Saint Joseph Pro-Cathedral
My Dear Family:
I call you my family.
All of us belong to the same body, as Saint Paul tells us, the Body of Christ. All of us are the People of God. Because we are God’s family, God’s people, we have this Vision for the Church of South Jersey.
This Vision is a model for us, it is a guide, it is to form our minds, how we think and how we are Church. All of us are the Church.
All of us by our baptism have been transformed with God’s life in us. All of us have become part of Jesus by our baptism. We are grafted onto Jesus. As we heard St. Paul in our Second Reading today, we are coheirs with Christ because we are the adopted daughters and sons of God the Father.
All of us together are the Church. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council gave us this teaching in the document Lumen Gentium, The Constitution on the Church. And this Vision is intended to help us to live this reality, to help us to truly be who we are.
In these next weeks, months and years, we are called on to reflect upon, pray about the words of this Vision. This Vision is not about actions we must take, but it is about who we are, the reality of what it means to be Church.
All of us are God’s family. I have a great love, a great passion for what the Church teaches about what it means to be Church. For this reason, we truly are family, we truly are sisters and brothers, we are bonded by our baptism, we are nourished by the sacraments and by God’s word, and especially by Eucharist. And we as family symbolically gather around the table of the Lord to be fed and to share.
This Feast of the Epiphany, the manifestation of Jesus to all people, reminds us that we have to show Jesus to others. It reminds us that we, the sisters and brothers of Jesus, have to manifest Jesus to our neighbors.
This Vision, then, is a call to all of us live out our identity, to understand and to be God’s people, to be the Church.
I am happy to be one with you, to be part of Christ’s body, to be Church. My prayer is that every day we can be the people of God, that together we can be the Church. This a vision. It is up to us to make it flesh and blood, alive and real.
May God bless all of us, may God bless the Church, may God bless us, the family.