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Dear Friends in Christ,

Today is the feast of the North American martyrs - St. Isaac Jogues, St. John de Brébeuf, and their six companions. All died especially vicious deaths, and if you have never read an account of their mission and their suffering, you should look in Francis Parkman's History of the French and English in North America, Volume I, a part of the "Library of America" series. Their story is something you will never forget.

Of course, celebrating the death of martyrs cannot help but bring to our minds, the death of the proto-martyr, St. Stephen, who also happens to be the Church's first deacon, and the patron of all deacons. His death serves as a lesson to us all, especially when we entertain, as we do today, thoughts of recommitment - of renewing that power within us, that led us to Holy Orders - of calling to mind, the joy which took hold of us on the day of our Ordination, and which may have grown weathered and beaten in the meantime.

Being ordained, and recommitment to Orders, is like a surrendering - a surrendering of our wills, and especially anything in our wills that might resist an unquestioning service of God, and His Church. It is a surrender to truth as well - to the truth, which under the influence of grace, fills not only our hearts, but takes a hold of our minds, and bids us speak - sometimes with abandon, but always with reverence for the truth which has been given us, through prayer, and through what we have learned.

Our Lord says something very telling in today's Gospel about the truth. "Everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but the one who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven."

When we speak a word against the Son of Man, when we articulate an opinion or a judgement that we know is not in accord with the commands Christ has given us about life, about morals, about our conduct, then the burden of guilt becomes ours to bear, and eventually, we cannot live with this guilt. Our conscience cries out, telling us to seek forgiveness, and that is what we do. We ask forgiveness for speaking or acting against the will of God in Jesus Christ. And the Spirit of God, especially in the Sacrament of Penance, gives us forgiveness. That is what the truth does to us - it reduces us to a state of direct contact with God, and in that contact, nothing can be false, nothing can be corrupt, nothing can be evil.

"But the one who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven," for to speak against truth, to proclaim what is false to be truth, is to live a lie - it is to shut ourselves off from God, from all the healing that contact with Him brings us, and eventually, we become a living lie, and for us there can be no forgiveness. The Church is very consoling to sinners, offering them all the forgiveness and healing that can be offered - but the Church is unforgiving against the perversion of truth, unforgiving against false teaching and false doctrines, for the Spirit of Truth, the Spirit of God, cannot be denied by she who is the Lord's Bride.

Stephen, thinking to mount his own defense and at the same time, perhaps to soften hard hearts, got caught up in a splendid sermon about the truth, which we read in the seventh chapter of Acts. And towards the end of his sermon, he said this to those gathered against him:

You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in hearts and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit…and now, you have betrayed and murdered the Righteous One, you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it.

He may have been mounting a defense, but with these words, Stephen was courting death, and death came. Those he accused became enraged - they carried him out of the city and began to stone him.

But truth had carried St. Stephen well beyond the realm of caring about death at that point - truth had carried St. Stephen to the very threshold of Heaven. As Acts relates:

But he, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus, standing at the right hand of God; and he said, "Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." But the people cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears and rushed together upon him. [] And Stephen knelt down and cried with a loud voice, 'Lord, do not hold this sin against them." And when he said this, he fell asleep.

The truth, which they could not stand, caused the people to drown out Stephen with their own cries of anger, and made them cover their ears. But the same truth elevated St. Stephen into the Heavenly realm, and while he yet lived, granted him a vision of Jesus Christ and the living God, a rare vision, but the vision of one who gives his life for truth, for Holy Truth.

St. Stephen is a model of recommitment for the hearts and minds of all deacons: - his last act was the preaching of a sermon - not extemporaneously, not off-the-cuff, but filled with the wisdom of study and knowledge; - and his motive was not to tell his own story, or to impress anyone with his inspiration - his motive was to move the hearts of those already hardened against the truth - to move them by the Spirit who inspired him, and by the accuracy of the historical truth he spoke; - and his final moments, when he understood that he had unwittingly given himself for the sake of Jesus Christ, his final moments were spent in a recommitment to faith and an imitation of the Lord, his last words being words of forgiveness.

Who knows the number of souls won by the blood of St. Stephen that day - but one we certainly know, for Saul, who stood by, holding the robes of the stoners, could never forget what he had seen, what he had heard - and as St. Augustine says: "The Church owes Paul to the prayer of Stephen."

Dear brothers, as you speak the words of recommitment today, remember well this man who is your model, and whose words are a guidepost for your ministry. For what he tells you to do, is to know your faith - to know the teaching of the Church - to know the truth - and to never, not for a single moment, not by a single word, to stray from that truth. And he tells you to love that truth, because it is the Word, and the Word was, and is God, and the Word is made known through your preaching and your teaching. And he tells you, finally, from the very moments of his death, that dying to self, is to see the glory of God above, and to let flow from the vessel that you formerly were, the forgiveness and peace of Jesus Christ - the forgiveness and peace that can be, and so often is, delivered by the ones chosen to be the helpers - you, the deacons of the Church.

May God accept your words of recommitment, then, and preserve your ministry, and give you, as St. Paul says, "a spirit of wisdom and revelation, resulting in knowledge of him…the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way."

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