TREASURES FROM OUR TRADITION
We’re reading St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians these days. What was Corinth like? It had a beautiful setting on an isthmus, about fifty miles from Athens. The location makes for very easy exchange by sea routes between Greece and Italy, a factor in its economic success even today. In Paul’s day it was a cosmopolitan and wealthy city with inhabitants drawn from all over the world, including a sizeable Jewish community. When Paul arrived about the year 50, the city was only about a century old, but already five times the size of Athens. Paul lived in Corinth for a year and a half, and a few years later came back for three months. The community of Christians there struggled against the influence of a very secular and self-indulgent society that was blind to the plight of the poor. Pagan attitudes afflicted the community, which had a way of breaking Paul’s heart; he wrote to them sometimes “with many tears” (2 Corinthians 2:4).

Today, Corinth is a small industrial city. Its historic core has been destroyed by a series of earthquakes over the centuries, and what little remained was totally obliterated in a war with Turkey in the 1820s. There’s a core city with glamorous shops to catch the tourists, but it is mainly a cargo port, with piles of marble, tiles, and minerals everywhere, a huge oil refinery nearby, a busy canal, a modern fast rail line to Athens, and a meeting point of major highways. Today, the remains of the Temple of Apollo and the marketplace are more ruined than most such sites. The glory of the city Paul knew well has faded, but the relevance of his words shines through the centuries.

TRADICIONES DE NUESTRA FE

El 11 de febrero de 1858 la Virgen María se apareció a tres niños franceses del pueblito de Lourdes. Allí brotaron aguas milagrosas con el poder de sanar enfermos. Eventualmente se construyó en Lourdes un santuario en honor de Nuestra Señora de Lourdes y millones de enfermos han recurrido a las aguas curativas. Muchos de los que visitan el santuario son latinos, porque a los latinos nos encantan los milagros y lo milagroso.

Pero ¿cuál es el afán de ver milagros? ¿Es que no podemos creer sin ellos? ¿Es que necesitamos demostraciones del poder divino antes de entregarnos a Dios? La Iglesia siempre ha canonizado santos y santas por cuya intercesión se han manifestado milagros, y ha buscado su poder de intercesión. Sin embargo, también ha insistido que es más importante
una vida ejemplar, una vida dedicada al bien del prójimo que una vida prodigiosa. Hay que tener mucho cuidado, porque frecuentemente en nuestro afán por ver milagros estrepitosos en lugares lejanos, cerramos los ojos a ver los milagros de las personas que nos rodean, y que silenciosamente ayudan al necesitado.

THE DEMANDS OF DISCIPLESHIP
Today we encounter readings that already have a Lenten feel about them. Nineveh undergoes a forty-day fast, the psalmist reminds us that God alone can show sinners the way, Paul shows us how fleeting the things and events of this world are, and Jesus cries out “Repent!” before he calls his new followers. “Come after me,” Jesus says, but if we are to truly live out the commands and demands of our discipleship through baptism, we must first know our need for conversion, our repentance, our need to believe in the gospel fully. Today’s Gospel opens with the stark reminder of what befell John the Baptist for completely living out his vocation as the herald of Christ and the gospel: he was arrested, imprisoned, and martyred. Though few of us will experience consequences that extreme, we must all be ready to risk some sort of rejection as, heeding the call of Jesus, we live out the kingdom of God at hand, repent of our sins, and believe in the good news of salvation.

TREASURES FROM OUR TRADITION
One of the most unusual Catholic churches in the world is in Amsterdam: Our Lord in the Attic, or as the locals say, “Ons Lieve Heer op Solder.” What looks like a beautiful narrow brick mansion alongside a canal is a clever disguise for a very well-preserved seventeenth-century home and a secret church. During the Reformation, the Netherlands was divided into Protestant Holland and the Spanish Netherlands, now known as Belgium, a Catholic stronghold. Protestant reformers seized all the Catholic parishes in Holland and “de-Catholicized” them. New laws forbade the celebration of the Mass in public. St. Nicholas Church was renamed “Old Church” by the new owners, and the dispossessed Catholics got to work “hiding” St. Nicholas Parish in the upper floors of this mansion. Other Catholics did the same thing, but this is the only hidden church that survives today. Sunday Mass is still celebrated here.

It’s a beautiful hideaway, with nothing spared in regard to marble, gilding, a pipe organ, and classic Dutch painting. A few steps away, the Old Church, begun in 1250, stands emptied of the statues and carvings of its Catholic days, its windows replaced by plain glass. The new tenants gave up when it came to the ceiling, which is still painted with saints, biblical scenes, and merchant ships. The Dutch reformers were tolerant sorts, and as long as the Catholics kept out of sight, they were out of mind. Catholicism was at last tolerated in Holland after 1853, but in 1924 when the International
Eucharistic Congress was held in Amsterdam, processions of Catholics were still forbidden in the streets. Today, Roman Catholics are about 19 percent of the population, and there’s no need for any of them to hide in the attic.