THINGS HIDDEN FROM THE WISE

Homily for October 5^th, 2019: Luke 10:17 -24.

          The seventy-two have just returned from their missionary journeys to tell Jesus: “Even the demons are subject to us” (Luke 10:17). Jesus responds with the spontaneous hymn of praise to his heavenly Father which we have just heard: “I give you praise, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned, you have revealed them to the childlike.” The wise and learned are those who fail to respond to Jesus, because they feel no need for God. Jesus’ disciples are the childlike, whose hearts and minds are open to the Lord.

          Who are today's wise and learned? They teach in our elite universities; they run the great foundations, with names like Ford, Rockefeller, and Gates. They dominate Hollywood and the media. With a few happy exceptions they consider the killing of unborn children whose birth might be an inconvenience to be a wonderful advance in humanity’s ascent from ignorance and superstition to enlightenment and freedom. They charge those of us who consider abortion for any reason a crime and a grave sin with waging a “war on women.” They look down with patronizing scorn, disbelief, and hatred on those who insist that life is precious at every stage: in the womb, but also in old age, when Grandma’s mind has gone ahead of her, and her meaningful life is over. When we contend that marriage is the lifelong union of one man and one woman, terminable only by death; and that re-defining marriage is an injustice to children, who have a right to a father and a mother, they denounce us as bigots and homophobes.

          Who, on the other hand, are today’s childlike? We are! We pray in this Mass that our merciful and loving Lord may keep us always so: aware that we can never make it on our own; that we are dependent every day, every hour, and every minute on the One who came to show us what the invisible God is like; who always walks with us on the journey of life; and who is waiting for each one of us at the end of the road – to welcome us home!

 

ST. FRANCIS

Homily for October 4th, 2019: St Francis of Assisi.

        Why does a gifted young man, son of a wealthy merchant, decide, on the verge of manhood, to exchange his privileged life for literal obedience to Jesus’ words to the rich young in the gospel: “If you would be perfect, go sell all that you have and give to the poor . . .  After that come and follow me”? (Mk 10:21, Mt. 19:21). That, in brief, is the story of the man we celebrate today: St. Francis of Assisi. 

         Born in that central Italian town in about 1181, he was given the name John in baptism. When his father returned from a buying trip to France, he started calling his infant son Francesco; in English “Frenchy” or Francis. The boy’s youth was much like that of rich young men the world over, with one exception: Francis was always generous to the poor. One day in his early 20s, he encountered a leper. Though Francis had always had a horror of people with this disease, he was moved to stop, get off his horse, and kiss the leper.

          Praying one day in the tumbledown church of San Damiano, Francis heard the painted figure of Christ on the cross say to him: “Francis, do you not see how my house is falling into ruin? Go and rebuild it for me.” Some time thereafter Francis gathered costly fabrics from the family business, loaded them on his horse and sold both the cloth and the horse in the market. Returning to San Damiano on foot, Francis offered the proceeds of the sale to the priest, for the renovation of his church. When Francis’ father sued to regain his property, the case came before the bishop of Assisi, a man named Guido. He told Francis that he had cheated his father and must make restitution. Whereupon Francis withdrew and returned to court carrying the expensive clothes he had been wearing, and clad only in his underwear. From henceforth, Francis said, only God would be his father. 

          This was the beginning of a life as a wandering hermit and preacher, living in literal obedience to Jesus' words in the gospel. At his death in 1326 Francis had inspired over a thousand men to follow him. Francis never intended to found a religious order, and possessed no ability to organize it when it came. What he did have was the example of a gospel oriented life that continues to inspire people today – most recently the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires who, on his election as bishop of Rome on March 13^th 2012 took the name of Francis as a sign of his determination to serve the poor. So we pray in this Mass: "St. Francis, pray for Pope Francis, pray for us. Amen."

"GO, PROCLAIM THE GOSPEL."

Homily for Oct. 3^rd, 2019: Luke 10:1-12.

“The Lord Jesus appointed seventy-two disciples whom he sent ahead of him in pairs to every town and place he intended to visit.” Was that just long ago and far away? Don’t you believe it! The Lord is still sending disciples to recruit new disciples by showing people the joy of a life centered on Jesus Christ.

One of them, a man now in his second year in seminary whose call to priesthood I have been nourishing, wrote recently about joining an Evangelization Club at his seminary. It started when some of the seminarians returned from visiting a state university fired with enthusiasm by the incredible response they had received from college students who came to know Jesus Christ from conversations with the visiting seminarians. “We are excited about the work done through the group,” my seminarian friend wrote, “and I've personally felt a certain aliveness in the Holy Spirit for proclaiming Christ.”

 “But of course,” I responded to him in an e-mail. “When we share our faith with others, we deepen our own faith. Teachers experience this all the time. They learn more than their students, because in order to communicate clearly the material they are teaching, teachers must first get a firm and clear grasp on it themselves.”

          “Go, and proclaim the gospel of the Lord,” we often hear at the end of Mass. But how? St. Francis of Assisi, whom we celebrate today, answers this question as follows: “Preach the gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.” Personal example is always more effective than words. If we center our lives on Jesus Christ; if we give thanks daily and even hourly for all the blessings the Lord showers upon us – so many more than we deserve – people will notice that we’re people of joy. They’ll want to know where this joy comes from. That gives us our opening: to tell them it comes from the One who loves us more than we can ever imagine; who is always close to us, even when he stray far from him.

His name, we’ll tell our questioners, is Jesus Christ.

 

THE GUARDIAN ANGELS

Homily for Oct. 2^nd, 2019: Holy Guardian Angels.

          Today’s memorial of the Holy Guardian Angels reminds us of an important truth of our Christian and Catholic faith. The world in which we live, which we entered at birth and which we shall leave at death, is surrounded by another world which, though we cannot see it, is every bit as real as the world which we see, touch, hear, and feel. This other world is spiritual. It is the world God, the angels, the saints, and our beloved dead. Though invisible, this spiritual world is not only as real as the visible world all around us. It is in truth more real than that world. For the world we see is passing away. The unseen, spiritual world is not passing away. It is eternal. Moreover, this spiritual world is our true homeland. St. Paul tells us this when he writes in his letter to the Philippians that, because of baptism, “we have our citizenship in heaven” (3:20).

          The Catechism says: “The existence of the spiritual, non-corporeal [that is, not bodily] beings that Sacred Scripture calls ‘angels’ is a truth of faith” (No. 328). And the Catechism goes on to quote St. Augustine, who says that “angel” is the name of their office: it tells us what they do. Their nature is spirit; in other words, they are not bodily but spiritual beings. “With their whole beings,” Augustine writes, “the angels are servants and messengers of God.” (No 329) They appear often in Scripture. The angel Gabriel told Mary, for instance, that she was to be the mother of God’s son. The Catechism quotes the 4^th century Greek Father, St. Basil, who writes: “Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life” (No. 336).

          Whenever, then, we are in danger; whenever we are strongly tempted, it is a joy to know that we can pray with confidence: “Holy guardian angel, protect me and keep me safe! Amen.”

STE THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX

Homily for Oct. 1^st, 2019: A spiritual prodigy.

          The young woman whom we commemorate today – she died at only 24 – was a spiritual child prodigy. Born Thérèse Martin on the 2^nd of January 1873 to deeply devout Catholic parents in northwestern France, she was the youngest of five sisters and her father’s little “queen.” Her mother’s death when Thérèse was only 4 plunged her into terrible grief which would last into adolesence. At age 9 Thérèse received a second blow, when her older sister Pauline, who had been a second mother to her, entered the Carmelite convent at Lisieux, where the family was living. Thérèse decided that Carmel was the place she too wanted to be – “but not for Pauline, for Jesus.” So certain was Thérèse of her vocation, that she started to ask permission to enter Carmel when she was only 14. It finally came, in a letter from her bishop, on January 1^st, 1888, a day before her fifteenth birthday. Three months later she was received into the community where she had longed to be from age 9. 

Thérèse soon discovered the shadow side of Carmelite life. “Of course one does not have enemies in Carmel,” she wrote, “but still there are natural attractions, one feels drawn towards a certain sister, whereas you go a long way round to avoid meeting another.” Thérèse resolved to counter these difficulties by going out of her way to be kind to the Sisters who most irritated her. Over time this would become what she called her “little way.” Since she could not do great things, she would do little things as an offering to God. One of those little things was her request to remain a novice. To her life’s end she had to ask permission to do things her fellow Sisters could do on their own.

For the last 18 months of her short life, Thérèse was suffering from tuberculosis, for which there was then no real treatment. She also suffered spiritual darkness, like a later sister with her name, St. Teresa of Kolkata. Death came on the evening of Sept. 30^th, 1897.

A year later the account of her short life which she had been commanded to write was published in a limited edition of 2000 copies, under the title, The Story of a Soul. Translated over time into 40 languages, it would produce what Pope Pius XI said at Thérèse’s canonization in 1925, before half a million people “a storm of glory.” People read Thérèse’s story, invoked her intercession, and found their prayers answered. Words she had spoke toward the end of her life came true: “I will spend my heaven doing good on earth.” Today we pray, therefore: “Ste. Thérèse, pray for us. Amen.”

WHO SHALL BE GREATEST?

Homily for Sept. 30^th, 2019: Luke 9:46-50.

          “An argument arose among them about which of them was the greatest.” So what else is new? we ask. The argument continued at the Last Supper (cf. Lk. 22:24). It continues today: we clergy are especially susceptible. Even canonized saints have engaged n the contest for position and honor. We celebrated one of them last Friday: St. Vincent de Paul. He decided to be a priest, even managing to get himself ordained several years before the minimum age, because he thought priesthood was a career, rather than a service. Only years later did he come to realize his error, acknowledging it with the words: “If I had known what priesthood was all about, as I have come to know since, I would rather have tilled the soil than engage in such an awesome state of life.”  In an attempt to put a damper on this contest about greatness, Pope Francis has put a severe limitation on the granting to priests of the honorific title of “Monsignor.”

          Our gospel reading makes it clear that Jesus didn’t overhear what his friends were arguing about. He didn’t need to. He could read people’s thoughts. This is one of a number of occasions in the gospels when he did so.

Jesus responds to the argument about greatness by calling a young child to his side. “Whoever receives this child in my name receives me,” he tells his disciples. “And whoever receives me receives him who sent me. For the one who is least among all of you is the one who is greatest.” We grasp the full meaning of Jesus’ action and words only when we know that his society was anything but child-centered. In Jesus’ world children, like women, were supposed to be seen and not heard.   

When I entered seminary just over 71 years ago, we newcomers were given a book of “Principles,” as they were called, to guide our lives. One of them went like this: “Choose for yourself the lowest place, not because of modesty, but because it is most fit for you. There is always someone whose burden is heavier than yours. Find him out, and if you can, help him.”

I’ve never forgotten that. Nor should you.