An IEC delegate receives the sacrament of Reconciliation at the IEC Pavilion, Jan. 25, 2016. (Photo: Roy Lagarde)
CEBU City, Jan. 25, 2016 – A Catholic priest facilitating one of the concurrent sessions of the ongoing 51st International Eucharistic Congress (IEC) at the Waterfront Hotel in Cebu City on Monday reminded delegates not to downplay their humanity as if it is a fault but to be unapologetic about it like Christ.
“Don’t say ‘I am only human. That is the best thing about you,” stressed Fr. Francis Moloney in his talk dubbed “The Word of God, Jesus Christ, and the Eucharist: Christian Hope in the Secularizing World.”
According to him, people who tend to excuse themselves for being “only human” are actually guilty of manifesting “animal-like responses.”
‘Sublime humanity’
He pointed out this cannot be the attitude of someone who attempts to put on the values taught by Jesus Christ given that God Himself became human.
In his nearly hour-long reflection, the Salesian stressed that being human is essentially a journey towards divinity, or what he called “deification.”
Moreover, he said when people regularly sin they fail to respond to the presence of “that which is sublime in their humanity.”
He added that selfishness, arrogance, jealousy, pride, overindulgence in basic urges do not make humans human but the opposite.
The priest went on to lament that many Catholics opt not to identify with Jesus’ humanity, considering that “He is very much like us, except in sin.”
‘Potential Jesuses’
“It was as a human that He loved, He hoped, He sang, He danced, He prayed, He interacted with other humans in creative ways, and He suffered,” he said.
Moloney recalled that acts commonly taken for granted like loving, hoping, singing, dancing, praying, interaction, and suffering among many others are things humans share with Jesus, and that in a way humans are “potential Jesuses.”
“We are irrevocably marked by the Divine. We yearn for our Divine home for which we are created,” he explained.
“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” the Salesian added, borrowing the words of St. Augustine. (Raymond A. Sebastián / CBCP News)
