We Catholics are the ones who are blessed

6th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C
First Reading: Jer 17:5-8
Second Reading: 1 Cor 15:12, 16-20
Gospel Reading: Lk 6:17, 20-26

“I can see your point of view,” someone told me just before the last election. “But then, you’re religious.”

The implication was clear—my “religious” way of looking at things was a personal bias, something to be discounted if we wanted to arrive at the truth.

That is how the world views religion. Today, even Americans—whose country’s foundations are deeply religious—often believe that “separation of church and state” means religion has no place in public life. In fact, the founders of the original 13 colonies were deeply religious men who wanted to ensure that no religion became “established” in the United States, as Anglicanism is in England.

Pope Francis has declared 2025 the Jubilee Year of Hope. This Sunday’s readings, especially the First, present belief and trust in God not as just one option among many, but as the only option that offers real hope, even in this world.

“Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord,” says the prophet Jeremiah. In contrast, those who “delight” in “the law of the Lord” are “like trees planted by streams of water,” says the Psalm. “In all that they do, they prosper.”

The fundamental truth—no matter how people scoff at it—is that God made us to know him, love him, and serve him in this world, and to be happy with him forever in the next. To reject this truth is to cut ourselves off from all hope in this world and all happiness in the next.

Of course, God does not promise that we will “prosper” in a worldly sense. “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied,” St. Paul says. In the Gospel reading, Jesus asserts unequivocally that poverty, hunger, sorrow, exclusion, and defamation are blessings from God.

Yet, according to the Second Reading, no belief or trust in God could give us hope if God had not become man, died to save us from our sins, and risen again to give us new life.

“If the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins,” St. Paul says. “Then those also who have died in Christ have perished.”

All religions bear witness to humanity’s search for God, but only Christianity asserts that God first sought man. That is why, as the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith stated in its 2000 declaration Dominus Iesus, “not all religions are equally valid ways of salvation.”

With the coming of Christ, “God has willed that the Church founded by him be the instrument of salvation for all humanity.” This truth “does not lessen the sincere respect that the Church has for the religions of the world, but at the same time it rules out, in a radical way, that mentality of indifferentism characterized by a religious relativism that leads to the belief that one religion is as good as another.”

It is true that “in ways known to himself,” God can lead all people, even those who do not know him, “to that faith without which it is impossible to please him.” However, all elements of holiness and truth, wherever they are found, “derive their efficacy” from the “fullness of grace and truth” that Christ “entrusted to the Catholic Church.”

We Catholics, blessed with that fullness, have a responsibility to live, talk, think, work, vote, pray, love, and suffer in this world as people who know the truth—always with love and humility, but without apology.