Homily for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
Readings: Proverbs 9:1-6; Psalm 33, Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58
Feast of Alberto Hurtado SJ
18 August 2024
In the Book of Proverbs, wisdom is personified and in today’s first reading speaks directly to the hearer of the word: ‘Come and eat my bread, drink the wine I have prepared! Leave your folly and you will live, walk in the ways of perception.’ And in the second reading, Paul says to the Ephesians: ‘Be very careful about the sort of lives you lead, like intelligent and not senseless people.’ In today’s extract from John Chapter 6, Jesus tells us: ‘The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I in them.’
Listen at https://soundcloud.com/frank-brennan-6/homily-18824
Coming to the table of the Eucharist, we are urged to act intelligently, not senselessly, walking in the ways of perception confident that Jesus lives in us and we in him.
When we Jesuits were returning to Queensland earlier this year, our provincial asked that we choose a Jesuit saint as the patron of our small community of three men returning to parish ministry here in the western suburbs of Brisbane as well as our more general availability to the church in the province of Queensland which includes the dioceses of Brisbane, Toowoomba, Rockhampton and Cairns.
I’ve not been much into canonised saints during much of my life. But I happened to have been in Rome on other business for two canonisations. One was Mary Mackillop in 2010. The other was the Chilean Jesuit Alberto Hurtado whose feast occurs on this day, 18 August, which this year marks the 74th year of his death. He was the one we chose as our patron.
It just happened that Hurtado was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1994 when I was doing what we Jesuits call tertianship, including a 30 day retreat some 10 years after ordination. During that long retreat, I was captivated by a saying of Hurtado: ‘It is in God’s plan that we be crushed. If anyone has begun to live for God in self-denial and love, all the miseries of the world will crowd around his door.’ Hurtado had studied law before he joined the Jesuits. So had I. He was 22 when he joined. I was 21. Early in my Jesuit life, I was given a mission to work for the rights of Aboriginal Australians.
In 2005, I found myself in Rome at a Jesuit meeting. So I decided to arrive early and make my annual retreat at the Church of St Ignatius. It just happened that Hurtado’s canonisation was to take place that week. The Chileans gathered in the Church of St Ignatius for prayer and celebration the night before the canonisation mass in the piazza at St Peter’s. I was there in the midst of the Chilean fervour, realising that Hurtado, the Jesuit lawyer had died at age 51. There was I, aged 51, contemplating what the Lord was asking of me after 30 years as a Jesuit.
Next morning, I made my way to the piazza, asking St Alberto to pray for me. In front of me was a Chilean mother weeping over a photo of her two sons. I realised that everyone had come into the piazza with their own story of grace and sin. Chileans had travelled vast distances. They brought with them their very individual joys and sorrows. I was filled with a profound consolation that despite my sinfulness I was being called by the Lord to be a Jesuit responding with heart and mind practically to the cry of the poor who are oppressed by law and policy.
Hurtado was an educator, a writer, and a retreat giver with a very practical commitment to the poor. In 1944, he was preaching a retreat to a group of women and invited them to contemplate the needs of the homeless. The women provided donations in response and he established El Hogar de Cristo, a foundation for providing practical assistance to people in need. The foundation has thrived for 80 years and now boasts over 500 works providing assistance to 25,000 people a month. In 1947, Hurtado then established a trade union movement. Between 1947 and 1950, he wrote three books On Unions, Social Humanism, and The Christian Social Order. He was plagued by pancreatic cancer and died too young at 51. But what a full apostolic life he had lived.
In his homily at the canonisation mass, Pope Benedict said:
‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart…. You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Mt 22: 37, 39). This was the programme of life of St Alberto Hurtado, who wished to identify himself with the Lord and to love the poor with this same love. The formation received in the Society of Jesus, strengthened by prayer and adoration of the Eucharist, allowed him to be won over by Christ, being a true contemplative in action. In love and in the total gift of self to God’s will, he found strength for the apostolate.
‘He founded El Hogar de Cristo for the most needy and the homeless, offering them a family atmosphere full of human warmth. In his priestly ministry he was distinguished for his simplicity and availability towards others, being a living image of the Teacher, “meek and humble of heart”. In his last days, amid the strong pains caused by illness, he still had the strength to repeat: “I am content, Lord”, thus expressing the joy with which he always lived.’1
Inspired by Hurtado to act intelligently, not senselessly, let’s walk in the ways of perception confident that Jesus lives in us and we in him. Invoking the aid of St Alberto Hurtado, we pray:
“Christ stumbles through our streets,” Alberto Hurtado said,
And he saw Christ everywhere he looked.
“Christ has no home,” Alberto Hurtado said,
So he built one to welcome everyone alone in the night.
“Through our works,” Alberto Hurtado said,
“The people will know that we understand their pain.”
And he always carried with him the salve of solidarity.
God of loving kindness, let us see you as Alberto Hurtado did:
A hearth by which all can warm themselves,
A home from which no one is turned away.
May we keep the fire stoked and sparking,
The door propped open, porch light aglow.
Amen.
From the start of 2024, Fr Frank Brennan SJ will serve as part of a Jesuit team of priests working within a new configuration of the Toowong, St Lucia and Indooroopilly parishes in the Archdiocese of Brisbane. Frank Brennan SJ is a former CEO of Catholic Social Services Australia (CSSA). Fr Frank’s latest book is An Indigenous Voice to Parliament: Considering a Constitutional Bridge, Garratt Publishing, 2023 and his forthcoming book is ‘Lessons from Our Failure to Build a Constitutional Bridge in the 2023 Referendum’ (Connor Court, 2024).
