Bertalan Homily - En

ACTS OF THE 7th EUROPEAN ASSEMBLY OF LAY DOMINICAN FRATERNITIES

ANNEX Vd

HOMILY BY FR. BERTALAN SZABÓ WITH ST DOMINIC, ON THE ROAD OF CHARITY (2 Peter 1: 2-7; Mark 12: 1.12)

We read in the second Letter of Peter: “Do your utmost, adding goodness to the faith that you have, understanding to your goodness, self-control to your understanding, patience to your self-control, true devotion to your patience, kindness to your fellow men to your devotion, and, to this kindness, love”. Here the apostle Peter shows how we can progress from faith to love. All these virtues that he mentions are interlinked and lead us towards love, the highest point of our Christian life. How do we progress from faith to love? This question is often a problem for the believer of our times. The Gospel reminds us unceasingly that conviction, for all its intensity, is not enough for us to be close to God and to other men and women. We all need God’s love. We are all called to advance on the road of love and to bear witness to it in the world. We belong to a religious Order that has profoundly marked the history of the Church. It is important to try to recover the wealth of the Dominican tradition. Faith, goodness, understanding, self-control, true devotion, kindness, brotherly love – all these values of which the apostle Peter reminds us in the first reading are also part of our theological tradition and of our spirituality. For us, being attached to these values doesn’t simply mean wanting to preserve the heritage that the Dominican Order has handed down to us. We would not be true disciples of St Dominic if we were not able to find our base, precisely starting from these virtues. All these virtues lead us closer to Christ. They are the characteristics of Christ himself. We want to belong to Christ, walking in the footsteps of St Dominic, who founded a religious Order in the service of the Church. St Dominic’s spiritual experience has always marked the development of our Order; it still helps us today to better understand what the Dominican Order is. Every time the Dominican Order has needed a new impulse, it has had to get back to that fundamental experience of St Dominic, to the Gospel love that he lived and proclaimed. In today’s Gospel, we heard a parable that reflects salvation’s history. The parable of the murderous workers in the vineyard shows us a world torn by violence and hatred, rejecting the initiatives of God one after another. God’s messengers have never been regarded favourably or welcomed. They have rather been misunderstood, sometimes rejected, cast out, persecuted. We find ourselves coming up against the indifference and rejection of our contemporaries. But God does not abandon us. The Father loved us so much that he actually sent his own Son for our salvation. The Son of God gave his life for us on the Cross. The Church was born out of Christ’s suffering; we are all called to bear witness to the meaning and the spiritual fecundity of that suffering.

St Dominic too suffered very greatly, seeing people erring and going astray. This suffering drove him to become the founder of a great religious Order. This suffering, like Christ’s on the Cross, has borne fruit. From this suffering a great family of brothers and sisters was born. Without this suffering, we would not be here. We brothers and sisters suffer too, when we see how far the contemporary world has drawn away from God. Despite the difficult times, St Dominic never gave up hope, because he knew the road that leads from faith to love. He constantly kept before his eyes the profoundly Christian values through which we too, Christians of today, can proceed on the road of love. May we who want to walk with St Dominic try to live our sufferings in a spiritual fecundity through which we will always progress from faith to love.