White Mass 2016

Published: October 27, 2016

Bishop Anthony B. Taylor preached the following homily for medical professionals at the Cathedral of St. Andrew in Little Rock on Thursday, Oct. 27, 2016.

Bishop Taylor

One of my roles outside the Diocese of Little Rock is to serve on the Doctrine Committee for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The Doctrine Committee is charged with reviewing materials for doctrinal accuracy and producing materials of a doctrinal nature when that would be helpful for the building up of the Kingdom of God.

One such document is the Ethical and Religious Directives for Health Care, the famous ERDs. And at the present time I am serving on an ad hoc committee reworking chapter 6 of these ERDs. The ERDs have been revised five previous times over the course of the last several decades, always due to new technologies or new collaborative arrangements in the health care field that needed to be addressed. And chapter 6 is about collaborative arrangements.

Why do we go to all this trouble? Why don't we just let everyone work things out for themselves, trusting that if they have good will they can't go wrong. The reason is that it is so easy to underestimate the power of evil and how readily we can be deceived. We can deceive ourselves and we can be deceived by the devil. Hence the readings we have in today's Mass.

In today's first reading St. Paul tells the Ephesians: "Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the devil." (6:10-20) There is a struggle going on between the light and the darkness, and the power of the cross lies in the fact that evil did its worst, but by freely embracing death for our salvation, Jesus broke the power of evil once and for all.

That is why we have a crucifix hanging in every church — to remind us of the damage that evil can do and the sacrificial love that was the price of our salvation. That is what Jesus is facing in the Gospel reading you just heard. (Luke 13:31-35)

He is headed to Jerusalem, where he knows a cross awaits him. We think of Jesus as sweet and gentle, but that is only part of the picture. Through his death he broke the power of death, but the struggle between light and darkness continues in our day. And so St. Paul tells us what we need to do to be equipped to hold our own in the struggle with evil in our own lives.

We should gird our loins with truth, put on the breastplate of righteousness and wear as shoes the Gospel of peace. We should use our faith as a shield when confronted with the flaming arrows of the evil one, protecting our head with the helmet of salvation and arming ourselves with the sword of the Spirit, the word of God. So to prevail in the struggle with evil, we need to be equipped with truth, righteousness, peacefulness, faith, filled with the Spirit and nurtured with the word of God.

My work on the Doctrine Committee is to make sure that we are equipped with truth as we address contemporary challenges in the field of health care, but truth alone will not be sufficient to prevail. We need all the virtues and all the help from heaven that we can get.

Which is why Paul goes on to insist on the power of prayer: "With all prayer and supplication, pray at every opportunity in the Spirit." That is what we have gathered here to do today, and it is what I am sure you must do each morning before going into work to do your share in the healing ministry of Jesus Christ.

God bless you for the gift you are to the Church. And may he assist you in your share in the struggle against evil in our own day.