It is a rare gift to read a graduation address and to recognize,
sentence by sentence, the unmistakable resonance of two papacies
speaking through one pastor’s voice. Cardinal Roger Mahony — retired
Archbishop of Los Angeles, and a friend of mine across many years and
many shared chapters of California Catholic life — delivered such an
address at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo this past Saturday, May 17. I
am posting it here in full because I believe it deserves an audience
well beyond the chapel at Camarillo.
The Cardinal’s text
arrives at a moment when his themes carry a particular urgency. Pope Leo
XIV has signed his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas,
with publication set for May 25. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the
Faith issued its formal warning to the Society of St. Pius X only days
before this commencement. And the question of what counts as authentic
Catholic identity — as against the projection of a political or
ideological faction onto the Body of Christ — has rarely been more
urgently posed.
Against that backdrop, what Cardinal
Mahony offers these new graduates — seminarians earning their philosophy
degrees and the lay women and men receiving the Master’s in Pastoral
Ministry — is not a partisan map but a sacramental one. The address
turns on a single theological insight, and it is precisely the right
one: that the Eucharist is the place where the priesthood and the laity
meet, not in competition, but in communion. The priest at the altar acts in persona Christi; the lay faithful become the Body of Christ in the world. The mission is one because the Source is one.
This is not a sentimental ecclesiology. It is the ecclesiology of Lumen Gentium, of Sacrosanctum Concilium,
and of the entire Conciliar architecture the Cardinal helped to
implement across his decades of episcopal service. It is also the
ecclesiology that both Francis and Leo have made the lodestar of their
pontificates — Francis with his ferocious insistence that clericalism is
a scourge, Leo with his more recent warning that
an “individualistic secularism” empties faith of its communal and
missionary character and reduces it to custom or personal preference.
Cardinal
Mahony names the dangers without flinching: drift into individualism,
drift into ideology — “neither are from Christ, but of the world.”
Anyone who has been watching the ecclesial landscape over the past
several months will recognize the precision of that diagnosis. We are
awash in voices, some wearing cassocks and some wearing keyboards, who
have substituted rigid systems for living communion, who have made
authority self-referential, who have allowed individual autonomy to
eclipse the shared journey of the People of God. The Cardinal does not
name them. He does not need to. He simply puts before these graduates
the alternative: hearts on fire, formation rooted in the altar, mission
shared between vocations that are distinct but never divided.
There
is a further note worth sounding here. The Cardinal’s address is not
only Leonine; it is unmistakably Franciscan in cadence. The reference to
priests carrying “the smell of the sheep” is taken straight from Pope
Francis’s 2013 Chrism Mass homily, and it remains one of the most
prescient images that pontificate ever produced. To send seminarians out
under that image, while also sending lay ministers out under the image
of the Acts of the Apostles — Peter at the Beautiful Gate, Philip
running to meet the Ethiopian eunuch, Priscilla and Aquila forming
Apollos — is to insist on a vision of the Church in which no baptized
person is incidental to the mission. That is exactly the vision Vatican
II proclaimed when it taught, in language Cardinal Mahony rightly calls a
flame, that the baptized faithful are “the heart and the lamp” of the
Church going into the future.
I commend his words to your prayerful reading.
— Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L.
