𝐅𝐫. 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐰 𝐁𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐥𝐢𝐧™️

Powerful reflections from Bishop Erik Varden's 11th and final conference given at the Vatican: Reverence for Christ’s wounds defined Christian sensibility for centuries. It found expression in devotion to relics of the Passion; in Stations of the Cross; in poems and paintings; in works of music from Renaissance Lamentations through Bach’s Passions to nineteenth-century hymnography. It was expressed in the cult to the Sacred Heart that spread worldwide in the wake of revolutionary furies. At the heart of it was respect for the tremendous mystery of suffering, constitutive of the human condition as we know it. The Cross lets us own reality while it affirms the non-finality of wounds, which can be healed and become sources of healing. To root ourselves within this mystery of faith is to work a constructive revolt against several fallacies: against the political fallacy that society, and the state, should be run on an evolutionary model in view of human perfectibility; against the anthropological fallacy of a normative standard of ‘health’ deployed to mark divisions between lives ‘worth living’ and lives ‘not worth living’; against the cultural fallacy that ascribes to wounds a fatal, deterministic power; and against the psychological fallacy that surrenders to hopelessness, mesmerised by the voice that whispers in our ear, at dead of night, regarding our most intimate hurts: ‘It will always be like this’. Christ’s Passion lets us lament without rage. It opens us to compassion, which is an epistemological category apt to prepare a graced insight like Job’s: ‘I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, now my eye sees you.’ We may call out to the Crucified-and-Risen-One: ‘My Lord and my God!’ The Gospel states that Christ’s wounds, after his rising, were not done away with, but rendered glorious. The world’s wounds can be, too, when Christ’s oil and wine are poured upon them.