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The Exaltation of the Holy Cross

by Fr. Michael S. Murray, OSFS

On September 14, the Church celebrates the Exultation of the Holy Cross.

The Catholic News Agency (CNA) provides a concise summary of the background behind this celebration:

“The feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross celebrates two historical events: the discovery of the True Cross by Saint Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, in 320 under the temple of Venus in Jerusalem, and the dedication in 335 of the basilica and shrine built on Calvary by Constantine, which mark the site of the Crucifixion. The basilica, named the Martyrium, and the shrine, named the Calvarium, were destroyed by the Persians in 614. The Church of the Holy sepulcher, which now stands on the site, was built by the crusaders in 1149.”

“The feast itself is a celebration and commemoration of God's greatest work: his salvific death on the Cross and His Resurrection, through which death was defeated and the doors to Heaven opened.” The Exaltation of the Holy Cross (catholicnewsagency.com) 

References to the Cross of Christ in the combined writings of St. Francis de Sales are too numerous to count. Suffice it to say, it speaks volumes that the “Gentleman Saint” concludes his epic "Treatise on the Love of God" with a profoundly powerful reflection upon the Cross of Christ and its primacy in our lives. He wrote:

“The children of the cross glory in this, their wondrous paradox which the world cannot comprehend: Out of death, which devours all things, has come the food of our consolation, and out of death, strong above all things, has issued the all-sweet honey of our love.”

“Indeed, Mount Calvary is the mount of lovers…Unhappy is death without the Savior’s love; unhappy is love without the Savior’s death. Love and death are so mingled in the Savior’s passion that we cannot have the one in our hearts without the other. Upon Calvary we cannot have life without love or love without the Redeemer’s death. Except there, all is either eternal death or eternal life. All Christian wisdom consists in choosing rightly.” (TLG, Book XII, Chapter 13)

God’s love for each of us is a great gift, freely given. But as we see in the life of Jesus himself, this love can come at a very great price: a price that comes with placing who we are – and what we have – at the service of others. Dying to anything that would diminish our ability to love God, ourselves, and one another is a lifelong process.

As we celebrate the Exultation of the Holy Cross, let us ask for the grace, the courage, and tenacity to choose life - to choose love.

Whatever the cost.



September 27 is the feast day of St. Vincent de Paul, and before selecting him for this month, I honestly only knew about his legacy of charitable works that lives on today and that he lived in France at about the same time that our beloved gentleman saint, St. Francis de Sales, was bishop. (And yes, the paths of these two great saints and men did cross.)



While so many saints came from noble families and even more possessed an unusually intense devotion to Christ in childhood, St. Vincent de Paul checked neither of these boxes. In reality, Vincent de Paul sought the priesthood somewhat as an escape from the circumstance of his birth and childhood. Born in 1581 in southwest France, the third of six children in a peasant family, Vincent de Paul was ashamed of his poverty, his ragged clothes, and especially, his father. However, it was his father who recognized the great potential in him. Knowing his son had been blessed with a brilliant mind, Vincent’s father sold an ox to afford sending Vincent away for a formal education. He was sent to live with and be taught by Franciscan friars in the town of Dax. He was then sent to the University of Toulouse for theology, and on September 23, 1600, he was ordained a priest at just 19 years old. Fr. Vincent remained in Toulouse to continue his studies of theology, and in 1604, a wealthy widow died and left him property in Marseille on the eastern coast of France. He set out to sell the property traveling by land to Marseille, but on the return route, he chose the faster, albeit more dangerous, option of boat, and this proved to be the first pivotal moment on his journey to living a life worthy of sainthood.

On the voyage, the ship was captured by Barbary pirates. Those who were not killed in the attack were taken to Tunis where they were sold into slavery; Fr. Vincent was among those auctioned off. The next two years were spent being bought and sold as an enslaved man. In 1607, he was bought by a man who had been a Franciscan priest but had renounced his faith for his own freedom. Vincent evangelized to the man who enslaved him, eventually winning back his heart for Christ, and together they fled Tunisia and returned to France. These two years of his life likely set the stage for his future works of charity and mercy.



In 1612, St. Vincent accepted a role at a parish outside Paris and was appointed the teacher of the wealthy family of Phillipe de Gondi. Besides teaching the family’s children, he served and ministered to the sick and poor workers who lived in the area. In 1617, St. Vincent de Paul encountered a dying man suffering from spiritual loneliness, who had never encountered the gentleness of a priest to demonstrate the love of God. St. Vincent’s heart was greatly moved by the spiritual poverty he saw in this man, and he requested to no longer serve the wealthy Gondi family. St. Vincent was then named the pastor of a small parish between Lyon and Geneva. There he saw increased poverty and sickness, but due to his previous work with the wealthy, Fr. Vincent began to realize how he could advantage the wealthy to support the poor. It is here that he began to organize a program to aid the sick and impoverished and share it with others desiring to offer charity.

In 1618, Fr. Vincent first encountered St. Francis de Sales in Paris. The Bishop of Annecy had published “The Treatise on the Love of God” in 1616 and his reputation for gentleness was already flourishing. They were living in a time where people were afflicted by hunger and poverty resulting from widespread crop failure and economic crisis. On the verge of the Thirty Years War, which began in 1618 and continued until 1648, the opposition of Catholics and Protestants erupted in devastation, disease, and death across Europe. In the end, the human cost was roughly 20% of the population across central Europe. In the face of such desperation, the messages that both St. Vincent de Paul and St. Francis de Sales shared of hope helped keep the fear at bay. Francis and Vincent both shared their secret of life – the gentleness of God's love – with the physically and spiritually burdened people. Like St. Francis de Sales, St. Vincent de Paul faced the difficulties of the time with gentleness, hope, and love. In 1617, St. Vincent de Paul had started his “charities” to serve the homeless, poor, and ill-stricken. As the charities grew, he invited Luisa de Marillac (St. Louise de Marillac), a young widow to assist him. Together they established the “Daughters of Charity,” religious women who took simple, not solemn, vows to live a life of humility, poverty, and chastity while serving the poorest among us with hope, love, and mercy.

In 1621, a year prior to his death, St. Francis de Sales committed the care of the first Visitation monastery to his friend, St. Vincent de Paul. After the death of St. Francis de Sales, St. Vincent de Paul wrote this in a letter to Pope Alexander VII encouraging the canonization of Francis:

“Faith, Hope, Charity, and the other cardinal and moral Christian virtues seemed almost innate in him and, taken together, formed in him, at least to my way of thinking, such a fund of goodness that, during an illness which occurred to me shortly after a conversation with him, I turned over in my mind his sweetness and exquisite meekness, and often repeated to myself: ‘Oh! How good must God be, since the Bishop of Geneva is so kind.’”

Following the death of Francis, Vincent also became the spiritual director of St. Jane de Chantal, and the two of them remained close for the next two decades until Jane died in 1641.

After the death of Jane Frances de Chantal, St. Vincent de Paul wrote of her:

“It seemed to me that she was full of every sort of virtue, and particularly of faith. Because of her strong faith, throughout her life, she was beset by strong temptations of doubt. Yet she always had supreme confidence in God. Mother de Chantal was wise, moderate, tolerant, and firm to a most unusual degree. The spirit of humility, austerity, obedience, and zeal for the perfecting of her Order and the salvation of souls absorbed most of her time. I have never observed any faults in her but always saw her put into practice her virtues and the rule of her community.”



Until his own death in 1660 at the age of 79, St. Vincent de Paul continued to tirelessly dedicate his life to the poor through the charities he organized. Today, the Daughters of Charity he founded with St. Louise de Marillac has over 13,000 women serving in 96 countries. 

In 1833, over a century after the death and then canonization of St. Vincent de Paul (1737), Blessed Frédéric Ozanam, a young Christian student in Paris, was inspired by St. Vincent de Paul’s legacy of charity and gathered a group of people to similarly serve the poor, sick, and hungry of the Parisian streets. At the time, Ozanam wrote about his decision to embrace the poor, “The question which is agitating the world today is a social one. It is a struggle between those who have nothing and those who have too much. It is a violent clash of opulence and poverty which is shaking the ground under our feet. Our duty as Christians is to throw ourselves between these two camps in order to accomplish by love what justice alone cannot do.” It seems throughout history that some things never change.

Ozanam’s movement soon spread across France and then worldwide, becoming the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, whose mission is to “witness God’s love by embracing all works of charity and justice.” Today, there are over 4,000 Society of St. Vincent de Paul organizations (called Conferences) around the globe, comprised of 90,000 Vincentians (the men and women who are Society members). To learn more about the good being done by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul or how to get involved, visit https://ssvpusa.org/.

If you were like me, and only knew a sliver of St. Vincent de Paul’s story, then you can now see why over 350 years after his death, the legacy of his life still shines brightly. A child of humble beginnings and no promising path came to live a life that still today ripples the love and mercy of Christ to millions of people in need around the world. Is there any greater legacy?



It was a pleasure to speak with many parishioners after Mass last weekend at the Care for Our Common Home table in the Narthex. We discovered that our ministry is unfamiliar to many. Here we are offering a brief description of who we are, accompanied by a reflection on how to approach the climate crisis using the "See - Judge - Act" methodology of Catholic Social Teaching. 

A Brief Description of the Care for Our

Common Home Ministry

In 2015, after a group of parishioners read Pope Francis’s Encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home, a number of us realized that this was a clarion call to action and not just an interesting read to be put back on the shelf. In Laudato Si’, we are called to care for the Earth, our common home, and for the people most impacted by climate change. We are a Laudato Si’ parish, which means we are officially part of the global Vatican-led movement to bring Catholic institutions to full sustainability over a period of seven years. The Arlington Diocese, along with over 40 other dioceses in the country, is also participating in the Laudato Si’ movement.

The mission of our ministry is to bring the rich message of Laudato Si’ to life in the parish. It is a call to hear the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor, and it is a reminder that God’s immanence is in all of creation. Laudato Si’ explains how all of our human activities are interrelated and, therefore, have a far-reaching impact, for either good or bad. Caring for creation is our Catholic moral duty and great honor. 



Please email us at saintjn.cch@gmail.com to join our distribution list and keep up to date with specific sustainability initiatives at the parish. Feel free to participate in any that interest you. See our website for more information and photos. We welcome your interest and talents!

Understanding the Encyclical through the

SEE - JUDGE - ACT Methodology

The following reflection is from Father David McCallum, a Jesuit priest in Rome and Executive Director of the Discerning Leadership Program at the Vatican. He summarizes the main message of Laudato Si’ using a method that comes to us from our rich tradition of Catholic Social Teaching: The See - Judge - Act approach to making decisions and taking action. In particular, he explains how we might approach the climate crisis using this method. His comments are a synthesis of The Ten Green Commandments of Laudato Si’. 

SEE



We begin by paying attention to reality as it is. Science provides us data about the state of the climate today, and with that data we can see patterns: rising temperatures, rising sea levels, increased intensity of storms, and all the impacts that they create in our day-to-day lives. We can see that conditions have changed since we were children. The trends don’t look good for the state of the planet when we look further into the future toward the lives of our children and grandchildren. 

So, we start with Seeing: seeing clearly for ourselves where we are and where we are going. First, Earth, our common home, is in peril. In Genesis, God calls us to take care of all the living things in creation. God loves his creation, and so must we. Love is an active verb. Seeing clearly does not mean being a spectator or a bystander; it involves participation and responsibility.

Second, we are called to love our neighbor as ourselves, and that means paying attention to the cry of the poor, who are the most disproportionate victims of the crisis of our common home. The ecological crisis is not only an environmental one but also a deeply moral one. The materially poor are the most vulnerable to suffering from the extreme weather that we’ve been experiencing. They live without the resources and safety nets that protect many of us. We see these gaps of resources and the desperation of the people whose survival and wellbeing are at stake. Once we are seeing for ourselves what is clearly the reality, then what? Then we have to make judgments.

JUDGE 

We have to make sense of what’s going on and judge (or discern), on the basis of our beliefs, our values, and our priorities, what God is calling us to do. In order to discern well, we have to be clear about what matters most to us as believers in Jesus Christ and in his good news to us. What are the values and priorities we need as foundations for making sense of our current experience? We need to rediscover a theological vision of the natural world as good news. The world is indeed good news that reveals the love, the beauty, and the glory of our creator. Notice how being in nature reconnects us to it as a brother or sister, like St. Francis of Assisi did. Nature makes a claim of responsibility on us, because nature is also us. In this sense, nature is much more like a person than a thing. This means regarding her with reverence, with dignity, and with care. 



We have to recognize that the abuse of creation is ecological sin. Just as when we hurt another person, the destruction of our common home calls for repentance. When we see the devastation of land, oceans, and species, don’t we feel regret for our part in this destruction? And the desire and the need to change the way we consume resources? It follows that we have to acknowledge the deeper human roots of this crisis of our common home. Repentance begins by acknowledging our human responsibility for the destruction.

ACT



Next, we act. Once we’ve discerned what matters most, where we need to place our priorities and consider what to do, we have to enact our discernment in real decisions and determine new individual and social actions to address the crisis. In Laudato Si’, we are called to develop an integral ecology, as we are all interrelated and interdependent. As every ecologist, and every farmer, hiker, hunter, or fisherman knows, you cannot do just one thing to ward off global warming or bring healing to our Earth. If you are a gardener, you know we need to understand how living things, including us, operate as systems. All of us depend on one another.

Some of us are old enough to remember taking home economics in school, where we learned what it means to manage our household. Now we need to learn a new way of dwelling in our common home and to manage it more responsibly through a new economics and a new politics. We need a new way to live on this earth, including an economy and a political order that focuses on the common good of all creation. That means educating everyone toward an ecological citizenship with a change in lifestyles. 

Ecological citizenship means we have to form a new agreement, a new contract between humanity and the natural world. One that not only looks to profit from it, or her, but to tend to her and help her flourish. This will mean changes of habits in what we make and how, what we buy, what we eat, how we use things, and what we do with them when we’re done. Embracing an ecological spirituality means living in a communion with all creatures, understanding how we are all in this together, and experiencing how the natural world is permeated with God’s divine presence.

Reconnecting to the Natural World

Many of us live separated from this natural world in artificial bubbles that can separate us from the way God is expressing God’s self in the natural world through God’s many gifts to us. It is important to re-establish that felt sense of connection with the natural world around us, to feel ourselves a part of it, just as it is a part of us, that we are together. Finally, caring for our common home means also cultivating the ecological virtues of praise, gratitude, care, justice, work and sobriety and, importantly, humility in the way we walk and travel on this earth together. 

“Crisis”

When the word "crisis" is used, it is not meant to frighten us so that we act in fear or desperation. The original meaning of the word crisis in Greek does not have the same negative connotation it has in English. It meant a time of sifting. Originally, it meant this is a moment of opportunity in the wake of a serious obstacle, to pause, to look back on the journey that has brought us to this point. And, to give ourselves a radically new direction. Any crisis brings real change. The crisis in our natural world, with all of its grim prospects, also holds a bright beam of hope for humanity – to seize this moment and rebuild our common planetary home, and to heal these ruptured bonds of friendship and fellowship with the rest of the living community, with plants, with animals, and with sea life.

Moving Forward with Inspiration

Laudato Si’ provides us with the inspiration and the moral compass to embark together on this journey, echoing the courageous challenge presented by the Earth Charter at the beginning of the millennia. In it we read, “As never before in history, a common destiny calls upon us to seek a new beginning. Let ours be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life.”

In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis tells us, “All is not lost. Human beings, while capable of the worst, also are capable of rising above themselves, choosing again what is good and making a new start.” We can’t change the past, but we can work together to build the future we long for rather than resign ourselves to the future that frightens us. 

Now is the time to see, judge, and act!



We think of St. John Neumann, the patron saint of our parish, as the former bishop of Philadelphia, where he became well-known as one of the earliest proponents of Catholic education in the United States before his untimely death from a stroke in 1860 at the age of 49. But there is much more to St. John Neumann’s story, with profound impact on Catholic education for all residents of the United States, especially the Black community.



John Neumann, an immigrant from Bohemia, now part of Germany, born in 1811, was ordained in New York City in 1836. After four years in western New York the Buffalo-Rochester area, failing health resulted in his move to Baltimore, Maryland, where he was the first person in America to profess as a Redemptorist, known as a missionary order, in 1842. After a time in Pittsburgh, Fr. Neumann returned to Baltimore as pastor of St. Alphonsus Church, and in 1852, he was appointed Bishop of Philadelphia by Archbishop Francis Kenrick.

Baltimore in the 1800s was one of the largest commercial ports and points of entry for immigrants in the eastern United States, particularly from the Caribbean in the early years. It is important to remember that Maryland was a southern state, and a slave state up to and through the Civil War. Maryland was also a border state, through which enslaved persons from farther south escaped to Pennsylvania and points north. Consequently, Baltimore had a remarkable mix of residents, with Black persons accounting for 25% of its population in the period 1800-1840, including a sizable number of free Blacks in a range of skilled trades and services.

Life for Baltimore’s Black residents was not easy. Manumission was not as difficult to secure in Maryland as it was in some of the other states. In fact, it was used as an incentive for skilled Black laborers to work hard in exchange for the promise of freedom, but not necessarily complete freedom. Life for enslaved men and women was brutal; they were subject to repressions, harsh punishments for violation of the rules, physical abuse, and loss of their children. But to paraphrase Langston Hughes, life for free Blacks was no crystal stair either.

Racism and racial policing were typical. Arrest and imprisonment in foul conditions for minor infractions of the law was common. Poverty was extreme among free Blacks. Limited or prohibited access to education was the norm. Providing an education for enslaved or free Blacks was illegal.

One of the free Blacks of Baltimore was Mary Elizabeth Clovis Lange. Born into a family of means in 1784, Mary Lange spent her early years in Haiti. Her family fled to Santiago, Cuba, sometime in the early 1790s, to escape the increasing challenges of the Haitian Revolution, especially with respect to religion and social class.

It is not clear exactly when Mary Elizabeth Lange and her family left Cuba, but she appears to have arrived in Baltimore in 1813 following some time spent in Charleston, SC, and Norfolk, VA. Baltimore may have been her ultimate destination due to a community of Haitian refugees already living there. She and other Haitian refugees would have been Catholic, as Haiti had been a French colony. Baltimore was probably the destination for Haitians as it was the center for the Catholic Church in the United States at that time. She arrived with Spanish and French as her primary languages and began to learn English as well.**

Thanks to her family’s means, Mary Lange appears to have been well educated, particularly for a Black person of that period. She recognized the need in Baltimore to provide basic education for Black children, both free and enslaved. With her close friend, Marie Magdalene Balas, she began offering lessons as early as 1818 for girls in her home. Her work came to the attention of James Joubert, who was a white Frenchman who arrived in Baltimore from Haiti in 1804. Joubert entered St. Mary’s Seminary and was ordained in the Sulpician Order in Baltimore. 

Providing meaningful service to the Baltimore Black community was a special interest of Archbishop James Whitfield. Fr. Joubert brought the work of Mary Lange and Mari Balas to the attention of the archbishop, who supported the creation of a school for Black girls in 1828. Mary Lange and Marie Balas expressed to Fr. Joubert that they were also interested in starting a religious order dedicated to education and received approval to do so, establishing in 1829 the Sisters of Providence, comprised of women of African heritage. Fr. Joubert became their chaplain, and Mother Mary Lange became the first Superior of the order, which was dedicated to the service of the poor and vulnerable.



As you might imagine, it was a struggle to maintain the Sisters of Providence and its work in education. Fr. Joubert and Archbishop Whitfield were helpful in providing support, however, in 1843, Fr. Joubert passed away, leaving the Sisters of Providence very vulnerable for more than three years. (Archbishop Whitfield had died several years prior to Fr. Joubert.) The order was required to have a chaplain, but there was little interest in appointing one by the bishop succeeding Bishop Whitfield, as education and services to free or enslaved Blacks were not considered important, rather a waste of time, energy and support. Without a chaplain to oversee the order, the Sisters of Providence could not continue.

Fr. John Neumann was familiar with Mother Mary Lange, the Sisters of Providence, and their work in education. He was able to convince Archbishop Samuel Eccleston, who had grown up on a plantation in Maryland, of the need for continuation of the Sisters of Providence and their educational mission. Eccleston felt that investing in the education of Black persons was wasteful, but he reluctantly agreed to Fr. Neumann’s recommendation to appoint Fr. Thaddeus Anwander as the new chaplain in 1847. This appointment stabilized the order and let it continue its work and grow in size and impact, opening, orphanages, providing health services, and expanding the educational opportunities for Black girls and eventually, Black boys as well. Mother Mary Lange also held night classes for Black adults so they could learn to read.

The sisters volunteered to serve the health needs of Baltimore’s Black community during at least one cholera epidemic and did not experience any deaths as a result of their service. Mother Mary Lange established the St. Frances Academy, initially for girls but eventually for boys as well. The Academy still operates in Baltimore today and is considered the oldest Catholic High School in the United States.

Mother Mary Lange passed in 1882, following a long life of service. Her legacy is present in schools and buildings in the City of Baltimore from Fells Point to the near west side of downtown, and in the work of the Sisters of Providence eventually spreading throughout the United States and abroad. Mother Lange showed amazing holiness in her courageous commitment to teach the enslaved when it was illegal to do so and caring for the sick during the cholera outbreak in Baltimore. What drove Mother Mary Lange was an unwavering faith in God, and the belief that she was to be in this place and this time, and to be of service to others. She lived a life of faith that is worthy of Sainthood.

It is difficult to imagine Mother Mary Lange continuing the Sisters of Providence and its teaching of Black residents of Baltimore without the intervention of then Father, and now Saint, John Neumann in recognizing the importance of her mission and commitment. While we recognize him as SJN's patron saint, he certainly also held a significant role in Mother Mary Lange's mission and that of the Oblate Sisters of Providence.

Candidacy for Sainthood



 The Archdiocese of Baltimore and the Oblate Sisters have championed the cause for her sainthood as the founder of the first Catholic order of African American nuns.

In 1991, thirty-three years ago, William Cardinal Keeler, the Archbishop of Baltimore at the time, with the approval of Rome, officially opened formal investigation into Mary Lange’s life of union with God and works of charity. This is the initial step to beatification and ultimately, sainthood.

In June 2023 Pope Francis designated Mary Lange venerable (essentially step two). Postulator of the Cause is the Vatican representative promoting the cause. Steps 3 and 4 are miracles attributed to an individual, necessary to be declared Blessed and then canonized as a Saint.

With the approval of the St. John Neumann Parish Council in 2023, a Chapter of the Mother Mary Lange Guild is being established in our parish to provide involvement and support of the efforts to canonize Venerable Mother Mary Lange as the first American Black Catholic Saint.



Involvement from across SJN is welcomed and needed for this initiative. Anyone interested may send their expression of interest to the Racial Justice Ministry at racial.justice.sjn@gmail.com.

**Mother Mary Lange’s early years are not documented in greater detail than presented here and may be subject to change.



The Pope's Intention for Prayer and Action

for September

For the cry of the Earth

We pray that each one of us will hear and take to heart the cry of the Earth and of victims of natural disasters and climactic change, and that all will undertake to personally care for the world in which we live.