by Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.
“But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.” (Acts 1:8)
As Catholics, we believe that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity was sent into the world to redeem the human race and restore our friendship with God. But we also believe that the Third Person of the Holy Trinity was sent by Christ on Pentecost Sunday to sanctify the world which He had redeemed by His blood.
The primary mission of the Holy Spirit, therefore, is to make us holy, which means to enlighten our minds and enliven our wills with the grace of God. Never in the history of Christianity has the Church needed holy people more than in our day. The twentieth century has been the most crime-laden century in human history. The murder of innocent unborn children has become the law of most of the once-civilized nations of the world. The propagation of untruth and the consequent multiplication of evil have no counterpart in any previous period in human history.
There is no other solution for the crisis of our age than for holy people to be channels of grace to a world that is starving for divine truth and dying out of thirst for the love of God.
This is the mission of the Holy Spirit as we approach the twenty-first century. It is nothing less than producing saints among Christians in every state of life. Ordinary bishops, ordinary priests, ordinary religious, ordinary fathers and mothers, ordinary Catholics will not even survive the massive revolution through which the Church is going in our day. We need heroic Catholics, sanctified by the Holy Spirit, to restore even sanity in the modern world.
That is why the Holy Father dedicated the second last year of our century to the Holy Spirit. By His divine power, where sin has abounded, there grace will even more abound, beyond all human expectations. There is only one proviso. We must cooperate with this grace for the redemption of the modern world.
