My dear friends, it is a very great pleasure for me to welcome all of you, members of the Catholic Women’s League of Canada, from all over our country, to Regina for your National Convention. The fact that we come together to celebrate the Eucharist to begin this Convention is in effect a statement of who and what the Catholic Women’s League is. It says to everyone that you are women of faith. It says that the Christian faith that we all share is the reason that the Catholic Women’s League of Canada exists.

My dear friends, it is a very great pleasure for me to welcome all of you, members of the Catholic Women’s League of Canada, from all over our country, to Regina for your National Convention. The fact that we come together to celebrate the Eucharist to begin this Convention is in effect a statement of who and what the Catholic Women’s League is. It says to everyone that you are women of faith. It says that the Christian faith that we all share is the reason that the Catholic Women’s League of Canada exists.

Your Mission Statement says this clearly: The Catholic Women’s League of Canada is a national organization rooted in gospel values calling its members to holiness through service to the people of God.

Everything you do as League Members is rooted in the person of Jesus Christ who has proclaimed the Gospel, the Good news to us. That good news of Jesus transforms and guides us from moment to moment as we live our lives. In his Gospel, Jesus invites us into an intimate and personal communion with Him, a union with him that is so profound that it enables to God to actually live in us. As Jesus said in John’s Gospel: “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home in them.” Jn 14:23

When we are aware of that gift of God for it changes our lives. It changes the way we approach life. We all know how challenging life from day to day can be. So many things give us cause for fear and worry. We are like Martha in the Gospel; we “worry and fret about many things.” We fear for ourselves, we fear for those we love. We are anxious about illness, about finances, about dying; so many things to blot out the sunshine. Yet we are never crushed down, for we know that we are never alone.

When life threatens to overpower us, we know that we always have God with us, so closely with us that God is within us, and with God’s presence there is strength. In our darkest moments, Jesus is the light of life for us. In our moments of fear and despair, the promise of Jesus gives us hope.

This awareness makes us want to go out to others and bring to them this good news of God’s love and what it does to our lives so that they too may find this strength and light and promise and hope for their lives too. This is holiness through service to others.

We do all of this because of our faith. We do this because we Catholics believe that Jesus is God’s only Son, God himself. We Catholics believe that God loves us despite all our failings. We Catholics believe that Jesus showed his incomparable love by dying for us and by dying for us has made possible for us life in its fullness, forever. We believe this; this is our faith.

You may have noticed that the readings of this Sunday’s Mass say much about faith. In the Second Reading, St. Paul gives us his famous definition of faith. He says: Brothers and sisters: Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Hope is so important for us, indeed it’s important for every human being. Our faith gives us assurance first of all that we can hope for happiness and fullness of life, for we believe that Jesus came to give us these things. Did not Jesus say: “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete?” (Jn 15:11) We believe that, and that faith gives our hope assurance and makes us able to have a strong conviction that we will come to to those things Jesus has promised to us.

In his first Encyclical Letter “The Light of Faith” Pope Francis describes faith as “a light for our way, guiding our journey through time.” The path we need to follow to find happiness and meaning in our lives is not always easy to see. Our faith lights the way for us. Our faith guides us so that we will discover the right path and follow it.

What a gift we have that we can give to our world and our society today; because there is a growing hopelessness in our secular and unrooted society today. I am sure that you notice this as well.

I was visiting one of our Catholic High Schools a while back and the principal made the comment that one of the greatest threats to our young people today is a lack of hope. If our young people, on the very threshold of their adult life, do not have hope for their future, then we have something very valuable to give to them and to our society.

In that same Encyclical, Pope Francis says: “In God’s gift of faith, a supernatural infused virtue, we realize that a great love has been offered us, a good word has been spoken to us, and that when we welcome that word, Jesus Christ the Word made flesh, the Holy Spirit transforms us, lights up our way to the future and enables us joyfully to advance along that way on wings of hope.” (Lumen Fidei 7)

As you know, we are in the midst of the Year of Faith, declared by Pope Benedict XVI. He gives us another definition of faith in his letter inaugurating the Year of Faith. He says that “Faith is choosing to stand with the Lord so as to live with him.” ( Porta Fidei #10) And he urges us to let the way that we live be seen by others.

Let people see the hope that is ours, let people see the happiness that is ours because of our faith. He calls us to give a credible witness of life to those around us. For it is a gift we have to give, “wings of hope” for a world struggling to find hope.

In the Gospel today Jesus tells us never to give up on giving this witness, not to get discouraged in the face of so much unbelief around us. For it is a task that Jesus himself has given us and calls us to do. He tells us “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit” ready for any opportunity to let the light of your faith shine on the darkness of people’s lives.

The Church celebrated this past week the feast of St. Cajetan. In the early years of the Protestant Reformation, many in the Catholic Church worked to eliminate the corruption that helped to fuel the Reformers’ cause. One of those people was the priest, Saint Cajetan, who founded the Theatine order of priests in 1524. The Theatines had no property and lived plainly and devotedly. They distinguished themselves from other clergy by wearing white socks! It was the symbol of their calling. They sought to change the lives of those around them by their example.

That’s what Pope Benedict called: “The witness of life.” We, too, can influence others for the good by making our lives a witness to the joy faith brings to us. Let us ask God to guide us so that we can discover what our white socks will be. Then we too can help, especially those we love and care about, to joyfully travel the journey of life, carried on wings of hope.