January 23, 2015
[Editor’s note: This Sunday, Jan. 25, is the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle, patron and namesake of the Paulist Fathers.]
On July 7, 1858, Servant of God Isaac Hecker and three others – Augustine Hewit, George Deshon and Francis Baker – founded the Society of Missionary Priests of St. Paul the Apostle, known ever since as “The Paulist Fathers.” For more than 150 years, the Paulist Fathers’ life as a religious community in the Church and their wider missionary outreach have been blessed by the patronage of St. Paul the Apostle, the feast of whose conversion we celebrate now during this special Year of Consecrated Life which Pope Francis has called upon all priests, brothers, and sisters in religious communities to observe.
Most saints are celebrated on the anniversary of their death. If the saint was a martyr, that itself is often his or her principal claim on our attention. Along with the Apostle Peter, Paul was martyred in Rome, and the two are celebrated together every year on June 29. But then, every Jan. 25 there is this additional celebration of St. Paul focused on the event in his life that we commonly call his “conversion.” That great event transformed Paul into a disciple of Jesus and put him on an equal footing with the others to whom the Risen Christ had appeared, highlighting what it means to be converted to Christ, to become a disciple of Jesus, his witness in the world and an apostle sent with mission to evangelize, to make disciples of all peoples. No wonder Hecker and his friends chose Paul as their patron! No wonder the Paulists celebrate this day every year as our patronal feast day!
Paul was, first and foremost, a devout Jew, well educated in the law, a Pharisee, that is, a member of the group most zealous about religious observance. But he was also a Greek-speaking Jew from the Diaspora. (There was nothing unusual about that. More Jews lived outside of Israel than in it at that time.) He grew up in what is today Turkey, in a Greek city, and enjoyed Roman citizenship.
All of this was very important because one of the great issues which confronted the first-century Church was figuring out how Jews and Gentiles were connected in God’s plan for the salvation of the world through Jesus Christ and how they should relate to one another within the one community of the Church. The way this issue was eventually resolved (thanks in no small part to Paul) helped transform what would otherwise have been a small Jewish sect into the biggest and longest-lasting multi-cultural institution in the world – the Roman Catholic Church.
What Paul experienced when he met the Risen Lord on the way to Damascus was a revelation of God’s plan to include all people in the promises originally made to Abraham and his descendents and now being finally fulfilled in Jesus. The God who revealed himself to Paul in the person of Jesus was the same God whom Paul had always served so enthusiastically as a Jew. What changed was that now Paul recognized Jesus as the One, though whom all people are included in God’s plan of salvation.
And because the converted, Paul now understood that it was Jesus that ultimately mattered, he also recognized no conflict between Gentile culture and faith in Christ. For the pagan peoples of the Roman Empire, that was good news indeed. It’s easy to see why Paul’s mission was so successful among different types of people and why he appealed to Hecker as a model – Hecker who was so convinced that the Catholic Church was just what American culture needed. The world has changed a lot since Paul’s time and Hecker’s time, but the Church’s mission – and our mission as Paulist Fathers – remain the same.
Paul had what Hecker so much wanted his Paulists to have, what Hecker called “zeal for souls.” Paul was not one of the original 12. He wasn’t there when Jesus said to his disciples: “Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.” But he absorbed those words as surely as if they had been initially addressed to him – as we also must do.
As Pope St. John Paul II famously said: “Those who have come into genuine contact with Christ cannot keep him for themselves, they must proclaim him.”