St. John Vianney

Today is the feast of St. John Vianney, patron saint of parish priests. He was quite simply the best parish priest the world has ever known. He almost didn’t make it through seminary, however, because he kept flunking his Latin exams. They consulted the bishop, who asked: “Is this young Vianney pious? Does he say his rosary well? Is he devout to the Blessed Virgin?” “He is a model of piety,” replied the seminary rector. “Then ordain him!” Fr. Vianney was assigned a small country parish in the village of Ars. “There is not much love of God in that parish,” the bishop told him. “You will bring it there.” He got lost on the way to his new parish and asked a boy named Antoine for directions. Antoine pointed the way, and Fr. Vianney told him “you have shown me the way to Ars. I will show you the way to heaven.” When he got to Ars he found that very few people were going to Mass, so the young priest spent much of his first year praying in the church. Soon people began coming back to Mass, even if just to see a prayerful priest. They also came to confession in such great numbers that Fr. Vianney would spend up to 16 hours a day in his cramped, unheated confessional. Eventually 20,000 people a year were coming to him from all over Europe, such that the French government had to build a special railway to the little village of Ars. The devil told him once “Ah, Vianney: If there were three such priests as you, my kingdom would be ruined.” If you do not know this priest, you would do well to read about him, and then you can say to us priests, “why can’t you be a little more like the Cure d’Ars?”

Greed is Death

St. John Vianney died in 1559 a completely spent man. He lived on two or three hours’ sleep a night, and just a few potatoes each day, giving almost all his time and focus to saving souls. The saints whom God calls to such extraordinary lives witness to simplicity. We really don’t need much to live on, and surplus food, entertainment, and luxury distracts us from the one thing necessary. A woman asked John Vianney once “how do I get to heaven,” and he replied “straight as a cannonball.” All three readings today warn against greed, which is essentially a loss of focus on the one goal of life, which is heaven. Today we have access to virtually unlimited distractions and historically unparalleled levels of comfort and security. To get to heaven, St. Paul says we must “put to death the parts of you that are earthly: immorality, impurity, and the greed that is idolatry.”  Jacopone da Todi, in 1265, described it even more acerbically: “obsessive avarice, a worm that knows no rest, erodes the mind with endless preoccupations.” It breeds discontent and dissatisfaction; it poisons our inner thoughts with envy and resentment; greed is a cancer that spreads its fibrous tentacles into every dimension of our lives. But the Bible gives a cure, which I will show you at the end of this homily.

God calls in the debt

​The first reading from the book of Qoheleth declares rather drearily “Vanity of Vanities.” Nothingness eventually claims everything on earth. All the prettiest things in life are no more than shiny bubbles that disappear within a few seconds. Don’t worship any bubble, because your bubble will burst soon enough. In Jesus’ parable, a man has worked very hard to amass so many things that he has to build bigger barns to store them: Mister Storage. Does anyone in this church not have stuff in storage somewhere? In Jesus’ parable, God “demands” the life of that man, just as he was moving his stuff into bigger barns. The literal Hebrew words are that God “calls in the debt.” Our possessions, and our very lives, are on loan from God, and he can call in the debt at any time. So how do I free myself of greed? “Put to death, then, the greed that is idolatry,” St. Paul writes. We kill greed by giving a portion of what we have been given away. When I tithe a portion of my goods, I declare my freedom from those things. The same goes for time: if I give God an hour a week in quiet prayer, or the rosary, or daily Mass, He gives me many more hours in return. I don’t know how it works, but I know it works. “Don’t worry about money,” Mother Teresa said. “God has lots of it.” So do we believe in the Prosperity Gospel? You bet, but we want to be prosperous in what matters to God. Like St. John Vianney, we want to lay hold of heaven with both hands. We will not let go of God no matter what, even if that means letting go of a lot of other things that separate us from Him. 

Corpus Christi

After Pentecost and Trinity Sunday, the Church celebrates two “feasts of the Lord,” which extend the glory of the Paschal Season into the year. These feasts Corpus Christi, which we celebrate today, and the Sacred Heart on Friday. Thus we conclude the great Paschal Season that we began on Ash Wednesday almost four months ago. We began by fasting on Ash Wednesday and we conclude by eating the Body and Blood of the Christ today. We enter now the “Sundays after Pentecost,” which will take us through the summer and autumn to the First Sunday of Advent this year on December 1st. We make our way to heaven within the mystery of Pentecost, in the age of the Holy Spirit, between the first and second comings of the Messiah. But it is the mystery of the Holy Eucharist, the Corpus Domini, that sustains us during our pilgrimage to eternity. The Holy Eucharist is the Most Blessed and Beautiful of all the Christian Mysteries. Adoration (a Latin word ad orem meaning “into the mouth,” the mouth of God!) brings us into God’s very being.

SS. John Fisher and Thomas More

Yesterday was also celebrated the Feast of SS John Fisher and Thomas More, martyred in 1535 by King Henry VIII. Of all England’s bishops, John Fisher was the only one to remain faithful to the Church in the face of the King’s apostacy. Thomas More, Henry’s own Lord Chancellor and the most brilliant mind in the realm, also refused the King’s declaration against the Church, saying famously at his trial: “I am the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” These men died rather than compromise the truth, whom they knew as a person, Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. They echoed the serene faith that martyrs have made from the first centuries of Christianity. In the year 303 the Roman Emperor Diocletian made attending Mass a capital crime, just as Henry VIII did in England. One Sunday morning Roman soldiers arrived at the home of Emeritus, a Christian who had invited a priest into his home to offer the Holy Eucharist. The soldiers arrested 49 Christians and brought them before the local magistrate. “What did you not understand about the law?” he asked them. Emeritus famously replied to the judge: Sine Dominico Non Possumus. We can’t live without the Holy Eucharist. Life would be without purpose, without beauty, without goodness. We would have no reason to get up in the morning, to go to work, to be kind to our wives and children, to be honest in our business dealings. We would rather die. And they did die. The government put all 49 Christians to death in February of the year 304.

SB 360

​Religious persecution is on the rise in our own time. Will there come a time when Mass will be illegal in our country as it was in 4th century Rome and 16th century England? Last week a large color ad in the SF Chronicle advertised a legal firm for clergy abuse cases. Certainly, abusive priests must be brought to justice, along with all other criminal public servants. But what graphics did the ad use to describe abusive priests? It portrayed a priest’s hands breaking the Holy Eucharist over a silver chalice. Why did they choose an image of the Holy Eucharist to portray a horrible crime? Accuse the priest, accuse the hierarchy, but don’t accuse the Blessed Sacrament! A bill is rapidly making its way through the CA legislature, SB 360, which will put a priest in jail if he refuses to tell what he has heard in sacramental confession. The absolute confidentiality of confessional prepares the soul to receive the Holy Eucharist. I will read a letter from our Archbishop on this in a minute. But realize that an attack on the Sacrament of Confession is an attack on the Sacrament of the Eucharist. The time will come when all Catholics will have to choose between peace with Christ or peace with this world. We will have to make the choice the bishops of England had to make in 1530, and the choice Christians had to make in 4th Century Rome.
 
Is Christ’s Body and Blood worth fighting for? Yes it is. Without the Eucharist we starve. The social order will collapse without this spiritual sustenance. So let us begin by coming back to Mass and adoration, because most of us have already lost faith in the Eucharist: only 20% of Catholics in San Francisco attend Mass anymore. A Catholic population that has lost its hunger for the Bread of Life will lose the Bread of Life. Its priests and its churches and its schools and hospitals will be taken away from them, and their culture will fail. Because: sine Domenico non possumus. We cannot live without the Lord’s Supper.

Father’s Day

Today we celebrate two mysteries: that of fatherhood, and that of the Holy Trinity. First, Happy and blessed Father’s Day to all of us, not just to our fathers and grandfathers, but to all of us who have provided for, protected, and indeed procreated by their participation in God the Father’s gift of Himself.
We pray for all our fathers this entire month of June, the month also of the Sacred Heart, by placing their names between two lit candles in our sanctuary. I also invite you to place your father’s picture on the photo stand in front of the altar of St. Joseph, father of the universal Church. It’s not easy being a father these days, but we men have only to turn daily to God the Father to know how we can provide, protect, and procreate those entrusted to us by Him.

Trinity Sunday

Our second mystery is the greatest mystery of all, and the source of all fatherhood in heaven and on earth, the mystery of the Holy Trinity. From the catechism #234: “the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them all.” The mystery of the Triune God takes us down into the core of all being, into the essence of God’s inner dynamism. God is one, but within this fundamental unity, God is three, a community of persons. He is one, but never alone, an eternal exchange of love between Persons. Without reference to the communal God, human community will always fail.
 
There is only one God, who is above all things and through all things and in all things. St. Athanasius wrote in the 3rd century: “God is above all things as Father; he is through all things as the Word (Jesus); and he is in all things in the Holy Spirit.” Our best profession of the Holy Trinity is to make the sign of the cross well: intentionally, thoughtfully, prayerfully, joyfully. It is our testimony that Love—the eternal exchange of love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is at the core of all reality. In the rite of exorcism, for example, the priest continually makes the Sign of the Cross both over himself and over the penitent. When the diabolical approaches to separate you from God and those whom you love, to disfigure your relationships, it will see the mark of the Three-in-One and fall back. So make the sign of the cross often over yourselves and your children.

God’s Sacred Communion

The human person—you and I—are essentially wired for relationship, to live in community with others. We need to be close to at least some other persons, because the fundamental template of the universe is a relationship between three persons, Father Son and Holy Spirit. In a godly relationship of love, no one owns anything exclusively but shares even his own person with the beloved. He knows the joy of trusting the one who loves him or her. The Father trusts everything he is and has to the Son, who trusts his father in the Holy Spirit, as he said with his last breath on the cross: “Father, into your hands I entrust my spirit.” So Our Lord says in the Gospel today from the farewell discourses in John 16: “Everything that the father has is mine…” The Spirit too, has no identity apart from the Father and the Son, as Our Lord says in the same passage: “The spirit of truth will not speak on his own, but will speak what he hears.”
 
God is one, but God is never isolated: he is essentially a communion of persons. And each of us is one, an “individual,” but we never need be isolated, because God invites us into communion within Himself, especially when we receive “Holy Communion.” We come together each Sunday to become one Body by receiving the Body of Christ. A city like San Francisco can easily isolate people, but we always have a home here in the Church. This morning I was doing my morning prayers in Golden Gate Park and a homeless woman walked by pushing her cart. She was completely alone, and she was talking to herself. She wasn’t talking to another person, but only to herself. She was disturbing my prayers, in fact, but I should have just jumped up to greet her in the Lord. Alas, a missed opportunity to break through someone’s isolation. But be very sure that God never talks just to “himself;” he communicates always to another person. We do not have to be self-absorbed or isolated, because the Holy Trinity always invites us into His Communion. Let us pray for all the lonely people, and let us be a Sacrament to them of God’s sacred communion.

A New Priest

We welcome Fr. Michael Rocha to the Catholic priesthood, and to our parish, for his First Mass. Our new priest grew up in Modesto and began serving Mass as a boy in St. Joseph’s parish, in which I served for 12 years. Now our former altar boy will offer the Supreme Sacrifice as a man, in persona Christi capitis. He has become a father, and will, God willing, become more fatherly as he learns to serve the Church qua sacerdos. We welcome Fr. Michael’s family as well: his mother Emilia and his twin sister Michelle, along with all the aunts and uncles and cousins. Fr. Michael’s father returned to God a few years ago, and so we remember the soul of Frank Rocha as his son offers the Holy Sacrifice at our altar. To our guest priests and seminarians, in particular Fr. Patrick Summerhays, archdiocesan vocations director, and Fr. Chrysostom Baer, prior of St. Michael’s Norbertine Abbey, and other guests. Many thanks to our festival choir as well, led by Mary Ann Carr-Wilson, and to the Knights of Columbus for providing the barbecue after Mass.

Where are we going?

Our Lord’s words in the Gospel contain a little pun. Expedit vobis ut vadam…. “It is better for you that I go,” but literally “my going out expedites you,” from ex (out) and pedes (foot). So, literally, he says “my departure moves your feet out.” We’re all getting out of town together! But … where are we going? Our Lord gently chides the apostles for not asking this basic question: “None of you have asked me where are you going?” The fundamental question in life, it seems to me, is “Where am I going?” Certainly, I’m on the road to somewhere. If you feel a bit lost at times, ask yourself: Where have I come from, and where am I going? The fathers of the Church answered this question in terms of exitus and redditus: We came from God, and we are returning to God. The priest is ordained precisely to remind every living soul of this first principle and final end. In fact, he himself, following Christ himself, leaves home in search of souls, and then returns “home” (to God), dragging his net full of fish. “You will be fishers of men,” Jesus told Peter.

The Smell of the Sheep

Fr. Michael will report for his first assignment in Epiphany Parish, about 25 minutes from here. He will take on the menial duties of a parish priest, entering into the mundanities of every soul that comes through the doors of his church. A priest certainly takes on the “smell of the sheep,” but sheep sometimes do not smell so good. Far more importantly than simply smelling like the sheep, the priest offers sweet-smelling sacrifices to God on their behalf. God wants to sweeten the smell of the sheep through his priests. The priest encounters the people where they are at, but in faithfully bringing them the Word of God, the Sacraments of Christ, and the tender Mercy of our Father, the priest brings the sheep beyond this world’s paltry pastures into the shining fields of eternal joy. Meet the people where they are at, O priest, but do not leave them there! Fr. Michael has been ordained, that is, fundamentally ordered and oriented, toward Christ: both to be Christ and to bring Christ. And it is the priest’s intense interior life--his fidelity to prayer--that enables him to deliver Christ’s word, sacraments, and charity. To remind himself of this, he puts on the Roman collar during the long hours he will work every day, and he puts on priestly vestments during his liturgical service. May God give our new priest the grace of faithful perseverance until he himself enters the splendor of eternal life!

She covered him with perfect obedience

​It is to be noted that Fr. Michael is 100% Portuguese. It was to his people that the Mother of God appeared 102 years ago in what many popes have said is her most decisive apparition. Her simple request was that we make good confessions, receive Holy Communion devoutly, and pray the rosary faithfully, because nothing can touch a man of prayer. We pray today that Fr. Michael remain a man of prayer, a man of the Eucharist, close to the Mother of God. She protects the sacred priesthood of all who call upon her day and night.
 
Finally, I want to relate a strange phenomenon at the ordination ritual yesterday. Fr. Michael put his hands into the Archbishop’s hands to promise obedience, which is the most costly of all the promises any of us make to God. The new priest put his hands into the hands of the Archbishop, who then asked him: “Do you promise obedience to me and to my successors?” There was a moment of silence in the Cathedral as we all wondered: will Michael submit himself in all things to the will of God, through his superiors? Will he submit himself to his pastor, to his bishop, and to the Church's teachings in everything? “God came to earth to obey,” wrote St. Jose Maria Escriva, “and to obey men.” Just then, in the silence, a bell began to ring. It was eleven o’clock, and the cathedral bells began to ring out the Ave Maria before striking the hour. As we all listened to Our Lady’s theme on the bells, the young priest answered “Yes,” echoing Mary’s yes to the angel. Fiat. “Let it be done to me according to thy will.” As the new priest made this leap of faith, I could see the Mother of Christ covering her priest’s imperfect obedience with her perfect obedience. Let it be done to you, Fr. Michael, as God has said. May you go with God, and may you lead us to Him by your holiness of life.

 
Mother’s Day
A blessed Mother’s Day to the mothers and grandmothers among us. It’s amazing, really: fatherhood waxes and wanes, but motherhood stays consistent. A few years ago the National Ad Council began plastering ads on freeways and TV networks urging men to “take time to be a Dad today,” and every few months new billboards promoting fatherhood appear in the City. I haven’t yet seen billboards urging women to be good mothers. And so many thanks to our dearest mothers, and don't forget our grandmothers, many of whom are raising their grandchildren. Many of our mothers and grandmothers may be far from us or already passed from this life, but we can still give them the best gift of all: a prayer. I’m going to say a second rosary today just for my mother, and of course I hope all of us will remember our mothers in this Holy Mass.
 
Good Shepherd Sunday
​We call the fourth Sunday of Easter “Good Shepherd Sunday” because of its Gospel. I am the Good Shepherd, Jesus says. “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” Since 1963 the Fourth Sunday of Easter is also the World Day of Prayer for Vocations. You get what you pray for, and if we don’t pray for good priests and nuns, we won’t get them. The word “vocation” comes from the Latin vocare, “to call,” which itself comes from the root word vox or “voice,” as in “My sheep hear my voice.” Most people, however, are listening to anything but the voice of God on their little white headphones. So on this 56th World Day of Prayer for Vocations, the Church asks us to pray that the sheep hear and answer God’s voice. May the gentle voice of the Good Shepherd be heard above today’s incessant devices and ideologies.

Longing for the Voice
A vocation is a voice from another world, but it’s not unlike the voice of our mother or father. At age 17 I left home for college. My mother drove me to Harrisburg, PA, and handed me my suitcase as I climbed aboard the train for Penn State. I had been the commencement speaker three months before at my little country high school. University Park’s 40,000 students seriously disorientated me, and at times my homesickness was acute. One night the terrible realization that I was homeless—that I could never return to my boyhood—overwhelmed me. At that moment, through the darkness of my dorm room, I heard my mother’s voice from far away. The voice was clear and unmistakable, just the way she used to call me for dinner: “Joe…!” Home was irrevocably beyond my reach, but my mother could still call my name.

Thirsting for the Word of God
In the first reading, the whole town comes out to hear Paul and Barnabas. They thirst for the Word of God, which was calling them home. Like the multitudes that listened to Jesus, and the immense crowds who traveled days to hear the Reverend Martin Luther King or Pope John Paul II, they hungered for the Word of Life. In the Second Reading, the Apostle John sees a huge crowd whom no one could count from every nation and race who have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb. They follow Him wherever He goes. At age 12 I heard the Word of God through aunts and uncles who said I should be a priest. In college I heard the Voice again through a vocations director who encouraged me to enter priestly formation. It was a call that burned even more intensely when I became still in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. I entered the seminary at age 24 and have never looked back. This coming Saturday three young men, one of whom began serving my Masses 18 years ago in Modesto, will be ordained to the Holy Priesthood at 10am in the cathedral. I encourage you to support these new priests by attending their ordination. They are entering the priesthood in a time of terrible conflict and disarray in the Church. They need our prayers.

A Man of Prayer
​An older priest once told me in the seminary: “Joe, I hope you will persevere. And just remember, nothing can touch a man of prayer.” He meant especially the Holy Eucharist and Our Lady. A priest who spends an hour before the Blessed Sacrament every day and prays his rosary will persevere. And so will we all. Let us honor Mary, the Mother of God, in this Eucharist, by crowning her queen of the Church and queen of the clergy. I invite now Mr. Spencer Christensen to carry his three-year-old daughter Agnes to will crown our statue of the Blessed Mother. 

Passion Sunday

In the more ancient tradition, Lent is progressive. It begins with Septuagesima three weeks before Ash Wednesday, followed by four weeks of Lent proper, then two weeks of Passiontide (beginning today) and finally the Paschal Triduum. Holy Saturday, the last day of our 70-day preparation for Easter, is marked by emptiness and almost total silence: no liturgical prayers, altars and churches stripped, and tabernacle doors gaping ajar, empty. The Crucifix is draped in purple from today until Good Friday, and statues covered until the Easter Vigil. Today is also known as “Judica” Sunday, because the introit or entrance verse comes from Psalm 42, the same verse used for the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar. “Judica me Deus, et discerne causam meam de gente non sancta.” Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause against a godless people. These words stay on Our Savior’s lips throughout his Sacred Passion. Tu Deus fortitudo mea, “you O God are my strength.” In his masterful Passion of the Christ, Gibson puts these words on Jesus’ agonized lips as he faces his trial and execution.

“I Am”

Our Gospel is taken from St. John Chapter 8, which begins with the woman taken in adultery. Jesus had pardoned the woman in the verses leading up to this Sunday’s reading, but he also commands her to sin no more. This act of forgiving sin, which we Catholics take for granted every time we enter a confessional, drove the Pharisees and legal scholars to fury against Jesus. They accuse him of everything under the sun: You are a Samaritan (an apostate). You are insane. You are possessed. Jesus patiently, but firmly, corrects their absurd charges, but finally speaks the one word that is sure to get him killed, the unspeakable tetragrammaton: I AM. It is this Name that Moses heard on Sinai, the name of Yahweh. “Before Abraham came to be,” Christ says,  “I AM.”  Thus He declares his eternity and his divinity. He leaves no room for equivocation: either he is a madman, claiming to be divine, or he is all that he says he is: the eternal and consubstantial Son of God. The Jews picked up stones to kill him.

God’s Shame

Jesus abscondit se. Consider the indignity of the Christ having to hide himself. The Lord of Lords and King of Kings, having pronounced his divine Name, must dodge his enemies like a common thief and hide down some dark alley. He doesn’t have to hide himself, of course, but in obedience to his Father’s will, he accepts the humiliation of every man who must run and hide from his enemies. Our frailty must often hide or flee certain evils we cannot prevent--misunderstandings, social awkwardness, and the consequences of our own miserable sins. Every morning when we put on clothing, we hide our bodies from shame and sin. When we enter the confessional we hide our sins from others and hide our face from the priest. And  yet, we long to be free of shame, for a day when we will no longer have to run and hide. But that day is not yet. In this life, as we must endure shame, let us endure it with Him. Our Redeemer’s shame, freely chosen, heals our shame.

Keeping the Lights On

​Tourists flock to our city to tour the sex districts and Pride Parades, which pride themselves on their shamelessness. “We have nothing to hide” men say, prancing naked down Castro Street. And yet, the newspapers shame us with pictures of homeless defecating in our streets and camping in front of apartments that rent for $6000 a month. The poverty in our wealthiest cities testifies to original sin, that something is fundamentally wrong with humanity. Many people are desperately trying to fix our problems, but no one has finally succeeded. San Francisco, like any wealthy city, desperately needs Christ, who alone can heal our essential shame. The powers of darkness have convinced most people in our city that we don’t need God: all we need is Google. But technology and the money with which it floods this city is not enough. Every inhabitant of our city needs the Word of God, and the Sacraments of God. And when they come back to God, we are here for them. At least once a month someone comes to Star of the Sea from the wasteland of agnosticism. They come because the doors are open, and the Eucharist blazes from the altar. A Russian orthodox priest last week told me how grateful he is to see our large and prominent church open with the Holy Sacrament shining out across Geary Boulevard. “Christ is blessing the entire city from your altar,” he said. We’ve got to keep the church doors open and the lights on. The human soul needs more than what we can see and taste. We need God. The Church today faces real enemies, men and women who have declared that (as an attorney in Orange County told a prelate) “we will not stop until the Catholic Church is destroyed.” They cannot destroy what God sustains, but they can certainly infiltrate it with poison from within and batter it with lawsuits from without. This Sunday I will ask you to make a gift to the Archdiocese in its Annual Appeal. Our parish goal is $82,000, and many of us are able to make a 1% gift, or $820. Why do we give to the Church beyond our own parish? We give so that the Archbishop can keep the doors open and the lights on in all three counties of Marin, San Francisco, and San Mateo. God will not be silenced, if we can help it.

What are you giving up for Lent?

“What are you giving up for Lent, Father?” That’s what a young man asked me at a public lecture last week, since Ash Wednesday is only three days away. So I’ll give you the answer I gave him: I’ll just do what I’ve been doing every Lent for the last 45 years: no sweets, no alcohol, no snacks, some extra charitable giving, stations of the Cross, etc. But on the other hand, life changes. For example, over the last few months I’ve noticed how addicted to my phone I’ve become. How many times at day do you look at your iphone, that little portal into another world? No self-respecting American sits in a waiting room or at a red light without checking his or her phone. And it’s not healthy. So a new fasting is necessary: from screen time. I’ve resolved, for the next 40 days, to use my phone only as a phone (which includes texts). But no emails, no internet, no music, no apps and no media of any kind on my phone. I’ll need a lot of help to pull this off, so I’ll be praying more in Lent too. But I want to practice the presence of God while in line at Safeway or stopped in traffic. I am resolved to see the souls around me, to say hello to people rather than hiding behind screen and earbuds, to pray the rosary or just be quiet if I’m stopped dead on the Bay Bridge. By denying myself those little hits of digital excitement, I hope to see the trees, the sky, the clouds and the sea, to appreciate all the beautiful people in cars, bikes, and sidewalks, and say a prayer for them. I hope to live the precious sacrament of the present moment.
 
As we will hear in Ash Wednesday’s Gospel, we draw closer to God through Prayer, Fasting, and Almsgiving. The most perfect prayer is time with the Blessed Sacrament, either at daily Mass or in adoration. The most perfect fasting is from food, feeling that lean hunger in your flesh. The most perfect almsgiving is cold hard cash, like a hundred bucks for suffering poor of Venezuela this Sunday, or a significant percentage of your wealth to a favorite charity.

Silence

I know a lady who gives up talking for Lent. Not a bad idea. Mother Teresa taught her sisters: “If we talk always we cannot pray. Jesus is not present within me. We must keep silence. When a person really keeps silence, she is a holy sister…. if we keep silence, silence cannot be corrected; if we speak, if we answer back, we make mistakes.” She was repeating the wisdom of Ben Sirach from our first reading: “one’s faults appear when one speaks.” Of course, sometimes one has to speak, like I’m speaking now. Priests have to preach, and parents have to teach their children, and popes have to speak clearly on heresy and sin. The silence of parents, priests, bishops, and popes over the crimes of the world and the Church is destroying our society. We must speak as the Holy Spirit guides us, but speech born of anger, negativity, or judgmentalism is not from God.

Splinters and Planks

​“Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye but not the wooden beam in your own?” Jesus asks today. The answer is obvious. We love to criticize others. Not infrequently a penitent in my confessional cannot think up any sins. A surefire solution is for me to ask if he or she has gossiped. “Oh sure,” is the common reply. “Everybody gossips!” We love picking at each others’ splinters. Now, helping someone get a splinter out of their eye is not a bad thing, but it depends how we get it out.
 
Jesus gives us three rules for removing splinters. First Rule: you have to think of the splinter-bearer as your brother: “Brother, let me remove the splinter from your eye….” We would find life so much easier if we called to mind that all those annoying people are my brothers and sisters, children of the same God. Second Rule: you have to believe you can remove your own splinter, or wooden beam: “Remove the beam from your own eye first.” I’ll never forget a penance I once received for confessing impatient driving: I was to stay in one lane all the way home. I actually drove two hours without changing my lane, and it was the most restful, joyful drive I’ve ever had. Third Rule: you must correct your brother. “Then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye.” If you had a splinter in your eye wouldn’t you want someone to help you get it out? We are supposed to correct our brother’s faults. We remove the wooden beam from our own eye so that we can remove the splinter from our brother’s eye.
 
We fast in Lent to see our own sins more clearly, so that we can help build a more “just, verdant, and peaceful world” (words I hear from the McArthur Foundation, proud supporter of NPR). We weaken our stubborn arrogance in order to break down our resistance to change. But not just for ourselves. Once healed, we are healthy enough to help others overcome their ailments. We are one body in Christ, the divine physician. Let us pray for the grace to help each other become stronger in Christ over these next 40 days.

Our Throw Away Culture

Yesterday around 70,000 people, mostly under 30 years of age, testified to the sacred value of every human life by walking down Market Street here in San Francisco. It was an overwhelming witness to the peace and joy of knowing there is a God and He holds each of us in His hands. Pope Francis coined the term “throw away culture.” We throw away perfectly good food, we throw away usable clothing, cars, and electronics. Try to get a pair of shoes or a clock radio fixed these days—they tell you it’s easier and cheaper to just get a new one. And not only material things: we too easily give up on marriages that could be repaired and friendships that just need a little loving care. Our throw away culture began, however, when we began throwing away our children, first through contraception and then through abortion. In pushing life away from us, we have pushed aside the very source of our joy. We have become a sad and fretful people, a homeless people because we have emptied the home of children.

The Joy of the Gospel

In the first reading, Ezra the priest reads from the Books of the Law to the Jewish people who had been deprived of God’s Word for 50 years during their Babylonian Captivity. Proclaiming the Torah from daybreak to midday, Ezra sees the people weep as they hear God’s love for them. “Do not weep,” Ezra says, “and do not be sad, for rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength!” In the Gospel, the Lord himself reads from Isaiah in the Nazareth synagogue, where he had grown up. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, to bring glad tidings, to proclaim liberty, recovery of sight, to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.” God is with us, and we are acceptable to the Him, no matter what we have done or had done to us. If God is a father to us, we are ever-young, children who know a benevolent father will protect and provide for us. He alone can restore the joy of our youth.

Ever Young

Why is the prolife movement so young? It’s not only filled with children and teens, young adults and young families, but the older people who have been praying in front of abortion clinics for 30 years are filled with joy and hope. It is born of a conviction that we are free and can be at peace with nature. The laws of nature do not restrict but free the creatures she governs.
 
One of nature’s laws is that every human being has inalienable rights. In other words, as St. Paul says in today’s epistle, “the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I do not need you’ nor the head to the feet ‘I do not need you.’” Every human life is needed. If our society is suffering a sense of isolation, of disunity and disembodiment, it is because we have been eliminating an entire part of the human family since 1973. Since Roe v. Wade at least 60 million lives have been thrown away, and if you and I do not say something, their blood is on our hands. The loss of even one human life is my loss, an irreparable loss to humanity. Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist whose story was made famous in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, saved 1200 Jews from Nazi extermination. In the end, he wept that he had not sold his car or his gold ring to save even one more life. He recalled the Jewish proverb “To save one life is to save the whole world.” If we go to church every Sunday, and practice kindness and honesty, but say nothing about the killing of unborn human beings in America, their blood is on our hands.
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The best of the prolife movement, however, is not motivated by guilt or anger. It is a movement propelled by the joy of youth. Last night I prayed with folks at the only Planned Parenthood still operating in San Francisco, as our parish does every Thursday night. A young adult led the prayers, but I marveled at Dr. Ron Konopaski, a retired dentist who coordinates San Francisco’s 40 Days for Life every year. He spends 12 hours every day for six weeks in front of the abortion facility. He is never sad. He is never frustrated, even though in this city of a million people few join him. I’ve never seen him angry at the sometimes-furious disrespect we endure from passersby. The other morning, on my way to say an early Mass for the Missionaries of Charity, I passed him on the moonlit street, hurrying to the Carmelites. Every morning he walks three miles to and from Cristo Rey for early Mass. What a way to spend your retirement! What a way to keep yourself ever young! You, O Lord, will restore the joy of my youth.

From the top of the year

By ancient tradition, the Church announces the dates for the coming year’s liturgical feast at the Epiphany Mass, which stands at the top, so to speak, of the liturgical year. From our perch at the top of the year we can see the year’s great feasts and mysteries spread out before us. And so, from the Roman Missal:
 
Know, dear brethren, that, as we have rejoiced at the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ, so by leave of God's mercy we announce to you also the joy of his Resurrection, who is our Savior. On the sixth day of March will fall Ash Wednesday, and the beginning of the fast of the most sacred Lenten season. On the twenty-first day of April you will celebrate with joy Easter Day, the Paschal feast of our Lord Jesus Christ. On the second day of June will be the Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ. On the ninth day of June, the feast of Pentecost. On the twenty-third day of June, the feast of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. On the first day of December, the First Sunday of the Advent of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom is honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen.

He who made the Pleiades and Orion

On Epiphany, a word in Greek that means “the shining forth,” one star rose in the East, pointing to the creator of all the stars. Let’s look into this starry heavens. If you filled a box with sand, each grain representing one star for every observable star in the universe, the box would have to be two miles high, two miles wide, and stretch from Washington to Atlanta. A few years ago astronomers pointed the Hubble telescope at the darkest part of the sky the size of a tennis ball at 100 yards, or about one 32 millionths of the sky. They kept the shutter open for a few weeks. What did they find in that “empty” bit of space? 5,500 galaxies, each containing about 100 billion stars. Go home and Google “Hubble deep field” to see the image—it’s beautiful! Galaxies of all sorts of shapes and colors and configurations, every one of them created by the baby in Bethlehem. And yet, that one baby—and every human life—outweighs all of those 200 billion trillion stars. That’s why the Catholic Church is unshakably prolife.

The Baby

During Christmastide we celebrate the birth of a baby, and with the wise men, we kneel before his sacred face. In three weeks we will celebrate the annual Walk for Life West Coast, vowing never to forget January 22, 1973, the day our government gave us permission to destroy the baby. Babies are a mystery, and mysteries are hard to live with, and mysteries are often frightening. I can remember one summer night in the High Sierras, lying down to sleep under the open sky. It blazed with billions of stars so bright that I felt as if I were falling into them, or they were engulfing me. I could not remain face to face with the abyss and moved under a tree! Looking into creation on a scale that vast leaves no escape for the creature before a power infinitely greater than itself. It’s frightening to admit but it’s inescapably true that “there is a God, and I am not he.” When we deny the Creator or destroy the unborn child or mock the laws of nature it is not nature that is mocked. We do not break the law of God; we break against it. Consider how Herod tried to break the natural law by destroying the children of Bethlehem.

Herod

Herod was a king, and by all historical accounts maniacally fearful of losing the petty power he possessed in his little city. Three magi—scholars of sacred wisdom—arrive at his palace seeking to honor a newborn king. Herod, and we read “all Jerusalem with him,” was greatly troubled at this. He and his city heard of a power greater than themselves, greater even than Rome, a power that moves a star. Herod will try to control the situation by destroying all male children up to two years old, and probably ripped children from pregnant mothers for good measure. But the wise men, overjoyed at seeing the star (a power greater than themselves) prostrate themselves before the child, offering him the gifts of their trustful submission. They kneel before the mystery. “I am the steward of this mystery” St. Paul writes in our second reading. I am not the owner, but the steward, of God’s law.

The Law of God

​The law of God is this: that every creature be saved. We pray in the opening prayer of this Mass “that we, who already know you by faith, may be brought to behold the beauty of your sublime glory.” In other words, that everyone go to heaven. For that to happen, however, we must join all of creation in submitting ourselves to the Creator. Go into the mountains sometime, under the night sky, and fearlessly look up into the stars. Or simply look into the face of a baby, into the infinite mystery of a human life—look deeply, and do not flinch. Ask yourself how you or I could let others, in their confusion or fear, destroy that face. At this moment in history, we are more confused than we were fifty years ago. Our leaders are confused. We regain clarity by looking fearlessly into the face of the child, into the depths of God’s sublime creation. Seek the Child, and follow his Way, and bring as many as you can to this child with the time given you on earth.

Rose Colored Vestments  

“Gaudete Sunday” takes its name from the first word of its opening scripture verse, the introit from Philippians 4, which is also the Epistle for this Mass: Gaudete in Domino semper: iterum dico, gaudete. Dominus prope est. “Rejoice in the Lord always: again I say it, Rejoice!... the Lord is near.” From the perspective of a sinner facing judgement, the nearness of the Lord is fearful, as in the Dies irae sequence. But from the perspective of the sinner facing final redemption, his imminent arrival is joyful. We want to get on with the necessary judgement so we can get through Purgatory and on to Heaven. We want the Lord to come quickly, because the arrival of the Lord is always our supreme good. Thus the priest and the altar clothe themselves in rose vesture to indicate the joy of the Lord’s imminent arrival.

Joy is More than a Feeling

​St. Paul does not ask but commands us to be joyful, in the imperative. He does not suggest; he requires that we radiate joy. Remember that birthday party when you were pouting and your mother said “You will be happy!” St. Paul can command joy because joy is not just a feeling. As they say in Retrouvaille, a program for troubled marriages, love is not a feeling; it is a decision. I will love you, even when I don’t feel love for you! I will radiate joy, especially when I don’t feel joyful. Sound “inauthentic” or “fake?” It’s not. It’s called fidelity. Contemporary culture, following the dictates of the sexual revolution, commands us to follow our feelings. Jesus commands us to overcome our feelings and to practice goodness even and especially when we don’t feel good. The good news is that we can choose to exercise joy even when things around us make us feel sad.
 
Joy is a virtue: it’s a habit we form by repeatedly choosing a good behavior.
Joy is a duty: God calls his disciples to radiate confident joy in his divine providence, the unshakable conviction that “all things work for the good for those who love God” (Romans 8:28). Joy is a net by which we catch souls, beginning with our own. A sad Christian is a bad Christian. We can lose our own soul by grumbling, by complaining, by falling into a pervasive negativity. When we grumble we throw God’s gifts back in his face. Complaining is a kind of blasphemy. And finally, joy is possible. God does not command the impossible, and we all know people who have suffered terribly but remain serenely joyful.

Prayer Guarantees joy

How can I retain that joyful peace when so much is wrong within and without? St. Paul’s answer is clear: prayer. “Rejoice in the Lord always,” he says. “Have no anxiety at all, but by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God.” Like everyone else, I struggle with sadness, frustration and discouragement. Being a priest in a culture that marginalizes priests because it ignores God is not easy. Being a priest in a Church whose leaders are confused is confusing. Being a practicing Catholic in a Church whose leaders have been living criminally double lives is discouraging. The betrayal of our leaders drains our courage to be Catholic. We all struggle to put on a joyful face every day with our co-workers, our children, our spouses, and with that most difficult of person, the one we see in the mirror every morning. Personally, what saves me is getting my old carcass out of bed and into the chapel every morning. What can we do when everything else fails but come before God?

The Star of the New Evangelization

​The great image of Our Lady of Guadalupe to my left is still with us from her feast last Wednesday. She brought joy to an entire continent at the lowest point in American history. The most highly developed civilization on the American continent, the Aztec empire, was in its death throes. When she appeared to Juan Diego Cuat-loat-at-zin in 1531, his civilization and the sacred beliefs of his ancestors were being destroyed by the Spaniards. She said to him, “Escucha, ponlo en tu corazón, Hijo mío el menor, que no es nada lo que te espantó, … no se perturbe tu rostro, tu corazón; … ¿No estoy aquí yo, que soy tu Madre?” God gave us His mother, so that we would believe in his tender love for us. By coming to Him through her, we will never flag in Christian joy. Our Lady of Guadalupe, cause of our joy, pray for us!