Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia

Easter Monday | 2020 | A
Vancouver, April 13, 2020
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The Easter Sunday reading opens with a phrase from Acts chapter 10: “You know the message that spread throughout Judea.” Peter repeats the message he heard.

A message is transmitted – word of mouth – tradition < tra-dere,“handed down,” “given over,” eventually “recorded” as Sacred Scriptures.

When St. Peter says we are witnesses to all that He did – essentially, “good works” and “healing” that Jesus had performed; and this, paradoxically, led to Jesus’ execution, but, as St. Peter says, “God raised Him from the dead.” We are witnesses to these events, we “who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.” The events before the death of Jesus and the events of Jesus after His death, they witnessed.

St. Peter whom Jesus entrusted with authority over His Church, tells us, “He commanded us to preach to the people, to testify,” Jesus is the one ordained by God, the Christ.

The prophets point to Jesus; reconciliation with God is through Jesus; the One whom God sent, His Son, the Anointed One.

Based on this reading from Acts 10 we understand the value of “preaching”; the centrality of the “message.” Preaching is fundamental to the Dominican Vocation. The message preached: Jesus is the Chosen One. Through Him our sins are forgiven. The one who was “hung” for us.

To preach, to convey a message, cannot be a lie. A good person does not lie. But a good person can fall into error. And this is the importance of preaching, conveying a message that is true.
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There are different means of conveying a message; artwork, music, teaching, parenting, a person consecrated to God who transmits the love of Christ. 

Followers of Jesus can also be mistaken about what they know. And this is the context in which St. Dominic founded the Order of Preacher; heresies that were widespread and continued to circulate. St. Dominic knew that if doctrine had been correctly taught, people would not have fallen into error.

This means not so much holding the heretics accountable, but those who were teaching them. St. Dominic emphasised truth dispelling darkness. Truth found in the Scriptures and the Truth found in the Magisterium, this One Truth of the Holy Spirit, the way to Jesus Christ and to Eternal Life.
The Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia, who carry the name of St. Dominic, share in what we have here in the Acts of the Apostles: preaching what is witnessed; what has been received, transmitted, “handed over,” from one generation to the next, what St. Paul calls, “tradition.”

And the Sisters of St. Cecilia have emphasised since their foundation in 1860 as a “small and poor southern congregation” the teaching apostolate directly linked to the foundation of the Dominican Order, where Pope Honorius III states, “the Church has called the Dominicans to teach the Word of God.” Parents are the first educators of their children, but they entrust their children to teachers to nurture their faith, to help them grow in virtue, to acquire knowledge, not just knowing “what,” but also knowing “how”: what is true, but also, how to live that truth. When we witness the Gospel, preaching, teaching, conveying this message of being a disciple of Christ, our intelligence is enlightened and our lives are transformed.

A prophetic vision is recognisable in the founding Sisters of St. Cecilia and fidelity to that vision: as schools and society become more secularised, Catholic education is fundamental in living the Gospel – each day.

This prophetic vision of the foundresses’ of educating young women, a girl’s academy in Nashville in its origins, but prophetic with the social revolution 100 years later, in the 1960s that would create an oppositions influenced by Marxism leading to conflictual relations of master/servant, man/woman/, gay/straight/, and now, transgendered/binary. This ongoing hostile material dialectic, only a proper Catholic education can correct. These hostile oppressor/oppressed oppositions are our modern heresies.

This prophetic vision is articulated in terms of Catholic education: “only when education provides the individual with a vision of the eternal and supernatural, as well as an appreciation of the temporal and natural, will he understand the purpose of his life.” [Sr. Rose Marie Masserano, The Nashville Dominicans, p. 119].

Sisters of St. Cecilia’s prophetic vision, from a girls’ academy to advanced Catholic education helps develop the role of the woman in society: as mother, as wife, pursuing a career, consecrated to God, transmitting the same message she received in her Catholic formation. Extending this education to include boys ensures parents the Faith their children have received at home, is sustained by the Sisters educating children in the truth. This is the Gospel transmitted in the Dominican charism of St. Cecilia’s Congregation.

In the Easter reading for Sunday, St. Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, focusses on seeking things “that are above” – where Christ is seated at the right hand of God – not on things of the earth. If we look at the Sisters of St Cecilia, we see from the start an incredibly vertical vision: vertical in being attentive to the will of God. Set on things above. Yes, there is disappointment, perhaps even feeling abandonment, more than once, by fellows members of the Congregation, abandoned by the Dominican Order, perhaps at times even abandoned by Church authorities, the experiences of the Garden of Gethsemane, but the Sisters move forward in trust, seeking and listening to the will of God.

The vertical vision of the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia is concretely expressed in charity: being asked for support in education in one diocese after another, and when they have fulfilled their mission, the Sisters withdraw. Spirit of detachment. A Dominican spirit of itinerancy surfaces which is very difficult.

Sisters leaving familiar surroundings, family, friends, culture, and starting over again. This is only possible if you do what St. Paul says in Colossians: set your mind on things that are above…

Women of different cultural backgrounds, Irish, German, English, Scottish, French, , working together, northerner and southerner; if your mind is not focussed on things that are above, you get stuck in local particulars, then, how is the message of Christ, the Anointed One, going to be transmitted?

The Sisters of St. Cecilia managed to work through all these particular differences, because they shared this common vision of education, of the Gospel, of the Church.

As the Congregation started in 1860, during the tumultuous American Civil War and postwar years, school funding diminished, and debits accumulated. Then, in 1873 a cholera epidemic in Nashville and shortly after a yellow fever epidemic in Memphis, where sisters died nursing the infected. The Sisters took in over sixty orphans in 1878 as a result of the yellow fever epidemic in West Tennessee. Courageous women whose Charity marked the foundation of St. Cecilia’s Congregation. One can see Sisters praying and Providence at work.

The Resurrection as we find recorded in the Gospel of St. John is a beautiful account of this first experience of Jesus resurrected. Mary Magdalene is present whom we regard as the first preacher in the Dominican Order, is present at the tomb. And she was the first to proclaim the Resurrection of Jesus. For this reason Pope Francis raised St. Mary Magdalen’s Day of Memory to a Feast: she is a beautiful example of conversion and fidelity.

Mary Magdalene is not a born again Christian for a month. She is there at the Cross with Jesus reflecting the depth of her conversion, and having experienced an encounter with Christ: fidelity to the teachings of Our Lord means to the very end.

The Resurrection scene is beautiful. In St. John’s Gospel the two meet, where Mary Magdalene recognises Jesus, hearing the words, “Mary,” and she replies, “Rabbouni.”

The name St. Cecilia is suggestive of music and the arts, we also think of beautiful. The details used to describe the Nashville convent and the Academy, its surroundings, the paintings, the art work, the architecture -- an appreciation of the beautiful.

We experience God through our senses: a soul substantially united to a body. And so when we enter a Church and see beautiful art and architecture, our souls are raised to God. The different forms of art in a way participates in divine activity, that creativity that makes us God-like, being created in the image and likeness of God. St. Thomas speaks of beautiful in relation to proportionality; we are drawn beauty, to the harmonious.

In creativity we discover and explore the gifts God has given us which again reflects the value of education. The creative arts are part of “humanising” the person, giving a person “culture,” synonym to giving an person “education,” knowledge and artistic creativity go together. One of the greatest artists in the Church is a Dominican, Giovanni Fieseole, “Fra Angelico,” who painted Jesus’ encounter with Mary Magdalene, Noli me tangere, “touch me not.” Art, poetry, music, nourish the soul to think about God – to elevate the soul to God.

This resurrection encounter in St. John’s Gospel is beautiful because Jesus now appears to the one who had first been converted, from her sinful way of life, to her total fidelity to Jesus -- right to the Cross, and she has been rewarded; Mary Magdalene with this beautiful personal scene of Jesus resurrected. Mary Magdalene experiences the joy of Jesus’ presence: she shouts, “I have seen the Lord!”

In her journey with Jesus, from His Conception to His Crucifixion, Mary, the most beautiful one, is there every part of the way, she who is without sin, Mary Immaculate. And while Mary at the foot of the Cross is the figure of a tormented mother, yet, a mother who could see beyond the Crucifixion – and the only one. Because Mary who accepted the message of the Angel Gabriel and conceived Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit, while she saw the Cross in front of her as Mother, Immaculate herself, Mary could also see the Throne of David, of the New Covenant and Everlasting Life.
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Let us pray for this courage to be faithful, and to proclaim what is true, as followers of the Risen Christ. Amen.