Just How Important Is Jesus Christ To Us? Series

Thursday of 14th Week in Course (July 7 2022) Roger Dicconson

“No gold or silver or money in your belt, no bag” basically the clothes on their back were all that the early disciple-missionaries had on their journeys. When we look at the histories of the witnesses to Christ in the sixteenth century, all we who are inconvenienced by a line at HEB wonder at their radical following of Christ.

God loves us. God loves us, as Pope Benedict often said, to His own detriment. God doesn’t change, but he isn’t some sterile statue off in space. God is changeless in the sense that He is perfect, so He can’t go from a state of want to a state of plenty. God is full and complete. But we make a huge mistake if we think that it didn’t cost anything for God to give us His only Son, to die a slave’s death. The Father’s gift of the Son to us cost Jesus His human life.

Hosea saw it hundreds of years before the Incarnation. Even when Israel responded to God’s many gifts with rebellion, God did not turn His back on His people. Again and again He sent prophets to tell the truth and plead for a turning, a metanoia. Again and again they said “no,” but in the end, God gave His best, His only-begotten Son, so that there would be again one woman and one man who never turned God’s will aside. Mary and her Son, Jesus.

We know that the sixteenth century was a time of rebellion. Germany for the most part was lost, then much of central Europe, then England and Scotland and Wales. But there were many recusants, Catholics who did not attend the Church of England, did not bow down to the Tudor and Stuart decrees. And some harbored priests so that the true sacraments could continue to nurture the Church.

Roger Dicconson was Protestant in his early days, but when we pick up his story he is coming from Rheims, France, where there was a colony of English Catholics. He is returning as a priest in the year 1583. There he was aided by an illiterate farmer, husband and father of eight, Ralph Milner, who was on parole from the prison where he was held for being a Catholic. He must have had a good conduct pass. Father Roger ministered until 1591, when he and Ralph and a number of faithful women were executed on July 7 for their faith. The judge was going to have Roger killed to scare the others into renouncing their faith, but they insisted that their crime was the same so they should have to pay the same price with him.

Imagine someone today being offered a reprieve of even a few days. Would he insist on going down with his pastor? Is Jesus Christ so important to us that we would lay down everything to witness to His abiding love, to His presence among us today in Eucharist? Every time we come to communion, aren’t we telling Him that we would? May His name be praised and honored for all ages.