Responsibles’ International Assembly A History Inhabited by a Presence From the homily of Bishop Jesús Sanz Montes of Huesca and Jaca (Spain), La Thuile, August 19th. “ I will take you from among the peoples, I will gather you from every land and I will lead you to your land.” The people to which we belong is not the fruit of a social or religious project of ours, nor is it the consequence of a strategy of ours to help God in His task of saving the world and of saving man, but it is the result of a choice well determined by an Other. We only have to discover that choice and embrace it, as one embraces the destiny for which we were created, discover what He has designed for our happiness, that is, for His glory. For, as the great Irenaeus said, “His glory is that our life be a success, Gloria Dei vivens homo. This people is a history inhabited by a Presence that sustains and accompanies it. It is not enough to remain. It is necessary to belong. This is the debate Jesus had with the Pharisees; they were in that chosen people of God, but they did not belong to the living history of this God, but to the history that they imagined. There is always the temptation to reduce real history to our claims or our abstractions. This was the temptation of Israel, and at times it is ours. I have been a bishop for eight months. When they called me to accept this new vocation, I realized that all my life was called to serve God in His Church as a successor to the Apostles, with all my history, all the graces and also with my sins. A first temptation was to organize things, collaborators, to undertake projects, and so on. I realized that I was doing just what Jesus condemned in the Pharisees, putting into play your ideas, your salvations–in a nutshell, your organization. I stopped and I began to testify to what I had encountered, the Presence that allows me not only to remain in a people that now the Church entrusts to me, but to know why, and, above all, to know for Whom. God is not scandalized by my limitations, and I don’t win over God or convince Him of my goodness. Beyond my badness or goodness, there is a completely gratuitous call that does not depend on me. Remember how Peter met Jesus the first time on Lake Tiberias. In that first encounter, Simon reacts violently before that Presence: “Go away, because I am a sinful man.” There is an impossible correspondence that scandalizes. That Presence challenges my limits and I am frightened to the point of censuring it–“Go away.” Three years later, this same Simon was more aware of his sin (he had even denied Jesus, pretended he didn’t even know Him), but now, not only does he not censure the Presence, he desires it; in fact, he asks for it in the most beautiful prayer that testifies to the belonging to that Presence: “You know everything, you know I love you.” Let us pray to Our Lady, let us pray to Saint Joseph, that our encounter with the Presence will not frighten us, that we will not be permitted to imagine a God who flees from us, frightened by our limits. In going toward this Presence, may we be helped to accept the grace of an impossible correspondence, saved by the mercy of Him who calls us.