The saint we honor today, Saint Thomas Aquinas, was and is so highly esteemed from the time he died in 1274 until the present. In popular terms, he was “a giant” in so many areas of his life: a philosopher, a theologian, a professor — each in an extraordinary way. Above all, he was “a giant” in living the faith. He was truly a man of faith in its fullest sense. In fact, in December of 1273, what he experienced during the celebration of the Mass persuaded him to stop his writing. “All I have written seems to me like straw compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me” (cf. Bert Ghezzi, Voices of the Saints, p. 695). In the end, what mattered most was his faith, that is, his response in body, intellect and soul to God Who reveals Himself in Jesus Christ His Son.

Faith is described in these words in the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults: “Faith is a personal and communal relationship. ‘Faith is first of all a personal adherence…to God. At the same time, it is a free assent to the whole truth that God has revealed’ (CCC, n. 150)…. But faith is also communal. It is not just a private act. In the assembly of believers at Mass, we profess our faith together and join our hearts as we experience ourselves as the Body of Christ. Our personal faith brings us into a relationship with God’s people, and the faith of the entire people strengthens us in our relationship with God” (pp. 37-38). I invite us to use “faith” as a kind of prism or lens with which to reflect on several events: the one recorded in today’s Gospel account and two others which have occurred in recent weeks.

The event recorded in today’s account from the Gospel according to Saint Mark describes so well the struggle which those first disciples had in surrendering to the Lord in faith. On the one hand, their question “Do you not care?” makes absolute sense. There they were in the midst of a storm whose violence they had never experienced before — and they were seasoned fishermen! They were facing a life-threatening disaster and “Jesus was in the stern, asleep on a cushion.” He seemed oblivious to their desperate request. Did He not care? Yet, they had already seen the miracles He had performed. Of course, they thought, He could do something, but why is He not? What they missed was: Jesus does care. So, the real question is not: if He cares, but when and how will He show that He cares. As a commentator puts it: “Today’s passage tells us that faith is not a matter of feelings. It’s a matter of trust, memory, and logic. If we can keep our minds fixed on Jesus and his truths, we will find all the faith — and peace — we will ever need” (cf. The Word Among Us, January, 2012, p. 48). Saint Thomas Aquinas was a man of great faith — “a giant”! He deeply believed and trusted that the Lord Jesus loved him and cared for him; indeed He died and rose for his salvation. Yes, Saint Thomas himself faced many a challenge to his faith and trust, but always he put that faith and trust — the two go together as the two sides of one coin — in the Lord Jesus. In doing so, he is a real model for us to imitate.

If faith is both a personal and communal relationship, we can reflect on several recent events through the prism or lens of faith.

Are we not facing several powerful storms? First, there is the storm of the culture of death. So many in our society do not treasure the gift of human life as God intends it, a gift which objectively begins at the moment of conception and lasts until its last moment at natural death. Clever rhetoric and false statements claiming to be facts have led too many to conclude that a woman has the right to choose to keep life within the womb or to end it. So, abortion and other forms of taking innocent and defenseless life within the womb are seen as a matter of choice, not as the intrinsic evil that they are objectively, “After all,” so many say, “to be free to choose — that is so American!”

However, it is through the prism or lens of faith that we evaluate “choice.” Faith is both a private and communal relationship with God Who reveals the truth to us. The truth is that life is His gift, beginning at conception. The only real choice we have is for life, not for death.

It is through this prism or lens of faith that we can reflect on the recent March for Life. This is an annual event on which probably well over a hundred thousand people witness to the sanctity of all human life, beginning with life in the womb.

The hope I see for the protection and defense of life in this nation rests primarily with our young people. I am convinced that they get the point: the real message — the truth — about life. Twenty thousand young people gathered in the Verizon Center and ten thousand more in the Armory in D.C. to pray and to witness! In our diocese, twenty of our diocesan parishes hosted groups for the March for Life, with an estimated two thousand five hundred youth and chaperones staying in the diocese. The offices of Youth Ministry and Respect Life sponsored the Life Is Very GOOD Event (at two locations, Hylton Memorial Chapel in Woodbridge, and Bishop O’Connell High School) — a Mass, concert and Eucharistic Adoration for five thousand on Sunday night.

Moreover, as the United States marked the thirty-ninth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, a new survey shows that the vast majority of Americans support significant abortion restrictions. The Knights of Comumbis-Marist Poll found that seventy-nine percent of Americans say that they would not allow abortion after the first three months of pregnancy. Fifty-one percent would only allow abortion — at most — in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother—or would not allow it at all. The numbers have held up over time as well and are almost unchanged from two years ago. Obviously, every abortion on demand is intrinsically evil but the survey shows that more and more our citizens are getting the point. In addition, the survey found that Americans (eighty-four percent) believe that laws can protect both the life of the unborn and health and well-being of women. That number was consistent with — and slightly higher than — findings two years ago when the number who said both could be protected was eighty-one percent.

Faith impels us to be steadfast, unswerving and persevering in our witness to and defense of life from conception to natural death.

Secondly, there is the storm attacking religious liberty. The Department of Health and Human Services on January 20 announced the Obama administration would not expand a religious exemption for employers who object to a requirement that insurance plans cover contraception as part of “preventative services.” The policy requires free coverage for sterilization and contraception, including some drugs that can cause abortions. The policy provides a religious exemption only for organizations that employ and primarily serve members of their own faith and that have the inculcation of religious values as their primary purpose.

Both the President of the U.S. bishops and the Bishops’ Pro-Life Chairman called on the thousands of Catholics gathered for the National Prayer Vigil for Life to speak out for the protection of conscience rights and religious liberty.

“From a human point of view, we may be tempted to surrender, when our government places conception, pregnancy and birth under the ‘center for disease control,’ when chemically blocking conception or aborting the baby in the womb is considered a ‘right’ to be subsidized by others who abhor it,” said Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York and President of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) at the vigil’s closing Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on January 23.

Addressing the opening Mass the previous evening, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, Archbishop of Galveston-Houston and Chairman of the USCCB Committee on Pro-Life Activities, excoriated the HHS rule.

“Never before in our U.S. History has the Federal Government forced citizens to directly purchase what violates our beliefs. At issue here as our President of the Conference stated it this past Friday, is the survival of a cornerstone constitutionally protected freedom that ensures respect for conscience and religious liberty,” said Cardinal DiNardo. He cited the January 19 address of Pope Benedict XVI to U.S. bishops visiting Rome, and I was among them, in which the pope said, “it is imperative that the entire Catholic community in the United States come to realize the grave threats to the Church’s public moral witness presented by a radical secularism which finds increasing expression in the political and cultural spheres. The seriousness of these threats needs to be appreciated at every level of ecclesial life.”

To exclude religious liberty is to say that we can no longer practice and live our faith in the public arena. No, we do not impose Catholic faith on the citizens of the United States. We speak about moral values and human rights which are rooted in the natural moral law implanted in our human nature, but we never impose Catholic practice on others. But, we have the right — as does every faith community — to be free in following the dictates of our conscience, which flow from both the natural moral law and the official teaching of the Church. We must be free to live faith as a personal and communal relationship within our society.

Faith, then, impels us to be steadfast, unswerving and persevering in our insistence and battle for religious liberty.

Yes, Saint Thomas Aquinas was “a giant” in living the faith. We do not all possess his outstanding and extraordinary gifts as a philosopher, theologian and professor. But we each have been given the gift of faith whereby both individually and as members of Christ’s Body the Church, we live in a personal relationship with God, entrusting our body, intellect and soul to Him in the surrender of the “obedience of faith.” Rightly did we pray in today’s Collect: “…grant us, we pray, that we may understand what (Saint Thomas Aquinas) taught and imitate what he accomplished” — living the faith!