That They All May Be One

Gospel Reflection for June 1, 2025, the Seventh Sunday of Easter

And not for them only do I pray, but for them also who through their word shall believe in me;

That they all may be one, as thou, Father, in me, and I in thee; that they also may be one in us; that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.

And the glory which thou hast given me, I have given to them; that they may be one, as we also are one:

I in them, and thou in me; that they may be made perfect in one: and the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast also loved me.

Father, I will that where I am, they also whom thou hast given me may be with me; that they may see my glory which thou hast given me, because thou hast loved me before the creation of the world.

Just Father, the world hath not known thee; but I have known thee: and these have known that thou hast sent me.

And I have made known thy name to them, and will make it known; that the love wherewith thou hast loved me, may be in them, and I in them. (John 17:20-26 DRA)

For some Catholic dioceses, including mine, today is the Solemnity of the Ascension, but since my colleague Judson gave an excellent reflection for the more common and traditional date of the Ascension last Thursday, today I will reflect on the readings for the seventh Sunday of Easter, or the first Sunday in the Octave of the Ascension leading up to Pentecost.

The Gospel reading for this Sunday focuses on the concluding verses of what is called Jesus’s High Priestly prayer at the end of His Farewell Discourse. During this prayer, Jesus refers directly to His Father six times, the only times in the New Testament that “Father” is used in the vocative case of direct address for God. These final words are given just before Christ leads His apostles into the Garden of Gethsemane, to prepare for His Passion, and they are addressed to those who will become Christian in the future.

The overall theme of these verses is unity. Our Lord prays that His Church will participate in the same unity which He enjoys as the Son of God in the life of the Trinity. The traditional terms for this Trinitarian unity are perichoresis in Greek or circumincession in Latin, meaning the mutual indwelling of the Persons by which each fully lives within the others and none acts without the others. All that they are as God is shared equally between them and their mutual love holds them together in a perfectly harmonious unity. This is the same love which Christ gives to the Church, which is made one – alongside holy, catholic and apostolic – by the sanctifying grace of charity which makes its members to be one Mystical Body in perfect communion with one another. As St. Paul wrote, “For as in one body we have many members, but all the members have not the same office: So we being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.” (Rom 12:4-5)

The Church is made one principally through the Eucharist, which is called by St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas and many others the “sacramentum unitatis” or the sacrament of unity. By sharing in the one communion of the Body of Christ, we become one Body, espoused to Christ and made one flesh in marital union with Him. Hence St. Paul taught, “The chalice of benediction, which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? And the bread, which we break, is it not the partaking of the body of the Lord? For we, being many, are one bread, one body, all that partake of one bread.” (1 Cor 10:16-17)

Every time we receive the Eucharist worthily and devoutly, we commune with all the saints of history, including not only the great Fathers and Doctors of the Church, the holy martyrs and missionaries, the servants of the poor, teachers of the ignorant and defenders of Christendom, but also the holy ones of Israel who preceded Christ but were saved by their anticipatory communion in Him through faith and the sacraments of the Temple. This is why Dr. David Fagerberg once defined the Divine Liturgy this way:

Liturgy is the perichoresis of the Trinity kenotically extended to invite our synergistic ascent into deification. Liturgy is participation in the perichoresis of the Trinity; asceticism is the capacitation for that participation; theology is union with God, making the Church’s liturgy an act of theologia; and liturgical asceticism is the life-long process of deification that results in the removal of the cataracts of sin from our eyes, giving us clear sight, at last.

There is also another important lesson on this theme of unity. Today, unity is often used as a synonym for tolerance, or a liberal spirit of relativistic pluralism toward the diverse religious beliefs and lifestyles of people, including toward those who claim to be Catholic. This, however, is not true unity. Love without truth, charity without faith or mercy without justice can give only a false and superficial unity, the same kind of “peace” achieved by Pontius Pilate when he washed his hands of his authorization of Christ’s Crucifixion in order to pacify the crowds.

This same spirit of acquiescence and accommodation has today led to the blasphemies of “pride masses” and the blessing of immoral relationships while those who love the Tradition of the Church and want only to celebrate it peacefully in union with the saints of history are persecuted by their own bishops, like those in the diocese of Charlotte who have recently been victimized by a weak-kneed enforcement of Traditiones custodes by Bishop Martin with no concern for the spiritual wellbeing of his flock.

The “unity” won by these sorts of actions is the same “unity” seen in the Soviet Union, when anyone who stood up against the government, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was summarily exiled to Siberia or simply executed. Many Catholics who uphold the Tradition of the Roman rite above the innovations of the 1960s are similarly exiled from dioceses, their orders and communities disbanded, their priests deprived of faculties and their people denied the protection of having their own bishops. By contrast, the great Pope St. Pius X wrote, “Indeed, the true friends of the people are neither revolutionaries, nor innovators: they are traditionalists.”

As St. Thomas taught, such unjust laws are no laws at all and such tyranny is a betrayal of the unity which the princes of the Church are charged to maintain by Christ, the King and source of their authority. All the while, Catholic politicians, priests and even bishops who flagrantly violate and teach against Catholic Tradition are not only “tolerated” but celebrated while focusing instead on secular political issues. This is a failure by the successors of the apostles to implement St. Paul’s directive: “For what have I to do to judge them that are without? Do not you judge them that are within? For them that are without, God will judge. Put away the evil one from among yourselves.” (1 Cor 5:12-13)

This Sunday, let us pray for true unity in the Church, the unity of truth, justice, mercy and charity, where sin is corrected and Tradition is restored to its rightful place, especially in fulfillment of Pope Leo XIV’s pontifical motto and mission to this effect. To quote St. Pius X again,

Catholic doctrine tells us that the primary duty of charity does not lie in the toleration of false ideas, however sincere they may be, nor in the theoretical or practical indifference towards the errors and vices in which we see our brethren plunged but in the zeal for their intellectual and moral improvement as well as for their material well-being.

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