4 May 2021
Memorial of St José María Rubio y Peralta, SJ
“It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the Kingdom of God.” (Acts 14:22)
To many these words would not seem to offer the effect which they had when St. Paul spoke them to the first Christians in Antioch. The Acts of the Apostles say that by these words, St. Paul “strengthened the spirits of the disciples and exhorted them to persevere in the faith.” Perhaps the Christians in Antioch could be strengthened by this admission of hardship in the Christian life, because they saw that St. Paul was someone who was both undergoing hardships (for example, the people of Derbe had recently stoned Paul and left him for dead outside of the city) and was filled with the zeal of one who is entering the Kingdom of God.
Our Lord says to the apostles at the Last Supper, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you.” (Jn 14:27) We may have many worldly images of peace which do not include any hardships (which certainly do not include being pelted with rocks outside of Derbe!). And yet, Christ offers us a peace which no hardship, no rock is strong enough to break. It is a peace which we cannot grasp all at once. The apostles certainly had their grasp of that peace shaken in the hours and days that followed the Last Supper. Yet it is a peace which Christ wishes to leave with us, to give it so that it remains with us, and draws us into God’s Kingdom.
The Jesuit saint whom the Society of Jesus remembers today, was known at the time of his death in 1929, as the “apostle of Madrid”. St José María Rubio y Peralta was a man who was accustomed to trials and hardships. In his early seminary days he wanted to be a Jesuit, but God asked him to spend his first nineteen years as a diocesan priest, taking care of an eldery fellow diocesan priest, and giving himself to catechizing children and ministering to the poor. He learned, as many caretakers know, both the hardships and the beauty of the Kingdom which is to be found in daily service to the elderly and one’s neighbor. Upon the death of the priest, St José María entered the Jesuit novitiate, and spent the next twenty years in the poorest neighborhoods of Madrid, hearing confessions (including those of the Archbishop) before dawn, founding tuition free schools for those in need, and seeking to nourish the bodies and souls of those whom God entrusted to his care. May the apostles of the first and twentieth centuries intercede for us, that we too may courageously face the hardships of charity that we may enter into the peace of God’s Kingdom.