Homily: Memorial Mass for Deceased Basselin Alumni and Professors at the School of Philosophy

Please enjoy reading the transcript of a homily given by Bishop Michael F. Olson, S.T.D., M.A., given during a Memorial Mass for Deceased Basselin Alumni and Professors at the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America on February 28, 2025.

Readings

Wisdom 3:1-9
Romans 5:17-21
Matthew 5:1-12
 

Homily

We are summoned by God in His compassion here today as a family to offer this Eucharist in memory of Theodore Basselin and of our departed professors, colleagues, friends, and brothers who like so many of us received so much through the gift of the Basselin scholarship. Whenever God summons the Church to worship Him at Mass, He offers each and all of us a sign of hope and invites us to offer an act of hope. This is most clearly true when the Eucharist is offered for the repose of the souls of the faithful departed. 

In his classic work, entitled, On Hope, the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper describes two states of being for the Christian: the status viatoris and the status comprehensoris. The status viatoris is the Christian who perseveres in this life and has in his vision of the horizon, the gift of eternal life and beatitude with God. The Christian in the status viatoris is a pilgrim, journeying imperfectly towards his destination but has not yet arrived at his ultimate destination of the beatific vision. The status comprehensoris belongs to the Christian who has faithfully finished life’s journey, has passed through God’s judgment, and both sees and possesses his supernatural end through God’s loving Grace and Mercy. Faith also tells us that there are those who have ended their journey in this life and now directly see the greatness of God but are in need of the purification of God’s love for they are not yet ready to receive what they behold. So, in the spirit of hope we pray for all our departed brothers and sisters for even though we admire their lives, there remains an enormous difference between even the best of human beings, and the amazing goodness of God. Our faith informs us that none of us, not even the best of us, can come into His presence without His mercy and grace. Those who have completed their earthly pilgrimage rely on our practice of the virtue of hope to assist them with our prayers.

What is there about God that prompts us to hope? The scholastic theologians wrote much about this question because it is a question that very much concerns what makes the good news so good. Saint Thomas Aquinas identified the motive for our hope as being God’s omnipotence, His power. “Nothing is impossible for God!” The Gift of the Fear of the Lord helps us to accept our powerlessness over so much in life about which the devil cunningly tempts us to grasp at total sovereignty.

The Basselin Program and the ministry of Basselins offer a unique stewardship of the theological virtue of hope – not only during the course of our studies here at The Catholic University of America – but even more so in the diverse ministries that we offer after we have completed the initial and disciplined course of study, when we go forth and preach the Gospel thereby attesting to the generosity of Theodore Basselin and even more so to the unconditional love of God.

A Basselin education is directed to cultivating hope rooted in humility in the life and ministry of a priest, that these virtues might imbue the priest’s preaching. Ultimately, a Basselin must come to admit that even by dint of utmost study, his vision is incomplete. Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote, “Amazement comes from the inability to see the whole. Therefore, God cannot be amazed.” But the Basselin scholar comes to know intimately through his life of study and priestly formation that philosophical wonder and Christian amazement can lead to a great and lively hope. The formation that a seminarian receives through participation in the Basselin program prepares him for Christian life and priestly ministry through the natural experience of philosophical study that cannot end anywhere else but in an understanding of his own finitude and inability to see the entire picture of being. Coming to that point, the Basselin is left to make a decision as a pilgrim whether to live according to this world ensnared in the lies of nothingness with its extreme contraries of despair and presumption, or to embrace hope in God’s power who has created each of us and all things that we might be. Hope brings us into reality to see which the eye blinded by sin refuses to see. Hope takes us out of the workaday world and returns us back to it to bring the truth of God’s love presented in the Gospel. This can only be seen with a grateful heart.

Saint Augustine teaches that “hope has two beautiful daughters, Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.” The priestly formation and subsequent ministry of a Basselin affords a clarity of vision into not only the fact that things are so muddled and unjust, but also why they are so muddled and unjust.  This insight opens for us the only path available to us for traversing to our ultimate destination as intended by God and imprinted in our human nature. 

A Basselin is not just a man who tells the truth. A Basselin is a man who generously contributes his life in testimony to the truth, by how he conforms his life to the truth, and by how he preaches the truth he has found in study and received in prayer and worship. This vocation within a vocation is twice rejected by the powerful of this world who are entrapped in nothingness. So, in our hope, the Holy Spirit offers us the Beatitudes as taught by Christ for our journey in this world as a foretaste of the Eternal Beatitude that awaits us at the end of our earthly journey through this valley of tears.

Father Servais Pinckaers, the late Dominican priest and moral theologian, once wrote about the Eight Beatitudes, “The beatitudes are realistic and true. They go deeper than words and ideas. They confront us with the aching realities of human existence and show us what lies in our own depths. They force us into an interior solitude and put to us this personal, decisive question: Here and now, in the emptiness of this trial, where darkness reigns and discouragement lies in wait, do you dare to believe the word of the one who declared that the poor, the afflicted, and the persecuted are happy?...The Beatitudes teach us faith and courage. They put into our hearts an astounding hope, new, strong, and capable of carrying us through the worst trials, so that for the sake of the Lord we can even find joy and light-heartedness in the midst of them.”

We are here to worship God in the manner that Christ has revealed that the Triune God desires to be worshipped through the Eternal Sacrifice of the Mass. Because we have been blessed with authentic hope born of faith, and desirous of charity, we pray for the repose of the souls of our fellow Basselins and teachers so that they who were blest with wisdom and insight might shine brightly like the splendor of the firmament and finally behold the paradoxical union of both the familiarity and newness of the Beatific Vision.

We believe and hope that everything upon which their eyes, hearts, and minds ever set in this life, have been confirmed by God as true, but so much richer, deeper, clearer, and more beautiful than anything they had encountered, grasped, or understood in this earthly life. This in itself will require our prayers because there is the healing and yet painful recognition that the love and knowledge in which they delighted in this life were imperfect compared to all that they now behold with perfect and beatific clarity in the very essence and life of God, Whom they have always imperfectly loved, the true God who loved them first and has always loved them, and the true God who called them into being.