Florida Catholic | Learning from St. Paul at Lenten Day of Reflection

Learning from St. Paul

Father Miguel Gomez: story of St. Paul’s conversion contains lesson for Christians today.

ANA RODRIGUEZ-SOTO | FLORIDA CATHOLIC MIAMI BUREAU EDITOR

Published: 03.07.08

Father Miguel Gomez, pastor of Santa Barbara Parish in Hialeah, who did his doctoral dissertation on St. Paul, speaks at the Lenten day on reflection on St. Paul. The Pauline Year, marking the 2000th anniversary of the birth of the "Apostle to the Gentiles," will begin June 28 but the archdiocese got a jump on it as part of its own celebration of its 50th anniversary.
ANA RODRIGUEZ-SOTO | FC

MIAMI GARDENS | Saul fell off his horse and his life changed. Or did it?

The conversion of the “apostle to the gentiles” is not as simple as it would seem, according to a local priest who wrote his doctoral dissertation on St. Paul.

Father Miguel Gomez, pastor of Santa Barbara Parish in Hialeah Gardens, spoke Feb. 16 at a Lenten day of reflection anticipating the beginning of the Pauline Year — June 28, 2008, to June 29, 2009 — which marks the 2,000th anniversary of the apostle’s birth.

The day of reflection was sponsored by St. Thomas University, Pax Romana and the Daughters of St. Paul. Advertised almost exclusively online, the event attracted a large number of young people to the university’s convocation hall.

That was no accident, explained Auxiliary Bishop Felipe Estévez. “We think the young adults need a renewal of their faith in the manner of Paul, so that they become evangelizers in their environment.”

“Pope Benedict is saying we need (Paul’s) spirit renewed in the church,” said Sister Tracey Dugas of the Daughters of St. Paul, a religious order dedicated to using modern media to evangelize, just as St. Paul did in his time.

The Pauline Year “is a good excuse to go back to the source, because he wrote most of the New Testament and we hear him once a week at Mass most of the time,” Sister Dugas added.

But while most are familiar with the story of St. Paul’s conversion — being blinded by a light on the road to Damascus and hearing Jesus ask, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” — to view that conversion as that of a sinner who changes his ways or a man who changes his allegiance — from Judaism to Christianity — is to have a “diminished understanding” of it, Father Gomez said.

St. Paul did not consider himself a sinner, after all. “He considered himself blameless, faultless,” a Jew defending his faith. Yet “his attitude toward God was deeply wrong,” Father Gomez said. “Paul was living not the Gospel of grace, but the Gospel of self-righteousness.”

Such self-righteousness led Paul to see himself as “not servant, but master, owner of the truth,” Father Gomez said. It led him, as it leads many today, “to all kinds of despicable actions” and “ideological violence.”

“Paul would never have confessed that he was weak or he was fragile. That is what religious hypocrisy is all about — (the belief that) you are the agent of your own salvation,” Father Gomez said.

Eventually, St. Paul comes to realize that “‘I was boasting of my own righteousness and, in fact, I had become the executioner of innocent people.’ Now he has to re-do his life from top to bottom.”

St. Paul eventually comes to a truly profound conversion, the realization that faith is not a possession, but grace, Father Gomez said. “It was a gift. It was not the result of his effort.”

The lesson Christians today can take from St. Paul is to look into their own spiritual lives and ask, “What is there in me close to or similar to or different from Paul’s experience?” Father Gomez said. “What makes me be what I am regarding God? What are those possessions of mine that prevent me from embracing with complete freedom God’s gift to me?”

Different advice came from the day’s second speaker, Msgr. Stephen Bosso, professor of Scripture at St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary in Boynton Beach.

“Paul is a genius when it comes to language,” Msgr. Bosso said, and his style of writing is “very descriptive … packed with images.”

He suggested that people read St. Paul’s writings “line by line, image by image.”

“Stop, and every time you see a different image, reflect upon that,” Msgr. Bosso said. “Use his images for your own spiritual reflection.”

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