the way things are, I'd be tempted to say John would not be accepted anywhere now; dare I say it, least of all in certain constituencies of the Church? He is too blunt, lacks sensitivity, is a little too certain when it comes to moral issues; no doubt it would be said that he was not compassionate, he would drive people away. 

There is truth in some of that, he was blunt and certain of his faith and mission. He didn't lack compassion nor sensitivity, but he didn't subject them to sentimentalism or relativism; he realized how high the stakes were and he was not going to soft-pedal on what was ruining souls. He did drive people away; I'm sure you couldn't see the Pharisees for dust when he got going and they fled the scene so as not to be contaminated by controversy. But he attracted people too, those who realized that what he was saying was true, even if it was uncomfortable, and these he prepared for the coming of the Messiah. Sinners as they were, and some would have been notorious, they had opened their hearts and John prepared the way for Christ in them. Sent to do exactly that, John did not curry favour with the elite or the professional religious, he did not parse over his message to keep everyone on board: he had little time to do what he had to do, and he got down to work. 

John was indeed strong medicine, and what did Jesus say about him? 'Among those born of women, there is none greater than John the Baptist' (eg Matt 11:11). Ouch, that's awkward for the critics. Jesus didn't just approve of John's ministry and approach, he held it up as a standard and declared John the greatest born of women. Of course Jesus then goes on to encourage his followers by telling them that though he is the greatest born of woman, John is the least in the kingdom - those who embrace the way of humility, are greater again. This does not undermine John, but rather calls on the rest of us to be humble and child-like in the living of our faith. So, we may say, John is the prophet, we the humble to take heed of what he says.

Today in the Gospel, the Church reflects on John's martyrdom. His preaching was the cause of his death. Stung by his moral position and his condemnation of her irregular relationship with her brother-in-law, Herodias seeks his death and uses an innocent to organize it. Too often we have the image of Salome, who danced for Herod, as some sort of voluptuous schemer, conspiring with her mother in the downfall of a holy man. Oscar Wilde in his play Salome does indeed present her as wanton creature who has set her eye on John the Baptist and then ruins him because he resists her charms. Given Herod's reaction to her dance, she was probably beautiful and able to use her charms effectively, but there is no evidence of any suggestion of lust on her part - perhaps on his. However, she reveals some innocence in two ways: when offered any gift she wants, she has to ask her mother what she should ask for - she is not scheming. Secondly, when her mother asks for John's head, while Salome is not recorded as being horrified, when she asks for it she wants it on a dish - she does not want to touch it, it may have been too ghastly for her. 

The request was not ghastly for Herodias, even though Herod, not a nice man at all, was shocked. Like Pilate after him, Herod chooses cowardice rather than justice and accedes to the request: the prophet is killed and Herodias's scorn is satisfied. Such is the way with prophets - the children of this world, scorned by the truth, will do anything, use anyone, even the innocent, to ensure a prophet is silenced and even destroyed. The Lord's death on the cross is the ultimate example of this, and there we see that truth cannot be killed, it rises from the death that has been imposed on it to be even stronger than before. It seems that after 5,000 years of Jewish and Christian history many have not realized that yet.

This is also true of the prophetic. John the Baptist was killed, but he rose again to new life and glory in heaven, one of the Church's greatest saints; but since then men and women who share in his prophetic call have emerged and continue to emerge. These men and women, like John, proclaim the way of the Lord, announce Christ and his mysteries and urge all of us to heed the Gospel and make it the blueprint for our lives. Every age in the Church has seen such prophets, and most of the time they are regarded as awkward, inconvenient, perhaps even enemies of the Church and her status quo at any given time. Of course, wisdom is proved correct, and later, perhaps centuries later, the mission of these prophets is finally acknowledged and their critics? Well, they tend to be quietly swept under the carpet. Someone once said to me that with these figures, Church leaders persecute them and many years later canonizes them. Not a completely accurate statement, but it contains more than a grain of truth.

Some examples? There are many. St Mary MacKillop comes to mind; she was prophetic in her work of educating and caring for the poor. She exposed an abusing priest and he was removed from ministry. That priest's friend sought revenge and through lies and machinations, working on an already awkward bishop, St Mary was made to pay the price by being excommunicated. She was eventually exonerated, but suffered a great deal. Tactics such as these are not unheard of. Those called to a greater observance of the faith often kickback by trying to oust the prophets out of the Church. They are stripped of offices they may hold, rumours are put about to damage their reputations, they are undermined by statements that they do not reflect the (current) position of the Church - they are wildcards. The Dominican Savonarola falls in here. When it comes to prophetic figures he was John the Baptist max, and he could have done with a bit more prudence. However, he fought against corruption, was an advocate for the poor and urged Christians, and particularly leaders in the Church, to live better lives of Christian fidelity. Pope Alexander VI, not renowned for his Christian observance (though not the worst either), had a part in his downfall - he excommunicated the friar and eventually had him burned at the stake. Was this a saint martyred by a pope? Time will tell: Savonarola's Cause has been opened.

Savonrola was the extreme end, and perhaps not the model for most, but in recent years we have had many in the Church who stand as prophets and have shared in the Lord's cross for their fidelity to him. The Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen is one; even now that he among the Saints in heaven, there are forces working against his glorification here on earth - they won't succeed. Closer to our time we had Mother Angelica, foundress of communities of religious life and EWTN. I need not say a lot about her because you already know a great deal about her. The spirit of John the Baptist was certainly in her, though she resisted it at first. Her initial way was compromise, a dialogue with those in the Church who disputed and rejected Church teaching. Angelica sought common ground - she was a charismatic, so open to new movements in the Church and new ideas; however, she found to her cost that there was no common ground with a lot of these people: they demanded surrender  to their ideology and she could not do that - she had to stay faithful to Christ and his teaching. 

That is the key to understanding Mother Angelica, and I think the Lord brought her to realize it herself: she had to choose between a religion firmly rooted in the world and its ideologies or Christ who taught his Gospel - it was about her vows to her Divine Lover. She chose Christ, and that brought a lot of hardship on her. She found she had to teach the faith to millions who had either forgotten it or never learned it in the first place: that made her dangerous to those in the Church who were trying to move the faithful in a more ideological direction. She discovered that she had to become a spiritual mother to millions as they opened their hearts to her seeking the truth for their lives and problems - this antagonized those in pastoral ministries who were guiding souls according to another gospel.  Angelica opened the Word of God for those who cared to listen and guided them through Scripture in a practical way, drawing on the rich heritage of the Church - she taught them that Scripture was the Word of the God rather than a human literary creation to be reinterpreted according to various ideologies. Realizing that souls needed to be guided in prayer, she brought them to the Blessed Sacrament and taught them devotions and meditation - the old spiritual practices of the Church that had sustained the Saints down the centuries.

Most dangerously of all, through EWTN, Angelica challenged those who were undermining the faith of the Church. She cast a critical eye over the critics and found them wanting, and exposed them. For those engaged in the deconstruction of the Church and its rebuilding according to their ideology, this was a declaration of war, and so they attacked. Senior clergy in the Church filled the ranks of those opposed to her and they tried every means to defeat her. They spent millions on a rival TV station, it collapsed. They tried to get senior figures in Rome to remove her, but the pope, John Paul II, and those around him, particularly Cardinal Ratzinger as was, knew the quality and fidelity of the woman, and they backed her. Instigating canonical procedures, they aimed to take EWTN from her, even then they didn't know what they were dealing with. While Angelica famously said she would blow the whole thing up rather than give it to them, she did something even more extreme and costly for her, she renounced it completely, and it was safely placed under the care of a lay board out of reach of its ecclesiastical enemies.

Angelica was, without doubt, John the Baptist for the Church in modern times; as staunch and strong,  as fiery, as clever and honest, as humble and prayerful. When it was demanded, she did not shrink from sacrifice - she lived with pain all her life, what was a little more for her Lord? Like John the Baptist, for many in the Church she was an inconvenient woman. She and her works still have their enemies, prophets always will, and like John the Baptist, she would not be welcome in the more refined corridors of our ecclesiastical structures. But Angelica reminds us that the spirit of John the Baptist is not quashed and defeated, it is reborn in every age, and those who have it will be gifted with the courage to speak the truth faithfully and, at times, stridently, even to the highest echelons of Church and state. That may well be inconvenient and unwelcome - and there is no doubt that the spirit of prophecy makes us all uncomfortable, but it is the way that Christ approves of and praises, and he recommends that we heed it.