“All who see them shall acknowledge them as a race the Lord has blessed”.

When the youthful Jesus stood up in the Nazareth synagogue and took Isaiah’s prophecy as now His own, he proclaimed that God’s Spirit was upon Him and indeed, in a unique way, properly His.  The Spirit made him the Christus, the Unctus, the Anointed One.  While that day in Nazareth led to his own townsfolk expelling him for blasphemy, He never ceased to fulfill the promise he made to the Father, “A body you have fitted me.  Behold I come to do your will”.  His identity is sealed by the Spirit, the same Spirit he promised and passed on to his disciples, the early community that grew to be the Church we recognize today as the source of our identity.  Here in this one Catholic Church  is where we too are anointed, we too are given the Spirit, we too become one with Him as His Body, his holy people. 

The oil may fade but the sign of who we are, the cross, is inscribed on our hearts forever. The chrism we bless today is the seal of the Spirit, God’s gift of His love.  And so we pray that “all who are anointed with it may be inwardly transformed and come to share in eternal salvation”.  So anointed, we now have a name, an identity.  We are Christians, a name that comes from belonging to God’s own Son, the Christ, the anointed One.  “Through the sign of chrism”, God grants us all “royal, priestly and prophetic honor”.  This is the chrism of baptism and confirmation by which we become one and are enabled to remain in him as His own people, His own Body, His own community of communion.

This same chrism is used by the bishop when he ordains priests, anointing their hands with the holy chrism as the sign of the indelible mark of ministerial priesthood.  This makes us priests participants in Christ’s high priesthood for the rest of our lives on this earth and forever in the priestly kingdom of heaven.  Those anointed hands are consecrated to bless and to baptize, to anoint the sick to the forgiveness of sins, to console and to embrace, to lift up the bread and wine and make them into the body and blood of the One who is uniquely THE CHRIST, God’s anointed, His Son in whom He is well pleased.

April 6, 2011| The Long Island Catholic Vol. 50, No. 1 | BISHOP WILLIAM MURPHY

(Reprinted from TLIC March 4, 2009)

In my letter for the holy season of Lent, I took my cue from the Holy Father’s message and reflected briefly with you about the great gifts that fasting and a spirit of fasting can bring to us in this Lenten period. The following week, I offered a few thoughts about almsgiving and charity, those acts which “cover a multitude of sins” because they are the ways in which we demonstrate our love and concern for our neighbors, especially the poor, the forgotten, the vulnerable.

The third “pillar” of our Lenten journey is the very one the Lord himself enjoins on us in the sixth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. There, as a part of the “Sermon on the Mount,” the Lord reminds us to pray, “and when you pray … go into your room and your heavenly Father who hears in private will hear your prayer.”

March 30, 2011| The Long Island Catholic Vol. 49, No. 48 | BISHOP WILLIAM MURPHY

Following last week’s column in which we reflected on Lent and our language as a gauge of our witness to Christ in daily discourse, I had occasion to re-read a recent brief letter from Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, entitled “Civil and Christian Discourse.” It can be found on the website of the Archdiocese of Washington as well as in Origins, pp. 660-662. This is not a new topic for either one of us who have been friends from seminary days. In this letter, the Cardinal succinctly limns the pitfalls of the kind of discourse we both describe as harmful to civil society and especially harmful to us who belong to the community of communion, the Church. The discourse he rejects is filled with anger and with a desire to “win” while feeling free to demonize the opponent or attack another person’s character or intentions simply because we differ. This does a disservice to the truth and even destroys the context truth needs to be spoken and understood. Bad as that is in civil society, the cardinal points out, “We who follow Christ must not only speak the truth, but we must do so in love (Eph. 4:15).”

March 23, 2011| The Long Island Catholic Vol. 49, No. 47 | BISHOP WILLIAM MURPHY

Every year Pope Benedict sends us a letter for our Lenten reading and reflection. This year he focuses on baptism, the universal sacrament of salvation by which we are immersed into the font of life to die with Christ and emerge as newborn sons and daughters of God, freed from sin and members of the community of communion which is the Church of Jesus Christ. Pope Benedict traces this rich and beautiful theme through the Sundays of Lent up to the Sacred Triduum. You may find the full text at the Vatican website, www.vatican.va. It is well worth reading and can provide you with a guide to each Sunday of Lent that will lead you to a deeper grasp of the sacred texts of the Sunday Lenten Masses.

We can never overestimate the extraordinariness of what God has done in us through the saving waters of baptism. It is the sacrament of salvation. We are rescued from the darkness of a human life that cannot escape the tyranny of sin and death to become one with the saints in light, the light that is the gift of Christ’s life. We are thus transformed into members of His Body, the Church thus making us members of a priestly people who in turn are called to bring that light into the world.