Vigils Reading – Louisville Cathedral

A reading from

ST OSCAR ROMERO

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A Christian must be concerned to form community and see that the

community keeps growing in depth of faith and missionary extension.

Christians must be dissatisfied as long as they see so many baptized persons

who have not perceived the richness of their baptism. What the apostles used to

do was to take that treasure and make it greater by forming communities and

community life.

This community sense is something we urgently need today in our

country. At times there is confusion between the Christian community and the

political group. Some are unable to tell the difference because the members of a

community don’t deepen their faith and they get mixed up.

In my pastoral letter, I say that often our people, especially the young

people, have reached political maturity earlier than Christian maturity, and they

see life more in political terms, as though the political dimension of life were the

only one, and they have no time left for what is Christian. But it should be the

other way around: what is Christian comes first, and it is thence that each one

should discover his or her proper place in the country, in whatever vocation God

gives one.

If God gives a political vocation. one should live it, but as a Christian. That

way we’ll have the sort of people needed nowadays, people who will become

mature in a Christian community, will mature in the gospel, in their faith, in

their commitment to Christ, in their following of the Lord, who will not let them

betray him in the laws or customs of the land, that is, in political life. And they

will then become the leaders of the transformations that the nation needs today

more than ever, Christians thoroughly committed to Christ, in a community

that is God’s people and, as the Bible says, is like a light on a mountaintop.

Today, with so much confusion, so many groups, so many claims, the

Christian community should consider itself a bright light, providing light and

orientation to everything that happens around us.