Homily by Keith Tulloch SM at Walsingham Marist Day, 2008

Mary Mother of Reconciliation

It is a great pleasure to be here in this holy place which has been a part of my life for more than half a century, and not simply to be here but to be here celebrating the Marist Project which has been an even more important part of my life for almost as long.  I say ‘Marist Project’ because what we are celebrating is a much wider entity than the Society of Mary (Marist Fathers). It is wider even that the collection of religious congregations that, each in its own way, share with the Marist Fathers a distinctive Marist spirituality: the Marist Sisters, the Marist Teaching Brothers and the Missionary Sisters of the Society of Mary. Why? Because each of these congregations has dedicated lay people with whom, and for whom they work and with whom they share that Marist spirituality. These we have gradually come to call ‘Marist Laity’ and they are an essential and energetic part of the Marist Project without whom that project will never, can never be brought to fruition.

I want to offer this Mass for everyone concerned with the Marist Project especially the many and varied Lay Marists around the world including, of course, everyone here today.  The theme of today’s Marist Day celebration, written on the front of this pamphlet, is Mary Mother of Reconciliation.  It is not, as far as I am aware, one of the traditional names of honour given to Our Lady like the ones we hear, for example, in the Litany of Loretto, but it is thought provoking.  Mary was the Mother of Jesus, which is easy to understand: everybody has, or had, a mother.  Since tradition tells us she had no other children anything else she may be called ‘mother’ of, must be associated with her only son Jesus. We call her Mother of God because we believe in the divinity of Jesus, we call her Mother of Hope because we place our hope in Jesus, and so on.  So if we are to call her Mother of Reconciliation it can only be to remind ourselves of the Word of God we have just heard which St Paul expressed so beautifully: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.” (2 Cor. 5:19)   As Christians nowadays we should never be satisfied to hear the word of God as something spoken hundreds of years ago; as a fossil from a former age. We should read, hear it as addressed to ourselves at the present moment.  We might rephrase what Saint Paul said as: “Here and now, in the Church (which we call, and believe to be, the Body of Christ), God is reconciling the world to himself.”   To reconcile the modern world to himself God uses people, he uses you and me; that’s why Jean-Claude Colin told his Marists that they were to be ‘instruments of divine mercy’.  They were, like all other Christians, to be the means by which God reconciles the world to himself and they were to be so under the special patronage of Mary, the Mother of Jesus who was also, by that very fact, Mother of Reconciliation.

Anyone can try do that, to be an instrument of divine mercy, anytime and anywhere in the world. For the time being I happen to be trying to do it, along with four other Marist Priests, in Japan.  Five people amongst a population of more than 120 million doesn’t seem very many – but then, there are always Lay Marists.  And besides, numbers aren’t everything; just think what one tiny little virus can do to a whole big body… perhaps not a good image. But to return to Japan: I would like to tell you something about Marist Laity in another part of the world.  To begin, I would like to share with you, briefly, the story of how Marists came to be working in Japan in the first place.

During the Second World War, the Pacific War, an Australian Marist Father, Lionel Marsden, was working as a military chaplain when the Japanese captured his unit and he was sent to a prisoner of war camp – I think it may have been at Changi, in Singapore. Whilst there, like so many others he was subjected, by the Japanese army, to appalling cruelties which, unlike many others, he managed to survive. When the war ended and he returned to Australia he became aware that, in those around him, perhaps in himself, there was an almost tangible feeling of hatred towards the Japanese.  In response to that he asked to be allowed to go to Japan as a missionary, to share his faith with the Japanese in the hope that, by doing so, this hatred could be lessened, or even dissipated.  He went to Japan and others followed him and they began a mission of reconciliation.  I think Lionel Marsden would have understood and approved of the name of honour given to Mary: Mother of Reconciliation.

Over the years our mission, in the province of Nara, has developed.  Apparently, in the eyes of the general administration, the Japanese mission acquired a reputation as the ‘bricks and mortar’ mission.  There was some justification for that.  In the course of only a very few years the men there managed to build eight churches, five kindergartens and an old peoples’ home.  There weren’t really very many Christians, but there was certainly plenty of bricks and mortar – or at least there would be except we use ferro-concrete since bricks and mortar are apt to fall down in earthquakes.  I’m not too interested in bricks and mortar myself; I mention these buildings only because they represent Christian communities, and in these communities are people who, in different ways, are associated with the Marist Fathers. There are people who work in the kindergartens we establish and people whose children attend them; people who work, or live, in old peoples’ homes we administer; there are parishioners in parishes where we minister; people who have become our friends. Among these people are some who, perhaps, think of themselves, and would be proud to call themselves, Lay Marists. They don’t because there is, in Japan, no organised Marist Laity. The first missionaries attempted set up the Third Order of Mary but for whatever reasons it never flourished. As far as I am aware there is now, in the whole of Japan, just one member of the Third Order of Mary: Yoshida Michiko, who is well into her seventies and still keeping accounts for the Marist community has she has done for many years.

Recently, in part as a response to directives from the general administration of the Marist Fathers we have been trying to do something to help these people gain a more specifically ‘Marist’ awareness.  At the same time we are anxious not to impose this Marist identity on people.  Unless people come to this awareness quite freely there would, obviously, be no value in it. As one of our efforts to promote Marist Laity, we have been taking small groups of Japanese people to the Marist Places in France and to the General House in Rome. ‘Small’ is the important word, small enough for people to be able to experience community. We prepare for these pilgrimages, for that is what they are, with preparatory meetings where we try to introduce the participants to the Marist worldview and we maintain contact afterwards by follow-up meetings. But still, there is no organised Marist Laity.  Just last month we had a pleasant surprise.  Jan Hulshof, superior general, came through Japan at the beginning of his visitation of parts of the Pacific Region.  We told a few people about it but took the view that he was simply coming to talk to us, the Marist Fathers.  In the event there was a wonderful reception for him organised not by us, but by our crypto-Lay Marists. Members of these different pilgrim groups got together and prepared a party.  Not only was there the inevitable sushi and sake, they also arranged a small exhibition about what Marists, not just the Marist Fathers but also Marists, including themselves, are doing in Japan.  It was far better than anything we could have done ourselves. The initiative came from them.  We discovered through this that they have been meeting to share their experiences in France and Rome. These people have little in common except their association with the Marist Project.  In the group which I accompanied two or three years ago the youngest participant was a student, aged twenty, and the oldest the 65 year old director of day nursery.  It included five kindergarten teachers, one was a head teacher and one was subsequently appointed as head teacher.  What they have in common is only their various associations with their pilgrimage experience and us.  But they do things together, go for meals together; I heard, just before I left, that they were planning a Karaoke party: thank God they didn’t invite me!  It is too early to say but we are hoping that they may, under their own steam, develop into the core group of a more definable Marist Laity in Nara. The essential characteristic of this Marist Laity would be, of course, sharing in the mission, sharing in the work of Mary.

I said at the beginning of the Mass that I wanted you to pray with me for the whole Marist Project and especially Lay Marists. The word ‘Project’ implies something, which is not yet accomplished, still at the planning stage. That is why I like to use the expression ‘Marist Project’: it is still under construction, changing and developing, as it must. The world in which the first Marist missionaries lived was vastly different from the one in which we live. The way in which we are trying to ‘be Marist’ to live this special way of being Church, has to be different from theirs.  But in the same way that we draw inspiration for present day Christian life from the ancient Scriptures, we can still draw inspiration for present day Marist life from the example of our earliest brothers and sisters in the Marist Project. The essence of Marist life, like the essence of the gospel is timeless. The seven missionaries who left France at Christmas in 1836 didn’t arrive at Wallis, where the first of them were disembarked, until November 1837: a little over ten months.  Mind you they weren’t moving all the time: they spent two months in Tenerife, having the ship’s rudder repaired, six weeks in Valparaiso, a couple of weeks in Hawaii: Thomas Cook, eat your heart out. But, seriously, that was real hardship, and the prospects for returning home were not good.  One died on the ship, Peter Chanel was murdered within a few short years.  It took me about a day and half to come here from Japan. To be a missionary in a distant place no longer takes the same degree of courage it once did, but it still requires commitment.  It is a different world and we have to feel our way forward to realise the Marist Project.  But we can still draw inspiration from the early missionaries. The story of those seven Frenchmen and their level of commitment to the Marist Project is enough to inspire anyone.

They, however, were all priests, or brothers but there were also in the early days of the Society inspiring lay Marists.  One of these was Françoise Perroton of whom I am a great admirer.  As a laywoman she responded directly to a plea for help from some women of the Island of Wallis where about eight years previously, on the journey I have just described, Fr Pierre Bataillon had been left and was clearly making some progress. This was published in the bulletin of the Propagation of the Faith.  At the age of 49 she left everything behind, hitched a six month lift on a ship, whose reluctant captain seems to have been a member of the Third order of Mary, and went to Wallis.  Not only that, when she arrived there she was given a decidedly cold shoulder by Father Bataillon.  A man of his time, he seems to have had difficulty accepting the idea of women working in the difficult conditions she had chosen to accept.  None the less she persevered and worked there for several years. She eventually died, almost thirty years later in neighbouring Futuna, where Peter Chanel had been martyred, having suffered terribly from various tropical diseases but, crucially, having fulfilled her vocation to be an instrument of divine mercy. She is recognised as one of the eleven pioneers of the Missionary Sisters of the Society of Mary, but when she began she was a laywomen and surely an inspiring model for Lay Marists. She is another who would, no doubt, recognise and approve of the title for Mary we are thinking about today: Mother of Reconciliation.