Drawing Near the Unworthy

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Last week we had the profession of faith by St. Peter that our Lord is the Christ, the Messiah, and this week we get a second dose of St. Peter, but this time we hear about his call.  What strikes me in this Gospel passage is that Peter acknowledges his own sinfulness, and yet the Lord does not draw back.  In fact, the Lord draws in Peter and gives him a new mission, no longer to strive to catch fish, but to work at the catch of men, captured in the nets of the love of the Lord.
    We’ve all, I believe, been in the position of Peter.  We sin, whether venially or mortally, and we don’t feel worthy for Christ to be around us.  I think this is especially true of mortal sin.  Mortal sin, as we hopefully remember, is when we commit a grave sin (something serious); we know it’s wrong; and we freely choose to commit that sin anyway.  All three characteristics have to be present in order for a sin to be a mortal sin.  Mortal sin separates us from God and takes away sanctifying grace, the grace that allows us to go to heaven.  Mortal sin is ordinarily removed by sacramental confession, though it could be removed if we had perfect contrition (though I’m not sure you want to take a chance that you had perfect contrition if you have the chance to go to confession).  The Church teaches that if a person were to die in a state of mortal sin, we do not know a way that that person could go to heaven.
    But, some may espouse the view that if we are in mortal sin, God stops loving us.  Or that, if we are in mortal sin, we should stop praying, because God won’t hear our prayers anyway, since we’re not in a state of grace.  But that’s not what our Gospel shows us today.  Who knows if the sin Peter thought of was mortal or venial.  But to fall on his knees makes me believe that there was something big, maybe even just his lack of faith in our Lord’s command.  Still, the Savior doesn’t say, “Sorry, I can’t hear you; your sin is blocking my hearing.”  The Savior doesn’t say, “You should have thought about the consequences before you chose to do what you did.”  The Savior didn’t say, “I can’t love you if you choose to sin.”  Our Lord told Peter not to be afraid, and called him to mission as His Apostle.
    We shouldn’t give sin more power than it has.  We shouldn’t give sin more power than God, which is what we do if we think that God stops loving us or God cannot hear us or will not answer our prayers if we are not in a state of grace.  Anything good only happens by the grace of God, including repentance.  Otherwise, we fall into a kind of semi-Pelagianism, where we earn our own salvation.  Feeling sorry for what we have done can only happen by God’s grace.  The movement towards the confessional can only happen by God’s grace.  And God does not stop being our loving Father when we have been sinful children.  
    Think about it in human terms.  If your child comes to you with an obviously broken arm, but is also covered in mud, do you make your child shower off before you address the broken arm?  Do you yell at the child because he’s making the house a mess when your child just wants you to take care of his fracture?  Do you tell your child you won’t listen to her request until she takes off her dirty clothes and cleans up the mud she has tracked into the house?  “‘If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heaven Father give good things to those who ask him?’”  
    Now, this is not to ignore sin, or say that mortal sin is no big deal.  Some of the saints have said that they would rather have excruciating pain than commit a mortal sin.  But if we fall, do not push the Father away because you feel unworthy.  To be clear, you are not worthy.  But the Father doesn’t care about your worthiness.  He cares about your salvation, and will do whatever He can to affect your healing.  
    And, having been healed, the Lord also wants us to become fishers of men.  Some are called to be fishers of men in the sense of a call to a vocation to the priesthood, where they will join others to Christ through the Sacraments, especially Holy Baptism, Holy Penance, and the Most Holy Eucharist, though certainly the other sacraments as well.  But God calls all of us to seek out those who have strayed from their Catholic faith and to invite in those who are not Catholic so that they can have union with Christ and His Mystical Body, the Church, so that they can be saved.  Is it possible to be saved without baptism, or without full union with the one Church that Christ founded?  God can save people however He wants.  However, our more certain way towards heaven is through the narrow way that Christ shows us through what He teaches us in the Scriptures and in the Church.  How sad it would be if others missed out on salvation, or maybe even just had a longer time in Purgatory because we were unwilling to invite them to become Catholic, or to return to the practice of the faith of their childhood.  
    Does that mean that all whom we invite will accept the invitation?  No.  Sadly, sometimes when we present people with the joy of following Christ, they walk away.  It happened in the Gospel; it will happen in our interactions with others.  But woe to us if we do not at least invite people convincingly and joyfully show them how much we love Christ and how it makes our life more fulfilling.
    Our Lord did not depart from Peter when he acknowledged his sinfulness.  Our Lord does not depart from us when we sin.  May we do all we can to avoid sin, especially mortal sin.  But if we do fall, may we run back to our loving Father and trust in His mercy.  And then, strengthened by His mercy, may we invite others to run to the Father and His merciful love, and find the joy and peace that all people desire, because they are made in the image and likeness of God: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.   

Never Enough

Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
    There is never enough.  Our Lord tells the disciples, “‘The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest.’”  That’s when there were 72 disciples, perhaps including, perhaps excluding, the 12 Apostles.  Too few for what Christ had in mind, which was the conquering by grace of the whole world, and the salvation of every man, woman, and child.  Catholicism spread like wildfire after Pentecost and into the first three hundred years of the Church.  By the end of the first millennium, most of the western world had received baptism.  But still, too few; not enough.  In what many consider the golden age of Catholicism in the US, the post-World War II years, many parishes had multiple priests, Catholic schools were full, and all seemed right.  Yet, the harvest was still abundant; there were many who were not Catholic, and even that great number was not enough; too few laborers, not only for the US, but for the spread of the Gospel around the world.
    Or perhaps, as we think about our own gifts and talents, we feel like we don’t have enough.  We look forward to a time when prosperity will flow over us like a river, and we would be like babies nursing who suckle until they’re full.  That could be true for the Church, to a time we look to when the Catholic faith would flourish and spread like wildfire again, like after Pentecost.  Or it could be true for us as individuals, who want to more fully live our faith and live for Christ.

7 priests ordained in 2025

   That phrase, “never enough,” can also be taken two ways: from the perspective of scarcity or from knowing that we can never exhaust what God desires for us.  In the first sense, we think about vocations to the priesthood.  Yes, we had seven ordinations to the priesthood this year, and we expect to have four more next year, based upon how many transitional deacons Bishop Boyea ordained in May.  But we need more priests.  And so, to the young men here who are not married, I would encourage you to at least think and pray about whether God is calling you to the priesthood.  He’s not calling all of you, but some of you He certainly is.  Marriage is also a beautiful vocation, and a way to serve God, but priests are the only ones who bring us forgiveness of sins through the Sacrament of Penance and nourish us with the Body and Blood of Christ through the Eucharist.  
    But we can also look at it from our own perspective, no matter what our vocation.  God always calls us beyond what we think we can do.  We probably all feel like we don’t have enough for the Lord.  But He will equip us for the mission to which He calls us.  We need only respond.  When I work out, sometimes I feel like I can’t give any more.  But my workout partner will push me to finish the workout, even if I need to take a little break before finishing.  God will push us to go beyond our comfort zone to live as saints and to spread His Gospel.  And if Jesus can make more than enough bread and fish for over 5,000 people from 5 loaves and 3 fish, He can work with whatever we have.  He will make our “never enough” enough for Him and His work.
    The second sense of never enough, from the perspective of never exhausting God’s goodness, is also a good reminder for us all.  For too long, families (though maybe not in this parish, but maybe so), have treated growing in the faith like completing K-12 education.  Sometimes it’s the kids, but often it’s also the parents.  After confirmation, too many take the approach that they have exhausted all they really need to know about Christ, and that faith formation is now optional.  Hopefully you can recognize how ludicrous that is.  God is an infinite spring to which He invites us each day, week, month, and year to drink from the streams of His wisdom.  The spring will never run dry, and we can always draw more from Him.  I was enrolled in an institute of Catholic education from 1989 until 2015, from kindergarten to my second Master’s Degree.  But each week I continue to learn more in my head and my heart about God, His Church, and how I can grow in holiness.
    We are never done growing in our faith.  Some times in our life may be more purposeful or more directed towards learning, but we should always try to grow in our knowledge and love of Christ.  That’s why we offer Bible studies, faith sharing groups, book clubs, men’s group, and more.  And, this September, I will begin, once a month, to offer sessions that can help remind us of things we learned, or teach us something knew, with what I’m calling Alpha and Omega.  It’s meant either for non-Catholics to learn some basics about the Catholic faith, or for Catholics to learn or re-learn important aspects of their Catholic faith.  Stay tuned for more information as we get closer to September.  But the point is, no matter how we do it, we should make efforts to grow as disciples throughout our life, no matter how longer we have lived as a Catholic.
    There is never enough.  There are never enough priests; there are never enough lay people on fire with love for Christ; there are never enough people to spread the Gospel; we can always use more.  There is never enough.  We can never exhaust the good things God has in store for us if we return to Him again and again.  No time, no circumstances will ever be enough, until Christ returns in glory, and all is made right in the new heavens and the new earth, when Christ will be all in all.  May we take seriously the many ways of realizing there is never enough. 

St. Peter: An Icon of Hope

Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul

St. Peter

    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  Today we have one my favorite liturgical celebrations.  It helps that I have seen the Papal Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, and the amazing, giant letters of the Gospel that we heard today (in Latin): TU ES PETRUS AND SUPER HANC PETRAM AEDIFICABO ECCLESIAM MEAM.  It helps that I have been to the Holy Land and visited the Church of the Primacy of Peter, which commemorates another Petrine dialogue with Jesus on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.  But mostly I love today because I love Peter.  I love Peter because he gives me hope.
    Now, this is not to leave out St. Paul.  St. Paul preached the Gospel with boldness, suffering greatly as he traveled.  And I have also visited the Papal Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls and the smaller church called Tre Fontane, where the Roman soldiers beheaded St. Paul.  His life, too, is encouraging and inspiring, especially his conversion.
    But Christ calls Peter to greatness, almost in spite of himself.  Peter always seems to be tripping over himself, from his first call to the time right before he suffered martyrdom.  Peter has moments where you just want to hit your head and say, “C’mon, man!”  But then he also has moments where you stand in awe at what he is willing to do out of love for the Lord.
    Think back to the call of Peter in Luke, chapter 4.  Peter had been fishing all night and had caught nothing.  And then the Lord asks him to go out into deep waters and throw his net over the sides.  At first, Peter objects, but he complies with the command, and then catches so many fish that his business partners, James and John, have to come and help him drag it in.  Peter begs the Lord to leave because of his sinfulness, but Christ calls Peter to abandon his boats and nets, and become a fisher of men.  
    We hear today the great proclamation of faith, that Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah, the Christ, the Son of God.  And Christ promises to build His Church upon the rock of Peter, and that the gates of Hell will not prevail against it, no matter how dark times seem to get.  Great moment for Peter!  But then immediately afterwards, the Savior tells the disciples how He will suffer, and Peter pulls Him aside and tells Him to stop saying that nonsense, wherein the Lord calls the other disciples together again and rebukes Peter to his face, saying, “Get behind me, Satan.”  Not a strong start for this newly-named first Pope.
    At the Last Supper, Peter assures Christ that even if everyone else abandons Him, Peter will stay faithful.  What a great statement of loyalty.  But then Christ tells Peter that He will deny even knowing Him three times, which, of course, happens, and Peter goes off to weep because of his betrayal.
    And, by tradition, even at the end of his life, Peter still struggled a bit.  Peter was warned by the Christians in Rome, where Peter was preaching, that the soldiers were going to arrest him.  So Peter runs away, and begins to leave Rome.  As he’s going away from Rome on the Appian Way, he sees Christ walking back to Rome.  “Domine, quo vadis?” Peter asks.  “Lord, where are you going?”  The Lord tells Peter that He is going to Rome to be crucified a second time.  At that point, Peter realizes he is not supposed to run away, and returns to Rome.  He undergoes crucifixion on Vatican Hill, though upside down because he did not consider himself worthy to die in the same exact manner as his Lord and Savior.

St. Paul

    Back to St. Paul, you can imagine how Paul, a trained theologian, might have wondered about Peter.  Perhaps Paul asked the Lord, “So Peter, this leader of your Church, how much as he studied the Law and the Prophets?”  And you can imagine the Lord saying, “Not much beyond a common man.”  Then Paul: “But certainly he has spent a great deal of time, like me, away from everyone else on retreat in the desert for this great mission,” and our Lord, “Nope.”  Paul: “Well, then, you must have given him some special visions and experience of the third heaven, like you did for me.”  But our Lord responds, “He has been open to special revelation from my Father, to be able to recognize me as the Christ.”  And St. Paul: “Hmmm.  Ok.”  Then our Lord speaks, “And you might have to correct him about how he interacts with Gentiles at some points, but not others, because he sometimes gets cold feet about my will.”  Paul made much more sense for a first pope.  But Christ chose Peter.
    And that gives me, and should give you, hope.  No, I’m not going to be pope.  But God has called us all to some mission for spreading the Gospel.  He chose us, me and you, not because we’re the smartest, or have the best training, or because we’re the holiest, or because we have our life figured out.  He chose us because He wants us to cooperate with Him in our own salvation and the salvation of others.  He has given us gifts that will help us proclaim the Gospel and bring others to Him, that others can’t do as well.  As St. Paul says in his second epistle to the Corinthians, “we hold this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing power may be of God and not from us.”  And as long as we recognize that, even if we, at times fail and fall, we can, like Peter, be successful in the end, maybe not in an earthly sense, but in the only sense that matters: in God’s eyes.  
    Peter gives me hope because, while he has moments of greatness, he is, more often than not, tripping over himself and putting his foot in his mouth.  He was, if I might, a fool.  But he was a fool for Christ, and Christ could work with Peter’s zeal, even though it came with warts.  May we open ourselves to the power of the same Holy Spirit who transformed Simon, the fisherman, the son of Jonah, into Peter, Prince of the Apostles and Pope of the Universal Church.  May Sts. Peter and Paul both intercede for us so that we can spread the Gospel as God wills, and inherit, by our life, the reward these holy Apostles won by the shedding of their blood: union with God[–the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen].   

Living the Trinitarian Life

Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity
    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  As we celebrate the Most Holy Trinity today, we do so in the secular context of Father’s Day.  Now, if priests are honest, today’s liturgical celebration of the Most Holy Trinity is one of the scariest to preach, because we preach about God who is infinite using finite words.  Most of the heresies of the Church concern how we speak about God, and priests want to accurately communicate this central teaching of our faith, that which truly makes us Christian, without misstating who God is.  And sometimes individual Catholics deputize themselves as the heresy police, with mixed results.  So I have to be careful as I preach about this revealed and yet beyond our intellect mystery of the Trinity.  
    And our understanding of God starts with the Father, who revealed Himself as one God (but not yet fully as Three Divine Persons) to the Chosen People.  Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraph number 239 states, “By calling God ‘Father’, the language of faith indicates two main things: that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children.”  God as Father does not mean that He has a body or any of the male parts that make one a human father.  God is utterly spirit, and yet, He is the Creator of all things and has authority over all things.  Still, He exercises this power and authority in love and for the benefit of His children: men and women He created in His image.  

    The Father, paragraph 2789 reminds us, is also the source and origin of the Godhead, that is, of the Trinity.  Here, again, our finite words fail to adequately express what is beyond them.  It seems odd to think of the Trinity having a source or origin, because the Son and the Holy Spirit are also eternal, also equally God, not lesser gods.  God the Father eternally begets the Son, Jesus Christ, and God the Father eternally spirates, or breathes forth, the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son in a single procession.  And yet, there is a deference the Son gives to the Father, even as they are consubstantial, as our Lord will say both: “The Father and I are one” and “The Father is greater than I.”  Rublev’s icon of the Trinity demonstrates this reality, as the three Divine Persons are imaged as three angels, but the heads of two, the two representing the Son and the Holy Spirit, bow their heads ever so slightly towards the one representing the Father.
    But what do we do with this knowledge?  It’s one thing to know, in some limited way, how the Trinity operates.  But if it’s the central teaching of our faith, then it should impact how we live.  And certainly, it does.  First of all, it affects how we worship.
    Now, I know, worship in a modern context doesn’t seem all the important.  But how we worship guides the rest of our lives.  Our Lord told us that He desired us to worship “in spirit and in truth.”  So if we wish to give back to God some little bit of the amazing things He has given to us as Creator, then we need to worship Him as He has revealed Himself: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Wrong worship means we don’t give back to God what He desires, which is, to be frank, rude.  Imagine for a second that you asked your spouse for a copy of the painting “The Starry Night” by van Gogh, but she bought a star chart poster instead.  Yes, it’s a gift; yes, it’s connected to the request, but it’s not what was desired, and if we have the possibility of giving what is desired, we should.  We can worship God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and, in fact, our entire Mass, the perfect prayer of Christ and His Church, is offered to the Father, through the Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit.  Almost all of our prayers in the Mass we direct to the Father, through the One (Jesus Christ) who reveals the Father to us, in the power and authority of the One (the Holy Spirit) who allows us to call on God as our Father by making us adopted sons and daughters in the Son of God.

    Secondly, if God created us in His image, then understanding the Trinity helps us to be who God created us to be, both men and women.  Yes, fatherhood is connected necessarily to men, but God is the source of all fatherhood and motherhood, and surpasses all fathers and mothers in His goodness.  But He encourages us all to be loving, to work for the good of others, to create out of love and beauty and truth, and to exercise whatever authority we might legitimately have as serving the communion of human persons and creating a more loving world.  When we focus on ourselves, and work only for our good, we fail to show forth the love of the Father and the entire Trinity.  When we exercise authority to keep others under our thumb and dominate them, we fail to live as icons of the power and authority that the Father truly has by nature, in which He lets us share by mere participation.  When authority is only used as a hammer to beat others into submission, rather than a guide to help others grow into the full potential of their human nature and according to their legitimate freedom, God looks more like a despot or tyrant when we talk about Him as Father, and it draws others away from belief in and love of God.
    As we pray at this Mass on Father’s Day, we give thanks to God for our earthly fathers, but we especially worship God the Father who created all things, and whom the Son revealed to us to be loving, patient, and merciful, even as He is just.  May our worship help us each to be icons of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.   

Not About Me

Memorial of St. Barnabas-15th Anniversary of Ordination Mass

    Before I begin my homily, I want to thank all of you for coming here this evening to celebrate my 15th Anniversary of priesthood.  At the risk of leaving people out, I do want to try to mention the different groups here today.  First, my parents and one of my two sisters, Amanda, and her family; secondly, my brother priests and deacons, including one of my classmates from Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Fr. Craig Giera from the Archdiocese of Detroit; third, my current parishioners from St. Matthew parish, who are graciously putting on this dinner, as well as former parishioners from other parishes going back to when I was a seminarian; fourth, priests of the Orthodox Church here in Genesee County and their wives; fifth, Knights and Dames of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, who are papal knights and dames and who bring great honor by their presence; sixth, members of the Michigan State Police, including command officers, troopers, and fellow chaplains; I appreciate the friendship of all of you and your presence here tonight.  Five years ago I had planned a celebration of my 10th Anniversary, perhaps a more normal number to celebrate, but that was June of 2020, and I didn’t want to put my Troopers in the odd spot of having to arrest me for violating executive orders, so we just cancelled it.
    There’s a lot of focus on me today.  Some may question celebrating an anniversary with others.  After all, we’re celebrating doing what I am supposed to do: be a priest and continue with my commitment to those promises.  And, in that sense, there’s not much noteworthy in doing what we’re supposed to do.  Our Lord Himself tells his disciples: “When you have done all you have been commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.’”  When we do what we say we will do, that should be normal, whether it’s the promise a priest makes at his ordination, the promise a couple makes to each other and to God when they get married, or the promise a Trooper makes when he or she takes the oath upon graduation from Trooper Recruit School.
    But, lest we pack up and just go home, rather than enjoying a tasty dinner after Mass, there must be something more.  Otherwise we’re just patting ourselves on the back.  And I think the something more is that we rejoice at God providing for His Church.  Christ promised His Apostles that He would not leave them orphaned; Christ promised His disciples that He would remain with them always, even to the end of the age, as they made disciples of all nations.  And in celebrating St. Barnabas, “a good man, filled with the Holy Spirit and faith,” we celebrate God fulfilling His promise.  And St. Barnabas took under his wing this guy named Saul, who, after his conversion, also went by the name Paul, and proclaimed the Gospel not only to Jews but also to non-Jews, Gentiles.  “And a large number of people was added to the Lord.”  

    Throughout the centuries God remains active in His Church through the power of the Holy Spirit.  God chooses people to continue His work, especially choosing certain men to share in His ministry, as we will hear in the preface of the Eucharistic Prayer tonight.  Men like Ignatius of Antioch; Basil the Great; Martin of Tours; Dominic; Jordan of Saxony; Anthony of Padua; Thomas Aquinas; Pius V; Antoninus of Florence; Charles Borromeo; John Henry Cardinal Newman; Emil Kapaun; Solanus Casey; Vincent Capodanno; John Paul II; Benedict XVI; and many others who have made Christ Himself present by their preaching and their sacramental ministry and service to the poor.  They didn’t just remind people about what Jesus did some 2,000 years ago, though they did that, too.  They acted in His Name and with His power to bring people into relationship with God through Holy Baptism; to forgive their sins through Penance; to give a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit through Confirmation; to join a couple as a icon of the Trinity in Holy Matrimony; to anoint and heal through the Sacrament of the Sick; and especially to make Jesus’ Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity present in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist through their sharing in Christ’s priestly ministry which they received in the Sacrament of Holy Order.  
    They did so as the person God made them, with all the ease and challenges that came with it.  They did it in their time, adjusting, not the teaching, but the method of proclamation to the cultures in which they lived.  They did so with joy at serving so loving a Father; they did so with tears knowing their own sinfulness and unworthiness to exercise so great an office.  They were set apart, like Barnabas and Saul, for the work to which God called them.  And we celebrate them today because they were faithful to that work and never gave up, even when it meant, for some, giving up their lives.
    And so today, God reminds me that I’m not done yet, at least not today (we are never promised tomorrow).  Today, you remind me that I have a high bar for which to strive.  My name is not in that litany of saints that I just enumerated, but it’s supposed to be after I die, and it gives me something for which I can strive.  
    And your name is also supposed to be in the litany of saints, those holy men and women who, throughout the centuries, heard the Gospel and conformed their lives, whatever their vocation, to Jesus Christ, so that they could say with St. Paul, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”  The good news for you, and the good news for me, is that Christ does the heavy lifting.  His grace makes it all possible.  All we have to do is cooperate, not get in the way, and let God do the brunt of the work.  
    Today is not about me.  It’s about what God has done and what God wants to still accomplish through me, with me, and in me, not so much for me, but for the People He redeemed by the Death of His Son.  Pray that I will continue to know that I am an unprofitable servant, doing only what I was obliged to do out of the love I have for Christ.  Pray that I will help you to hear, even as I myself hope to hear, these words at the end of my life: “Well done, good and faithful servant….Come, share your master’s joy.”   

Peace

Solemnity of Pentecost

    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  One of the most striking parts of Pope Leo XIV’s election (aside from the fact that the cardinals elected a pope from the United States) was his first greeting.  As he stepped out on the loggia, and we saw him for the first time, he said, “La pace sia con tutti voi,” which, translated into English, means: “Peace be with you all” or simply, “Peace be with you.”  What struck me is that these were the words of the risen Christ when He appeared in the Upper Room after the Resurrection, which we heard in today’s Gospel.  This 266th successor of St. Peter made his own, as his first words, the words of Christ to the troubled disciples.  His desire, as that of Christ’s was that His followers might have peace.
    Peace is one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit, whose descent upon those same disciples at Pentecost fifty days after the Resurrection of Christ we celebrate today.  We list peace as a fruit of the Holy Spirit, based upon Galatians 5:22-23, a list of the virtues that one should exhibit when the Holy Spirit dwells in a person.  Peace should be a hallmark of our lives as followers of Christ, those who have received the Holy Spirit first through Holy Baptism, and then through Holy Confirmation.  
    Often when we think of peace, we think of it as something external, concerning countries and their relationships with other countries.  I daily pray for peace in the Holy Land, and what tends to be on my heart is the cessation of violence and war in the land where the Prince of Peace walked.  But peace is not meant only for over there.  Peace starts right here, in our lives: in our souls and in our hearts.
    Peace goes beyond stopping violence or war.  The Biblical meaning of peace, or shalom in Hebrew, It means a wholeness to the person, a reality of fulfillment in God.  It recognizes that we have nothing to fear because, as St. Paul says in his first epistle to the Corinthians, “all belong to you, and you to Christ, and Christ to God.”  Or, to say it more simply with the words of a campy, devotional song, “He’s got the whole world in His hands.”  
    While nations can break peace between themselves by starting fighting, the peace that comes as a gift of the Holy Spirit no one can take from us.  If we lose peace in ourselves, we gave it away.  We allowed something to enter in and pushed aside the peace that the Holy Spirit wants us to have, the peace that allowed martyrs to suffer for the faith serenely, even though it involved great amounts of pain and suffering.  It is, as St. Teresa of Avila said: “Let nothing disturb you, / Let nothing frighten you, / All things are passing away: / God never changes. / Patience obtains all things / Whoever has God lacks nothing; / God alone suffices.”  When we recognize who God is and what He does for His beloved children, then nothing need worry us or try to convince us to give away our peace.
    Do we ask for this fruit of the Holy Spirit?  Do we seek out peace and desire it to fill our lives and demonstrate itself in our lives and our interactions with others?  Or does the lust to dominate seem more attractive to us?  Would we rather lack peace and seem to have more control over others than they have over us?  Because there is always a bigger fish.  There is always someone else who will lord over us as we have lorded it over others.
    To have peace within ourselves means that we seek to order our lives in the way that God intends: our bodily desires subject to our reason; our reason subject to our souls; our souls subject to God.  Adam and Eve lived this sort of life before the Fall in the Garden of Eden.  But when they decided to disobey God, they shattered that order that brought them peace: their souls were no longer subject to God, their minds were no longer subject to their souls, and their bodies were no longer subject to their minds.  So they had to cover themselves for fear that the other would seek to dominate and take advantage of each other’s body, though they were of one flesh.  They quickly blamed each other for the fault to which they both assented, because they were afraid of the other having some priority of spiritual power over each other.

    So how do we have peace?  How do regain that which Christ gave to us at Easter?  Though we have received the Holy Spirit in the Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation, we still recognize that our interior and exterior lives do not always fall into order.  If we wish to have peace, then starting with ourselves, we have to live in a rational way, not simply giving in to the desires of our body.  And to do this, we practice bodily asceticism like fasting or abstinence.  By denying ourselves from some bodily good temporarily, we remind our bodies that they are subject to higher goods that our minds perceive.  We also make sure that our minds are formed properly by truth, and not by falsehood, or even by conjecture or conspiracy.  We should watch how we form our minds, and what we allow in.  Does our intellectual diet include solid foods of truth, or is it simply the candy of gossip and jumping to conclusions?  Lastly, we subject our souls to God through obedience to what He has revealed, especially when it is difficult or doesn’t come naturally.  The Church is a sure guide of knowing the will of God, and helps us to order our life in the way God originally intended through its moral teachings.  
    Pope Leo XIV reminded us in his first words as pope that Christ wants us to have peace.  The gift of the Risen Christ is peace, which is given as a fruit of our reception of the Holy Spirit.  May this same Holy Spirit, who descended upon the Apostles, the Blessed Mother, and the disciples at Pentecost, give us peace at all times, the peace the world cannot give, the peace that comes from ordering our lives to God: the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  

Conscience: Gut or Cricket?

Sunday after the Ascension

Leroy Jethro Gibbs

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  While, in my opinion, the TV show “NCIS” is not as good as it was when Mark Harmon’s character Leroy Jethro Gibbs led the team of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, it still was one of my favorite shows to watch.  Gibbs, as most call him, is known primarily for two things: his rules and his gut.  But in this case, the gut doesn’t refer to the paunch or beer belly, but to his instinct, his intuition when it comes to cases and finding the suspect who did the crime.  
    When most people use the word conscience, what they really mean is intuition, instinct, or gut.  It’s a feeling, a sense for what to do.  But this can all too easily change into desire or want, having its base in our will and our passions, rather than in anything objective.  Or some may think of it like Jiminy Cricket from the Disney animated classic, “Pinocchio.”  And perhaps this gets closer to the truth, as conscience is meant to have a connection to something outside of ourselves.
    The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraph 1776, states:
 

Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey.  Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment….For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God.

This text is actually taken verbatim from the Vatican II document, Gaudium et spes, n. 16.  It addresses both the reality of being something interior, like intuition, instinct, or a gut, but also something exterior, like the fictional conscience of Pinocchio.  While some would make conscience a law unto itself, and cite church teaching that we must follow our consciences, and even an erring conscience binds, conscience is rather our understanding of the objective moral law, given to us by God, applied to the particular situation in which we will find, we are finding, or we have found ourselves.

St. John Henry Newman

    And this voice that speaks to us from within is really the Holy Spirit, who gives testimony to Christ and His teachings within our soul.  St. John Henry Newman describes conscience this way: “[Conscience] is a messenger of him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by his representatives.  Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ.”  By our conscience, Christ continues to speak to us each day through the Holy Spirit who helps us to know right from wrong, and how to choose the good and avoid the bad.  The Holy Spirit gives us the power to be prudent and loving, as St. Peter instructed us in the epistle, so that “in all things God may be honored through Jesus Christ, our Lord.”  
    Christ teaches us in the Gospel that the Holy Spirit will give testimony to Christ.  Practically, this means that the Holy Spirit will never encourage us to do that which Christ would condemn or teach as wrong.  Again, modern man wants to make the conscience a law unto itself, that is, something which is untethered to any profession of faith or church teaching.  But the Holy Spirit always testifies to Christ, and so they can never contradict.  The Holy Spirit will never encourage us to do evil things, even with the best of intentions.  The Holy Spirit will never contradict what He has said earlier in a privileged and infallible way.  Right now there are some (perhaps even many) in Germany who want to rewrite the Church’s teaching on the reservation of the Sacrament of Holy Orders to men, or the Church’s teaching on the proper use and meaning of sexuality.  They use the word (wrongly, I would suggest) synodality to promote merely human and political evaluations of what we call wrong and right.  And perhaps some even appeal to conscience.
    And while they may have voices within them telling them that trying to change Church teaching is right, I can assure you that those voices are the voices of a holy spirit, but of a fallen one.  Because the Church has, always and everywhere taught, and this was confirmed as a matter of faith by Pope St. John Paul II, that the Sacrament of Holy Orders is reserved to men: not because of a greater holiness of men or because of a cowardice of rejecting sinful patriarchy, but because Christ willed it this way for His Church, and it is, after all, His Church, His Mystical Body, not ours.  Sacred Scripture, affirmed in both Old and New Testaments, and affirmed by doctors of the church and pontiffs, teaches clearly that marital relations are meant only for a man and woman within the context of a loving marriage and as an expression of true love and the full gift of self in an act that could, under the right circumstances, conceive a child; and that marriage is for life, and he who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery.  The Holy Spirit cannot teach us anything different without undermining everything of what came before and leaving all teachings open to shifting mentalities and proclivities of human activity.  
    We often don’t naturally remember what Christ told us, because those teachings call us to reject our fallen passions and intellect, and live in a way that does not always come most easily to us.  But our conscience, the voice of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, tells us what God has affirmed as true, which will not change, even if the rest of the world declared it to be changed.  
    Our duty is to form ourselves to be able to distinguish the voice of the Holy Spirit from the voice of other spirits or even simply our human so-called wisdom.  We do this through reading the Scriptures, reading the Catechism, and studying our faith through sounds guides like the saints.  The more we do that, the more we will recognize that even when we want to do something wrong, we know that we should not.  If we try, we can hear that voice, and if we hear that voice, we can follow it, even when it means true challenge to what comes most easily to us.
    Our conscience does come to us from within, like Gibbs’s gut.  But it also references that which is outside of us, the inerrant and unchanging teachings of Christ through the Scriptures and through the Church.  May the Holy Spirit strengthen us to readily hear His voice and follow what He teaches us, that is, what Christ tells us.  Who with the Father and the same Holy Spirit is God for ever and ever.  Amen.  

Waiting

Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord
    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  When it comes to difficult times for most people, any time a person has to wait probably ranks towards the top.  Maybe it’s a child waiting for summer break to begin in the last days of May and the first days of June (or maybe a teacher!).  Maybe it’s a mother, waiting for her child to be born.  Maybe it’s waiting in a doctor’s office or in the lobby of a dealership to get the oil changed.  Maybe it’s waiting on the phone for a customer service representative to try to resolve whatever issue you may be having.  For me, one of the frustrating things is that there is nothing I can do to speed up the time when I’m waiting.  I have no control.

    So as we celebrate the Ascension of our Lord, we’re now in a long waiting game.  And if you think you were on hold for a long time with that customer service representative, we’ve been waiting almost 2,000 years for Christ to return, as the angels promised He would.  We know that God keeps His promises, but we also know that He chooses the right time to accomplish His will.  After all, He waited unknown centuries from the fall of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, to fulfill His promise to send a redeemer to restore them to friendship with God.  But that waiting wasn’t just sitting on their hands, doing nothing.  He prepared His People so that they could be ready to welcome the long-awaited Messiah, who was also His Only-Begotten Son.  They waited through the Great Flood; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; slavery in Egypt and their return and conquest of the Promised Land; the judges and kings; the prophets who corrected them when they went astray; and even through foreign occupation of their land, first by the Babylonians, then by the Greeks, and then eventually by Romans.
    So, in this time, we also wait, as we have from the year AD 33.  And our waiting is really twofold: waiting to celebrate the promised gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and waiting for the Parousia, the return of Christ in glory.  
    While we wait to celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, we should be asking the Holy Spirit to dwell within us more deeply, especially through the Novena to the Holy Spirit.  These days between the Ascension and Pentecost was the first novena, the first nine-days of prayer for a particular petition.  Granted, in most dioceses that’s now shortened to seven days, but that’s another story.  Still, even though we have received the Holy Spirit, especially through the holy sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation, we can never have too much of the Third Divine Person of the Blessed Trinity, the one who is our Advocate, who strengthens us with gifts like wisdom and courage, and who gives us the fruits of love, joy, and peace, among others.  While waiting at a doctor’s office or waiting on the phone can seem very passive, where you can’t do anything else, waiting for the Holy Spirit is more like waiting for summer break, or even giving birth to a child, where there are preparations and things to be done so that, when the day comes, we’re ready.  It would be very sad to go into labor, knowing that we hadn’t started or completed the baby’s room or crib, or bought the necessary supplies to help the child thrive and grow outside the womb.  But, when it comes to Pentecost, how often does this happen, that we are not quite ready to receive the Holy Spirit?
    But beyond Pentecost, we wait for Christ to return in glory.  And this, too, is not a passive waiting.  This wait should be active.  Because at the end of time, Christ will put all things “beneath his feet,” as St. Paul says in his epistle to the Ephesians.  What is not of Christ will be cast down; what is of Christ will be raised up.  In this waiting time, we have the opportunity to participate in that reign of Christ already, even though it’s not yet fully known.  We have the opportunity to cast down all that is not of God, and focus on making sure we devote all of our words, actions, and thoughts to God so that God will raise us up, and will not have to cast us down, whether in totality to Hell, or even just parts of us in Purgatory, the parts that have to be burned up like chaff, or like the dross that is burned off to purify gold.  
    We know that Christ will return, but we don’t know when that will happen.  So, the best plan of action is to make ourselves ready at all times, or at least as ready as we can be.  And it’s not just a matter of looking the part (I remember a sign that said, “God is coming back; look busy.”).  Making ourselves ready is only possible by cooperating with God’s grace, and letting that grace transform us from the inside out.  We are not promised more time.  We are only promised today; God only gives us “now” to turn away from sin and turn back to Him.  If we passively wait, presuming we have more time, the day of Christ’s return, or the day of our death, could catch us off guard, and then perhaps we will be cast down because we had not allowed Christ to configure us to Himself.
    Waiting is difficult.  And it’s especially difficult when we see evil grow and be celebrated and good struggle to survive and be persecuted.  We might feel tempted at times just to give up, like our wait will never end.  But, like summer break for children; like the day of birth for a pregnant woman; even like when we’re waiting in a doctor’s room: the time will come when our hope will be fulfilled and our joy, which no one will be able to take from us, will be complete in Christ [who with the Father and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns for ever and ever.  Amen]

Truth: Proposition and Person

Fourth Sunday after Easter
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Math is not my thing.  Math is good, but it’s not something I focus on or am drawn to in my life.  There were many days in high school that I wondered whether I would ever use what I learned in Algebra I, Geometry, or Algebra II later in life.  But today, at even if just in this homily, it seems like math is once again useful.
    The math that came to mind when reading over the Gospel was the Transitive Property of Equality.  This law states that if A is equal to B, and B is equal to C, then A is equal to C.  What does that have to do with the Gospel?  Well, our Lord states that when the Spirit of truth comes, He will teach us all truth.  But the Christ Himself also says, “‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life.’”  So the Spirit of truth will lead us to truth, but Christ is truth, so the Spirit will lead us to Christ.
    Pope Francis, may he rest in peace, emphasized this point in his weekly audience in May 2013, when he said:
 

Jesus himself told his disciples: the Holy Spirit “will guide you into all the truth”, since he himself is “the Spirit of Truth”.  We are living in an age in which people are rather sceptical [sic] of truth.  Benedict xvi [sic] has frequently spoken of relativism, that is, of the tendency to consider nothing definitive….And yet Jesus is exactly this: the Truth that, in the fullness of time, “became flesh”, and came to dwell among us so that we might know it.  The truth is not grasped as a thing, the truth is encountered.  It is not a possession, it is an encounter with a Person.

We often think of truths like we think of mathematical laws: propositions that explain reality.  But truth cannot be limited to propositions, but desires to be encountered in the Divine Person of our Lord.
    We can try to limit truth to mere propositions.  We might say: you must believe this fact; or you must live in that way.  But for Catholics, these propositions do not exist simply as Platonic ideas in a far away heaven.  For Catholics, our beliefs and our morality reveal to us who Christ is, which is important because Christ reveals who we can be to us.  Gaudium et spes, the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World from the Second Vatican Council puts it this way: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light….Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.”

    And the Church Fathers from the earliest times recognized this revelation of who God desires us to be so clearly.  At the end of this month, we will celebrate in this church, with our Orthodox brothers and sisters in Genesee County, the 1700th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea.  At this first ecumenical council in the life of the Church, the 318 bishops affirmed that Christ is consubstantial with the Father (‘𝜊𝜇𝜊𝜊𝜐𝜎𝜄𝜊𝜍 is the Greek term; we say consubstantialem in Latin), rather than what the heretic Arius taught, which was that Christ was an exalted part of God’s creation, but merely a created being.  But the fathers recognized that if Christ was not co-equal God, then He could not save us.  As St. Athanasius said, “God became man so that man might become God.”     So Christ reveals to us, in this proposition of truth, that we are those saved by God Incarnate.  We encounter the mystery of God-made-man, which allows us to understand that we are worth saving, that God would come to us and take on our human nature so that our human nature could be united to God.  While there are propositions that are true, we can more easily reject cold axioms.  But if Truth is a Person, then our connection to that axiom becomes a relationship with a brother, an opportunity to love and be loved and become the fullest version of ourselves, revealed by the one who created us.
    And Truth in flesh calls us to go deeper than merely the recitation of facts or axioms.  This becomes clearer when you think about your spouse or your best friend.  I could tell you that my best friend has brown hair, is six-foot-something tall, is muscular, works for the State Police, is married with children, likes to joke around and poke fun at me for mediocre homilies.  You might know those facts, but if you haven’t met Anthony, you wouldn’t fully appreciate who he is and how he is.  I could list all the facts in the world, but the encounter with him gives a reality that stating facts never could.  The same is truth for our faith: we could give all the facts about our Lord, but until you encounter Him, you cannot truly love Him, and only in encountering Him can that love blossom so that it gives us the fullness of joy that God desires for us.

    Yes, the Holy Spirit, the gift of the Father and the Son to the Church, leads us to understand propositions and axioms of how God made the world and how we are to live in it to find happiness.  But the Holy Spirit leads us to so much more than that!  The Holy Spirit leads us to encounter the Truth that surpasses propositions, because the Truth is not an “it” but a “He,” a Person that loves us, has shown us how to be truly happy, and that desires our love in return, Jesus Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God for ever and ever.  

Two-fold Evangelization Approach

Fifth Sunday of Easter
    How do we help others recognize the important of joining the Catholic Church and living as a disciple?  Does a secret recipe or formula exist?  What program do we need to buy?  Our readings give us a hint of how we can evangelize effectively.
    Really, it comes down to two phrases from our first reading and Gospel, with the second reading an affirmation of what we heard in the first reading.  The two approaches that God gives us through His Sacred Word today are: report what God has done; and love one another.

Statue of St. Paul from St. Peter's Basilica

    The entire Bible lays out what God has done for us, which is why we read it week after week in the Church.  We’re following the pattern set down for us in the Acts of the Apostles where Paul and Barnabas, “called the church together and reported what God had done with them.”  The story of our Church, the one founded by Jesus Christ, stretches back to Judaism and the Book of Genesis, and goes all the way through the Book of Revelation.  This inerrant, privileged communication of God demonstrates what God has done.  He rescued us from the sin and death of the fall of our first parents through the Resurrection of Jesus, and then accompanied that proclamation of new life by signs and wonders.  Whether it’s the first patriarchs from the Book of Genesis, Moses and Joshua, the Judges, the good and bad kings, or the prophets, we hear how God interacts with us and calls us to the life that brings us happiness.  We then hear the life of Christ and how God worked through the second Divine Person of the Blessed Trinity.  And then we hear how the Holy Spirit continued the work of Christ through the early Church and the activity of the Apostles Paul, Peter, James, Jude, and John.  And we close Divine Revelation in the Scriptures with the culmination of how God will make everything right through the Book of Revelation, or the Apocalypse of St. John.  
    The Bible tells a very objective side of how God has worked, but we also make up the larger story of salvation history, that did not end after the death of the last apostle.  And so, part of effective evangelization also entails communicating what God has done in our own life.  No matter who we are, God works in our day-to-day life.  He’s not the God that many of the founding fathers of our country posited, who created the world, but then stands afar off, like a distant clockmaker who put together the clock and watches it wind down.  No, He’s intimately involved in every part of our life, or wants to be, and wants to guide us to live in a way that prepares us for heaven.  
    As the Book of Revelation tells us, God dwells with us as our God, and we are His people.  He works to help us stay on the narrow path to get to the place where tears are wiped away, where death, mourning, wailing, and pain no longer exist, because He has cast away the old life of sin and death, and made all things new.
    But, being a disciple goes beyond simply telling others about God.  To live as a disciple means loving others as God has loved us.  Jesus gave us this command in the Gospel today, and connected the living of this commandment to the glorification of God.  When we love others as God loves us, we glorify God, and God is glorified in us.  
    But love is not some amorphous idea.  Love means willing the good of the other in individual circumstances.  Whether we work in the home, raising children, or work outside the home; whether we are in school or on vacation; whether we try to find the right job or enjoy retirement from our job; God calls us to will the good of the other.  This can seem vague, but think about individual choices we make: if I hit my sibling because he or she annoys me, can I really say that I am willing my sibling’s good?  If I look at another person, whether live or online, with lust and use them for my own gratification, am I really willing that person’s good?  If I drive in a way that endangers my own or another’s life, am I willing the good of my fellow drivers?  If I treat people based on what they can do for me, or how productive they are for society, am I truly willing the good of those people?  The vague becomes pretty concrete when we think about it that way.
    The early Church seemed pretty good at sharing what God had done for His People (generally) and them (individually).  They were convinced that others needed to hear the hope and joy that God does not dwell in some far-off heaven, removed from our everyday experiences, but loves us and wants us to involve Him in our day-to-day life, to increase our joys and bear our sorrows with us.  They did not treat people based upon their social status or economic bracket, but loved even those whom society had cast away or who seemed dispensable.  And in this way, whether in Judea, or Egypt, or Persia, or India, or Rome, or wherever, the Gospel spread.  
    So while there are best practices in evangelization, there is no secret recipe or formula.  There is no program that we can buy that can replace these two essential factors: sharing what God has done for us, and loving others.  Not just to grow our parish, but to help people get on the road to heaven, God calls us to these two aspects of evangelization.  Will we share the Gospel and help others get to heaven?  Will we share what God has done for us, and love them as God has loved us?