Who Is An Outsider in the Catholic Church?

A visit to any Catholic Church will probably show the visitor a look into the world. There are people from every walk of life, and from every culture, all coming together to receive God’s grace.

There may be reasons why someone would consider themselves unwelcome in the Catholic Church. Whether the reasons are valid or not, no one has to stay outside the Church.

If you have left the Church, come back. If you hate the Church, come and be healed. If you are curious, come and check us out. If you are a practicing Catholic, search out and welcome the stranger.

Comments by Laura Weston, Deacon Michael's widow

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One of the, to me, the best things, the most fun things about Mary Immaculate Church is that we have so many people from so many backgrounds.

Even here, we have someone from Iowa, we have someone from California, we have someone from England, we have someone from Wisconsin, and from Mexico... all over.

And you go to Sunday Mass, it’s even more so. It doesn't matter. That's one of the wonderful things, that anybody who walks into this Church, into Mary Immaculate Church, no matter where they come from, they are welcomed.

Oh, I see so many times people come in… a visitor, just moved here… and I see them coming in. I greet them a little bit. I talk to them. And then after Mass they come out here and they're talking to two or three people whom they've made the acquaintance of. That is an absolutely wonderful thing.

That is the point of the readings today. We have Jacob. Jacob is, basically, set out on a trek. He's going to get a wife. His father says, "No. You are not going to get one of the neighborhood girls. You're going to go somewhere else. And you are going to go within the family and you're going to bring her back."

Now Esau, on the other hand, knew his father was saying that, and went out and married one of the neighborhood girls, but that's a different point.

And so Jacob is going and he has this dream. And he has this dream and we have very explicitly here The Land. Remember the five pillars of ancient Judaism? We have three of them here: we have God; we have One People because Jacob has to go somewhere else to have the one people, and The Land.

And we see a relationship that is growing here in the five pillars of ancient Judaism: the source of the Jewish people, the source of the faith going back to Abraham.

Abraham, Father Abraham, is perceived as the father of the monotheistic faiths: Christianity and Judaism, and Islam all trace themselves back. And part of the core of what we see here is there is one People, one God, and one Land.

And the one God is the God of Israel. The God of Islam. The God of Christianity. So we see a unity there.

But we also see something in the gospel that is very, very different. Again, it is the transformation of the world by Jesus of taking the accepted world. One of the things, for example, that is remarkable about the Jews is that over the two thousand years since the Diaspora, the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and of Jerusalem itself, they are a genetic marvel. Because geneticists are able to trace things back, and actually take them back, many of them, back to Israel. They have maintained a purity of people.

Jesus takes on this purity of people and the one land in the gospel reading today. First, the official is very likely to have been Roman. The official was someone who was hated. He was in a strange land imposing himself upon them. One of the Roman policies was that you go into a city, or you go into an area, and especially soldiers, retired soldiers, you bring them into an area so they will become part of the community and thus the community will become part of the Roman Empire.

So you see a force that is basically attacking the One People of Israel and Jesus is treating him as He treats the Jews. There is no distinction.

The other one goes back to "bad things happen to bad people." This woman has had hemorrhages for twelve years. One… blood is bad. It is horrible. If you touch blood as an ancient Jew there are rituals you have to go through, and a period of time that you have to stay and purify yourself because you have come into contact with blood.

This woman, very likely, whenever she was around anybody else, may well have had a bell that she had to ring, but she had to, when she came into the presence of someone else, shout, "Unclean, unclean!" so everybody could get away from her.

And the fact that she touched Jesus is remarkable. So she is separated from the One People by her condition, be it simply a physical condition, or by the condition which represents that she is a bad person.

And she touches Jesus and Jesus talks to her with respect. She is not treated by Jesus as anything different from everybody He loves.

"Courage daughter, your faith has saved you."

And then we see Jesus again touching the dead, which are incredibly unclean, and her rising.

So when we look at the five pillars of ancient Judaism again, we get the understanding of the Jewish religion that Jesus was facing. The one God, the one People, the one Land. All of those are in the Old Testament reading today. And we see Jesus shattering them. He is making a mockery of them. There were devout Jews who, when the official came up to Him and Jesus talked to him, they were going, "Whoa! Whoa, whoa, you… you don't talk to them. They're the bad guys. They're foreigners. They're bad."

When He was dealing with was the woman with the hemorrhages, they were going, "But He's got to clean himself for thirty days after she touched Him. It's a horrible thing. He can't be talking to her. He can't be dealing with her. He can't be healing her. She's different. She's not one of us."

And similarly, the little girl was dead. It never says that she wasn't dead. He raised her from the dead. He touched the dead. That is another thing you just don't do.

So you see the shadowing of the One People and the One Land. And we see a God that takes on characteristics very different from the God of Abraham and Jacob. The God that is very much in a vertical relationship with them. We see a God that's changed His character to a horizontal relationship which is basically exemplified by "Our Father."

He loves us so much He isn't simply commanding, he is loving us. And He is doing it through the proximity of touching.

We see in this a representation of the radical nature of Christianity that we are called to live. We are called to live the Christianity that Jesus lived. That we look around and it doesn't matter that they're from Wisconsin, or she's from Iowa. It simply doesn't matter. No matter what our image of where they came from is, no matter what our image of what their background is, no matter what we hear: "Oh, they don't speak English properly. They don't speak English well. They don't wear the same clothes. They eat different foods. They, you know, fill in the blank."

What Jesus tells us is that's totally irrelevant. It doesn't mean a thing. What is the important part is that they are children of God and Christ died for them on the cross. And that we are called again in this summer season, and we seem to have the core of readings for several weeks, is that we are called again to understand the magnitude and the radical nature of the teachings of Christ that we are called to live in our own lives, of loving thy neighbor no matter who the neighbor is. And loving them unconditionally and doing for them what society, what mores, or whatever, say we shouldn't do. Those are the ones that we are specifically called to love and to give of ourselves for them.

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