THE PEACE OF THE HEAVENLY JERUSALEM

A SERMON FOR THE 14th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

A couple of years ago I had a dream.  Usually I can’t remember even the dreams I had last night, but this one I remember vividly.  In this dream, I was standing with an old friend of mine in front of a great range of mountains.  It was early evening, and the sun was starting to set behind the mountain peaks before us. It was the time of day when people usually stop their work and go home to rest.  And yet, a very strong interior voice told me I needed to climb up the mountain that towered before me.  No reason was given, and yet, in my dream, I knew this to be the voice of God.  And so I told the friend who was with me what we had to do.  Of course, he was full of objections, and very reasonable objections they were too, but finally he agreed to accompany me, and together we started up the mountain path. I won’t bore you with the details of our climb—let’s just say there were many forks in the road where we picked one path over another and simply hoped for the best it was the right one; and then, finally, as we approached the summit of the mountain, the path narrowed to the point where we had to climb up an extremely steep and narrow gravel path, where the rocks kept sliding from under our feet and we were in great danger. And yet that interior voice told me to go on, to persevere, and we managed to reach the top.

Here, hidden among the mountain peaks, we found what I can only describe as a palace, a huge imposing building that was accessible by one of those alpine cog railways like the one that takes tourists up the Matterhorn.  It turned out that the palace was serving as an art gallery, but when we met the owner, he told us he needed to sell the place, and offered us this enormous palace for only $12,000.  “It’s going to need a lot of work,” he said.  We were very happy because we had been looking for a place to set up a monastery for our Guild of St. Peter ad Vincula.  Providence had guided us to the perfect place, where the monks would be able to take care of the place properly and live a life of seclusion far from the world of mammon in the valleys below.

And then, of course, I woke up to the world of reality.  And when I awoke, it was with a thud of disappointment.  Not because I realized the dream wasn’t real and we didn’t have a palace.  No, the disappointment was in myself.  Because I knew that in real life there was very little chance I would have heeded that interior voice and climbed up a mountain at that time of day with neither food nor water, no hope of shelter in the night, and for no apparently good reason. Sometimes, you see, Providence asks us to do things that seem very imprudent on the face of it.  And nearly every time we hear that quiet yet persistent voice of God, we come up with every reason under the sun why we shouldn’t pay attention to it.

“O ye of little faith,” says our Lord in today’s Gospel.  “Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat?  or What shall we drink?  or Wherewithal shall we be clothed?  Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness: and all these things shall be added unto you.”  

Now I’m not saying that prudence is not important.  On the contrary, it’s one of the most important of the virtues, and one that we must cultivate and practice if we are to make the right decisions and choices in life.  We need to make those judgments, and yet we also need to rely on God’s Providence too, to “provide” for us (which is what the word means).  That doesn’t mean that we should just sit home every day and pray, thinking that God will take of everything we need.    Reliance on Providence is not to be confused with feeling entitled to God’s help.  No—we must go to work to earn money for our daily bread.  Then we must take that money to the store and buythat bread, we have to bring it home, and slice it, and put peanut butter and jelly on it, and put it on a plate and bring it to the table.  Our dinner plates are not just going to appear miraculously before us when we sit down for dinner.  

Obviously, we must take the normal steps in life that allow us to survive and live normally.  But we must never place these “normal steps” above the kingdom of God.  First serve God.  Base everything else on this first duty.  Listen to the main things God prompts you to do in life, base your major decisions on what will best serve the spiritualinterests of yourself and your family.  Then just follow through on your decision and don’t look back.  Chances are that if you do, not only your spiritual but also your physical needs will be provided for—you’ll have a job so you can afford your bread, you’ll have the transportation to get to a store and buy it, you’ll have the good health to eat and enjoy it.  Seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.  And even if God knows that being deprived of some of these things would be to your spiritual benefit, if you’re unemployed, or living a frugal life on food stamps, or if you don’t have good health or whatever, then Providence will still provide you with the graces necessary to endure your hardships.  Indeed your very hardship is in itself a grace, a gift from Providence to encourage us to rely more on God alone.

After all, prudence may be a virtue, but faith is an even higher virtue.  In fact it’s one of the three cardinal virtues, along with hope and charity.  We have to subordinate our prudence to our faith in God, knowing he will not give us crosses we cannot bear, knowing he will not ask of us to wage battles we cannot win.  Sometimes, even with every human expectation of failure, we must take up the cross that he, God our Father,gives us, fight that battle that hesends us into, with supreme faith in God’s ability to help us achieve the victory he sets for us.  If the task comes from God, we had better embrace it, no matter how imprudent it may seem.  And above all, we must always act with supreme love of God, a love that is often imprudent, as love so often is.  But this love of God should inspire us sometimes to throw caution to the winds and begin our apparently fruitless trek up the mountain, carrying the cross of Jesus on our back.

Whether we find good things at the top of the hill or not, ultimately it doesn’t matter.  For if we hear that still, small voice of God, and if we abide by the promptings of his Divine Providence, we shall be serving him, we shall be serving God and not Mammon, and in that fact alone we shall find peace.  We shall be seeking first the kingdom of God, and working for our divine Master.  Even if the hill we climb turns out to be our Calvary, and we are nailed to the cross we carry up it, we will sooner or later find in death our palace, the palace of the heavenly Jerusalem, the house of God and gate of heaven.  It is this heavenly city that is our ultimate reward for relying on God’s Providence, so let us repeat the words of Psalm 126 and make it our daily prayer: “O pray for the peace of Jerusalem; they shall prosper that love thee.  Peace be within thy walls, and plenteousness within thy palaces.”

ETERNAL RULER OF THE CEASELESS ROUND

A HYMN FOR THE 14th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

1 Eternal Ruler of the ceaseless round
Of circling planets singing on their way;
Guide of the nations from the night profound
Into the glory of the perfect day;
Rule in our hearts, that we may ever be
Guided and strengthened and upheld by thee.

2 We are of thee, the children of thy love,
The brothers of thy well-belovèd Son;
Descend, O Holy Spirit, like a dove,
Into our hearts, that we may be as one:
As one with thee, to whom we ever tend;
As one with him, our Brother and our Friend.

3 We would be one in hatred of all wrong,
One in our love of all things sweet and fair,
One with the joy that breaketh into song,
One with the grief that trembles into prayer,
One in the power that makes thy children free
To follow truth, and thus to follow thee.

4 O clothe us with thy heavenly armour, Lord,
Thy trusty shield, thy sword of love divine;
Our inspiration be thy constant word;
We ask no victories that are not thine:
Give or withhold, let pain or pleasure be;
Enough to know that we are serving thee.

By John W. Chadwick, 1864

OUR DAILY BREAD

A MESSAGE FOR THE 14th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

We all know the expression that “many hands make light work.”  And we’re also familiar with the other saying that conveys the opposite meaning, that “too many cooks spoil the broth.”  The two proverbs have conflicting meanings, and yet they are both true, depending on the circumstances.

In the words of our Lord, we sometimes come across similar paradoxes, where he says two things that seem to contradict each other, but actually are just meant to be applied to different situations.  In today’s Gospel, which is part of the Sermon on the Mount, he tells his disciples to “take no thought.. what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink..”  And yet, earlier in the same Sermon on the Mount he had instructed them on the best way to pray, including these words: “Give us this day our daily bread.”  So why does our Lord tell us to pray for our daily bread, and then almost immediately tell us that our “heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things”?

God wants us to pray to him. Sure, he knows what we need already. He knows everything.  But he still likes to be asked.  We should ask for our daily bread, not with anxiety as to whether we are fed or not, but with the simple confidence that a child has in his father to provide what is needed whatever the circumstances. 

Our Blessed Lord is telling us not to worry about the material things of life.  In our modern American lifestyle, the idea of real “hunger” is almost non-existent.  We simply go to the local supermarket and do our shopping – our biggest worries there are choosing between the cocoa puffs and the Count Chocula. But even if global wars or epidemics or financial ruin wipe out our complacent reliance on luxury, we should still place our trust in God, knowing that he hears our prayers and will either give us what we need, or give us the grace to endure our privations.

MAKING THE CHURCH WHOLE AGAIN

A SERMON FOR THE 13th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Several decades of increasingly graphic horror movies from Hollywood have deadened our appreciation of what is truly shocking. And yet, I believe that if I were to show you photographs of the effects of leprosy on the human body, you would still find it in you to be appalled and horrified.  It is a gruesome disease: the symptoms begin with the thinning of the eyebrows and eyelashes, and then a thickening of the facial skin, so much so that the person is no longer recognizable, his face contorted and disfigured by swellings and infection.  First the nose starts to bleed so badly that you can’t breathe through it, you develop pain in the throat and are unable to speak properly.  Eventually, this results in the complete destruction of the nasal septum and the collapse of the nose.  In the advanced stages, arthritis develops, with swelling of the lymph nodes in the groin and armpits, fingers and toes become deformed and sometimes fall off altogether, and if that wasn’t enough, the leper would often go completely blind. 

Today, the world is full of lepers.  Many of them are very close to you:  members of your family, friends, neighbors and acquaintances, people you work with and deal with every day.  Because leprosy, no matter how bad it is when it ravages the body, is far worse when it attacks the soul.  We must cast our thoughts and our compassion to the hundreds of thousands of poor souls whose faith has been genuinely damaged, in some cases destroyed altogether by the after-effects of the Protestant Reformation, of the French Revolution, and now, yes, of the Church’s apostasy since Vatican II.  We must think of those Catholics who no longer have the stability of their two-thousand-year-old Catholic faith to sustain them through the temptations and trials of their life.  What happens to them?  Inevitably they fall into sin, and their soul takes on the characteristics of leprosy.  Their minds become infected with ignorance, depression and despair.  Their intellect and will are deformed by a complete surrender to sin. Their state of grace, their ability to act properly, their desire to please God—all drop away like diseased fingers and toes.  And in the latter stages they are blinded to their own sad state, excusing themselves as no worse than anyone else, justifying their sins and sometimes even taking pride in them.  

If you don’t believe me, think of “gay pride”. Look at the human deformities who walk in those parades, blind even to their own identity, and ready and willing to mutilate their bodies to turn themselves deliberately from the men and women God and Nature made them, into monsters, no longer creatures of God, but open advertisements for sin and debauchery.  They are the deformities of Satan, and yet they take “pride” in this. It is as absurd as if the lepers in today’s Gospel, instead of humbly asking for God’s mercy, were to strut up and down the street, boasting about the stench of their rotting flesh, displaying the gaping holes in their faces, holding high the decaying fragments of their body that had fallen off, all for us to admire and applaud.

This defiant attitude to the laws of God and nature can have only one logical conclusion.  As the faith of so many individuals crumbles like the flesh of a leper, it leads eventually and inexorably to the point where the very foundations of our society disintegrate and entire Catholic nations lose their bearings, voting for example en masse for legalized abortion and same-sex marriage.  And as it spreads from one nation to another, we are forced to watch helplessly, as day by day the two thousand years of Christian civilization culminate in this terrible disease of spiritual leprosy.

Is there no cure for this disease?  Back in our Lord’s day, once a person contracted leprosy, it was a death sentence.  Not a quick death, but a long and lingering disintegration of the body.  Today, in our spiritual parallel, the whole world is suffering from the torments of this slow death.  The Gospel presents us with this picture of ten lepers for a reason.  For they were indeed cured from their disease by our Lord, and it is in him today that we must place our hope for a cure for the epidemic of spiritual leprosy that has spread its tentacles through our society.  As the words of today’s Gospel float by, let’s remind ourselves that they are the Word of God, Christ himself, who passes by today with this message.  Now it’s up to us whether we are just going to let him pass by, or whether we are going to call out to him, insistently, like the lepers in the Gospel: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”

We must ask for mercy just as the lepers did. Certainly not with complacency, feeling as though we are entitled to a cure for our civilization, which after all, has done so very much in these recent years to offend God.  But neither with despair, devoid of hope that the faith can ever be restored to Christendom.  We must ask with a firm hope in God’s mercy, knowing full well that if he so chooses, the present crisis will be made to vanish just as quickly as it first appeared.  And if we see signs that God is indeed giving his graces to a corrupt Church and perverse people, then we must absolutely not greet such signs with cynicism and doubt. Rather, we must thank God for his graces.  We must be like the one leper who turns to our Blessed Lord and gives thanks, not like the nine who show no gratitude for their cure, but simply return to their lives of complacent sinfulness.  When we see small signs, such as the current rumblings of revolt in the Novus Ordo Church against Francis and his over-the-top hatred of all things traditional, by all means let’s hope.  We should hope with caution and some measure of distrust in those “conservatives” who may be starting to rise up against their more modernist masters.  But we should hope!  Rome wasn’t built in a day, and if it is to be rebuilt, that probably won’t happen overnight either.  It will take a lot of grace from God, and a lot of cooperation from those in high positions.  But none of this will happen unless we, the chosen few who have kept the faith intact, pray very, very hard for it to happen.

So let us pray for the restoration of the Church.  Let us repeat, over and over again the words of the lepers, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”  Let’s look to the signs that give any indication of any turn by the Church back towards the light of her former truth and glory, and if we see any, let us be grateful and redouble our efforts.  Maybe one day, if it be God’s will, we will be blessed to hear once again the words of our Lord: “Arise, go thy way, thy faith hath made my Church whole.”

BRIGHT AS THE SUN, FAIR AS THE MOON

A HYMN FOR THE SUNDAY WITHIN THE OCTAVE OF THE ASSUMPTION

Bright as the sun, fair as the moon,

She reigns, who held within her womb

The Word made flesh, God’s Son made hers,

To whom the angel host defers.

Night is not dark where she stands bright,

The woman robed in living light,

Crowned with the stars, who served on earth

The Word to whom her faith gave birth.

O God, we read by her love’s flame

The Word in whom we sing thy name;

We bow before thy majesty,

One holy, threefold Mystery.  Amen.

By Sr. Genevieve Glen, OSB

SHOWING CHARITY BY INTOLERANCE

A MESSAGE FOR THE 13th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

One of the last things Christ did before his Ascension into heaven, was to order, order, the Apostles to go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.  It has always been the greatest task of the Church to bring all nations to the truth of Jesus Christ.  For two thousand years we sent out missionaries to baptize the pagans, we did our best to preserve the souls of the faithful from the deceits and errors of Protestantism and other heresies.  And we were always ready to welcome with joy all converts who wished to be members of the Catholic Church and avail themselves of the graces of her sacraments.  Compare this attitude with Pope Francis, who actually said (and this is a direct quote): “The worst thing you can do is religious proselytizing.”  Proselytizing is the new-fangled Vatican II word meaning “convert”.  He’s telling Catholics that the worse thing they can do is try and convert non-Catholics.  He’s telling us to disobey Christ’s commandment to teach and baptize.  Unbelievable.

After all, what did Christ do with the lepers?  Did he “dialog” with them as Pope Francis would have us do?  Did he pat them on the back, and commend them for being “good lepers”? Did he congratulate them for their diversity, welcoming them into society so that they could infect the healthy? Did he apologize to them that they had been marginalized from the rest of society?  No.  He healed them.  And our mission as Catholics is also to heal.  To instruct the ignorant.  To rebuke the wicked.  To convert the sinful.  Christ never told us to just “be nice” to non-Catholics or fallen-away Catholics by lying to them.  Certainly, we can be charitable to them, we can be polite and civilized, tolerating to a certain extent their error.  But not by lying to them and telling them their error is on an equal level as the truth of the Catholic Faith.  It’s not“nice” to lie to them as Pope Francis would have us do.  It’s not “nice” to tell them that they should continue in their lack of faith, or in their sinful way of life, or in their disobedience to God’s law.  I cannot stand here and lie to you and tell you that there will be no consequences when you die.  Nor should we lie to our neighbor.

On the contrary, to allow our neighbor to remain in this kind of blissful ignorance is a sin on our part againstcharity.  How can we truly love our neighbor as ourselves if we just abandon them to their fate?  Love of our neighbor demands that we strive to bring them into the arms of their merciful Saviour, repentant for any sins they have committed, and eager to make up for lost time by leading a life of renewed virtue and a burning love of God.

CLOTHING OUR NAKEDNESS

A SERMON FOR THE FEAST OF THE ASSUMPTION

When Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit, it could very well have spelled doom and damnation not only for them but for all of us.  The fruit they ate was taken from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil – before that terrible day, it’s not that our first parents didn’t know the difference between good and evil and just did whatever they wanted whenever they felt like it.  It’s rather that everything they did was good, because up to that point they had passed the test of their free will, by willingly obeying God and not eating of the forbidden fruit.

We can only imagine that sickening thud which was the first ever human pang of conscience. And what a pang that must have been! These two most perfect of human beings, born not of other wicked men, but created to be the closest image of God’s own perfection, they now, suddenly, realized that out of dust were they made, and unto dust they would return.  In a thunderclap of understanding, they knew that they had betrayed their Creator, and in the process, ruined their own lives, and any prospect of happiness, in this life or beyond, for their children and their children’s children.

When God created Adam and Eve, the second chapter of Genesis describes them as being “naked, but they were not ashamed.”  They had not yet eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and were perfectly content to run around in their garden without any clothes on, just as innocent babies do today.  But the sudden awareness of their own conscience, which they experienced on eating the forbidden fruit, now gnawed at them, and they reacted.

They had just committed the most terrible sin we can imagine, betraying the God who had created them free from suffering and death, and condemning themselves and their children potentially to an eternity of suffering.  And what did they do to try and appease their consciences?  When their eyes were opened and they knew that they were naked, they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. Then they hid themselves from God. When God finds them, Adam explains: “I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.”

So the very first hint that man ever had of the difference between good and evil appeared to him in the form of immodesty.  What had been the innocent nakedness of a child now became something else entirely. In one split second the world loses its innocence, and becomes a place of sinful guilt.

Our first mother, Eve, was the first to know this difference between good and evil, and it was she who introduced this knowledge to her husband Adam, and thus to the rest of us, the poor, banished, children of Eve.  It would now require another Mother, one who was conceived completely innocent, stainless, and immaculate; one who had not inherited the awful guilt of knowing both good and evil, but who remained pure and sinless throughout her entire life.  Our Queen conceived without original sin, given to us by Christ himself from the gibbet of the cross, Blessed Mary, Virgin and Mother, Mother of Christ, Mother of God, she would now replace the poor, wretched Eve and be the Mother of all mankind.

Thus it was that God promised to Adam, on the very day he committed his original sin, that he would put enmity between him and the woman, and between Adam’s seed and the woman’s seed.  And although the serpent would bruise Adam’s heel, she would crush its head.  The heels of Adam and all his descendants would indeed be bruised by Satan from that day forth, but already in promise, the devil’s head was crushed by our Mother Mary.  For surely it was this new Mother of all mankind, this Mother of Eve herself even, who had already enlightened our first parents in their first taste of guilt and sorrow.  Surely it was Holy Mary who inspired them to try and hide their sin by their first virtuous reaction of clothing themselves so they would no longer be naked.  Surely it is still today our own Blessed Mother, who clothes our nakedness when we would otherwise stand before God, our sinfulness open for him to behold.

Without our Mother Mary, who wraps her own veil around us, how would we dare approach to the Holy of Holies in the Blessed Sacrament?  But her beloved Son gave to her this role of Protectress, and it is the first duty of her motherhood.  When her own Son was born in a cold midnight stable, in the bleak midwinter, wasn’t the very first thing she did to wrap him up in swaddling clothes and place him in the soft, warm straw of the manger?  And will she not wrap us in the comforting bands of innocence after we commit sin after sin against her little Child?

Alas, there seem to be no depths to the iniquities man is prepared to commit.  And surely we deserve the original fate of Adam and Eve’s original sin, that upon our death, we should return unto the dust from which we were created?  Surely, there is nothing we can do to raise us above the stench of our wickedness?  And yet, there is our Mother.  If it were not for this one Spotless Creature, our Blessed Lady, who herself never tasted of our sinfulness, and who never tires of protecting us from the wrath of her Son, we would be doomed.  So how thankful must we be for this greatest gift of God, who gave her to be our Mother, and who today wraps us in the swaddling bands of forgiveness.  

And because Blessed Mary alone never knew sin, she alone can clothe our nakedness, and raise us above our sin.  Because she never knew sin, she alone can herself rise above the corruption that is due to sin.  To her alone can these words never be said: “Remember man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.”  For she alone, by not tasting sin, has not deserved to taste of the punishment due to sin. So she alone would be free from bodily corruption, and at the end of her life, she alone was chosen to rise immediately, body and soul, into the heavenly bliss prepared for her by her Son.  

Today we celebrate that great event.  And as we cast our minds on that day when our blessed Mother was taken up, body and soul, into heaven, let us thank our loving God for giving us such a gift as she. Then let us thank her for raising us above the multitude of our offences, for clothing our nakedness, so that God might turn his countenance towards us, that his people may rejoice and be raised by him into the bliss of his eternal kingdom.

WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?

A SERMON FOR THE 12th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

If our Lord were to appear before us today, and each of us were given just one question to ask him, I wonder what that question would be.  It’s something we might want to reflect on later when we have a bit of time—I think the answers we come up with would tell us a lot about ourselves.  But for now, let’s stick to the events of today’s Gospel.  In it, a man does get to ask his one burning question to our Lord. This man is a lawyer, and so feels he has a reputation to uphold; the question he asks is not so much to find out the answer, as to show the bystanders what a clever chap he is.  It’s not a bad question, mind you, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?”  But he already knows the answer—when our Lord replies by asking him what the law says, he comes right out and recites it.  He knows it by heart.  “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself.”

Now that he’s answered his own question, he’s not feeling quite so smug and conceited any more.  And so as not to lose face with the people he’s trying to impress, he shoots a follow-up question at our Lord: “And who exactlyis my neighbor?”

The answer is not what anyone expects.  The Jews have always been a very tight-knit community.  They think of themselves as the chosen people, and non-Jews are referred to politely as Gentiles, and less politely as goyim, which means “cattle”.  So when the hero of our Lord’s parable is revealed as a Samaritan, his listeners must have been astonished, if not actually horrified. The Samaritans were the inhabitants of Samaria, a breakaway nation from the Jewish homeland, situated between Judea and Galilee.  They were considered heretics, and were therefore shunned by the Jews, who normally would not even talk to them, let alone help them if they were in trouble.  And yet it was a Samaritan, not a Jewish priest, nor one of the holy tribe of Levites, who helps the Jew who gets mugged.  Our Lord’s parable does not fit in with the agenda of these holier-than-thou hypocrites who were listening to him.

In 1983 a movie was made for TV, which, probably unintentionally, retells our Lord’s parable of the Good Samaritan.  It’s based on a true story, and stars Gregory Peck as an Irish monsignor, Hugh O’Flaherty, who lived in the Vatican at the time of the German occupation of Rome in the last couple of years of World War II.  I stress that he was Irish—Ireland was still fresh from its long fight for independence from the United Kingdom, and Monsignor O’Flaherty had no love for the British.  And yet, like the Good Samaritan, he did everything he could to help his one-time adversaries, by helping escaped English POWs and providing safe haven in the neutral Vatican, and safe routes of escape out of German-occupied territory.  

Nor did his “Good Samaritan” work end there.  The SS Chief of Police for Rome, Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Kappler, played by Christopher Plummer, is meanwhile intent on rounding up all of the city’s Jews for deportation to the death camps.  Monsignor O’Flaherty extends his compassion now to these hunted people, hiding them not only in the Vatican, but all over Rome, in churches, convents, and even the private homes of some of the devout local people.  His rescue organization succeeds in saving an estimated 6,500 lives by the end of the war.  We should note that, whether it be Englishmen or Jews, the people Monsignor O’Flaherty saves from death and imprisonment are not those of his own choosing, but rather those whom God provides.

But the real test of the monsignor’s faith comes at the end of the movie.  The Allies have by now succeeded in landing in Italy and are overcoming German resistance, moving steadfastly towards Rome.  Colonel Kappler sees the writing on the wall, and recognizes that German defeat is now inevitable.  He fears for his family’s safety from vengeful partisans, and in a one-to-one meeting with O’Flaherty, asks him to save his family, appealing to the same values that motivated O’Flaherty to save so many others.  The Monsignor, however, refuses, refusing to believe that, after all the Colonel has done and all the atrocities he is responsible for, he would expect mercy and forgiveness automatically, simply because he asks for it, and he departs in disgust.

Kappler is eventually captured by the Allies, and during the course of his interrogation, he is informed that his wife and children were smuggled out of Italy and escaped unharmed into Switzerland.  Upon being asked who helped them, Kappler realizes it must have been his one-time adversary, Monsignor O’Flaherty, but he replies simply that he doesn’t know.

In the movie’s epilogue we learn that O'Flaherty was decorated by several Allied governments after the war. Meanwhile, Kappler was sentenced to life imprisonment, but was visited in prison every month by O'Flaherty, his only regular visitor. The most gratifying outcome of O’Flaherty’s Good Samaritan work, however, was that eventually, the former SS officer converted to the Roman Catholic faith, and was baptized by the Monsignor himself.

It’s a simple yet powerful story, and I really don’t need to spell out in detail the message it holds for us.  It’s not meant to improve on our Lord’s parable, which has the same message, but is simply a true illustration of its significance being upheld by a good and decent Catholic man.  We should resolve today to act with equal courage if God should ever provide for us a similar opportunity to help those we don’t like, and even those who are our persecutors.  It is not only our duty to do so, but we never know what benefits may result from our good deeds.  Should anyone, ever, ask for our help, we must obey God’s greatest commandment, which is to love him and our neighbor.  And on this simple, yet hard-to-obey commandment depends the answer to that most important question of all:  “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”  It’s food for thought… We must love our neighbor as ourselves.  No matter who they are.

TO MERCY, PITY, PEACE, AND LOVE

A HYMN FOR THE 12th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love 

All pray in their distress; 

And to these virtues of delight 

Return their thankfulness. 

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love 

Is God, our father dear, 

And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love 

Is Man, his child and care. 

For Mercy has a human heart, 

Pity a human face, 

And Love, the human form divine, 

And Peace, the human dress. 

Then every man, of every clime, 

That prays in his distress, 

Prays to the human form divine, 

Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace. 

And all must love the human form, 

In heathen, Turk, or Jew; 

Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell 

There God is dwelling too. 

By William Blake, 1757-1827

OUR SUFFICIENCY IS OF GOD

A MESSAGE FOR THE 12th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

If there is one group within the Catholic Church who truly live according to the words of St. Paul “Our sufficiency is of God,” it is the Order of Friars Minor, more commonly known as the Franciscans.

St. Francis took the vow of poverty seriously.  His friars were not permitted to own anything, and even the Order itself refused financial aid.  Their simple needs were taken care of by Divine Providence, as they begged for their daily bread and worked to sustain themselves by their own labor.  

Today, we celebrate the feast of St. Clare, who founded the female branch of the Franciscans. They were known formally as the Order of Poor Ladies, and even today the insistence on poverty remains in their more familiar title of “Poor Clares.”  The Roman Breviary describes her as “an eminent lover of poverty, from which no need ever made her swerve, and she persistently refused the possessions which were offered to the sisters by Pope Gregory IX for their support.”

Poverty, believe it or not, is something to which we allhave a vocation.  Certainly, not every one of us is expected to sell all his possessions and live the life of a monk.  But the spiritof poverty is the true lot of every follower of Christ.  It should be part of our way of life, to practice the evangelical counsel of poverty by detaching ourselves from all distractions of the world, and while retaining private ownership of our goods, using them with a holy detachment and indifference. With an utter contempt for pride, we should, in accordance with the spirit of the vow of poverty, cultivate a warm-hearted generosity towards the poor and unfortunate, and offer our humble aid to pious causes.  We should give generously to the Church, and to other worthwhile charities that provide for the alleviation of suffering and hunger in this world.

In other words, our attachment to Poverty is measured by our Generosity towards those in need of our help.  Through poverty we learn to be true Good Samaritans, and, as St. Paul says, “able ministers of the new testament. 

OUR HIDDEN GOD

A MESSAGE FOR THE FEAST OF TRANSFIGURATION

The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity has been hidden from us in one way or another since the beginning of Creation, where he acts as the unseen Word of God by whom all things were made, and without whom was made nothing that was made.  Throughout the Old Testament he remains hidden in the words of the prophets and the untold number of shadowings and prefigurations that point to his coming.

When we turn the Bible’s pages and begin the Gospels, we find him first of all hidden within the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, where he begins to dwell amongst us, and from which he sanctifies the unborn soul of his cousin St. John Baptist.  Even after his birth in Bethlehem’s humble stable, he is wrapped in swaddling clothes, the majesty of his divinity concealed within this outer wrapper that symbolizes his human nature.  We see Christ walking amongst his people, and yet what did those people really see?  A human figure like them, walking, talking, eating, suffering and dying like them.  Their human vision was not sufficient to penetrate the divine nature of God that co-existed in that human framework.

With the fulfillment of the New Testament at the Last Supper and on Calvary, that same deceased human nature was hidden in the tomb, awaiting its resurrection from the dead.  And even then, his glorious body concealed itself from his disciples, as time after time, they failed to recognize their risen Lord.  Eventually, he ascended into heaven, and the veil that separates heaven and earth once again shrouded the mystery of the divine nature.

It is no different today.  The Son of God is hidden from us in the Holy Eucharist, both the divine and human nature masked under the form of bread and wine.

In all of human history, only three men have seen the true divine form of God.  In a foretaste of the beatific vision, which, by the grace of God, one day we shall all enjoy, Saints Peter, James and John were taken up Mount Tabor to witness the transfigured nature of God’s divine Son.  This most wonderful event is commemorated tomorrow in the Feast of the Transfiguration, on which we anticipate our future glorious vision of God, when we shall see God no longer as through a glass darkly, but then, face to face.

WILL WONDERS NEVER CEASE?

A SERMON FOR THE 11th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

If you read between the lines of today’s Gospel, we will find a rather sad commentary on human nature.  As Our Lord approaches the town of Decapolis, his reputation apparently precedes him.  The crowds rush out to see this man who works miracles.   They are excited because they have heard he can perform wonders, and like children at a birthday party, they want to see the magician perform his tricks for them.  And so when they present to Our Lord “one that was deaf and had an impediment to his speech”, we must suspect that it is not so much out of compassion for this poor afflicted man, but rather that they are motivated by curiosity and simple thrill-seeking.

Nevertheless, Our Lord cures the man.  True, he first looks up to heaven and sighs, making us wonder if he too is perhaps exasperated by the attitude of the crowd.  But he does heal the deaf-mute all the same, to the gratitude of the poor man, and the frenzied delight of the crowd.  “Tell no man about this”, Our Lord admonishes them.  “But the more he charged them,” says the Gospel, “so much the more they published it.”  They just couldn’t hold their tongues, but had to go around buzzing the latest big news, “Did you hear what just happened?”

If Our Lord lived today, and performed miracles here in Cincinnati, would we see the conversion of hundreds of thousands? Would we see a religious revival with empty churches refilled, long lines in front of the confessionals, crowds gathering to recite the Rosary?  Given the attitude of the people in today’s Gospel, and worse yet of the people in the world today, I think not.  We see the local news anchors broadcasting their live reports, the crowds going wild and taking selfies with the Messiah on their iPhones, teenage girls fainting in delirium, and the same whoops of delight that they showed in Decapolis all those many years ago.  After all, we live in a celebrity culture today that far outdoes the mentality of first-century Galilee.  Just a half century or so ago, people still had respect for kings, popes and presidents. Today, they are just celebrities, and when they come to town, the paparazzi chase them through the streets, we wave our handkerchiefs, take our photographs, and then can’t wait to get home to tell all our friends on Facebook who we’ve just seen.

And of course, nobodycares what the man says, nobodycares about the values he endorses, nobodyhas any interest in obeying the man’s laws, or respecting his wishes, or following his good example, or believing in him.  After all, celebrities come and go, and our only stability in such a world as this is to cheer them on, and then to cheer them off, while we remain unchanged.  Wehave become the only stable thing in this world that swirls around us.  Our steady reliance on our own attachment to the same old sins. This, I fear, is what Christ would find if he walked the Streets of Urbana today.  He would be welcomed as a celebrity, and people would be more interested in what he can do, than in who he is.

It’s not just the millennials who are guilty of this spoiled attitude.  After all, aren’t we too partly guilty of it?  Think about it!  When do we pray—reallypray?  Isn’t it when we want God to dosomething for us?  We pray to God when we have a problem, when we have a favor to ask, when we want him to intervene on our behalf.  In other words, when we want him to perform a miracle for us, to interfere in the universe he created by altering the natural chain of cause and effect. “Please God, take away the headache (that’s the result of the two gallons of liquor I consumed last night), please let my soccer team win the World Cup, please let me pass the examination, please do this, do that.”  The bottom line with most of our prayers is that we aren’t prepared to suffer the consequences of our actions, or rather we don’t accept the consequences of Adam and Eve’s action in eating the forbidden fruit that caused suffering and death to enter into the world.  Are we really being fair if we think we are entitled to some alleviation of our sufferings in this vale of tears?  Shouldn’t we simply thank God for the opportunity to suffer in this world in reparation for our sins, rather than in Purgatory with its far more terrible pains and sufferings?   And how many times a day do we pause to remember our Lord’s own terrible sufferings on Calvary and give tearful thanks for our redemption?  You see, we’re really not so far from the madding crowd, are we, demanding miracles and party tricks?  And shame on us.

And yet, in spite of this seemingly unacceptable tendency we have to pray for favors, our Lord tells us elsewhere in the Gospels that we should pray.  He wants us to pray for favors.  While today he sighs as he looks up to heaven, and while we can almost hear the frustration in his voice as he cures the deaf  mute, he still does answer the prayers of the crowd, even if they were motivated by the desire to be entertained.  He cures the man, obviously not to please the crowds, but out of the pure motive of compassion he has for this pawn of the multitude, who through no fault of his own has been dragged in front of Our Lord for their entertainment.  For him, our Lord has pity.  And so we must hope that in spite of our own negligence in prayer when things are going well for us, he will take equal pity on us and our loved ones when we cry out for his mercy.

We should, nevertheless, examine our motives when we pray.  We must choose our prayers carefully, and out of love of God and our neighbor, rather for our own petty whims and desires.  Our prayers should be for others, rather than ourselves, and when we do pray for ourselves, it should be as our Lord himself taught us, for our daily bread, for forgiveness of our sins, the resistance of temptation, and deliverance from evil.  If we do ask for material things like money, let it be so that we can pay our legitimate bills, rather than so that we can afford some fanciful luxury we’ve seen on eBay. Let us avoid doing those things that get us into trouble in the first place, such as maxing out our credit cards for things we don’t need.  To do so and then expect the Creator of the world to bail us out is simply tempting God.

To sum up, praying should not be something we do as a reflex reaction whenever we aren’t getting what we want.  We should stand in awe of God’s occasional interventions in our lives, not smugly feel that we are entitled to them.  Let our prayers be made humbly, aware that we do not deserve more than what God has already given us.  Perhaps we should follow our missal a little more closely. Let’s try and do this a bit more diligently from now on, rather than just make up our own prayers for what we think we need.  Instead, let’s take a keener interest in what’s said by the priest after every time he utters those momentous words, “Let us pray.”

DISPOSER SUPREME AND JUDGE OF THE EARTH

A HYMN FOR THE 11th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Disposer supreme, and Judge of the earth, 
who choosest for thine the weak and the poor; 
to frail earthen vessels, and things of no worth, 
entrusting thy riches which ay shall endure.

Those vessels soon fail, though full of thy light, 
and at thy decree are broken and gone; 
thence brightly appeareth the arm of thy might, 
as through the clouds breaking the lightnings have shone.

Like clouds are they borne to do thy great will, 
and swift as the winds about the world go: 
the Word with his wisdom their spirits doth fill; 
they thunder, they lighten, the waters o'erflow.

Their sound goeth forth, "Christ Jesus is Lord!" 
Then Satan doth fear, his citadels fall; 
as when the dread trumpets went forth at thy word, 
and on the ground lieth the Canaanite's wall.

O loud be their trump, and stirring their sound, 
to rouse us, O Lord, from sin's deadly sleep. 
May lights which thou kindlest in darkness around 
the dull soul awaken her vigils to keep!

All honor and praise, dominion and might, 
to God, Three in One, eternally be, 
who round us hath shed his own marvelous light, 
and called us from darkness his glory to see.  Amen.

By Jean-Baptiste de Santeul, 1689, translated by Isaac Williams