You have got to read this from Don Marco, my priest-monk friend from the Abbey of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome. (I'm not posting tomorrow so this is it! He is absolutely brilliant and ought to have either his own blog or write more books!)
"We live in the company of the saints. We are in communion with them, and communion implies communication. There is, at every moment, a mysterious exchange taking place between us and the saints who surround us. The Letter to the Hebrews says that we are "watched from above by such acloud of witnesses" (Heb 12:1).
I was shocked and saddened to read that a group of citizens are planning to bring a lawsuit against the city of Las Cruces, New Mexico to have the three crosses removed from the city's official seal. (The city is named after the three crosses of Mount Calvary.) Similar objections have been made against the symbolism associated with Sacramento, California and Corpus Christi, Texas, both named for the mystery of the Eucharist. California is dotted with cities and towns named after the patron saints of the missions around which they grew up, San Francisco being the most famous of these. Ignorance of the saints, or even indifference to them, is one thing: an ideology that seeks to erase their memory from the collective consciousness is quite another.
The names of saints are more and more rarely being given to Catholic babies. While there is a part of ignorance here, today's parents were the victims of the disastrous lack of catechesis that followed the Second Vatican Council, there is something more.
The pressure to secularize every area of life is picking up momentum. Change what people say, and you will change what they think. The modification of vocabulary, and in this case the suppression of the glorious heritage of Catholic saints' names, will lead to a modification of values and, ultimately, of morality.
Monasteries have the splendid custom of attributing a saint's name or a biblical name to every room and place, from the cells to the workrooms to the storage rooms. The significance of this age old custom is as beautiful as it is profound: the monastery is inhabited not only by the visible people who live within its walls, but also by its invisible residents, the angels and the saints. The naming of a room for a saint is a confession of faith; it flies in the face of secularist ideologies that would have us believe that reality stops with what is visible.
The movement to secularize every thing and every place is as pernicious as it is aggressive. It is part of the "smoke of Satan" that Pope Paul VI saw penetrating the Church to foment confusion. It is important that we respond to the crisis with courage and with conviction. The invasion of the secular must be countered by a renewed acceptance of the sacred, and by reclaiming all things for Christ under the patronage of his saints and his mysteries: our cities, our towns, our homes, our institutions, our rooms, and, yes, our children.
The feast of Saints Joachim and Anna invites us to consider these things. Joachim and Anna arrived in North America with the first colonizers from France and Spain, those who named every new place for the saints of Christ. By this, they made it clear that the Kingdom of Heaven was also expanding and that all places and peoples were invited to live in communion and in communication with the saints.
In seventeenth century France devotion to the Holy Family became a mark of the renewal that, following the Council of Trent, blew through the Church like a refreshing breeze, a mystical invasion. The Holy Family was understood, at that time, to refer to the entire extended family of Jesus, including his grandparents, Joachim and Anne.
From France, Jesuit missionaries, Ursuline and Hospitaller nuns,and devout layfolk carried the devotion to the Holy Family to New France. A sanctuary dedicated to Saint Anne was built in 1658 between the Saint Laurence River and the Beaupré coast in Québec. Other smaller shrines to Saint Anne mark the "Catholic geography" of New England.
After the French Revolution, the Church knew an extraordinary burst of energy characterized by the foundations of hundreds of new religious communities of women; many of these nineteenth century foundations were dedicated to the Holy Family and, again, the grandparents of the Lord were not excluded. Some of these French communities came, in turn, to America where they taught generations of Catholics to reverence the human family of Christ and to live in communion with the saints.
Saint Anne and Saint Joachim have a special message for the grandparents among us. Grandmothers and grandfathers have a particular vocation in the order of grace. Grandparents are called to foster the supernatural life of their grandchildren, to pray for them, to pray with them, and to model holiness for them. Grandparents can reach places in a child's heart that no one else can reach. Grandparents can introduce their grandchildren to the joy of living with the saints.
We are the spiritual descendents of the saints. We profess our faith in the communion of the saints and acknowledge their presence in our homes and in our lives. We renounce the evil ideologies of secularization that, by suppressing the things that call to mind the saints, aim at erasingthe supernatural from daily life.In the Eucharist, heaven descends to earth and earth is assumed into heaven. In the Eucharist there is infinitely more than what meets the eye. Saints Joachim and Anne are present to us; their most holy Daughter, the Virgin Mary, is present to us. Let us ask them to join their intercession to ours, imploring peace for the Middle East. This too is the communion of the saints: the Holy Sacrifice offered here can bring peace there. Live then, as if you were seeing the invisible! There is nothing more real than that."
