Madeleine Delbrêl & the women of Cursillo 1024

My friend Gerry Straub writes that Madeleine Delbrél was a young French poet who at the age of 20 underwent a radical conversion to Catholicism. She and a community of lay women who formed around her were the very work of hope. See Gerry's post here. Today on this feast day of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica she is featured in the Magnificat's Meditation of the Day. 

The Church is the greatest sign of the mystery of God.  For she contains the famous dimensions of love described by Saint Paul, dimensions he hopes we can attain with all the Saints.  She alone is the sign of the massive breaking open that our entire being has to undergo in order to be capable of God and God’s tasks.

We will be incapable of incarnating God’s love in the world we will be incapable of bringing the Gospel, which is but the manifestation of love, to the world, if we do not first accept the incarnation of this love in the Church in the mystical Body of Jesus Christ… 

Everything in the Church shows the movement of Christ’s blood, the gestures that offer it, the places where we can place our lips to drink it and to cause it to pour forth. 

This is what liturgy is…  Are we aware that liturgy is the salvation of the world?  If, through the long course of history, it was necessary to adapt the liturgy, to explain it, to translate it, and if it is once again necessary to do so in our time, it never has been and is not today a question of making the liturgy more human.  It already is human, and tragically so: it is the Passion of the Son of God made man, made continually present among us. 

This is, above all, what a parish is, in the midst of a world that comprehends nothing about such things.  What else are bishops with their offices other than the faith preserved and the responsibility for the salvation that is meant to spread to the ends of the earth?  Rome, through everything else, is the love of God that has been promised to the Church for eternity.  This body wants to propagate itself.  The Church will forever aspire to the world.  She doesn’t need the world in order to accomplish her mission, but without the world, she would have no mission.  The world is the stubble and the Church is the flame.   (Servant of God Madeleine Delbrel +1964)Taken from the Magnificat November 2012, Vol 3, No 1

At a prayer service for the team and candidates of Cursillo 1024 last night I sensed this powerful movement that I believe Delbrél refers to in her reflection. When I finished the reading from Philippians I looked out at all who were gathered, and there sitting among us were innumerable spirits, many were those who have gone before.  We all had come together in celebration, worship and thanksgiving in this love in the Church, in this Body of Christ.