I’ll be back with another post, pertaining to yesterday’s March for Life, Catholic Underground, human dignity, and politics; later, I’ll post about Warrior, a movie I saw recently. For now, here is something I threw together in response to a topic on phatmass.com, What did you hear in the Sunday homily?

Sunday’s homily was about revolution. Here’s a summary:

Father began by referring to the Greek word for good news, evangelion. We have good news: God became man to give hope to humanity, to forgive sin and cure the sick, to give purpose to the despairing, and even to rob death of its power. The apostles saw all the miracles of Jesus and rejoiced because they believed they would be able to work the same miracles as a result of following him. Eventually, the apostles were sent out to the ends of the earth as his emissaries (my word), spreading the good news of hope: restoration of life.

It should be noted, the word evangelion predates Christianity: the Roman Emperor referred to himself as a god and son of a god (Julius Caesar) and announced the “good news” of military victories and conquests of new territories. These conquests resulted in destruction and subjection unto despair. The “good news” of Caesar was news heralding death.

As the good news about the true God, the real Son of God spread throughout the Roman Empire, every facet of life was infiltrated (my word) by a Christian, a messenger of the good news of the kingdom of God. For instance, St. Sebastian was a bodyguard of the emperor himself. Each and every one of us is called to be an emissary of Christ, of his love, spreading hope everywhere we are: this is essentially the mission of the New Evangelization.

There is much to be hopeful about and nothing to fear because Christ conquered death. While it is not theologically accurate to say that “the world is going to hell in a handbasket,” the world is in the direst need of hope; announcing the good news is getting increasingly difficult. Think of the new HHS mandate requiring Catholic institutions, other than parishes, to cover contraception and sterilization under insurance plans for employees. It was the Catholic Church that essentially invented hospitals with the intention of caring for the sick and bringing them to health and now the government wants Catholics to go against conscience. Catholics must speak out against these injustices that have everything to do with the good news of Caesar and of not Christ.

We have a mission to start social revolutions with the message of good news of life and love and defeat the bad news of Caesar.