Nothing New Under the Sun?

May 20

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.

- Ecclesiastes 1:9

During his homily that occurred during his inaugural Mass celebrated on Sunday, May 18, Pope Leo XIV called for the respect of cultural and religious diversity. While exhorting the faithful to aid the marginalized and the poor and declaring that religion and faith should not be imposed on others in an age of arrogance, hatred, violence, and division, he observed:

“This is the missionary spirit that must animate us; not closing ourselves off in our small groups, nor feeling superior to the world. We are called to offer God’s love to everyone, in order to achieve that unity which does not cancel out differences but values the personal history of each person and the social and religious culture of every people.”

Where before have we heard of the mutual relationship between unity and diversity? Just over four hundred years ago during a time of similar civil, cultural, and religious animosity and division from the pen of St. Francis de Sales himself! In his Treatise on the Love of God, Francis wrote:

“The supreme unity of the divine act (Creation) is opposed to confusion and disorder but not to distinction and variety. On the contrary, it employs these latter to bring forth beauty by reducing all differences and diversity to proportion, proportion to order, and order to the unity of the world, which comprises all created things, both visible and invisible. All these together are called the universe, perhaps because all their diversity is reduced to unity, as if one were to say ‘unidiverse,’ that is, unique and diverse, unique along with diversity and diversity along with unity…In sum, God’s supreme unity diversifies all things and God’s permanent eternity gives change to all things. Therefore, even to this very day we see a perpetual revolution and succession of times and seasons which shall continue until the end of the world.”

And we can go back even further to the very early days of the Christian community itself regarding the interplay of unity and diversity. Recall the words of St. Paul:

“As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ. Now the body is not a single part, but many. As it is, God placed the parts, each one of them, in the body as he intended. God has so constructed the body as to give greater honor to a part that is without it, so that there may be no division in the body, but that the parts may have the same concern for one another.” (1 Corinthians 12)

Amid so much diversity, what is the path to unity? To ‘love the Lord our God with all our hearts, all our souls and all our strength; and to love our neighbors as ourselves.’

From a Salesian perspective, there’s absolutely nothing new about that.