Bishop Flavin began serving on the Committee on Missions
for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) in 1970. On November 17 of 1971, Bishop Flavin was
elected chairman of the Bishops’ Committee on Missions. Committee members included John Cardinal
Carberry (Saint Louis), Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (Rochester), Bishop Richard
H. Ackerman (Covington), Bishop William G. Connare (Greensburg), Bishop Frederick
W. Freking (LaCrosse) and Bishop Harold H. Perry (New Orleans).
Taken from the book “Bishop Flavin – Loyal Servant of the
King” by School Sisters of Christ the King in collaboration with Peter E.
Mayeux and Monsignor Myron J. Pleskac.
You may obtain a copy of this book here: Sisters of Christ the King
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Homily given by Bishop Fulton Sheen on the
Occasion
of Bishop Glennon P. Flavin’s Consecration as
Bishop
Basilica Cathedral of St. Louis, Missouri
May 30, 1957
In
the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
May it please Your Excellency Most Reverend Archbishop
Ritter, Your Excellencies Most Reverend Archbishops and Bishops, Right
Reverend, Very Reverend, Reverend Fathers, beloved religious, family and
relatives of His Excellency Bishop Flavin, my good friend Your Excellency
Bishop Flavin, and all friends in Christ . . .
On this beautiful day, forty days after Easter, Our Lord took
leave of His Apostles and as He ascended into Heaven, two angels standing
nearby said to the Apostles, “Why stand ye here gazing into the Heavens?” That seemed to be the normal thing to
do. This was their Lord and their
Master? If He was taking leave of them,
why should they not look into the Heavens?
And yet there was the reprimand and the reason was the world is worth a
look! Heaven is only for those who have
completed their tasks and fulfilled their duties. Our Lord was practically saying, “I have sent
you into the world; therefore finish your work.” And because we are taking the
world seriously, there is being consecrated today the Archdiocesan Director of
one who is aiding the world. Now let us
meditate on the meaning of this ceremony. . . .
Our
Blessed Lord (after), as He prepared to ascend into Heaven, said to His
Apostles that they were to remain in Jerusalem for ten days and to wait for
power on high. Why should they not go
into the world immediately? Why wait for
ten days? Had they not received all the
powers? In the Gospel, which you just
heard, before the Ascension, our Blessed Lord had given them the power to
forgive sins. He gave them the power to
preach in His Name, to heal the sick, to baptize. He had already given them the power and the
authority to offer the sacrifice of the Mass and the memorial of His
death. Why should they wait for power on
high? Because the Apostles, up to that
point, were only priests. They had to
wait for ten days until the Holy Spirit would come to make them bishops. Notice that in the conferring of the
priesthood our Blessed Lord, as it was said, “breathed on them.” The breath is the only symbol that we have of
the Holy Spirit. First of all because
it’s the soul, life, it’s invisible, and it’s something that lies too deep for
words. The Son can express Himself by
words. Now the breathing on them was the
giving of the measure of the Spirit. But
notice that on Pentecost, it was a wind not a breath! We make a distinction between a breeze and a
gale and a wind. So too, Sacred
Scripture makes that distinction. Up to
this time they had been given the truth, but they had not been given the Spirit
of truth! So our Lord said “It is
fitting for you that I go. If I go not,
the Spirit of Truth will not come unto you.”
In the greatest mind of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas, makes this distinction
that I have just made for you. He said
that the priests receive the power to offer sacrifice, and to administer
sacraments and to preach but to the Bishops was given the authority, ad ostendendam
doctrinam, for the manifestation
of truth and of the doctrine of the Church.
So
on this blessed day, we are witnessing a greater measure of the Holy Spirit
poured out upon a truly great and apostolic priest. Now this distinction that I have made,
between the priest and the bishop, is even in the life of Our Lord in an
analogical way. Suppose we put it in a
catechetical form to make it interesting.
When did the Son of God become a priest or was He always a priest? And when did He become a bishop? Our Lord is called the Bishop of our souls in
the Scriptures. Was the Son of God a
priest in Heaven? No. He became a priest when the oil of divinity
anointed His humanity. He became a
priest in His Incarnation. For that
moment, He was given a body. He was
given the raw material of a sacrifice.
It was now possible for Him to be both priest and victim on the
cross. So, on the cross He would be
upright as the priest. He would be
prostrate as the victim. “Corpus optisti
mihi.” “A body thou hast fitted to me” (Hebrews 10:5).
Now,
there came a greater measure of the Spirit to His humanity on the day when He
was baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist.
Then it was the Heavens were opened.
God the Father spoke and said, “This is my beloved Son in Whom I am well
pleased.” And the Holy Spirit descended
in the form of a dove. Men receive the
Spirit under the symbols of water, of oil, as His Excellency has just received
it, water, fire, wind. But, the Son of
God received the Spirit under the symbol of a complete organic form, namely
that of a dove, to indicate the very fullness of the Spirit and notice that,
that was the moment when our Blessed Lord began teaching. See how it is related to what St. Thomas says
about the, the manifestation of the truth and the witnessing to the
doctrine? That is why we always speak of
the episcopacy as the fullness of the priesthood.
Now
St. Paul says it is a good work to desire the episcopacy. But the reason St. Paul said it was a good
work to desire the episcopacy was because in those days everyone who became a
bishop was martyred. And today many are
martyred.
Now
there are three practical conclusions that follow from this meditation. The first is this: that a Bishop is
consecrated for the world not for a diocese.
A diocese is a sign for jurisdictional reasons for the purpose of
government, but the consecration itself commits a bishop to the world. It is therefore very fitting that the one who
was consecrated today has already world interests. And though you good people of the Archdiocese
of St. Louis are to take pride in the fact that one of your sons has been
raised to the burden of the episcopacy, nevertheless, the very presence of
other bishops from other diocese manifest the fact that the whole world is
rejoicing. His Excellency Bishop Flavin
today becomes, for example, part of the bishops whom he serves, like, like the
Bishop of Shanghai who’s a kind of a “Mindzenty” of China, of the bishops
behind the Iron Curtain. This is a world
event! And not only does it bind him to
the world, but in virtue of this consecration, he also is given a very
exceptional and extraordinary power. A
priest cannot beget priests. The
priesthood would die without the episcopacy.
Therefore when a bishop is consecrated, the Church assures the
propagation of the priesthood. This is a
very fitting day for His Excellency, Archbishop Ritter, to have a spiritual son. For His Excellency was ordained forty years
ago today. This is therefore a double
reason for rejoicing. And, when I was in
Rome just a few weeks ago, a couple of Cardinals told me that one of the
outstanding Archbishops in the United States, for an unmeasured love of the
Church throughout the world, is the Archbishop of St. Louis. And I know that His Excellency Bishop Flavin
is very happy to receive the spirit of Archbishop Ritter. And those of us who know His Excellency
Bishop Flavin well, also know that those who are ordained by him, in years to
come, will be as proud of their father as he is proud of his spiritual father
today.
And
this last and final reflection, about the Bishop, we said that the Bishop is
the sign of the preservation and the continuation and the manifestation of
truth. Perhaps, in order to understand
that well, let us seemingly digress. You
remember reading the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew there is a tremendously
long genealogy there of forty-two names broken into three distinct groups of
fourteen each in which there is a genealogy of our Lord carried back to
Abraham. Luke carries it back, of
course, farther. Now in this genealogy
of both of these evangelists, there are names mentioned that do not seem to
mean very much for example: Ram begot Amminadab, Amminadab begot Nahshon,
Nahshon begot Salmon. Will, why should
Sacred Scripture give us this pedigree at the very beginning of the Gospel of
Our Lord? In order to show that our
Blessed Lord was tied up with all humanity!
Why, like a great river this pedigree of humanity runs through the
course of history! Some of the names
indeed are important like a David, like a Jesse, like a Solomon and others are
unimportant like Ram, like an Amminadab, like a Nahshon. But it makes no difference when they all are
mentioned! It means that our Blessed
Lord comes full-blown into history with this tremendous genealogy and
attachment to the whole human race! Some
are good, some are bad but He is bound to the world and to men, whom He is to
save. Now the Bishop is in relationship
to the truth of Christ as the genealogy in Matthew is related to humanity. In other words, if we wish to know, today,
the truth of the Church, how it has come down to us, it has come down to us
through the Apostles, through their successors under the leadership of Peter
and His successors. How do we know the
Resurrection took place? Not just
because it is written in the Gospels, but because we have had some of our
ancestors present there! The Apostles were
there! They bear witness to the
Resurrection. That’s how we know that
the Resurrection took place! And so here
we’re just adding one name, not a minor name like Ram and Amminadab and Nahshon
but a great name, that will assure this continuity of truth from Christ on
until His second coming as the genealogies attach Christ back to Adam and to
Abraham. And in the glory of this day,
since he is attached to the truth of Christ now by consecration, we cannot at
the same time forget that he has been attached to Christ by the sanctity of his
life. And if there was any way of
describing the apostolic labors of Bishop Flavin, it would be to say, as it was
said of Our Lord, “He went about doing good.” And may his good father and
mother, since they have begotten one so Christ-like, find special joy in the
words that were spoken by Christ Himself from the cross; this time words of joy
and rightful praise: “Behold thy Son a
Bishop of the Church.” God love you.
