LA’s new bishops and bringing Jesus to people

The Holy Father Pope Francis has given us the great gift of appointing four new auxiliary bishops for the family of God in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Our bishop-elects are local priests — Msgr. Albert Bahhuth, Father Matthew Elshoff, OFM Cap., Father Brian Nunes, and Father Slawomir Szkredka.

Each is a man of prayer who loves Jesus and has a deep desire to proclaim the Lord’s love and to serve God’s people.

In Jesus’s plan for the Church, bishops are ordained to carry on the mission that he gave to his 12 apostles, to be “fishers” of men and women and to “take the place of Christ himself, teacher, shepherd, and priest, and act as his representative,” as the Catechism teaches.

St. Ignatius of Antioch, a bishop taught by St. Peter, and later martyred, said, “One should look upon the bishop as upon the Lord himself.”

The beautiful task of the bishop is to bring Jesus to his people and to bring people to friendship with Jesus.

This is the mission of everyone in the Church. To be a disciple is to be a missionary. Each of us, in our own way, is called to make Jesus present in the world and to help people to find their way to him.

In this task of revealing Jesus, we face challenges from the culture we live in, just as the first Christians faced challenges from their culture.

This is true in every generation, as Jesus predicted. The world, he said, will always resist the good news of God’s love. He said it stronger than that: “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.”

In our generation, the challenges we face come from the expectations of our culture’s scientific, materialistic, and individualistic worldview.

The conventional wisdom is that in a sophisticated, technological society, people simply cannot believe in Jesus as he is proclaimed in the Gospels and in the Church’s creeds. To speak of a Creator who takes on human flesh, works miracles, rises from the dead, sounds too incredible, like an unscientific myth or a folktale.

So, instead, Jesus is often presented as a person from history, a man like us only wiser and holier, who teaches us to accept others and who advocates for the poor and those marginalized and excluded from society.

This image of Jesus — as only human, not divine — is widespread in our society. It is a comforting picture, but it leaves out a lot.

The “historical and human” Jesus is not the whole truth. And only the truth can save us and set us free, as Jesus himself taught us.

We need to return to the original reality of Jesus that we find in the Gospels and in the writings of the Church fathers and the creeds. This is the real Jesus, the one whom saints are willing to sacrifice for, and martyrs are willing to die for.

We need to proclaim again the “greatness” of Jesus and his love for us, that he is the Lord of history and the Lord of our lives, our Savior and our Friend.

This is the task for all of us in the Church: to tell the world that Jesus is the only Son of God. That in him, God entered human history and revealed his face. The same God who created the world out of nothing, led his people out of Egypt, and spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai.

Only this Jesus, the Son of God who out of love was crucified to save the world and every one of us from sin and death — only this Jesus, who died and rose — can save us and lead us to heaven. Only he can love us to the end, and draw near to us and walk with us in the struggles and joys of our life, today as he did yesterday.

In June, Pope Francis wrote a beautiful letter about the 17th-century philosopher and scientist, Blaise Pascal.

He reminded us that this brilliant man of science, who invented the prototype of the modern computer, also loved Jesus and lived for him.

Pascal understood that faith in the Jesus of the Gospels “liberates reason,” and opens the door to true understanding — not only of the truths of nature, but the truths of the human soul.

“Apart from Jesus Christ, we understand neither our life nor our death, neither God nor ourselves,” he said.

Pray for me and I will pray for you. And let us pray for our new bishop-elects!

And may holy Mary, mother of the Church, help us to reveal her Son to the people of our time, that they may discover in Jesus the answer to every question and every longing in their heart.