July 2021: Homilies & Reflections

Homily of Saturday, July 31, 2021

We remember Saint Ignatius Loyola, whose life encompassed one of the great conversion stories in Christian history. When I entered the monastery in St. Louis, I was very much surprised to find, on the younger monks’ side, a hostile attitude of rivalry with Jesuits, whom they regarded with disdain and suspicion. That is very ironic. Benedictines influenced St. Ignatius at the very beginning of the Jesuit order at his retreat at the Benedictine monastery at Montserrat. Also St. Francis Xavier and his companions were inspired to make vows by the Benedictine nuns at their convent in Paris. In a strange way, it was tensions between the Jesuits and secular clergy and local Benedictines in Valladolid, Spain that gave rise to the founding of the English Benedictine Congregation. And both Jesuits and Benedictines suffered martyrdom in England. These two great orders are like two lungs of the Church, very much like Saints Martha and Mary whom we celebrated two days ago. St. Benedict established his monastery and its rule as the Roman empire was collapsing and Europe was engulfed in chaos. Benedictine monasteries preserved the best of ancient civilization for the future. St. Ignatius established his order as medieval Christendom collapsed and Jesuits helped preserve and spread the Church for its future beyond Europe. The two works of these orders, of prayer and active missionary zeal, are both necessary for the Church to fulfil its mission. Thank God for St. Benedict. Thank God for St. Ignatius. And thank God for Pope Francis – the first Jesuit Pope. May God guard, guide and protect him in his prayer and his work for all of us.

Homily of July 30. 2021

Our saint today, Saint Peter Chrysologus, was the Bishop of Ravenna in the 400’s. Ravenna is a city on the opposite side of Italy from Rome. During the 400’s it was the capital of the Roman Empire. Rome had fallen on hard times. The Byzantines were acting up a lot in the east, and it became necessary to move the capital of the western empire to Ravenna. Saint Peter Chrysologus was the bishop at that point. Originally Ravenna is kind of a backwater place. The location was swampy, low and wet - a stifling sort of area with a little city, but with a really great harbor, so it became tactically important.  We know very little about Peter Chrysologus. We have about a hundred of his homilies and they are well known as being very short and very interesting. I highly recommend them. Get a book of his homilies some time and read them. They’re quick reads, ten minutes in some cases, maybe 15 if you read slowly.  The dowager empress came and heard Peter’s first homily, the very first one he gave. She was so impressed that she agreed to bankroll his entire church building projects for the city of Ravenna.  He had very big plans and she saw them all through. And because of that one homily, Ravenna became one of the most beautiful Christian cities in the west. We still go to Ravenna to see some of the best Byzantine mosaics that have survived.  

In the seminary we held St. Peter up as a role model when we were teaching candidates for ordination how to write their first homily, because he was one of those rare homilists who knew how to stop talking when he ran out of things to say.  And he certainly got great results! 

There is a real lesson in that. 

Homily of Thursday, July 29, 2021 (Feast of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus)

Martha and Mary and Lazarus were clearly friends of Jesus, and there is reason to believe that this was not the only time they entertained him in their house. It is interesting that they are disciples of the Lord who have not left everything. They seem to have a decent place to live and entertain him and his disciples, which means they must have some substance from which they can provide food and drink and a place for him and his disciples. Martha, by the way is clearly the boss in this family. And it is unusual and hard to explain two Jewish sisters and a brother who are living together and are not it would seem married. In any case, Martha is the boss. She is the one who deals with Jesus most directly. And in this case, I think most of us would agree, she has a point: Look, I am doing all the work; can’t you just ask Mary to help out a little? And he says: No, she’s chosen the better part. Well, I don’t know what Martha’s reaction was, but I would be a little miffed if that is what he said to me. Which is just an indication that his ways are not our ways, his thoughts are not our thoughts. It’s something we have trouble learning. But notice that he says that Mary has chosen the better part. That’s where the church gets the idea that the so-called contemplative life, a life centered on prayer, and what we call lectio divina is the better part. That’s the better life, so to speak. The other life again, you know, is very important, because he says: Anyone who gives you a drink, anyone who helps in his name gets a reward. So, working with the poor, helping in any other way the progress of people is also good in his sight. But notice this: the rabbis say, when speaking of the Scriptures we call the Old Testament, they say God addresses his special friends, the ones who, let us admit it, he values above all else, he addresses them in this double way. “Abraham, Abraham.” “Moses, Moses.” “Samuel, Samuel.” “Jacob, Jacob.” Notice when he speaks to Martha he says, “Martha, Martha.” And that’s his way, that is the way of Jesus. “Simon, Simon,” he says to Peter. And of course, famously, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” So, in a way, while he does, in a way, rebuff Martha, in another way he extols her.

Homily of Tuesday, July 27, 2021

Some time ago an author described the modern world as “an airconditioned hell.” An airconditioned hell whose most characteristic quality is that of tedium, of weariness, of boredom. I suppose it’s something like having a thousand TV channels, yet there’s still nothing to watch. We have everything, and we have very little. This is not what we see in the New Testament. In the New Testament world, we see everything is significant. Everything touches the absolute. Everything touches the transcendent, the ultimate. Everything is of significance. It is significant; it is ultimate. Even hell. So seriously are we taken that even the smallest things could lead to larger things, could lead the possibility and reality of hell. In a world in which even the most significant things are unimportant, even the most significant things are unimportant. But the world we see in the New Testament is very different. Each of us in this church today and beyond is called to be heroic. Even the most pathetic, the most miniscule, the most weak, the most insignificant of individuals is called to be heroic. Each day in our own way we are called to be Bravehearts or cowards, heroes or villains. That’s pretty significant. That’s pretty ultimate. Pretty impressive. Our Lord speaks about hell a lot. Not because he’s “into hell”, as it were. Not a “fire and brimstone” preacher, as far as I can see in the gospels. Because hell is real, because hell could happen to us, because each of us could go to hell. Because each of us is significant; every act is significant. Each person is significant. I am not a fan of hell. I would rather not see people go to hell, not go to hell myself. But it does show that we are significant people, that we have ultimate meaning; we have intrinsic, transcendent meaning. And we’re pretty important, no matter how insignificant we may be in other respects. Our simple acts, our life itself is significant. It has ultimate realities. So we are called today not to be among those who go to the darkness, where they may weep and gnash their teeth, but to enter the light. To be transformed, to be deified and made godlike. That is our destiny, if we pursue it, if we follow it, if we cooperate in the graces God has given. And that’s impressive. So, hell is a possibility. Each of us, the best of us, the worst of us, could go to hell. But we could also go to heaven.

Homily of the Seventeenth Sunday in prdinary Time (july 25, 2021)
2 Kings 4: 42-44; Ephesians 4: 1-6; John 6: 1 – 15 

This year we’ve been following St. Mark’s gospel each Sunday. We’ve now come to the account of Jesus’ miraculously feeding the multitude. St. Mark’s description of this dramatic event is very brief, whereas, St. John’s account is more detailed and leads into a lengthy and beautiful discourse on Jesus as the bread of life. For that reason our Sunday gospel readings have switched over to those of St. John for the next few weeks. 

But before we leave St. Mark let’s recall that at the end of his gospel last Sunday we learned of Jesus’ arrival at the place of solitude where he hoped to have his disciples rest. When he saw the eager crowds unexpectedly already there waiting, he was overcome with pity because he saw them as sheep without a shepherd. St. Mark tells us that Jesus immediately began teaching them many things, not one thing or even a few things, but many things. This spontaneously generous act of open-handedness forms a significant prelude to the symphony of divine generosity we are about to hear as we continue the story today with St. John. With his teaching complete, Jesus sees that they will need to be fed but that the place is deserted. He asks the apostles what’s available and is told of only five loaves and two fish. He accepts them, gives thanks over them and without hesitating, somehow produces enough for the crowd of thousands to eat. 

This event made a tremendous impression on the early followers of Jesus. The account of it was repeated widely year after year and finally ended up recorded in all four of the gospels. In fact, both St. Matthew and St. Mark each contain two versions of it. Jesus gave thanks over the loaves and fishes. The Greek verb to give thanks is eucharisteo. That word, meaning thanksgiving, is the origin for one of our names for the Mass, the Eucharist. In this and several other ways the Evangelist links the feeding of the multitude with the great sacrament of Christ’s self-gift. St. John refers to this miracle as a “sign” and assures us that when Jesus asked about the food, he knew already what he planned to do. He intended to make a “sign”. Like any sign it points to something else, in this case, to Christ himself, the bread of life, the infinite self-expenditure of God. We’ll hear a lot about the meaning of this sign in St. John’s Gospels of the next few weeks. 

In preparation for that, let’s remember today’s first reading from the Second Book of Kings. It depicts a similar food-miracle performed by God for Elisha a thousand years before the time of Christ.  And it’s a preview of Jesus’ multiplication of the loaves and fishes. The accounts are parallel in two ways. First is the small amount of available food. Second, this insufficient portion becomes an overabundance, enough to feed everyone with more left over.  In both accounts, the “far-too-little” becomes “much-too-much”.  This recalls a related miracle also in St. John’s gospel: the changing of water into wine at the marriage feast at Cana. As the feast progresses the supply of wine runs out.  In order to avoid seeing the party spoiled, his mother gets Jesus to intervene. He does so by turning water into wine, way more than needed. Again, here is a surplus. Why not just enough? Why is this excess an essential factor in these stories: both of bread and of wine. Again, both are “signs” indicating the idea of the superfluous, of the more than necessary. Christ gave us these signs because they testify to the astonishing benevolence of God, an important part of the mystery of the Eucharist about which he wants us to become more aware.  

 It’s helpful to remember here a structural law of nature in which life squanders a million seeds in order to save one living one, or in which a whole universe of stars and galaxies is spent in order to prepare on one tiny planet, a place for the human race. Excess is God’s trademark in his creation. As the Fathers of the Church put it, “God does not reckon his gifts by measure.” We seldom think about it but consider this: there are over ten thousand species of birds on earth (and counting), more than 33,000 different kinds of fish and over 60,000 kinds of trees (and still counting). Wouldn’t, say, a hundred, or maybe a thousand have been plenty? Evidently not; God’s gift to mankind is in every case breathtakingly generous, even playfully luxuriant. And God reveals himself to be even more benevolently carefree in the order of redemption. This is precisely what Jesus meant to signify when he made use of the human “far-too-little” not just to miraculously fulfill a need, but to deliver “’way-too-much”. In today’s gospel we’re told that twelve baskets of extra bread were gathered up after everyone had eaten. In the sign of that “extra” we see Christ, leaving for his Church the limitless gift of himself to be distributed for all time, for all of us. Nor was the feeding of the multitude a single, one-time event. It continues today, right now, right here. In his self-gift at the altar, Jesus feeds not just a few thousand, but all mankind in every age with the bread of life, his own flesh and blood. 

At Cana Jesus miraculously changed six large stone jars of water into wine. This would have amounted to jaw-dropping 180 gallons of wine, to say the least, a somewhat unusual quantity for a small, private banquet already in progress. And, as the master of the feast recognized, wine of this high quality ought to have been served first not last. This no-nonsense chap clearly saw it all as some sort of carelessness or folly. The calculating mind like his will always find it absurd that God should spend himself so extravagantly on mankind. Jesus has shown us that most fundamentally God is Love, and anyone who loves easily sees that his divine folly is in fact his divine wisdom. It’s the wise folly of a lover for which only the total gift of oneself will answer, and for which extravagance alone is enough.   

In today’s second reading St. Paul points to Jesus’ real, ongoing multiplication of bread – the distribution of his body in the Eucharist. The apparent inadequacy of the bit of bread and wine we offer at Mass, which includes the gift of ourselves, is taken up and transformed in his hands into the infinite self-giving of his own body. As this miracle satisfies our spiritual hunger, it also unites each of us into the one Spirit of Jesus. As Christians we live first and foremost as the beneficiaries of Christ’s infinite bounty. Because of this our righteousness can consist only in becoming ourselves generous donors, like any suppliant, grateful for what is received, generously passing part of it on to others. Our self-gift, small as it may be, when accepted, blessed and multiplied in Jesus’s hands, makes us participants, really includes us in his bringing an entire world starving for holiness together, in Paul’s words, into “One Body and one Spirit” with “One God and Father of all’. 

Homily of Saturday, July 24, 2021

This is from one of the talks by Pope Francis: “Jesus’ gesture at the Last Supper is the ultimate thanksgiving to the Father for his love, for his mercy… The Eucharist is the summit of God’s saving action: the Lord Jesus, by becoming bread broken for us, pours upon us all of his mercy and his love, so as to renew our hearts, our lives and our way of relating with him and with the brethren. It is for this reason that commonly, when we approach this Sacrament, we speak of “receiving Communion”, of “taking Communion”: this means that by the power of the Holy Spirit, participation in Holy Communion conforms us in a singular and profound way to Christ, giving us a foretaste already now of the full communion with the Father that characterizes the heavenly banquet, where together with all the Saints we will have the joy of contemplating God face to face.” (General audience)

Homily of Thursday, July 22, 2021 (Feast of Mary Magdalene)

All of us want to go to heaven, but no one wants to die. It is not surprising. We hear a lot about the resurrection. We are all fans of the resurrection, but not such great fans of the crucifixion. In the life of today’s saint, Mary Magdalene received both in their fullness. When the apostles had run away, and everyone else had run away, she was at the cross. She saw the agony of the Lord, the horrible torture, the suffering, the death of our Lord. And death is never pretty. And suffering is never pretty. It is painful as can be, even for the person watching it. It is not attractive, it is not artistic, it is not anything. It is demeaning; it is degrading; it is painful. And because she lived through the death of our Lord, she was there, the first person to see our resurrected Lord, to see him transformed and transfigured, to see the triumph of what his life had been. And this is good for all of us to know. As the phrase goes: no cross, no crown. No pain, no gain. If we want to become saints, and I hope all of us do want to become saints, in our better moments, we have to suffer through this. Sometimes life can just offer plenty of opportunity, difficulties of every sort, family, job, physical health, etc. Other times, we have to work through difficult things, like difficult moral decisions, difficult prayer realities. In any case, without suffering there is no crown, there is no transformation, there is no resurrection. It’s good to know this, because when suffering does hit us, no one wants it. No one likes it, no one revels in it, no one paints pictures about it, because it’s painful and ugly and demeaning. But if we work through this evil, this difficulty, it is a difficulty, then great things happen. Great spiritual things, great physical things. Mary Magdalene lived through both. She lived through the agony of the passion of our Lord in ways that the apostles did not, who ran away. And so she could see and experience powerfully the resurrection. Let us be like Mary Magdalene. Let us live a life of intense, intense transfiguration, through suffering, through the difficulties that life offers us, the difficulties we put on ourselves in many cases. And then we will reach the goal, which is holiness, happiness, and transfiguration.

Homily of Wednesday, July 21, 2021

The prayer we will say in a few minutes, which we are using this week, has a prayer over the offerings: “O God, who in the one perfect sacrifice brought to completion varied offerings of the law, accept, we pray, this sacrifice [that is, the sacrifice that we are about to offer, the sacrifice of our Lord, of his passion and death on the cross; the bloody sacrifice we offer in an unbloody way] from your faithful servants [that’s us] and make it holy, as you blessed the gifts of Abel, so that what each has offered to the honor of your majesty may benefit the salvation of all.” Notice, Saint Peter tells us we are a “priestly people.” That means that when we come to offer the sacrifice of the Mass, we all offer it with the ordained priest together. We are all performing our priestly function. And notice this refers to the offerings of the Law. That is those many, many, thousands of sacrifices that were offered in the temple, or before the temple, by the Jews, the children of Abraham. But it also makes reference to the sacrifices before that, offered before the Jewish people existed, by all human beings, it seems. We don’t know how that began, or when it began, exactly – our offering to our God or gods, or whatever it is, spirits good and bad. But people are offering sacrifice from the beginning, as far as we can tell. In the Bible, the first sacrifice is offered by Abel, who is a just man. In the first canon we use from time to time, there is reference also to the sacrifice of Melchizedek, again a non-Jew. And to our father in the faith, Abraham, as it were the first Jew. All those sacrifices were taken up in the sacrifice of Christ. He gives himself to be the one sacrifice that actually does the job, so to speak; that all of those other sacrifices were offered in the hopes that they would do. Notice, too, that it says that “what each as offered to the honor of your majesty” that it “may benefit the salvation of all.” That is of all of us, of all the church, and all the world. When we come to Mass, we are praying, of course, for ourselves and our dear ones, and all our special intentions. Let us remember that we are also sacrificing for the whole world, for its peace, and that it may become, in time, God’s kingdom.

Homily of Monday, July 19, 2021

Pharaoh was given ten signs, and so he gave in and let God’s people go. But then he changed his mind, because he had no faith despite those signs. God’s people were given those same ten signs, and so they followed Moses, but then changed their minds, because they too did not have faith… a fact they demonstrated at the foot of Mount Sinai with the golden calf. The pharisees ask Jesus for a sign, implying that they would believe in Jesus if he gave them such a sign. They might change their opinion about him, but they would not have faith. How many signs have we been given in our lives? Do we even recognize them? Do they strengthen our faith? …or do we ask for more signs? If Jesus’ generation was faithless and to be condemned what about this generation today? The Church has unfortunately given countersigns in the scandals. So we, the people of God, each of us, together the Church – WE are Jesus Christ in the world today. Are we faithful enough to being other Christs, so that the God seeking and truth seeking will recognize Him in us and come to faith? May God give us the wisdom and strength to live our faith to win hearts. Changed minds will not remain if the heart is not changed. 

Homily of the Sixteenth Sunday in Oirdinary Time (July 18, 2021)

“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” So H. Richard Niebuhr described the Protestant liberalism of his day, the dominant theology of his day some 50-some years ago. It has now become quite universal. And that’s unfortunate, because of God is not awesome, is not terrible, is not powerful; if God is not judging, as it were, thinking, as it were, being, as it were, fully God, the flipside of that, His divine pity, is also not real. What strikes us so powerfully about the God of the New Testament is that He, who has the power to do anything, controls the winds, does miracles, etc., etc. also is full of pity for us, love for us, care for us. “His heart was move to pity,” says todays gospel. He cares for us. He wants what is best for us. That ordinary people do that is kind of a given. That God Himself, who is this awesome, terrible, power, etc. – cares and loves and pities is quite significant and quite amazing. Without the God of wrath, the God of power, the God who is terrible in every sense of that word, awesome, powerful, there can be no true pity, true love, true concern, true transformation. And Christ, by his coming into this world, the Son of God coming into this world makes possible that power, that life that we can plug into, be transformed by, we can be one with, through prayer, through his sacraments, through Him. He tells us in today’s gospel that they should come to “a deserted place” – which means they went to pray. Prayer is always a way to connect to God and His power and His life. And that is one of the main means by which we achieve this transformation. We are made one with true reality. We deal with all the difficulties of life, etc. Because He is a true, powerful, awesome, terrible God, who is full of love for us, He can do all these things, and does all these things. Because He truly cares for us.

He is the true shepherd, unlike so often the shepherds around us who care about power and money and position and status and everything else out there. Or don’t want to be embarrassed by what happens in newspapers, etc., etc. Care more about how they look than the truth, about reality itself. His heart was moved to pity. We are called to an absurd life, a life of transformation, of spiritual, of supernatural transformation, of which prayer is a key ingredient, real prayer, true prayer. It means a radical, true, repentance and transformation. There are hard things in this life, there is no doubt about it. Things we have to do, things we have to not do; things we have to suffer, things we have to carry like the cross, etc. But the payoff, as it were, is enormous. It is life. It is eternal life, already in this world, before we even reach paradise. It is not “pie in the sky when you die.” Already in this life, God offers His awesomeness, His majesty, His love, His concern, His intimacy, if we give ourselves to Him, if we truly, authentically follow Him, if we make Him our true shepherd. Most people, as I said before, care more about themselves and how they look and how they position themselves, and what status they have and how much money they have, and what they can do, and their bank account, etc., etc. – then about you. Your mother cares about you, some other people care about you, but more importantly: God cares about you. Each of us is important to Him, and our happiness is important to Him. Because hell is real. According to the great mystics and saints, there are people in hell, plenty of people. I would rather not be one of those, if I can help it. And God offers that means by which we can have Him forever and ever. Because what is hell, but the absence of God? Hell is not torture with little demons stabbing you or whatever. It is the absence of the love and power of God.

Or better, perhaps, as one mystic and father, Isaac of Nineveh talks about, it is the presence of God for those who can’t bear God. God becomes their punishment, their torment, their suffering. God is just being God, God is just being Himself. He is radiating the goodness of Hos own nature, which for us who are turned towards Him or are moving toward Him, is a means of grace and transformation and happiness. But for those who are opposed to Him it is a means of suffering and torture and unbearableness. So, the Divine Pity. God truly, authentically cares about us. The True God, not this wimpy god that is described in Niebuhr’s description, but the awesome, terrible, powerful God who cares about us, which is amazing. And He gives us the means to become His friends, His intimate friends. None of which is easy, none of which is without effort; not that it is without suffering and difficulty. But it is far worth the effort, far worth the effort. So every day we are called. Every day we are called to follow Christ. This we know already from our catechism, from our CCD, etc., etc. But it is really meant to be true. We are called: if we follow Christ, we will be happier people; we will be more transformed people. We will be ourselves, our true selves. Because, actually, there is somebody, beyond our mother, who cares about us, who truly cares about us. And that is God Himself. So let us follow God. In the lives of the saints you see this very powerfully, in the lives of the great mystics very powerfully. Let us follow God. And it is difficult, it is difficult, no doubt about it. And we will have the happiness that we deserve, that we are made to have. We will have the fullness of life – what we have now is a shadow of life, we have a shadow of a shadow. It is not much life at all, when you get down to it. He offers true life, true abundance, because His heart is full of pity, of love for us, concerns for us. He wants what is best for us, even when he has to say hard things, difficult things, as He often does – as true shepherds will. When a shepherd gives you everything you want, everything you think you deserve, etc., etc., he’s probably not a true shepherd, probably not a real shepherd. And, God knows, we have enough of that as it is. With Christ we have the good and the bad both, the authentically good, the authentically evil. If we follow Him there is life. There can be nothing greater than that, nothing better than that.

Homily of Saturday, July 17, 2021

We know that Mary has the title “Mother of the Church.” This is a comment on that by John Paull II in his 1982 Message of Fatima: “Motherhood means caring for the life of the child. Since Mary is the mother of us all, her care for: the life of man is universal. The care of a mother embraces her child totally. Mary's motherhood has its beginning in her motherly care for Christ. In Christ, at the foot of the Cross, she accepted John, and in John she accepted all of us totally.”

Homily of Wednesday, July 14, 2021

This gospel, although it is accidental, is certainly appropriate for St. Kateri. She was one of God’s little ones. This is from John Delaney’s of her; he is an American “saint-watcher” (her dates: 1656-80): “The daughter of a Christian Algonquin who was captured by Iroquois Indians and married to a pagan Mohawk chieftain, she was born at the Indian village of Osserneon (Auriesville), New York (where two Jesuit priests, St. Isaac Jogues and St. Jean de Lalande, had suffered martyrdom in 1646), and was orphaned as a child when her parents and brother died during an epidemic of smallpox, which left her with seriously impaired eyesight and a disfigured face. She was converted to Catholicism by Fr. Jacques de Lamberville, a Jesuit priest-missionary, in 1676 and was subjected to great abuse and ostracism by her relatives and the other Indians for her new religion. Fearful for her life, she fled her native village and trekked some 200 miles through the wilderness to the Christian Indian village of Sault Ste. Marie, near Montreal, Canada, in 1677. She made her First Communion on Christmas of that year, lived a life of great holiness and austerity, and in 1679 took a vow of chastity and dedicated herself to Christ. She died at Caughnawaga, Canada, on April 17, venerated for her holiness and concern for others. She was known as the Lily of the Mohawks, many miracles were attributed to her, and in 1943 she was declared Venerable by Pope Pius XII; she was beatified in 1980 by Pope John Paul II.” She was canonized in 2012. Her statue is, if you look for it, on the front door of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

Homily of Tuesday, July 13, 2021

“If today you hear the voice of the Lord, harden not your hearts.” We just heard the cantor sing those lines from the psalms. And it really provides a keynote for our readings today, especially in the gospel, where Jesus uses some of the hardest language, the fiercest language, ever in the gospels. This is a reading nobody likes: “Woe to you,” he says to us. He is talking to cities that existed back then, but because the gospels are the incarnation of Christ extended through time, he speaking to us. And he is saying, “Woe to you.” “Woe” is a very, very severe word. It is not condemnatory. It is not condemning someone to hell, but it’s saying they are in very, very grave danger. Jesus didn’t use this word often, to say the least, and never to individuals, only two cities, for instance. I do ask that it be taken very seriously, everyone, because the reason he is being so severe with Tyre and Sidon is their refusal to repent. That’s the point. Today if today you hear the voice of the Lord…: they heard the voice of the Lord. Sodom didn’t. But they heard the voice of the Lord. They saw his mighty deeds, and did not repent, just as we hear the voice of the Lord, we see his mighty deeds, we seldom really repent. Repenting is turning around, right? Repenting means to reverse direction. It is something we need to do all of our lives, constantly, on a daily basis. How do we do that? What is involved in true repentance? Well. it’s going inward and it’s going outward, as is prayer itself. We go inward to listen to our conscience, what Saint Augustine called “the teacher within.” It’s the Holy Spirit in our hearts, as the word of God. Obviously, we blunt it an awful lot, in order to excuse ourselves from doing things that we would rather not do, all of that sort of thing. But it is listening to our conscience the very best we can. Conscience is formed over time and it’s deformed over time, and we have to admit that in ourselves as we listen to it. Going outward, on the other hand, is the prayerful reading of scripture. I don’t mean studying scripture; I mean praying and worshiping as we read scripture. It’s participation in all of the sacraments, not just the ones we decide we like and that don’t threaten our comfort zone. It’s listening to preaching. It’s doing our spiritual reading on a regular basis. Those kinds of things are extremely important if we expect to repent, to have the strength to repent, which is exactly what Christ is calling us to do today. He says to us, “Woe to you.” That’s a warning. It’s a very serious warning. If we are picking and choosing what we want to do as Catholics, picking and choosing our sacraments, picking and choosing what we want to read, what we want to do, we are Cafeteria Catholics. It is a very thin fare compared to what Christ is offering us. And we are basically refusing most of what he is offering if we do that. It is thin fare, but it is also, as he is saying today, that we are skating on very thin ice, far thinner than we think.

Homily of Monday, July 12, 2021

I think the vast majority of us believe, whether consciously or unconsciously, that the purpose of religion, the purpose of Christianity, is to create unity, peace, and concord. To unite us, and not divide us. And it matches the deep need that most of us have to belong to the group, to be accepted and to be loved, to be cherished, to be part of a larger reality. And then we come to today’s gospel, which is totally opposed to that. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace, but the sword.” This does not sound good, does not sound promising. Who wants to be the odd person out? The oddball, the freak, the misfit, etc. The person who is not in the group, who wants to be martyred and suffer, etc. and carry their cross. Certainly not I, certainly not I. And yet, we are called both to seek unity, and to seek Christ. We’ll find the unity in God, and the peace and power and grace and transformation he gives us, and from that to other people. We’ll find division and difficulty and contrast with everybody else, because our values, our vision of the world is different than most peoples. However nice people may be, however good, maybe – and the world is full of goodness, to be sure, and full of niceness, to be sure – their vision of life does not include the vision of Christ, for the most part, to a great extent and in its core. It is a vision centered in this world, on what the world estimates as being good, valuable, useful etc. That is not the vision of Christ. That also cannot bring true peace, true concord, true unity, etc. This is the great tragedy of modern life, that we have the answer of peace, but it is a sword to many people, a place of division, a place of difficulty. And though we would love to be friends with everybody and to bring love and unity to everybody, it’s not going to happen if we follow their views because their views actually lead to death and nothing, whereas the views of Christ will bring true unity, but in the reality of our experience division and conflict. Which brings us to today’s feast Saint John Gualbert: not one of the most famous saints in the calendar, 11th-century monastic reformer, founder of the Vallumbrosan order, which you all have on the tip of your tongue, I am sure. A very small place, to be sure. It still exists, but it’s very small kind of monastic order, an order given more to contemplation then to activity. And in his lifetime, he met much division. He belonged to the elite, the nobility, etc. He lived the way that the world expected him to live, that is contrary to the gospel, that is contrary to true peace, true concord, true acceptance, true love, etc., or the true God. And he found his way to the true God. You can read his dramatic story, I am sure, if you are interested, in many books online, etc. But all of us, not just Saint John Gualbert, all of us will meet resistance and difficulty, because to follow Christ, to carry our cross, to be true disciples, will of itself, despite our best efforts, cause conflict and difficulty, division and separation, and misunderstanding. And we have to accept that fact. We have to accept that reality and find our power our love, our peace, our concord in God, and through God to everybody else. Let all the saints be to us a model of true concord and true peace, that only Christ can give but which   invariably will bring us pain and suffering, the cross, conflict, contradiction etc. For many other people who, hopefully for the best reasons, you know, don’t understand us, cannot understand us, if we are faithful, if we are true, they will, if not in time then in eternity. And that is our hope: to be faithful and by our good example to bring others to the presence and fellowship and unity with Christ.

Homily of the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (July 11, 2021) 

Early in the reign of Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, the kingdom of Israel split. The 10 northern tribes, not wanting to depend on the southern kingdom of Judah, which included the holy city of Jerusalem, built 2 shrines, centered around calves of gold, one in Bethel, and one in Dan. By the time of Amos, about 170 years later, the northern kingdom had become more prosperous and more powerful than the kingdom of Judah. However, much of this wealth was built on manipulating wealth to create richer elites.  

So God sends them a shepherd tending his sheep in the southern kingdom of Judah, Amos. God told Amos to go to Bethel, this city with a golden calf, a national shrine for the northern kingdom of Israel, to denounce the lack of justice in the Northern kingdom and announce their impending destruction. God gives Amos his vocation as a prophet. The prophecies he gives are not a job he chose, they do not fundamentally come from Amos, but are instead the fruit of a vocation God chose for him. Amos prophecies to live out his life as God intends, because he has turned his life towards God. In spite of this, the response from Israel is what you would expect. Amos is initially ignored, then warned about his preaching, and eventually kicked out. And about 30 years after his preaching, the northern kingdom of Israel would cease to exist after the Assyrians invaded, conquered, and deported most of the population. 

This whole story seems odd. God sends a shepherd from Judah to condemn the actions of Israel. God does not send somebody who is well educated, with a resume that must be taken seriously by those he is speaking to. He does not send a professional prophet, from a recognized prophetic school. Instead, God sends a humble outsider, a shepherd tending his sheep. The message he brings seems pointless. Amos tells people who won’t listen that they will be destroyed and then they are destroyed. He does not convert Israel. Nevertheless, this is his vocation. This is the task that he was given by God, and through which his life was ordered towards God, towards his final end. Although it fails to convince Israel, or turn Israel away from the path of destruction, the inspired text that bears his name ends up serving an unexpected purpose within salvation history: it helps to prepare Judah for the coming of Christ, and our hearts to receive Christ. It promotes and inspires the twofold love of God and love of neighbor that is the most essential vocation every Christian is called to in his or her baptism. 

At the end of another era, about 1200 years later, lived St. Benedict. If July 11 weren’t a Sunday, we would be celebrating his feast day as Patron of Europe today. His vocation came about in a slightly different way than Amos’, representing a different point in salvation history. As an adolescent from a noble family, he was sent to Rome to receive an education. He eventually left the city and abandoned his education out of disgust with what he saw in the city. He then became a hermit, and lived in a cave at Subiaco for 3 years after meeting a monk in the area, Romanus, who gave him the monastic habit and brought him food while he lived and prayed in the cave. Eventually, St. Benedict became known to the wider community, left the cave and began founding cenobitic monasteries, monasteries where the monks live in community. The most important of these was Monte Cassino, where he wrote the rule that would ultimately be adapted for thousands of other monasteries, including our own Abbey of Our Lady Queen of Peace and St. Gregory the Great. Through all this, he endured attacks from a jealous priest who tried to poison him and tempt the monks in his care, monks who also tried to poison him, and a world thrown into chaos by barbarian invasion and the sacking of Rome. 

Unlike Amos, who received his vocation as a direct message from God, St. Benedict’s vocation proceeds more naturally. He meets Romanus, from whom he receives his vocation as a hermit. Eventually, he attracts followers to his holy way of life and begins cenobitic monasteries. To regulate the order of his monastery, he writes a rule. He does not seek to be a founder of Europe. However, because he follows his vocation, because he fulfills the task given him by God through which his life is ordered to God, his final end, his ideas grow beyond him. Eventually, Benedictine monasteries and Benedictine monks would play key roles in the evangelization of Europe, as well as in the preservation of texts from the Classical world. These two elements: Christianity and the wisdom inherited from the classical world of Greece and Rome, would combine to become Western European culture, making St. Benedict a fitting patron of Europe. 

This brings us to today. We say that there is a vocation crisis within the Church today. What we mean by this is that vocations to the Priesthood and religious life are at an unsustainably low level. In addition, polls suggest that living out the vocation of the married life in fidelity to the teachings of the Church is rare. I would suggest that these are side effects of a failure to live our lives in love of God and love of neighbor. So, how do we hear and live out our vocations? Most importantly, how can we truly live out our lives directed towards our final end? How do we live out love of God and love of neighbor? 

Looking at Amos and St. Benedict, one key feature we see is listening to God’s voice. Amos has his heart turned to God, which makes it possible for him to listen and respond when God speaks to him. It is only possible for Amos to receive his vocation to prophecy to the northern kingdom because he listens to God, he turns to God in prayer and receives inspiration, the grace needed to condemn the sins of Israel. Similarly, St. Benedict listens to God’s voice when it speaks to him through Romanus to call him to live as a hermit. He continues listening to God as he is called out of his hermitage, and as he is called away from the area of Subiaco and to Monte Cassino. Because he has a deep, active life of prayer, he recognizes the vocation God has given him for what it is, as his way to live out God’s plan and turn his life fully towards God. Similarly, through prayer, we speak with God and listen to Him, and become able to discern his will for us, whether it is revealed to us directly in prayer or through the words of others. 

Listening to and recognizing a vocation is not the end of the story, however. Both Amos and St. Benedict continued suffering hardships after they began their vocation. There were two separate attempts made to poison St. Benedict. Amos is kicked out of the city he is sent to prophecy to. They both persevered anyway because they were full of God’s grace. Their continued life of prayer made this possible. They continued listening to God and kept his will. St. Benedict, a member of the body of Christ, had the additional help of the sacraments, and the liturgy, the sacrifice of praise offered to the Father, through the Son, and in the Holy Spirit.  It is similar for us. Through prayer and the sacraments, through Christ’s sacrifice offered in this and every Mass, we receive God’s grace and become capable of fulfilling our vocations, capable of living out God’s will for us. By doing this, and only by doing this, we can become holy, truly fulfilling our most fundamental vocation, the common Christian vocation to love God and our neighbors. 

Homily of Saturday, July 10, 2021

Pope Francis has added three petitions to the Litany of Our Lady, the Litany of Loreto, and they are: the first comes after the Mother of the Church – it’s Mother of Mercy. That’s an old title that is now added to the litany. It’s in the Salve. And then after the next petition, it’s Our Lady of Hope. So it’s mercy, hope – of course, Jesus is our mercy, Jesus is our hope, and therefore she is the mother of mercy and of hope. The third petition is for refugees, Protectress of Refugees, before Protectress of the Afflicted. Of course, the problem of exiles and refugees is very, very much in the mind of the pope, in the mind of the church because of the increase of these, especially in that area of the Mediterranean today. So these presumably are things that the pope wants us to be aware of: hope, our need for it; mercy, our need for it; and help for exiles and refugees, their need for that help.

Homily of Friday, July 9, 2021
Matthew 10: 16 - 23

In today’s Gospel, Jesus describes the persecutions we may expect to see with the post-resurrection mission of the Church. It’s not a pretty picture. He speaks of the time “before the Son of Man comes” and warns us to expect some hideous future events. But two thousand years along, we don’t have the luxury of seeing these things as future events. It’s pretty obvious that the time he described has come. We are in the middle of it right now. Jesus goes on: “Brother will hand over brother to death, and the father his child; children will rise up against parents and have them put to death.” We live in a time absolutely saturated in exactly these evils:  euthanasia, abortion, mass-murder, assisted suicides – all the ways the world leads us to destroy life rather than face problems. He then continues: “They will hand you over to courts…you will be led before governors and kings…” The State did not create us, did not design us, and did not give us life. And it certainly never granted us the right to life. Therefore the State cannot take away that right. The right to life belongs to every person ever conceived because it was given by God the moment they were created us in his image and likeness. Instead of shrinking the Fifth Commandment, as the modern “quality of life” ethic does, Christ expanded it. In the Sermon on the Mount, he recalls the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”. But he added to it a severe denunciation of anger, hatred, and vengeance, attitudes that now seem to be becoming more fashionable every day. He assures us that “Whoever endures to the end will be saved.” To the extent that we nurture hatred, rage and vengeance in our hearts; to the extent that we express them as intolerance and revenge, we know ourselves to have abandoned that endurance. Yet we go on expecting somehow to be saved? Whether we admit it or not, these evils make us complicit with those who do the actual killing that has become so shockingly commonplace today. As we consider Jesus’ words, we might be inclined to see ourselves as the sheep. But let us honestly search our own hearts. Is it possible that we might find ourselves at least somewhat in league with the wolves instead?

Homily of Thursday, July 8, 2021

You’ve never had it so good. That was a slogan used by Harold McMillan in the 1950s to run for reelection as British Prime Minister. It was true then, and it is even more true now. We’ve never had it so good. I was rather stand a few years ago when the Brookings institute published the result that the majority of the world’s population, not of the First World, not of Western Europe, but of the world’s population, was middle class and better. We’ve never had it so good. And that is true. We’ve never been so well fed, long-lived, etc., as we are presently, more or less, despite the COVID, etc.  That being so, we’ve never suffered so much. We’ve never experienced such emptiness, such hollowness, such want. We are sheep without a shepherd, as our Lord said earlier this week in the gospel. We need something more. This world is not enough. The power of God, the power of the kingdom, that the Lord spoke about in today’s gospel, to free us from all the sufferings and difficulties of this world, and also give us eternal life, which transcends this world forever and ever. Each of us is called to me members of that kingdom, to manifest the power of that kingdom. Each of us is called to be Joseph to our neighbor, to open to each other, to others, that power, that life, that mercy, that graciousness, that eternal life which Christ came to give us. That’s our job. That’s what we are called to do. Each of us, individually. God knows people fail, the church fails, institutions fail – left, right, and center – in every respect. And each of us has the responsibility to manifest the kingdom of heaven, try our best always, by prayer, virtue, etc. To be transformed by the power of God, and by doing so to transform others, because each of us touches lots of other people, far more than we imagine. Each of us is called to be Joseph to each other. Each of us is called to be Joseph, to be a member of the kingdom, a transfigured, deified, transformed member of the kingdom. And that is no mean thing.

Homily of Wednesday, July 7, 2021

The first lesson we have this morning is amazing, because it brings together any number of chapters in Genesis to tell the full story of Joseph and his brothers in a paragraph or two. A lot is left out, but Joseph can be seen as a type of the Christ, of the messiah. That is, a foretelling, so to speak, of our Lord Jesus Christ, in this way: His brothers want to kill him out of jealousy. They don’t kill him, but out of greed they sell him as a slave… He, as it were, dies to his family, as he goes as a slave into Egypt, where he is unjustly condemned for a crime he did not commit. He is put into prison; by the power of God given him he is raised out of the prison. And then he saves the people of Egypt and his own family from the starvation of the famine, because of the grain that he has stored up. That’s the bread that he provides for them. And especially, though we do not get it today in the reading, he forgives his brothers their sin against him, and he says that they wanted to do harm, they wanted to kill him, but God wanted to save life, to preserve life. And thus he, Joseph, fed them with the bread he had stored up. Our Lord says: The bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.

Homily of the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (July 4, 2021)

It is the Fourth of July, of course, so it seems appropriate to say something to us as Americans. I do this by putting before you this morning three brief texts from talks given to the American people by Pope John Paul II on his various visits. The first comes from the homily he gave in Baltimore in 1995. He said: “Democracy cannot be sustained without a shared commitment to certain moral truths about the human person and human community. The basic question before a democratic society is: "how ought we to live together?" In seeking an answer to this question, can society exclude moral truth and moral reasoning? Can the Biblical wisdom which played such a formative part in the very founding of your country be excluded from that debate? Would not doing so mean that America’s founding documents no longer have any defining content, but are only the formal dressing of changing opinion? Would not doing so mean that tens of millions of Americans could no longer offer the contribution of their deepest convictions to the formation of public policy? Surely it is important for America that the moral truths which make freedom possible should be passed on to each new generation.” The second of these is from a talk he gave in New Orleans in 1987 to young people. He said: “Prayer can truly change your life, for it turns your attention away from yourself and directs your mind and your heart towards the Lord (That is an important point) … t turns your attention away from yourself and directs your mind and your heart towards the Lord. If we look only at ourselves, with our own limitations and sins, we quickly give way to sadness and discouragement (or we refuse to look at ourselves) But if we keep our eyes fixed on the Lord, then our hearts are filled with hope, our minds are washed in the light of truth, and we come to know the fullness of the Gospel with all its promise and life.” And finally from a talk he gave in 1988 to the bishops of the church. He said: “The universal Church of Christ, and therefore each particular Church, exists in order to pray. In prayer the human person expresses his or her nature; the community expresses its vocation; the Church reaches out to God. In prayer the Church attains fellowship with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ (Cfr. 1 Io 1, 3).  In prayer the Church expresses her Trinitarian life because she directs herself to the Father, undergoes the action of the Holy Spirit and lives fully her relationship with Christ. Indeed she experiences herself as the Body of Christ, as the mystical Christ.” We heard today of God sending his prophet Ezekiel to his people. They didn’t listen to him. Jesus preached to the people of his day, and for the most part they didn’t listen to him. Was John Paul sent to this country by God to tell it something, and have we, in fact, not listened to him?

Homily of Saturday, July 3, 2021

Cardinal John Henry Newman famously wrote that 10,000 difficulties do not equal one doubt. And that is true: difficulties are numerous, they are infinite, and they are every day. Doubt is more significant. And we do not deal with doubt very well. The human species does not deal with doubt well. As Viktor Frankl pointed out so many years ago, we are meaning-seeking people. We need to understand reality. That is why we have rationality. We seek to find our place in society and life, and this and that and so on. So doubt is anathema to our human nature. Yet, life is full of difficulties. And we are called frequently, both in the New Testament and in other places – with a whole field of theology devoted to this – to give reasons for our faith. So we can say look at this, and look at that, and look at this, and what does this mean, and what does that mean. And they point to something. Something powerful. Something transcendent. But some things are beyond human calculation, human discussion, human argument. The supernatural: it is above the natural by definition. And for that reason the supernatural grace, illumination, assistance, that transcends our rational nature, our free nature, our desire to seek meaning. In fact, it is the ultimate meaning. And Christ really understands that, God understands that, which is why he came to the apostles, why he came to Thomas, and why he comes to many other people. They have reasons for their belief, yes, but then, ultimately, finally, the greatest reason is Christ Himself. It is His presence, His power, the illumination of the Spirit, etc. To believe what transcends human power takes something beyond human power: the power of God. And all of us should do that. All of us should pursue this. We are made to know the truth. We are truth-seeking, meaning-seeking creatures. And the highest truth transcends our human capacity to find it. That is why we should seek. As the gospels say so well: Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and the door will be opened to you.