12 July 2018 - homily - Thursday of the 14th week in Ordinary Time - Matthew 10:7-15

   As Jesus sends the disciples out as missionaries, he tells them to travel lightly and gives them the power to create signs that the Kingdom of God is at hand: to cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, and drive out demons.  Sometime we feel God calling us in a particular way to live out of lives of faith, to follow a certain vocation in our proclamation of God’s kingdom.  But, sometimes, the reality of the world makes that difficult or impossible to do.  I thought of a novel I read several years ago entitled The Last One to the Scaffold, written by a German convert to Catholicism, Gertrud von Le Fort in 1931.  After the French Revolution, many monasteries and convents were ordered shut, as the new government turned against the Catholic Church.  In 1790, the government ordered the Carmelite monastery in the town of Compiegne, France to close.  Yet, in 1794, the 16 nuns who lived in that monastery were arrested on charges of living in a religious community, which was against the law in post-revolutionary France.  The nuns were sentenced to death in Paris, where they put to death by the guillotine while they sang the Salve Regina.  They refused to bow down to a government that condemned their Christian way of life.  But this is not the end to this story.  In 1957, after having read this novel, French composer Francois Poulenc wrote an opera based on their story entitled Dialogues of the Carmelites.  It is the only major opera that has all female voices.  Poulenc, a lapsed Catholic at the time, said that composing the opera, both the music and its lyrics, brought him back to the Catholic faith, as he was so inspired by the story of these Carmelite nuns.  These were beatified by Pope Pius X in 1906.  Their feast day is celebrate by the Carmelites on July 17.  As we hear the call from Jesus to be missionaries, as we are inspired by the story of the Carmelite martyrs, may we pray that the Lord help us to live out his mercy in our lives, that he help us to be faithful servants to his word in a world that is often against us.