Guest Lenten Reflection - Father Darr Schoenhofen - Who Bears Responsibility For Jesus’ Torture and Ignominious Death on the Cross?

[What follows is a Lenten Reflection written by Father Darr Schoenhofen that he shared with the Parishes of Saint Malachy in Sherburne and Saint Theresa in New Berlin, New York on April 1, 2020. He has given me permission to share it with my readers.

Father speaks the Truth with clarity and a needed sense of urgency. He reminds us why Jesus weeps and then asks: Do We?

This reflection is well worth reading, pondering and sharing far and wide. I was unable to reproduce the image of our crucified Lord that Father used. I substituted another.]

(Image Source: Wikimedia Commons)

 For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.  For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world may be saved through him.   — JN 3:16-17

Dear Friends in Christ, Beloved Parishioners,

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.  For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world may be saved through him.   — JN 3:16-17

Before the Second Vatican Council, the Sunday before Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week, was known as Passion Sunday.  It began a week of readings at Mass that focused on the proximate events that led to our Lord’s Passion.  The Gospel text for that Sunday was JN 8: 4659.  Commentating on this text, Father Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen, O.C.D., wrote in his now classic book, DIVINE INTIMACY: 

The Gospel [text] narrates an instance of the pressing hostility of the Jews, an evident prelude to the Passion of Jesus.  In their hardened hearts they had absolutely refused to acknowledge the mission of the Savior; as a result, they schemed in a thousand ways to oppose His teachings and to belittle Him before the people by declaring Him a liar and one possessed by the devil.

It is important to note that not all of the Jews were hostile to Jesus, but many in Jerusalem were, and on Good Friday this group, a maddening crowd, clamored publicly along with the Sanhedrin to Pontius Pilate to have Jesus crucified.  The CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH (CCC) reminds us that Jews collectively are not responsible for Jesus’ death:  

The personal sin of the participants (Judas, the Sanhedrin, Pilate) is known to God alone.  Hence, we cannot lay responsibility for the trial on the Jews in Jerusalem as a whole, despite the outcry of the manipulated crowd and the global reproaches contained in the apostles’ calls to conversion after Pentecost.  Jesus himself, in forgiving them on the cross, and Peter in following suit, both accept “the ignorance” of the Jews of Jerusalem and even of their leaders.  Still less can we extend responsibility to other Jews of different times and places . . . (CCC, 597).

Who, then, bears responsibility for Jesus’ torture and ignominious death on the cross?  The Church’s answer is clear: 

In her magisterial teaching of the faith and in the witness of her saints, the Church has never forgotten that “sinners were the authors and the ministers of all the sufferings that the divine Redeemer endured.”  Taking into account the fact that our sins affect Christ himself, the Church does not hesitate to impute to Christians the gravest responsibility for the torments inflicted upon Jesus, a responsibility with which they have all too often burdened the Jews alone (CCC, 598).

 The CATECHISM, in that same paragraph text (598), goes on to quote Saint Francis of Assisi. 

We must regard as guilty all those who continue to relapse into their sins.  Since our sins made the Lord Christ suffer the torment of the cross, those who plunge themselves into disorders and crimes crucify the Son of God anew in their hearts (for he is in them) and hold him up to contempt.  And it can be seen that our crime in this case is greater in us than in the Jews.  As for them, according to the witness of the Apostle, “None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”  We, however, profess to know him.  And when we deny him by our deeds, we in some way seem to lay violent hands on him.

Nor did the demons crucify him; it is you who have crucified him and crucify him still, when you delight in your vices and sins.

How bitterly ironic that some of the Jews of Jerusalem, enraged at Jesus by the devil, a liar and the father of all lies, accused Jesus of being a liar and possessed by a demon; and how much more bitterly ironic and utterly tragic that to this day so many Christians, by their grave, unrepented sins committed under the insidious sway of the devil, in effect make out Jesus (whom with their lips they profess to be Lord) to be a liar and so crucify him anew in their hearts. 

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For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.  For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world may be saved through him.   — JN 3:16-17

This year we are entering Holy Week in the midst of a global pandemic.  President Trump announced yesterday that according to the most recent projections he had received we can expect that anywhere from 100,000 to 240,000 Americans will succumb to the COVID-19 illness in the coming weeks and months — and that estimate is based on the assumption and hope that the vast majority of us will practice unfailingly the measures mandated in order to limit the spread of the virus.  To be sure, we must be responsible citizens in our actions and pray for and support the physicians, nurses, and other health-care workers that are literally risking their own lives daily to save as many of us as they can from death.  At the same time, as we remind ourselves during this coming Holy Week that all of us bear “the gravest responsibility for the torments inflicted upon Jesus,” we should also remind ourselves that people everywhere, ourselves included, when they and we commit grave sin and then live in unrepentant denial of it, bring all sorts of other evils into the world, evils that harm everyone.  Sin, in addition to separating one from God’s grace, can and often does have other (albeit lesser) terrible consequences — and yes, even in the natural order; and yes, consequences that fall not only upon the guilty but upon the innocent as well.  This because, first, God created human beings to be the stewards of his creation, all of it (which includes all of us), and so honor and protect its goodness as coming from and sustained by his divine hand; and second, because God created and called the human race to be a family, a corporate body, a unity of a common humanity, a holy communion of persons in him who in his infinite, holy uncreated being is an eternal communion of three Divine Persons.  Sin offends the sanctity of God in whose image we all are made and thus wounds our common humanity, there being no such thing as absolutely “private” sin.  (The evil of this common wounding by personal sin, which can affect, as I said, things in the natural order, is more serious among the baptized, that is, within the Body of Christ, due to the infinitely greater grace proffered by Christ in his suffering and death, at first received and made effective in baptism, and then lost by those baptized who in sinning become lost to Christ and dead members of his Body, the Church.  It doesn’t jeopardize the salvation of other Christians, but it is their suffering loss too because it caused Christ their head to suffer most bitterly on the cross.) 

Original sin wounded profoundly this unity God intended from the beginning.  And so it has been ever thus that the personal sins of one human being impact directly or indirectly the lives of others, just as disease can begin in one part of the human body and spread throughout; or as one ill member of a family who foolishly exposes himself to a contagious disease and becomes infected invariably infects other family members.  At bottom it’s not a question of whether or not this is fair — it isn’t, one may suppose, at least as viewed from a puerile, individualistic perspective of fairness.  In truth it’s simply the vulnerable aspect of the reality of a body being a body, of a family being a family according to God’s plan, which is totally for the good of us all, called to be one as Jesus and the Father are one (cf. 1 COR 12:26 & JN 17:20-23).   

In the midst of this pandemic and the horrific suffering of mind, body and spirit it is afflicting upon billions of people throughout the world, how amazing and disturbing it is to hear a number of prominent persons (sadly, even some bishops and priests) suggest or say outright that the pandemic’s causes are entirely of the natural order and that our prayers for deliverance should be focused exclusively on that domain so as not to be “judgmental” of persons. If that’s true, then there’s nothing of human interior darkness at work here behind the natural causes; nothing here In of the spiritual opacity of the human heart that transcends the physical realm and yet affects it; nothing here of the supernatural battle of good and evil that is waged within every human soul; nothing here that is deadly for our mortal bodies and in a different way for our immortal souls; nothing here that offends Jesus and makes him weep because in his Heart he feels us crucifying him in our hearts; nothing here that is the unseen, unquantifiable, yet ultimate cause of all this suffering that God has no part in but in his mercy and justice is allowing for our salvation; nothing here therefore that could be rightly understood by men and women of faith as an urgent plea from heaven to humanity to repent and turn back to God before it’s too late.  I ask you: can an integral reading of Sacred Scripture on this question, a reading guided by the Fathers of the Church, the witness of many saints, and the repeated warnings of the Blessed Mother, in particular those at Fatima in 1917 (which interestingly were followed by a global influenza pandemic, part of the aftermath of the First World War) — can it and does it, I ask you, support such an incredibly naïve, strictly secular, mundane interpretation of the causes of the current pandemic we are suffering?  I think not.  No, with one voice these sources cry out, wake up! 

As of this writing, the World Health Organization, the U.S. Center for Disease Control, and other major health organizations report that so far there have been 45,497 COVID-19 deaths world-wide.  (The actual number is thought by some to be much higher because China is believed to have grossly under-reported the number of these deaths in its country.)  For the deceased and their loved ones who mourn them we pray, but we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to the fact that the number of abortions performed world-wide in 2019 has been estimated to be around 42.4 million.  Jesus weeps for his multi-billion “legally” aborted ones and their mothers.  Do we?

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Please continue to pray your Rosary daily and fervently this coming Holy Week and include as one of your intentions that the souls most in need of Jesus’ mercy will look upon an image of him crucified and hear these words of Sacred Scripture in their hearts:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.  For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world may be saved through him.   — JN 3:16-17

And please pray the following act of reparation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus:

ADORABLE HEART OF JESUS, glowing with love for us and inflamed with zeal for our salvation!  O Heart ever sensible of our misery and wretchedness to which our sins have reduced us, infinitely rich in mercy to heal the wounds of our souls!  Behold us humbly prostrate before You to express the sorrow that fills our hearts for the coldness and indifference with which we have so long requited the numberless benefits You have conferred upon us.  With a deep sense of the outrages heaped upon You by our sins and the sins of others, we come to make a solemn reparation of honor to Your most sacred Majesty.  It was our sins that overwhelmed Your heart with bitterness; it was the weight of our iniquities that pressed down Your face to the earth in the Garden of Olives and caused You to expire in anguish and agony on the cross.  But now, repenting and sorrowful, we cast ourselves at Your feet and implore forgiveness.

ADORABLE HEART OF JESUS, source of true contrition and ever merciful to the penitent sinner, impart to our hearts the spirit of penance and give to our eyes a fountain of tears, that we may sincerely bewail our sins and for the rest of our days.  Would that we could blot them out even with our blood!  Pardon them, O Lord, in Your mercy, and pardon and convert to You all that have committed acts of irreverence and sacrilege against You in the Sacrament of Your love, the most Holy Eucharist; and thus, give another proof that Your mercy is above all Your works. 

DIVINE JESUS, with You there is mercy and plentiful redemption.  Deliver us from our sins.   Accept the sincere desire we now entertain and our holy resolution, relying on the assistance of Your grace, henceforth to be faithful to You.  And in order to repair the sins and ingratitude by  which we have grieved Your most tender and loving Heart, we are resolved in the future ever to  love and honor You in the most adorable Sacrament of the Altar, where You are ever present to  hear and grant our petitions and to be the food and life of our souls.  O compassionate Jesus, be our mediator with Your heavenly Father, whom we have so grievously offended.  Strengthen our weakness, confirm our resolutions of amendment, and as Your Sacred Heart is our refuge and our hope when we have sinned, so may it be the strength and support of our repentance, that nothing in life or death may separate us from You.  Amen.

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, be assured of my fervent and frequent prayers for you in this time of trial and tribulation, especially during this Holy Week.  Please pray for me.

Mary and Joseph, pray for us!  Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us!