June 14, 2026 • 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time
I bore you up on eagle’s wings—Exodus 19:4
The Israelites have escaped from the slavery of Egypt thanks to the Lord. Why did God do this? After all, the Israelites were mere slaves, the least of these. God acted out of love creating a sacred relationship. We will see that the Israelites do not always honor this relationship by failing to act in ways that testify to God’s compassion to others beyond their own. Whenever the Church becomes more attentive to her own well-being than to her mission to be Christ in the world, she fails to honor God.
What is this mission to be Christ to the world? In his book, A New Way to be Church: Parish Renewal from the Outside In, Jack Jezreel, founder of JustFaith, writes, “How can we possibly follow Jesus and not find ourselves in the company of our sisters and brothers who are hungry, homeless, and hopeless?. . .If our churches are not forming or trying to form real-life saints committed to the abandoned and downtrodden, then what are they doing?” (21-22). Jezreel believes “that every facet of Catholic life in most parishes is being shortchanged” because, as he writes, “the vision of God’s love and justice and Jesus’s proclamation of the reign of God and the life journey of compassion and integrity outlined in Catholic social teaching and the Gospels are central, critical ingredients of our mission, our self-identity, and our vision” (21). In most parishes, we have more ministries inside the walls of the church than those that go out beyond those walls.
We must look at our parishes, and ourselves, and ask, “How much of the life of my parish is done outside its ‘walls’? What am I doing to be Christ in the world? The Vatican II document on the laity makes it clear that Christian social action is the laity’s pre-eminent work and goes so far to say that “the demands of justice must first of all be satisfied; what is already due in justice is not to be offered as a gift in charity” (8). Clearly, for the laity, this call to mission to be Christ to the world must be instilled as the way of Jesus and as the way to life with God. God bore us up on eagle’s wings so we can spread God’s love to others.
To join in this work of mission to the world at Cathedral, contact: socialconcern@hnojnc.org
Barbara Molinari Quinby, MPS, Director
Office of Human Life, Dignity, and Justice Ministries
Holy Name of Jesus Cathedral Raleigh, NC