Is This Our 9th Hour On The Cross?

A few nights ago, I watched the movie “Conclave.” This beautiful movie tells the story of Cardinal Thomas Lawrence who’s burdened with the responsibility of leading a politically-charged conclave to elect a new pope due to the sudden death of the previous one.

At the opening of the secret conclave, Cardinal Lawrence delivers a welcoming speech to the attending Cardinals who’ve gathered for the first procedural vote. While listening to what he said, I noticed tingles running down my spine—a sensation which seizes me whenever a sacred Truth is spoken.

In our own times of political turpitude, it made me think and caused me to wonder: how do we go forward from here? How do we become whole in the midst of a bloodless takeover that shuns democracy and insists on obedience to an unelected autocrat?

Within all this turmoil and noise, I’ve asked for guidance, I’ve asked God to shed new light on what’s best for us as a nation, and what’s required to bring it forth in this darkness.

Cardinal Lawrence seems to have answered my plea with these words:

“Paul said to be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. To work together, to grow together, we must be tolerant—no one person or faction seeking to dominate another.

“And speaking to the Ephesians who were, of course, a mixture of Jews and Gentiles, Paul reminds us that God's gift to the Church is its variety. It is this variety, this diversity of people and views which gives our Church its strength.

“And over the course of many years and in the service of our Mother, the Church, let me tell you, there is one sin which I have come to fear above all others: certainty.

“Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end, ‘My God, my God why hast Thou forsaken me?’ he cried out in his agony at the ninth hour on the cross. Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.”

Hearing these words made me think of us. It made me think of America. In fact, change the words “the Church” and replace them with America—and then read it.

I don’t believe God has abandoned his city on the hill. I believe he’s teaching us how fragile, how weak we’ve become. He’s teaching us a lesson about what happens when we ourselves shun democracy in favor of demagogues. And should this lesson bring this country to its own ninth hour on the cross as a result of forsaking the “diversity of people and views which give our Church (or America) its strength,” then I have faith we will be resurrected once more if we come together to be better servants to the ideal of liberty and justice for all.