The St. Francis House, formerly on Blackstone Street in Woonsocket, was once a Catholic home for working women and then generally for elderly residents. The Franciscan Sisters from Allegheny in New York staffed this northern Rhode Island residence as they did St. Joseph’s Hospital and St. Margaret and St. Maria Homes in Providence. Although the St. Francis House always had its own resident chaplain, the sisters and the residents always enjoyed a close relationship with the nearby St. Charles Borromeo parish where the parish women formed “The Trinity Club,” sponsoring socials and events to support the good works of this neighborhood institution. During my high school years, I was pleased to assist the sisters whenever possible, offering them rides once I got my license and participating in musicals and skits the sisters offered for the entertainment of the residents. I once burned my hand in a St. Patrick Day pageant portraying the saint casting out a demon. When I was ordained, the sisters presented me a relic of the True Cross, with sealed documentation, explicitly noting, in longhand, “…ex lingo…,” Latin for “out of the wood.” Clearly I treasure their gift and have been pleased to offer the relic for veneration on Good Friday at whatever parish I might be serving.
This coming Sunday will offer the universal Church an opportunity to recall and reverence the place of the True Cross in salvation history and in pious devotion. The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross extends back seventeen hundred years to the providential and beneficial reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine and his mother, St. Helena. According to Christian tradition (and Wikipedia), the True Cross was discovered in 326 by St. Helena, the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, during a pilgrimage she made to Jerusalem. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was then built at the site of the discovery, by order of Helena and Constantine. The church was dedicated nine years later honoring a portion of the cross. One-third had remained in Jerusalem, one-third was brought to Rome and deposited in the basilica Santa Croce in Gerusalemme (Holy Cross in Jerusalem), and one-third was taken to Constantinople hoping to make the city impregnable. The date of the feast today marks the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 335. This was a two-day festival. Although the actual consecration of the church was on September 13, the Cross itself was brought outside the church on September 14 so that the clergy and faithful could pray before the True Cross, and all could come forward to venerate it.
The Cross of Jesus Christ, like Moses’ healing serpent in this Sunday’s first reading, is a visible, tangible contradiction. Jewish infidelity occasioned the ancient desert to be overrun with poisonous snakes “which bit the people so that many of them died.” These venomous creatures, possible Cobras, were hardly a cause or even a symbol of health and well-being. If anything, they were to be shunned and avoided. Yet God, however curiously, ordered Moses to make a metal replica of the fateful serpent “and mount it on a pole, and if any who have been bitten look at it, they will live.” So the source of their downfall became the occasion for their relief. Clearly Christ’s saving Cross on Calvary is foreshadowed by Moses’ healing serpent in the desert.
Today Calvary’s vicious Cross has become a universal sign of hope, healing and heavenly fulfillment. But the promise of the Cross is fulfilled today in the same manner it was achieved on Golgatha. The Cross was, and is, first of all a sign of obedience. “He humbled himself,” St. Paul writes in this Sunday’s second reading, “becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.” Christ’s docile acceptance of His Father’s challenging Will transformed the Cross from an instrument of torture into the agent of salvation.
True to his Redemptorist roots, Bishop Bruce A. Lewandowski, C.Ss.R., of Providence, chose words from St. Alphonsus’ venerable Stations of the Cross as his episcopal motto: “…Because by your Holy Cross…” And yes, indeed, because of Christ’s example on the Cross the challenges, sufferings and iniquities of this present life are not idle ordeals to wear humanity down but rather trials to direct a believer’s reliance more toward God as the sole source of earthly endurance and then heavenly fulfillment. Like the snakes in Moses’ desert and the Cross atop Calvary, what appears to the human eye to be a curse is understood by the eye of faith to be an opportunity, a chance honorably and courageously to follow God’s providential will in challenging times as well as in more comfortable circumstances. The Jews regarding the elevated snake and Christ embracing his raised up Cross are Scripture’s clear lesson on embracing God’s Will as the focus of this life.
