Bishop's Statements

Interview with Coadjutor Bishop Patrick J. McGrath
March 1999

“Preparing for the Millennium: Encircled in God’s Love” was the theme of the English keynote address given by Coadjutor Bishop Patrick J. McGrath at the diocesan Catechetical Conference, March 6. The following is the text of his address which will be published in parts in The Valley Catholic.

Part I

The parable of the Prodigal Son is one of the most familiar and comfortable of the Lord’s parables and is particularly apt and appropriate to this third year of anticipation and preparation for the coming Jubilee.

In his Apostolic Letter, Tertio Millennio Adveniente (As the Third Millennium Draws Near), our Holy Father has designated this to be the year of the Father, following upon the year of the Lord and the year of the Holy Spirit.

Nevertheless, I find it egocentric to speak of this as the parable of the prodigal son. The Lord’s illustration and instruction tells not so much about the wayward child, as it does about the love, compassion and mercy of the long-suffering father.

Here is a Father who does not brood and sulk over his injuries, but instead keeps vigil at the doorway of the house, his gaze scanning the horizon; he remains anxious, impatient while anticipating a glimpse of that son who was lost.

This is not a Father who stands on his dignity or insists upon precedence; rather, here is a Father who rushes up the dusty road in order to greet and welcome the returning scoundrel.

Even before the self-serving and now self-pitying son can blurt out his well rehearsed act of contrition, the errant child is surrounded and enfolded in the loving embrace of an already forgiving Father.

I believe we are mistaken if we take this to be a story about sin. Instead, it is an allegory about the nature and fundamental quality of God our Father—that he is a God of compassion and a Father of love. God loves us, not because we are good, but because God is good.

Charity reaches out and shares

The Aristotelian philosophers, perhaps chief among them St. Thomas Aquinas, reasoned that it is the nature of true love, charity, to be diffusive. That is to say, the quality and effect of love is to reach out and to share. The aim or object of this true love is the good of the other.

It is, then, out of love, rather than necessity, that the Father has reached beyond the community of the Trinity in order to share being and life with His creation. Seeking the good of the beloved, the Father has endowed us with reason and formed us in His own image and likeness, so that human kind is imago dei—the icon of God.

Likewise, it is in love and compassion that the Father has sent the Son for our salvation and that together they have given us the Holy Spirit for our wellbeing and life.

In choosing to become one with us, the Son recalls us to the dignity that is ours as children of the Father.

Further, St. Paul frequently recalls that through Christ we have assurance and confidence that the Father knows, understands and empathizes with our human condition and frailty, for now we have a High Priest who is both human and divine; the Son who always pleads our cause before the Father.

In the Son and through the Spirit, God the Father has brought to full circle the love that prompted and directed the work of creation.

Now by the urging of the Holy Spirit and in union with the Son, we—the prodigal sons and daughters—are able to return to the all embracing, comforting, forgiving love of the Father.

From creation to salvation to unity in the family of God, we are “Encircled in God’s Love.” God is the loving and compassionate Father, patiently and persistently awaiting our return, rushing forth to embrace us at the least sign of repentance, forgiving us even before we can utter our sorrow, much less restore the harmony so bruised and battered by our sin.

Here, then, I wish to borrow a central theme from my homilies when conferring the Sacrament of Confirmation; a theme appropriate not just to young people completing their initiation into the life and reality of the Church, but applicable to all of God’s people.

“It matters not to God where you have been or what you have done. What matters to the Father is that we have returned home.”