Cardinal DiNardo explains the family as domestic church at CFLC

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston gave the Oct. 23 keynote address at the Catholic Formation and Leadership Conference. Carol Baass Sowa | Today's Catholic

SAN ANTONIO • “My miter goes off to you,” said Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, addressing an audience of Catholic school teachers and those involved in religious education and formation in attendance at the Archdiocese of San Antonio’s Catholic Formation and Leadership Conference (CFLC) on Oct 23. The two-day conference took place at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, with the focus on “Family as the Domestic Church: An Intimate Community of Life, Love, Mission and Service.”

Quoting from the National Directory for Catechesis, the cardinal stated, “The Christian family is ordinarily the first experience of the Christian community and the primary environment for growth in faith.” While parents are the primary educators of faith, all members of the church make up the family, he said, “creating a basic environment in which a sense of God’s loving presence is awakened.”

To illustrate this he drew on Scripture, showing Jesus in the midst of what is domestic, first, in the Gospel of St. John, which tells of Jesus’ first public miracle at the wedding feast at Cana, when he changed water into wine. This is celebrated as part of the Epiphany in the liturgy of the church, he related, which is not a chronology of Jesus’ life. Rather, it is a celebration of the mysteries of Jesus, as we hear of his birth in a manger, being baptized by John in the Jordan and finally the miracle performed at the wedding feast.

When John the Baptist pointed out Jesus to his disciples as “the lamb of God,” they followed the Rabbi of Nazareth and asked him where he lived and he invited them to come and see. Cardinal DiNardo noted that the Greek words used actually translate as, “Where do you abide?” and, in time, the apostles learn that where Jesus truly abides is with his Abba, his father.

“His home is an open invitation to live with him, in his family,” said the cardinal, with the whole reason why Jesus is among us being shown in John’s Gospel as “to make us a home, to be domestic with him.” This requires of us deep repentance and transformation.

Noting that all the earliest images of the Virgin Mary show her with the Christ child, Cardinal DiNardo pointed out that in these depictions Jesus looks out intensely at you, while Mary looks down in compassion, and it was this compassion she shows towards us that is evident in her actions at the wedding feast, when she indicates to her son that the newlyweds have run out of wine, which would have been a great embarrassment.

Jesus, realizes the miracle he is about to perform will set in motion his public life and all that will follow but, with “no histrionics and no hype,” he directs the waiters to draw water and bring it to the steward, who will find good wine in the jars. Here, said Cardinal DiNardo, we start to see Jesus symbolized as the bridegroom, in all his glory, and Mary as the bride, who, with Calvary, will come to be every member of the church.

Jesus can be said to take as his bride all who are disciples, making the church of the disciples a “domestic church,” and thereby sanctifying marriage in the process, he explained. This is further illustrated in St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, which describes the marriage of Christ and the church as one of mutual submission to one another. “The family is the place, however good or wounded,” the cardinal added, “where the children ? or young adults even, may or may not discover that God loves them deeply.”

He then told two stories from his days as a young pastor in a new parish in Pittsburgh whose church started out in the basement of a building. He stressed to his parishioners the necessity of parents being the first to form their children in the basics of the Catholic faith and he saw a wonderful example one Sunday, when a young mother was stuck in their basement church between Masses with her three rambunctious little boys, ages eight, five and a half and two and a half.

In the stark basement, she patiently began to show and explain to them the purposes of the tabernacle, lectern, and so on, and set about teaching them to genuflect, which they did with varied proficiency. “This is where the Lord Jesus lives for us,” she told her sons. “This is where he abides.” That woman, the cardinal said, exercised Catholic leadership as a parent. “She just knew one thing,” he said. “That I’m responsible to these little ones, their basic understanding of the beauty of our religion, of the closeness of our God, and that God loves them.” This is one of the fundamentals of catechesis.

Another mother in the parish, also with three young boys, similarly taught him about this profound maternal instinct when she brought her sons up for ashes on Ash Wednesday. He had advised parents to be sure children were old enough to truly understand the meaning of repentance before bringing them for this rite and said he would leave it to their discretion. He administered ashes to the two older boys and was about to give the youngest just a blessing, when the mother hissed, “He knows exactly what he’s doing! Give him ashes!”

They mystery of the wedding feast in Cana, he noted, “is remembered forever because the bridegroom of the church ‘showed his cards’ that day” and the wine that was drawn at the wedding foreshadowed the symbolism of the blood and water that would flow from his side onto Mary and St. John at the foot of the cross ? and onto us, making us a symbol of wedding cakes.

Through this, Jesus is telling us of the special charism given in marriage, he said, “the charge of love for one another, the bond, the fidelity of the marriage feast.” It is symbolic of the love of Christ for the church. “If we have a crisis today,” he added, “it is because we need deeper repentance, deeper understanding.”

Drawing on the Gospel of St. Luke, Cardinal DiNardo noted the striking difference between the births of John the Baptist and Jesus. While John’s birth is announced in the temple and marked by crowds and great anticipation, Jesus incarnation takes place in Mary’s home and he is born in a humble stall. When he is presented at the temple, he is seen as just another little Jewish baby. “The extraordinary,” he said, “took place in the most ordinary of circumstances.”

Jesus, however, by the age of 12, when his parents find him “about my father’s business” in the temple, was aware of who he was, said the cardinal. “He knows. He’s domestic with his Abba,” the cardinal continued, adding that this gives us the basis to understand what it means “to abide.”

“I can’t emphasize enough,” he said, “that the basis for understanding marriage and the domestic church is that we have to unpack the mysteries of the life of Jesus for couples, for families.” He reminded those present that “you are always being catechists, whether you like it or not” and this sense of “abiding” will impart to those being taught how to really meet God.

Finally, he spoke of the Gospel of St. Mark, in which the apostles are shown as flawed and even petty at times, yet they come to be honored and revered by the church following the Resurrection. This, he said, proves that there is hope for us all and that “even the greatest of the apostles had to learn that to abide with Jesus is to abide with him to the cross.” This, he added, is the one lesson we must pass on to our charges, though it may seem harsh. “You understand the Lord Jesus,” he said, “when you go to the cross.”

God the father’s response to his son’s death on Calvary was clear, he observed. The veil of the temple was rent in two, signifying that no longer would his Divine Plan be found in the Torah or the temple, but in “the broken body of my beloved son” and distribution of the Eucharist. “That’s God’s domestic church,” he said. “That’s what God wants for us,” and when we are “drunk” on that wine and the body of Christ, “the words we speak will flow” and we will bring about his domestic church.

In closing, he urged those present to “please stay with it” and not to lose sight of God’s domestic household. “Then,” he added, “the sky’s the limit of what we can do!”