33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Dn 12:1-3
Second Reading: Heb 10:11-14, 18
Gospel Reading: Mk 13:24-32

Jesus calls all the baptized to evangelize and spread the Gospel. This homily is the first in a series of three following the recent Upper Room evangelization event. 

“God made us to know him, love him, and serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next,” says The Penny Catechism. He calls us to share in his own life “by knowledge and love,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Notice: knowledge and love.

Of these two, “love of God is immeasurably more important,” said author Frank Sheed. In fact, says the Catechism, the teaching of the doctrine “must be directed to the love that never ends.”

However, knowledge is fundamental. I often ask elementary students whether they love my sister Bernadette. “She’s very lovable,” I assure them. Finally, after some puzzled looks, they reply, “But we don’t know her!”

“No one can love what he does not know,” St. Augustine noted.

In fact, St. Basil said, “love of God is not something that is taught.” Only knowledge of God can be taught. Nevertheless, Sheed explained, “each new thing known about God is a new reason for loving him.”

As we get to know God, we want to know him better and to understand more fully what he has revealed, the Catechism notes. “A more penetrating knowledge will in turn call forth a greater faith, increasingly set afire by love.”

From the beginning, the Church expressed and handed on what she believed in brief formulas like the Apostles’ Creed. However, she also synthesized it so that she could present it as a whole. Thus we come to understand what God has revealed: the totality of his plan, the connections among the doctrines.

“From this loving knowledge of God springs the desire to proclaim him, to evangelize, and to lead others to the yes of faith in Jesus Christ,” the Catechism says.

“God challenges those who believe in him to go forth,” Pope Francis said in his 2013 document Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”).

But first, said Archbishop Miller at the recent Upper Room event, we must be “with” Christ: “intentional disciples.” Anyone “who has been with him cannot keep to himself what he has found; he has to pass it on,” becoming a “missionary disciple.” That job is not just for “religious professionals” or those who have the “knack,” but for every Catholic.

In fact, said Vatican II, Christianizing our “mentality, customs, laws, and structures” is “so much the duty and responsibility of the laity that it can never be properly performed by others.”

We have various reasons for shirking it. But often, it is ignorance. If we have learned nothing about our faith since Grade Eight, we probably cannot answer the world’s questions. We may even think that the Church does not have answers!

That is why I and a colleague teach The Catholic Faith in Plain English.

Following Pope Francis, we keep our teaching “faithful to the Gospel,” but we try to express it in language that brings out its lasting “newness.”

Sometimes, the Pope said, traditional religious language suggests “something alien to the authentic Gospel” because it uses words and formulas that no longer convey the meaning. “The expression of truth can take different forms,” which we must renew constantly in order to transmit the Gospel today.

Our course comprises 36 100-minute YouTube sessions, available free at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. In print form, all 36 are posted already; in audio-visual form, another one is posted every Sunday. You can read, listen, or both.

The topics are arranged in logical order, but you can “drop in” for individual sessions; no one takes attendance! The website contains a calendar and a schedule of the course.

Each session begins with a hymn, a prayer, a Bible reading, and a brief summary. The main presentation includes explanations and reasons. You can delve deeper, using the footnotes, the bibliography, the appendices, and the Glossary, which defines about 1,000 religious terms “in plain English.”

Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English in both written and YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 9, available on YouTube Nov. 14,  is “The Liturgical Year.”