Rebuilding the Church

Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time/19th Sunday after Pentecost
    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.]  Yesterday marked the 800th anniversary of the death of St. Francis of Assisi, one of the most recognized saints.  Our Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV declared a holy year for Franciscans to celebrate their holy founder’s passing to eternal life.  While we still celebrate the twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time/nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, I wanted to take a break from focusing on our readings, and focus on St. Francis.

St. Francis of Assisi embracing a leper

    St. Francis, like St. Dominic, founded a mendicant, or begging order.  Just as we members of the Dominican Family refer to St. Dominic as our holy father Dominic, so we also refer to St. Francis as our holy father Francis.  Hopefully it won’t be too confusing when I refer to St. Francis of Assisi as our holy father Francis.  The Italians, for their part, refer to him as Il Poverello, or the little poor one. 
    Our holy father Francis was radical in both senses: he returned to the roots (from the Latin radice), but he also was a bit out there.  I remember a homily in college seminary where the priest said that if we went into the public square and stripped naked, as our holy father Francis did to demonstrate his rejection of his father’s money and inheritance, it wouldn’t be a man in a white cassock coming for us, but men in white jackets to put us into a padded room.  
    At the heart of our holy father Francis’s vocation was a call he heard to rebuild the Church.  At first, Il Poverello started to collect materials to re-construct the little church of San Damiano, which was collapsing due to age and neglect.  But he came to realize that his order, the Franciscans, was to rebuild the Catholic Church by his witness of evangelical poverty, chastity, and obedience; especially poverty.  Our holy father Francis wanted to live like Christ, who relied on God the Father and others for His basic needs; live a life totally given over to the mission of the Father by giving up the good gift of romantic relationships; do only and all that the Father willed in proclaiming the Kingdom of God is at hand.  
    Our beloved Church, though perfect in heaven, on earth is always falling apart due to age and neglect.  God constantly calls each generation to rebuild His Church.  How can holy father Francis help us do this?  Need we strip naked and give away all our money to beg from others as we proclaim the kingdom?  No.  Need we jump into rose bushes every time we feel a sexual temptation coming on (as the story goes, Francis jumped into the roses to get his mind off the temptation, and from that time on they bloomed without thorns)?  No.  Need we take a vow of obedience to a religious leader and go wherever he or she tells us?  No.  
    But when we live as owners of our possessions rather than our possessions owning us, we are living, each in our own way and according to our own vocation, the evangelical counsel of poverty and building up the Church of God.  God has called many of you to engage in the cares of the world, in commerce, and to build up the earthly world by our good stewardship of it, advancing appropriately technology and unlocking the secrets that earth has to help us better understand our Creator.  But all too easily we make life about money, or possessions, or some other thing, rather than living life for God.  
    When we recognize that human sexuality is a precious gift from God that God calls us to use very specifically, each according to our vocation, we are living the evangelical counsel of chastity and building up the Church of God.  God has called many of you to be spouses and parents.  Some of you have heard God’s will time and time again (and sometimes many times after that) to be fruitful and multiply, which not only increases the size of our human family, but increases the number of disciples of Christ.  But the key is not simply having as many babies as physically possible–a number which varies for each woman and a number to be discerned through prayer and study by husbands and wives–but to see how God wants you to engage in the marital act as a way of expressing the love of God, rather than simply seeking after the pleasure that comes with it.  And for those who are not married, to utilize that desire for fatherhood or motherhood either temporarily or permanently in a non-physical way: caring for others and showing others brotherly and sisterly love, or even fatherly and motherly love without the biological connection.

    Lastly, when we obey legitimate authority, always subject to what we know God commands us, and when we seek out the will of God and strive to do that above all else, each according to our vocation, then we are living the evangelical counsel of obedience and are rebuilding the Church of God.  Too often and too easily we live life with the theme song of Hell: “I Did It My Way” (with no offense intended towards Frank Sinatra, God rest his soul).  Now more than ever, society tells us to focus only on ourselves and what we want.  We are like the sea gulls from “Finding Nemo,” always saying “Mine, Mine.”  When it comes to Burger King, have it your way.  But when it comes to holiness, we find it through submitting our will to God the Father’s will, sometimes made known to us strongly and miraculously, often times made known through prayerful reflection and study.  And not just doing the will of God begrudgingly, but lovingly saying “Thy will be done,” with our lips and our lives.
    God calls us, as He called our holy father Francis, to rebuild His Church.  The way we do so will not follow exactly Il Poverello, but will follow the same principles: poverty; chastity; obedience.  St. Francis of Assisi wrote, “Praised be you, my Lord, through our sister bodily Death, from whom no living man can escape.  Woe to those who die in mortal sin.  Blessed are those who will find your most holy will, for the second death shall do them no harm.”  If we, according to each of our vocations, live a poor, chaste, and obedient life, the second death shall do us no harm, and we shall praise God for eternity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.  

No Man is a Failure who has God as his Friend

Nativity of the Lord–Second Mass

   In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  While there are many classic Christmas movies, one of the great is “It’s A Wonderful Life,” starring Jimmy Stewart.  But, truth be told, it’s not the most joyful Christmas movie ever.  In the second half of the movie, after we’ve been introduced to George Bailey by an angel named Clarence, we see Bailey, a good man, go from failure to failure, as his absent-minded uncle loses a significant deposit that kept his bank in business, and then he foolishly decides that everyone would be better off if he hadn’t existed.
    How many of us here have been in George Bailey’s shoes?  Maybe not wanting to jump into a freezing river off a bridge, but wondering if our life has made a difference, or if anyone would really notice if we didn’t exist.  Maybe we feel like they would be better if we didn’t.
    Clarence, George’s angel, grants, if even for small while, George’s wish and shows George just what an effect he had on others: from his family, to those who benefited from his reasonable loans, to local citizens.  Spoiler alert: George realizes just the impact he has had on others’ lives.  He recognizes that when one gives of himself, when one treats others as human beings and not as means to gain power or money, one becomes rich, no matter how much or how little one has.  George recognizes that, despite what seems like earthly failures, he is, as his brother Harry calls him, “the richest man in town.”  Or, as his angel, Clarence, writes in the front cover of his Bible, “No man is a failure who has friends.”
    How poor we humans were, even the Chosen People of God.  We found ourselves trapped in cycles of sin.  The greatest king God had provided for His people, King David, was long dead, and his descendants no loner occupied a throne.  Even the voice of prophets had fallen silent.  A foreign, pagan power controlled the Holy City and daily oppressed the ones whom God had promised never to abandon.  We walked in darkness.  We were poor.

    And yet, “the kindness and generous love of our God…appeared.”  At the moment we had lost hope; when despair had almost taken us, God sent us an Angel of Salvation, the Angel that the canon references when it says, “command that these gifts be borne by the hands of your holy Angel to your altar on high in the sight of your divine majesty,” Jesus Christ, the fullest messenger (𝛼𝛾𝛾𝜀𝜆𝜊𝜍 in Greek) that God ever sent.
    And God revealed to us that we were not poor, as long as we enjoyed friendship with Him.  As long as we remained close to God, we had everything, because “everything belongs to you…and you to Christ, and Christ to God,” as St. Paul says in his first epistle to the Corinthians.  
    But it was not only the Chosen People who felt the sting of their poverty.  Even we, who have been washed clean from original sin and made the adopted children of God in Christ through Holy Baptism can feel like George Bailey.  We can feel like we don’t add anything to society, or even our friends or family.  Life gives us lemons, and we make sour faces.  
    The Good News is that God found us worth saving, though we had no worth in ourselves.  The Good News of the Incarnation is the grand love story of God for His People, who, though they walked in darkness, God did not abandon, but illuminated.  God doesn’t have to show us what life would be like without us; He shows us that we are worth humbling Himself and taking on our frail humanity in order to prove His love for us.  Our debt consists of much more than $8,000 that Uncle Billy lost and Mr. Potter took.  But like the village that rallied around George Bailey, God gives us what we need so that our debt does not mean that we are lost to eternal bondage to sin and death.  And unlike the fellow citizens of Bedford Falls, we didn’t do anything for God.  He owed us nothing.  And yet He still gave, up to and including the Precious Blood of His Beloved Son.  If the donation of money from George Bailey’s neighbors signified their support for the banker who had carried them through the Great Depression, financed their homes and businesses, and saved them from foolish decisions, how much more does the Incarnation and Paschal Mystery show us just how much God supports us and loves us.  
    And this gift from God, the reason for Christmas, truly changed the world.  Without Christ we don’t truly understand human dignity and individual liberties.  Without Christ we mark time altogether differently.  Without Christ we don’t have universities, hospitals, magnificent cathedrals, the scientific method, so many things that we take for granted.  But, above all, without Christ we don’t have salvation, and the kingdom of heaven remains locked to us, which would be the saddest fact of all.  
    But God gives Himself to us, to prove just how much we mean to Him.  Though we are poor, like the shepherds in Bethlehem, God calls us to Himself by the voices of other messengers, other angels, to let us know the good news that our lives have value beyond what we could ever imagine, no matter how good or how bad our lives seem to go.  
    One of the reasons that “It’s A Wonderful Life” continues to be a Christmas classic is because it tells a timeless truth on the silver screen: even when we are at our worst; even when life seems to crash down all around us; even when things seem the darkest; God loves us and values us and is willing to pay any price to save us and help us walk in the light.  If I may be so bold, I would slightly change Clarence the angel’s words to George Bailey, as words that we should always keep at the front of our minds, not only at Christmas, but every day: “No man is a failure who has God as his friend”: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Caring for Lazarus

Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

    When it comes to funny quotes in a musical, “Fiddler on the Roof” definitely has its fair share: “Rabbi, is there a blessing for the czar?”  “May God bless and keep the czar…far away from us!”; “As Abraham said, ‘I am a stranger in a strange land…’”  “Moses said that.”  “Ah.  Well, as King David said, ‘I am slow of speech, and slow of tongue.’”  “That was also Moses.”  “For a man who was slow of tongue, he talked a lot.”  And, one that is apropos for the readings today: “I realize, of course, that it’s no shame to be poor, but it’s no great honor either.”
    God reminds us today, both through the Prophet Amos and through the Son of God, Jesus Christ, that we have a responsibility to care for the poor.  That might make us a little uncomfortable, as we have a lot of poor people here in Flint, and caring for them requires a certain amount of resources.  Pope St. Paul VI, in his homily for the canonization of St. Juan Macias, a Dominican friar, said, “When we say that Juan Macias was poor, we do not mean the kind of poverty that can never be sought or blessed by God: the poverty which is culpable or due to passive inertia with regard to earning a legitimate sufficiency.”  So there is a type of poverty that is, we might say, vicious, because it stems from laziness.
    But, there also exists a poverty which does not come from natural sloth, but comes from an inability to care for oneself, as Lazarus in the Gospel was unable to do.  His sores meant that he had to keep away from most people, which certainly meant he could not earn a living.  Jesus says that he should have been a reminder to the rich man at whose door he rested.  But the rich man ignored Lazarus.  Even the dogs cared for Lazarus more than the rich man, as the dogs licked the sores to try to clean them.  
    This type of poverty we have a responsibility to alleviate according to our means.  Why?  Because God has a special love for those who cannot care for themselves.  In Old Testament times, this meant the poor, widows, and orphans, who had no means of familial support but had to rely on the generosity of strangers.  In our times, when we have many agencies that care for the poor, be they religious groups or government offices, which can make us think that we don’t have to do anything any more.  I think of the exchange between Ebeneezer Scrooge and two men collecting money for the poor:
 

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge…it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time…”
“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman…
“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge.  “Are they still in operation?”
“They are.  Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”
“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.
“Both very busy, sir.”
[Scrooge said,] “I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

Scrooge supported with his taxes prisons for the poor and workhouses for the poor, which often had deplorable conditions themselves, but in the end, felt that the poor should rather die and not burden society so much.  How much of Scrooge still remains in our heart?
    God calls us to care for the poor because through our care, people learn about the loving concern of our heavenly Father.  Those who are not able to work, whether because of a physical limitation, and all too often these days mental handicaps, are still children of our heavenly Father and human beings worthy of respect.  Do our actions, the way we treat people who are poor, demonstrate respect or something other treatment?  
    This is why we annually provide toys for Christmas for low-income families; food for people, especially at St. Mary Oratory on the east side of Flint; the work with the North End Soup Kitchen; and Hope in a Box for Catholic Charities: when we work together, we can do more to help them poor than we could by ourselves.  But we try to offer opportunities so that we can live up to our call to care for the poor and imitate our heavenly Father.  
    Certainly, it can be hard to discern who truly needs assistance, and who tries to scam people.  Those who are poor from laziness, or those who try to get money pretending to be poor, certainly have a harsh judgement awaiting them, as it not only affects their own person, but makes many people question assistance to the poor.
    But there is also spiritual poverty, which is no less prevalent and no less problematic.  St. Teresa of Calcutta once said, “The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty–it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality.  There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.”  You can have a full belly and warm clothes and a house in which to sleep, but if you do not have God, you are still poor, because you lack the treasure buried in the field and the pearl of great price: a loving friendship with God which makes all of life worth living. 
    [Cameron today you have been accepted into Order of Catechumens.  You have acknowledged your spiritual poverty and God wants to make you rich.  No, you may not increase in financial stability, but God will pour out all His graces that you need to go to heaven, where no one lacks for any good things.  Like all of us baptized, it is only when we recognize our poverty, our need for God, that God fills us with His grace and love.  You have cried out to God in your poverty, God has heard you, and God is preparing to give you the best inheritance you could imagine: eternal life in heaven after a life of following Him on earth.  When you have God, even if you have nothing, you have it all.  When you don’t have God, even if you own everything the world can give you, you have nothing.]
    May all of us, then, continue to work to provide for the poor, whether financial or spiritual poverty.  May we do so, not begrudgingly, not as a “requirement” that we have to check off, but as an expression of love for our brothers and sisters who lack sufficient resources, be they food, clothing, or the knowledge and love of God.  May we not live like the rich, who ignored Lazarus right in front of him, but see each person as a child of God, worthy of dignity, respect, and whatever assistance we can give, even if that is simply prayer. 

Humility and Poverty

Sunday within the Octave of the Nativity

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  One of the foci (plural of focus) of St. Francis of Assisi (or, as the Dominicans call him, our Holy Father St. Francis), and the Franciscan Orders, is the humility and poverty of God.  This shouldn’t surprise us much, as Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone (as he was baptized) gave up his family’s wealth and prestige to become a begging or mendicant friar and took the name Francis.  He literally (and I use that word properly) stripped off his family’s wealthy clothes and put on a rough, brown habit, and relied on the generosity of others to survive.  And through this poverty, and with the assistance of our Holy Father St. Dominic, they did much to rebuild the Church, which had so greatly fallen into disrepair.
    But poverty and humility don’t only regard physical possessions or wealth.  Our Lord shows us great humility and poverty in His Incarnation.  And yes, the Gospels are clear that the Blessed Mother and St. Joseph did not have much wealth (they had to present the poor family’s offering of two turtledoves or pigeons to redeem their firstborn son).  But the poverty of Christ comes from recognizing how much He gave up to take our human nature onto Himself.  As pure spirit, before the Incarnation, Christ had no limits, experienced no lack, and existed in pure actuality.  After the Incarnation, Christ could be seen in only one place, few the pangs of hunger and thirst, and would grow from potentiality to actuality throughout His life.  The King of the Universe could be mocked by his neighbors.  He could get splinters and feel pain while working with St. Joseph in his workshop.  
    But beyond that, Christ subjected Himself to the Law of Moses.  Our Lord gave the Law to Moses, and knew its deeper meaning, as He would preach in the Sermon on the Mount.  But, as one like us in all things but sin, He subjected Himself to a Law to which He, as Lawgiver, should never have had to follow.  The Law was for children as a tutor.  He needed no such tutor.  And yet, He did not consider it beneath Himself to obey the law in all its commands.  He received circumcision on the eighth day (as we will hear on Wednesday); His parents redeemed Him in the Temple 40 days after His birth (as we will celebrate on Candlemas), which is the earlier passage of today’s Gospel; He went to the Temple for Passover and the Feast of Booths and the Day of Atonement.  He who would declare all animals clean to St. Peter in a vision, obeyed kosher laws.  He would pay the temple tax, though He was the Lord of the temple and the object of its worship.  
    And He did all this so that He could redeem those under the law, so that we might not simply be servants or slaves (though St. Paul will still use these words from time to time), but sons and daughters in the Son of God, so that we could have the same access to the Father that He has.  What great humility for the one who did not sin, which the Law was meant to guard against, to live according to the Law!  What great poverty that He would live under the same rule as slaves, though He is Son.
    So how do we demonstrate this humility and poverty?  Or are we too important to humble ourselves and live under the rules of others, even when they seem not to apply to us (as long as they don’t go against our conscience)?  Kids will often confess disobedience to their parents in one way or another.  I know I disobeyed my parents when I was a child (shocking, I know!).  I will often remind them that our Lord, when He was a child, obeyed Mary and Joseph, even though Christ made and redeemed Mary and Joseph.  Christ, strictly speaking, owed no obedience to anyone; He is God.  And yet, if Joseph told Him to wash His face, or help His mother with dinner, or join in in the workshop, Jesus would yes, “Yes, Abba.”  If the Lord of all Creation can obey human parents, then we, who are not divine, can certainly give our best attempts to obey our parents and what they say.
    How about when Holy Mother Church asks us to do something: how do we respond then?  Some laws are man-made.  They are rooted in what we believe, but they are not directly from God.  Do we take time to obey them, or do we figure that we know better and don’t need to be shackled by such limiting regulations?  When the Church asks us to do penance to unite ourselves to Christ on the cross on Fridays, do we do that, in one way or another?  When the Church asks for some support in prayer, can we add a little prayer time to our daily habits, or do we complain that we pray enough, and are too busy to add another devotion?  Certainly devotions are not necessary, but they can sometimes help.  
    It is so easy to think that we know best, and we shouldn’t have to do something because it doesn’t apply to us, or won’t have an effect on us.  But Christ, through. His Incarnation and Nativity, shows us how to humble ourselves, and how to live in poverty, maybe not of possessions or money, but in poverty of spirit.  May the humble Christ Child, whom St. Francis, il Poverello, the little poor one, loved so much and imitated, help us all to be a bit more humble, a bit more poor, so that we can be more like our Lord Jesus Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

The Shepherds

Nativity of the Lord: Mass at Night
    Merry Christmas!  As we assemble tonight to celebrate the birth of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ, we do so at the same, or at least a similar time, as the shepherds just outside of Bethlehem.  Luke records that the shepherds were “keeping the night watch over their flock.”  And yet, in the midst of the darkness, “the glory of the Lord shone around them” as they witnessed angels and heard one of the first proclamations of the beginning of the Gospel, that, “‘today in the city of David a savior has been born for you who is Christ and Lord.’”

Painting of the shepherds from Shepherds' Field in Bethlehem

    I started a tradition when I became a priest to add, each year of my priesthood, to a Fontanini nativity set.  In the first year I had to buy the basics, and besides Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus, and the angel, the only other figure who was included was a shepherd and two sheep.  There’s something about the shepherds that belongs at the heart of the nativity, just slightly behind the necessary figures of the Holy Family themselves.
    Perhaps part of their importance connects to how many times in the Old Testament God refers to shepherds.  Psalm 80 states, “O Shepherd of Israel, lend an ear, you who guide Joseph like a flock!  Seated upon the cherubim, shine forth.”  Probably one of the currently most popular psalms, 23, states, “The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I lack.”  God appoints Joshua, son of Nun, “that the Lord’s community may not be like sheep without a shepherd.”  God likewise calls David as the king to shepherd God’s people by ruling over them. 
    God also condemns bad shepherds.  In Jeremiah he states, “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the flock of my pasture…I myself will gather the remnant from my flock…and bring them back to their folds.”  Through Ezekiel God says:
 

Woe to the shepherds of Israel who have been pasturing themselves!  […] I myself will search for my sheep and…I will bring them back to their own country and pasture them….In good pastures I will pasture them….I myself will pasture my sheep; I myself will give them rest…The lost I will search out, the strays I will bring back, the injured I will bind up, and the sick I will heal.

Shepherds hold an important place in the Old Testament, both as an image of God who cares for His people, and as a warning for those who have authority but do not exercise it well.
    Many have also noted that shepherds were poor.  They did not, beyond their flock, have much to their names.  They recognized their dependance on God, and relied on Him to provide for their livelihood.  And so it is the poor, those who not only lack material goods, but also who recognize their need for God, who first hear the message of the Gospel, and are drawn to worship the newborn king, “‘wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.’”
    Tonight the Lord invites us to come before Him like the shepherds, no matter what our adjusted gross income.  We come in our poverty of spirit, our recognition that we need God, and bow before the Shepherd of Israel, the one who leads us to good pastures, who rules over us, who seeks us out when we are lost, and places us upon His shoulders when we are injured.  As Psalm 100 states, “we are his people, the flock he shepherds.” 

Door of Humility

    Poverty in spirit is an exercise in humility.  At the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem, there is a door, which was added in the sixteenth century, that was built purposefully with small dimensions.  Practically, it kept people from bringing horses and cattle in the church.  But that was quickly theologized and the door was called the “Door of Humility,” because each person, no matter how rich or how poor, how powerful or how insignificant, had to bow down to be able to enter.  As we come before the Lord, we bow down in the presence of our God and King.  While not required, kneeling when we receive Holy Communion, is a beautiful expression of our humility and poverty in spirit as we receive the same Jesus who was born in Bethlehem in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist.  And during the Creed, we usually make a profound bow from the waist when we mention the Incarnation, but tonight, the day we came to know it happened, we genuflect, lowering our very bodies in each case which is meant to remind us to humble our souls as well. 
    Lastly, while not part of tonight’s Gospel passage or pericope, verse seventeen of this same chapter states, “When [the shepherds] saw [the infant lying in the manger], they made known the message that had been told them about this child.  All who heard it were amazed by what had been told them by the shepherds.”  This great celebration is not something that the shepherds could keep to themselves, nor should we be able to keep this great celebration to ourselves.  When we appreciate God as our shepherd; when we recognize the great humility that God first showed us by taking on our human flesh, with all its limitations and weakness, we should share that news with others.  So many celebrate Christmas, but they have forgotten what it means, beyond presents and big meals with family and friends.  Christmas, at its heart, is about the Lord, our Shepherd, seeking us out, and taking us upon His shoulders so that He can carry us to the verdant pastures of repose in heaven.  God did not have to do this.  God would not have lost anything in Himself if He had let us pay the price for our disobedience in Adam.  But so much did He love us, that He got rid of the bad shepherds who only cared for themselves, and shepherded us rightly, taking us to Himself in love and truth. 

    Tonight, may the lights of this great temple shine like the angels in the heavens.  May our celestial hymn of “Glory to God in the highest,” not only ring out in the ceilings of this church, but re-echo outside and in the witness of our lives, so that others may also come to adore our newborn King, and find the life that God desires for all His sheep.  

How to be a Holy Family

Feast of the Holy Family

            A few weeks ago I had the great pleasure to visit Lansing Catholic High School and talk with the sophomores in Theology class.  Part of the class was spent talking about how I had discerned that the Lord was calling me to be a priest.  The other part of the class was answering prepared questions that they had penned anonymously.  One of the many great questions they asked was why marriage and family isn’t talked about more.  And so, here we are, at the feast of the Holy Family, the day after Christmas, when we get to focus on family life, including marriage.

            Having a holy family, based upon the example of the Holy Family, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, is often thought of as impossible.  After all, Jesus is fully God and fully man, Mary was conceived without original sin, and Joseph kept getting these dreams from God to tell him what to do to care for the Blessed Mother and the Christ Child. 

Statues of the Holy Family in Flight to Egypt,
in Bethlehem, the West Bank

            But what made the Holy Family holy?  It was that, in every circumstance, they were obedient to the will of the Lord.  They were always ready to say “yes” to God, even if it meant leaving home and family to go to Egypt, so that Jesus would be protected from King Herod’s murderous decree.

            The life the Holy Family led was not easy!  Following the will of God included challenges, real and monumental challenges. But still, despite the trials and tribulations, they were resolute in saying “yes” to God.

            Things have not gotten any easier for families in the two millennia since Christ walked the earth.  Too many mothers feel forced to kill their unborn child because there is no support from the father of the child or from the mother’s family; marriage as it was created by God, between a man and a woman for life, seems to be under constant attack from the secular culture in the name of a false view of compassion and diversity; too many children do not have enough to eat or drink because of underemployment and unemployment; families, especially in our own State, have had to leave their homes and families in search or a stable job in other States.

            How hard it is to say “yes” to God these days! To choose life in a culture of death; to take seriously the call of every husband and wife, not just to be open to life and have children, but to raise them and form them in the faith, starting with the life of faith lived out at home, but also including trying to make sure that children receive the best education and religious formation possible; to stand up for the indissolubility of the marital bond between a man and a woman.  While many of the challenges are different now then they were in first-century Palestine, striving for holiness as a family, striving to say “yes” to the will of God in all circumstances, is no easier.

            In the midst of these trials, and many others that I have not named, the Church stands behind you!  While we need priests to bring the sacramental life to the People of God, most especially the Eucharist, we also need families to fill the culture with the Gospel; to preach Christ crucified and raised from the dead; to pass on the faith to their children.  From these holy families will come holy priests, and more holy families to continue to prepare the way of the Lord and make straight His paths.

            How does the Church stand behind you?  First and foremost through the Sacraments which give you the grace to be holy families.  It is impossible to be a holy family without the grace, the inner life, the love, of God in you.  And so we stand ready to impart that grace to you through the Sacraments.  We also stand with you to help you through the tough times, whether they are financial or emotional.  Through the work of so many great services that the Church offers, we can help you to choose life, even if no one else wants to support you in that choice; to find a way to provide for your children; to talk problems out and find counseling for the times when families are struggling to simply be civil in dialogue; to give your children the full benefit of a quality academic and religious formation, especially in our Catholic schools, so that they can become, not only good citizens of the City of Man, to quote St. Augustine, but more importantly good citizens of the City of God. 

            I could spend hours talking about all the ways that we as a parish community help each other out to be holy families.  Our St. Vincent de Paul Society works tirelessly, not only to provide clothes, but also to help with utility payments, and other basic necessities, especially after one or two members of the household have lost their jobs and are coming up a little short to keep a roof over their heads. 

            Our students do great work with Alternative Spring Break, and so many members of the permanent community here help them in many ways, to provide basic necessities for the underprivileged members of our nation and in other countries.

            Our Right to Life committee works hard to make sure that new mothers and fathers know that there are people who will support them in bringing their child to term and providing for the needs of the family during pregnancies.

            Our school children provided a vast amount of presents to families that otherwise would have gone without this year, spreading their own blessings out to those who are struggling.  And our pastor, teachers, and family members of the school are very generous in ensuring that, if a child of our parish wants to attend our great school, and receive the quality education and formation which it provides, money will not be the issue that prevents that desire from becoming a reality.

            The Holy Family had challenges in living a holy life, and families today have challenges in living a holy life.  But the basic ingredient in the Holy Family’s life, and in any family’s life that wants to be holy, is saying “yes” to God: in the big things and in the small, seemingly insignificant things.  But remember, you are never alone.  We as a Church: the saints in heaven like Mary and Joseph, and those still struggling here on earth to make it heaven, are behind you 100% so that you can say “yes” to God.