This Sunday marks the conclusion of the Year of Faith.

As we will recall, Pope Emeritus Benedict proclaimed this year before his retirement. It began on the First Sunday of Advent last year and has run until the last Sunday of our liturgical year, which is this Sunday.

The year had four particular goals outlined by Pope Emeritus Benedict in his letter explaining why he proclaimed this year. They were:

�–� reading again (or for the first time) the documents of the Second Vatican Council,

�–� reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church,

�–� renewing our lives of prayer and

�–� witnessing our love for and service of the poor and the less fortunate.

I am very grateful for the work that has been done by individuals, families, prayer groups, parishes and especially the priests and pastors of the Diocese of Rockford to make use of this occasion. As I have gone around the diocese I have encountered everything from signs and bulletin announcements about meetings or study groups, to people simply telling me about their efforts to respond to Pope Emeritus Benedict’s call.

I am also very grateful to the diocesan staff for the work that they have done to help set up and execute the expert speakers from outside the Diocese of Rockford to help us understand and read about the Second Vatican Council. Those talks are archived on the website of the Diocese of Rockford (http://www.rockforddiocese.org) so you can watch them all, or any individual talks you may not have been able to get to.

Like any year or space of time in our lives, the Year of Faith was filled with ups and downs, highs and lows. It will ever be a part of the history of this Year of Faith that Pope Emeritus Benedict surprised the world with his resignation, the first by a pope in 600 years.

So many of us were moved by the images of Benedict’s slow, almost agonized, walk to the car as he left the Vatican for the last time as pope.

And our sense of the work of the Holy Spirit continued as the cardinals voted for the new pope and onto the balcony and, we might say, onto the world’s attention, came Cardinal Bergoglio, now Pope Francis.

But if these were the high points, we will never forget either that the Year of Faith was dishonored and defaced in our diocese by the vote of the Illinois legislature to redefine God’s creation of marriage between one man and one woman. The citations referring to Pope Francis and the Catholic faith as votes were being cast were a distortion of our faith bordering on insult.

Still, the Year of Faith was directed to the hearts of each one of us. So this is a good moment to ask if we have made use of this year, if we have stirred up the gift of faith.

We should each ask if my faith has been strengthened in the last year? Did I study either the Second Vatican Council or elements of Catholic faith that I have always wondered about or had trouble understanding?

Did I make sure to get to Mass each Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation as part of an act of faith in Jesus and the Church? Did I perhaps, kick it up a notch and go to daily Mass?

How about confession? Did I make that a point of emphasis in the Year of Faith, or has it still been a number of years since I went?

And did I make sure that I helped the poor and the needy in a greater way than before?

The Year of Faith is really just a slice, a section, of what we are all called to: a Lifetime of Faith. Those same questions can be asked on the scale of our whole lives.

In the end, the Year of Faith is not a checklist. It is a calling — a calling to our friendship with Jesus Christ. That’s what our Catholic faith is.