I am a Dead Man

Last week I preached on hell, and this Sunday I will speak on death. Normally we talk about the “last things” in November, but last Sunday Jesus spoke of going to hell (“Gehenna”) and this week Paul gently chastises us: are you not aware, brethren, that you have been “buried with Christ?” Baptism is not, for Paul, a cute ceremony for babies with flouncy white gowns, perfumed oils, and flickering candles. Baptism is a death: “we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death.” These days, we can barely even pronounce the word “death.” Almost no one dares say “she died.” We have to tiptoe around the fact lest we be accused of insensitivity. We say “she passed….” Not even that she passed away, but simply “she passed.”
 
So first of all, we have to be able to say the word “death.” And we are “dead” in two senses. First, we are dead men walking because, if we will all die in 40 or 50 or 80 years, we might as well be dead now. What will come is already here. I just marked my 26th anniversary of ordination, and those last 26 years seem to have come and gone in a blink of an eye to me. But where will I be in another 26 years? I’ll be dead, most likely. Note well that I am young compared to many of those in our parish. If you are mildly offended that I point to your age, and that you will probably die before me, we need to have this little talk about death. The world as we know it, and especially ourselves, as St. Paul says, is passing away. “Soon,” in the grand scheme of things, we will all be dead. So we might as well think of ourselves as dead already.

Baptism has Killed Me

But we are dead in another, far more important, sense. We are dead because “we have died in Christ through baptism,” as St. Paul writes in the second reading. The word in Greek means “immersion”—that is, drowning. Baptism’s triple immersion plunges us under the earth with Christ for the three days he lay in the tomb. Water kills, but water brings life as well. And so Paul goes on to say “we were buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised form the dead we too might live in newness of life.” The old life, before baptism, is not worth living. It is really a living death to exist on this planet without God, captives of original sin. We go to work, we eat, we drink, we party, as zombies if we do all that without a greater purpose, without relationship to God, shackled to our own lusts and compulsions. So Paul says we rise from baptism not just to continue our former life but to “newness of life.”
 
Baptism is an inoculation against real death, which we call hell: an eternity apart from God and his family of saints. How does an inoculation or vaccination work? The nurse puts a little bit of a pathogen into our bloodstream, which awakens our natural defenses to annihilate the pathogen. By tasting a little of the sickness, we overcome that sickness. In baptism we taste death, but the grace of God awakens in us to destroy that death. By this grace, sin becomes bitter to our taste, and we are freed to choose always the good, the true, and the beautiful. Baptism makes eternal life possible by giving us the capacity to refuse sin and the eternal death to which sin leads.

The Sign of Death is My Life

​“Consequently,” Paul concludes, “you too must think of yourselves as dead to sin and living for God in Christ Jesus.” Every time we sign ourselves with holy water we make that sign of death over us. After all the cross is a sign of death. The first century Romans mocked early Christians for choosing the sign of the cross—like choosing an electric chair or a gas chamber for one’s church logo. We chose the cross as our sign because we chose death, the death of Christ, in order to reach eternal life. When death comes for us—that is, when sin knocks on our door—we chose death rather than sin. When lust grips us, when anger throttles us, when despair chokes us, we say simple: sorry, I’m already dead. You cannot hurt me. A dead man does not fear death. I have died with Christ, and my motto is “death but not sin.” We are dead to sin.
 
May Our Lady of Fatima, who called the world to prayer and penance, give us the joy of choosing death over sin. Death to my own will, so that I may live fully free in this world and forever in the next. 

The Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

Today we celebrate the external feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which is properly celebrated on the Friday after the Sunday after Corpus Christi. The Church often celebrates beloved feasts more than once—we just can’t get enough of them! On the Feast of the Sacred Heart, we call to mind how our Lord thinks about us all the time. We are always in his heart. The graces we receive daily from God’s thoughtfulness, however, come at a price, as we are reminded in the Gospel today. There is no love without suffering. A soldier thrust a lance through Our Lord’s Sacred heart as he hung on the Cross; blood and water gushed from his open side. Why would blood and water flow in abundance from a corpse? First, because Jesus, though dead, lives forever, and his heart never ceases to beat, his blood never ceases to flow, for the people he loves. Second, the Church is born from Christ’s wounded heart in the sacraments of water and blood--Baptism and the Holy Eucharist--pour upon the world. Christ’s heart is open to all men and women. It is never closed.

Immaculate Heart of Mary

The Church celebrates also the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary the day after the Sacred Heart, although this year the Nativity of St. John the Baptist superseded it. But let’s reflect a little on the Immaculate Heart of Mary, since we missed it this year. Jesus in his infinite love sent his Holy Mother to three shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal, six times in 1917. On June 13, she said to the children:
 
“I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated.” All of the evils came to pass: Russia spread her errors to all of Eastern Europe, Asia, and South America (especially Cuba). Nations were annihilated (Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, etc.). More Christians were martyred from 1917-1989 than died in the entire world over the previous 19 centuries. The Holy Father was shot by what seems certainly to have been a Soviet-motivated agent on May 13, 1981, but beyond that one attack, Pius XII, Paul VI, and JPII suffered terribly in the brutal persecutions of the Church under communism.

Prayer and Penance

But it was the July 13 apparition at Fatima that, in the words of St. John Paul, “summed up the whole 20th century.” She gave the children three visions, which Lucia called the three “secrets” because Our Lady instructed her not to reveal what the children saw immediately. She allowed the children to see hell, but only for a few seconds—any longer would have caused them to die of fright, as Lucia said later. Our Lady has assured the children that they would go to heaven if they continued leading good and holy lives. Seeing hell for themselves moved the children to pray and do penance for poor sinners.
 
Our Lady had assured the children: “In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.” Although Russia is more Christian now than at any time since 1917, the triumph of the Immaculate Heart has yet to happen. The West is moving rapidly away from God, even beginning to persecute Christians and peace has yet to come among nations. The eternal destiny of many souls—heaven or hell—depends on the Church’s intercession.  We must continue to pray, do penance, and make our communions of reparation. I have decided to begin promoting the Five First Saturdays of reparation, for which our Lady specifically asked at Fatima. We choose first five Saturdays in a row to attend Mass, pray the rosary, spend 15 minutes of meditation on the mysteries, and make a good confession. I have been negligent in promoting the first Saturdays; may Our Lady forgive me. Let us dedicate ourselves to real prayer and penance. The best penance is to accept patiently, even gladly, the sufferings God allows in our lives. May the evil one in our time be checked by Our Lord’s Sacred Heart. May many may be won over from sin by the Immaculate Heart of Mary, cause of our Joy.

Pentecost How was your Lent? Remember getting your ashes way back on March 1st? The Feast of Pentecost brings Ash Wednesday and the entire 90-day Lent-Eastertide cycle to its fulfilment today. And what did the Son of God accomplish by going to the Cross and back, and finally sending the Holy Spirit upon us? He accomplished a perfect sigh of love.

A Sigh of Love

As Bishop Barron, quoting Archbishop Fulton Sheen, mentions in a commentary: from all eternity the Father looks at the Son and the Son looks at the Father. What each sees is utter perfection and beauty. Each sighs his love for the other, and this shared breath is the Spirits Sanctus, love breathed back and forth between Father and Son. The Holy Spirit is a sigh of love, born of beauty. We begin life breathing, so to speak, in union with our mothers, enclosed in their wombs, under their hearts, two hearts beating as one. Once born, we take our first breath of this world’s air and begin to cry, seeking to regain closeness to the maternal heart. We grow older, taking deep breaths, learning to receive and give love, but learning also that all human love is limited. Most of us eventually find love in a particular person, a boy or a girl whose beauty captivates us. We long to breathe together, to become one beating heart again. But this love, only human, disappoints us.

A Refining Fire

Pentecost draws us into the perfect love between the Father and the Son. Their sigh of love fills the world: “a driving wind” fills the house in which the apostles were. They begin to speak with this same breath, speaking only one word: “Jesus.” Jesus is my all in all, as Mother Teresa put it. “Only by the Holy Spirit,” St. Paul testifies, “can anyone say that Jesus is Lord.” Only by the Holy Spirit do we even know that we have a Savior, one who can purify our hobbled human love. The Holy Spirit, however, is not only oxygen to people who are suffocating, but also the fire that feeds on that oxygen. Not only a strong driving wind filled the house, but fire filled the air above the apostles. The sigh of love between Father and Son becomes a fire animating the entire world. Human love needs to be purified. The human embrace can only be fruitful—can bring us to “flourishing” to use a popular word—by virtue of the Holy Spirit. A man and a woman in love humbly ask God’s permission to enter a true embrace, begging the Holy Spirit to fill them on their wedding day. Only after they make their vows before the God’s altar may they kiss. Recklessly entering a “relationship” without first begging help from the Holy Spirit will disappoint us, and eventually hurt everyone around us.

The Sacred Heart

June is the month of Pentecost, and also the month of the Sacred Heart, whose feast follows Pentecost by three weeks (this year, June 23). Jesus opened his heart to us from the Cross, his supreme act of love for his Father. It is when he breathed his last with the words “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,” I think, that the Father most loved his Son. God’s love died, and we buried it, on a Friday afternoon, but the Father raised it up again. To “love without limits” (St. Maximilian Kolbe’s aspiration) is now not only possible but certain. But human love must be enclosed within the Sacred Heart, which pours itself out for mankind both from the Cross and on Pentecost.

The Immaculate Heart

​Finally, the month of June also is also the month of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, whose feast day occurs the day after the feast of the Sacred Heart. In Christ’s Mother, we return to Our Mother. Even the Beatles knew that “Mother Mary comes to me” in times of trouble. When we pray to God in and through Our Lady, we recover the lost love we had in the womb of our earthly mothers. Let pray this June, beginning with the Feast of the Holy Spirit, and marked by the Feasts of the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts, brings us the joy of knowing Jesus. 

Mothers’ Day  A blessed Mother’s Day to all dear women who give themselves in love to their husbands and their children. I am flying home tonight to see my mother and father—she’s 85 and he’s 91 and they’ve been married 63 years. We wish we could love our mothers as much as they love us!

Fatima in 1917   One hundred years ago yesterday, on May 13, 1917, a beautiful Lady came from heaven with a message for earth. She appeared to three simple children in Portugal as they watched over a flock of sheep, and they were afraid. Three flashes of light seared a cloudless sky before she appeared, frightening the children. She said: “Do not be afraid.” It is the first thing almost every visitor from heaven tells a visionary, not only in the Bible but in almost every vision since. This Lady told the children there was no reason to be afraid, because she had come from heaven, where they had a place prepared for them.
 
All of Europe was paralyzed with fear the day that beautiful Lady appeared. The First World War had been raging for three years, unleashing a carnage history had never believed possible. Entire cities were blown apart. Whole populations were forced to leave their homelands. 16 million human lives were destroyed. The new mechanized warfare poured death from the air, crushed farms and villages under massive tank treads, cut men down like weeds with machine gun fire, and burned the lungs of entire battalions with mustard gas. The beautiful Lady appeared to reassure a world at war: “This war will soon end, but we must pray. A worse war will come if we do not pray.” The war did end by November of the next year, but a worse war did come, and still men do not pray.
 
​America in 2017   America in 2017 is not unlike Europe in 1917. The nation is in the grip of a culture war that has destroyed much of what America once held dear. Our respectful political discourse, our pleasant and safe neighborhoods, our Christian approach to social life have been largely destroyed. Many more than 16 million human beings have been killed, not by enemy fire, but by our own hands, sanctioned by our own Supreme Court. Hitler horrified the world by practicing eugenic population control, but our laws now provide for the sterilization and abortion of the poorer classes. The middle class, in fact, is disappearing as cultural elites consolidate their wealth and power. Fear and outrage dominate the newsroom and the classroom. Corrupt leaders have weakened our faith in government and in the Church herself. We are afraid of looming terrorism, economic collapse, and climate change.
 
Who is stoking these fears? Certainly not God nor His Holy Mother. They bring us nothing but peace and joy. In his canonization homily yesterday, Pope Francis called on the 500,000 pilgrims to follow the example of heroic virtue lived by St. Francisco and St. Jacinta, particularly their insistent prayer for sinners and their adoration of "the hidden Jesus" in the tabernacle. We too must pray. It is here, together at Mass, and at home, praying the rosary with our kids after dinner, and in our weekly holy hour before the “hidden Jesus” that we will find our peace. So many have committed themselves to a deeper, more consistent life of prayer here at Star of the Sea. Let us continue what we have begun, in obedience to our dear Mother at Fatima: Pray the rosary, my dear children. Pray, pray, pray.

Divine Mercy Sunday

We had so many confessions today, and no wonder: this is the Feast of Divine Mercy. Jesus said to Sr. Faustina to “ask of my faithful servant [a priest] that, on this day, he tell the whole world of My great mercy; that whoever approaches the Fountain of Life on this day will be granted complete forgiveness of sins and punishment.” There is no better day to make a good confession than today. It’s kind of like getting bonus points for just entering the confessional. Jesus also told St. Faustina that “mankind will not have peace until it turns with trust to My mercy” (Diary 300). He told her that just after World War I had unstrung a thousand year civilization of mutual respect and culture in Europe. But perspicacious men knew that the war had not resolved anything, and that another, more brutal war would come unless mankind turned back, with trust, to the mercy of God.

Peace I give to you

When we were children we trusted our parents, and we trusted that the world was beneficent. As the world proved less rightly-ordered than we thought, we gradually lost that trust. The Gospel for the second Sunday after Easter speaks of ten men who had lost that trust on a Friday afternoon but regained it the following Sunday night. On Easter night, 10 of the original 12 apostles are huddled in an upper room behind locked doors. The first thing Jesus says to them upon walking through the locked doors is “Peace be with you.” You can trust me. He says it again. Pax vobis. He brings the peace of right order into the room. “I have risen from death, never to submit to it again,” He tells them, “and nothing and nobody can disturb your peace.” Thomas was not with them on that Easter night. Where was he? The apostles were gathered in prayer, in community, with at least some hope that all was not lost, as some had reported seeing Jesus alive. But Thomas: he was agitated, skeptical. He was not with them in prayer. “I will not believe,” he insisted.

We all need more silence

ut a week later (that is, today) Thomas was with them. Jesus returns and say to them (for the third time): “Peace be with you.” He is not angry at Thomas, but he does command him to believe in the Resurrection. And Thomas makes the great act of faith: My Lord and My God. It is hard to believe. To believe without seeing, without touching the nail marks on His risen body, we must pray. And to pray we must quiet ourselves, we must find silence and stillness. There is so little peace in our society because there is so little silence. Deep faith is only possible with deep silence, a silence that is full of God. We need places and we need times when there is no computer, no smartphone, no negative news reports, no gossip, no demands on us to outperform others, nothing but God. We need more silence in our lives.

My greatest hope

My greatest hope for our parish, and for the Church universal, is quiet prayer before the Holy Eucharist. That is why we built our adoration chapel. Many are coming to pray in silence and finding peace. Last night I came in at 11pm to do my night prayers and there was a young man, in silence before the Risen Christ.
 
Every good thing comes from Eucharistic adoration. In my last parish, after we started adoration, our Mass attendance doubled, our income doubled, four men entered the seminary, many more people came to confession, our love for the poor increased (we opened a full time St Vincent de Paul center, among other commitments to charity). Families became stronger and more beautiful, blossoming with children. Spouses stayed together against unbelievable odds.  And why? Because people in crisis had a place to pray; because we were praying as a parish, as a family. So the greatest thing you can do for your happiness and those you love is to spend an hour a week with Jesus. “Mankind will not have peace until it turns with trust to My mercy,” Jesus told Sr. Faustina. It is before the Holy Sacrament that we will find the peace of a child who trusts his Father. Come, let us pray.

Welcome

A warm welcome to the family and friends of our five men and three women who will become Catholic Christians at this Divine Liturgy. In the Mother of all Vigils, God bestows upon us, in word and sacrament, through fire and water, the inestimable grace of rebirth in Christ, and no Easter Vigil is complete without a baptism or two. For the faith of these eight children of God, we give thanks and glory to His Divine Majesty. I also want to thank the many people who have worked hard over the last few days to give glory to God in this beautiful liturgy: Brendon Ford and our choir, his brother Martin who has spent the last two days camped out managing logistics, Ed Tobin our sacristan and the small army of altar servers, Claire Herrick and the RCIA team, including sponsors, Thelma and our “flower team,” including John Sellai from Pinelli’s Flowerland, and the whole parish infrastructure that supports the delivery of these divine sacraments day in and day out.

The Easter Vigil

The Paschal vigil unfolds in four parts: First, blessed fire, which breaks through a pitch-dark church, signifying Christ’s resurrection. In bearing our little candles in procession to the sanctuary, we bravely bring faith into a darkness that has not and cannot overcome it. The tabernacle stands empty as we begin the Mass, but God will return in response to our pilgrimage to this church, His house on earth. Second, an hour of solemn Scripture proclamation, retelling our essential history from Creation to Redemption. This is real history—His-Story, our story, the greatest story ever told: God creates the cosmos, Abraham binds his son Isaac, Moses leads the children of Israel through the Red Sea, and the new Moses, Christ Jesus, leads the children of God through baptism to eternal freedom. Third, the Liturgy of Initiation, when the priest confers baptism and confirmation on these eight new members of our family, and witnesses the renewal of baptismal promises from the rest of us. Fourth is the Sacred Eucharist itself, where we take our place at Christ’s Sacrifice on Calvary, relived through the sacraments of bread and wine at this sacred banquet. The Mass delivers this final gift, bread for the journey, so that we will have the strength to make it all the way, not only to the end of this three-hour Mass, but to heaven itself.

Our Final Loneliness

​“Christ strode through the gate of our final loneliness,” wrote a young theology professor in 1968. “In his Passion he went down into the abyss of our abandonment. Where no voice can reach us any longer, there is he. Hell is thereby overcome, or to be more accurate, death, which previously was hell, is hell no longer.” The author’s name is Joseph Ratzinger, whom we know as Pope Benedict XVI. Little Joseph was born to Joseph and Maria Ratzinger on April 16, 1927, which that year was Holy Saturday. He was born at 2am, and brought later that day to the local parish, where he was baptized at the Easter Vigil. He was an Easter baby. And so are all of you. Every Day is Easter for Christians. Every day, every Mass, we are reborn by word and sacrament, by water and fire: the dew of God’s kindness and the fire of his love. The only difficult thing in life is believing in his never-failing love for his children. The only thing that can keep us out of heaven is disbelieving in the eternal happiness that he offers us.
 
By this gift of baptism, we have found unending life. We have found Christ. To our eight beautiful candidates for the sacraments: dearest Pamela, Kevin, Linda, Susan, David, Naoki, Raghav, and Hebert: we welcome you to the land where the sun never sets, and death is no more. With Our Lady, Star of the Sea, and St. Joseph, Master of God’s house, with your guardian angels and patron saints, and with good people who believe in something greater than themselves, we welcome you to the Catholic Church, the community of believers, and the communion of saints. May we all live and die holding tightly to the faith that we professed on the day of our own baptism.

The Holy Eucharist

Thank you for coming to Holy Mass tonight. It is not a day of obligation, so I think you are here because you love Jesus more than anything else you could do this evening. The parish feels especially like home on Holy Thursday, recalling our best childhood dinner tables, pointing us to the eternal banquet of the Lamb. God our Father, and the Church our mother, have called us to the meal. Like children we have come down from our rooms to dinner with Him and the rest of the family.  We love Him so much because He first loved us so much. This night, unlike any other night, we witness the very institution of the Holy Eucharist in the Mass. Only on this day will your priest pray these words before the consecration: “On the day before he was to suffer for our salvation and the salvation of all, that is today, he took bread in his holy and venerable hands….” It is the Mass of the Lord’s Supper.

The Priesthood of Jesus Christ

God instituted the Holy Mass on this day by first instituting the Sacred Priesthood. “I no longer call you slaves but friends, because I have told you everything…” He told His twelve apostles. For them He blessed the bread, broke it, and gave it to them saying “this is my body…. Do this in remembrance of me.” He gave His Body to these men first to sanctify their own souls and then that they would sanctify the world. These men were the first “stewards of the mysteries of God,” the distributors of Christ’s saving sacraments.
 
St. John Paul described the priest in these words: “The only priest who will always prove necessary to people is the priest who believes profoundly, who professes his faith with courage, who prays fervently, who teaches with deep conviction, who serves, who puts into practice his own life the beatitudes, who knows how to love disinterestedly, who is close to everyone, especially those most in need.” The world needs priests like this. I need priests like this.
 
In 1954, Sir Alec Guinness, the great British actor (“Obi-Wan Kenobi, to those of us raised with Star Wars), was in France shooting a movie about a Catholic priest. He was walking back to his apartment one evening, still dressed in a priest’s cassock, when a little boy darted out of the bushes and grasped his hand. “Mon Pere,” he babbled, “let me tell you about school today.” The boy’s simple confidence and affection in the priesthood deeply impressed the actor. Two years later Alec Guinness became a Catholic, hoping to find the same joy in knowing God through his priests. His Jewish wife followed him to the Church a year later. I’ve given a few retreats in Haiti, and those simple words with which everyone seems to greet the priest, mon pere, is so touching. Rich and poor alike call priests whom they have never met “my father” because they believe they have a Father in Heaven who loves them through His priests.
 
A priest works for truth and justice in this world, but always from the perspective of eternal salvation. He consoles people best when he helps them see this world’s difficulties in light of eternity. Above all, the world wants priests with a zeal for souls, that themselves believe in things above more than things on earth.

Adoration

It is not easy for your priests to do that, especially in a secular, post-Christian society. He is tempted to give up or give in to the world. Any man who becomes a priest wants to help others. But as the world wears on him, he is tempted to use human means rather than God’s ways. In the stress of running his parish, he may forget the primacy of grace. But the parish, and the priest, must above all be a school of prayer. A priest who prays will never be undone by evil. Nothing can touch a man of prayer, they told me in the seminary, and I have found it to be true. That is why we have dedicated ourselves to the Holy Mass and Eucharistic Adoration in our parish. The chapel tonight is full of live plants, to look like the garden of Gethsemane. That is where we will find the great high priest. He is in prayer, in the garden, in his agony for all souls. Let us go with him into that garden, and pray for our priests to dwell in that garden with him, to undergo the agony all priests must undergo, that none be lost. With Our Blessed Lady, we intercede for the world, that none be lost.

Jesus dismisses death

As we progress through Lent towards Easter, the Gospel readings get longer and longer. We will hear the longest Gospel of the year next Sunday (the entire Passion narrative), and finally, a week after that, nine lengthy readings cover the whole sweep of salvation history at the Easter Vigil—just the readings alone in this “mother of all vigil Masses” last an entire hour. This year we will baptize 7 adults at the Easter Vigil, so don’t miss it. All of these readings, however, conclude with a very short Gospel on Easter Sunday: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” Death—the sum of all human fears, to be extinguished, forgotten, life rendered meaningless—death for Jesus is just a brief sleep from which he will easily wake us. We think death is the ultimate finality, but Jesus dismisses death with a simple word.
 
The raising of Lazarus is a drama second only to the Passion itself. It is story haunted by death’s spectral form and putrid stench: “but Lord, he has been dead four days.” Jesus faces death, and is “deeply troubled,” but in the end, obliges death to glorify God by conceding to life. “This sickness is not to end in death, but is for the glory of God.” As the Eastern liturgy says, “by your death you have trampled death.” O death, where is now thy sting?

Where were you?

A few brief points from this long tale. We commonly say that death and taxes are life’s only absolutes (your taxes are due in less than two weeks, by the way). But Jesus shows us that death is not absolute. He describes Lazarus’ death as “sleeping.” “Lazarus is dead … but I am going to awaken him.” Love is greater, and will undo death. This great truth is told in many fairy tales, as in the prince’s kiss awakening the dead princess from her “sleep.” By his death, Christ has become the true prince of this world, able to awaken all who are dead by his divine kiss.
 
Jesus gets to Bethany “four days late.” Both of the dead man’s sisters reproach him in exactly the same words: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” God, where were you when we needed you? Jesus receives these panicked accusations calmly, and simply says, “I AM the resurrection and the life” (do you need me to prove it to you?). And that is the point of this last and greatest miracle of Jesus: He raises a man four days dead to reassure us. Nothing is beyond His reach. He can rebuild anything.

Jesus shudders and Jesus weeps

Having said this, however, Jesus himself weeps in front of his friend’s tomb. He shudders with repulsion at the stench of death. Christ will raise this man, but it will cost him. With loud cry, like that from the Cross, eloi eloi lema sabachtani, Jesus calls the dead man out. “Untie him, and let him go.” By my death, I have come to untie you from the bondage of death. I will die in your place. You will all die, but you will rise to a new life through my death.
 
Death has never been absolute. There is only one absolute, and that absolute is a Person, a Person who is love. All things, St. Paul writes, especially suffering and death, work for the good for those who love God. Suffering does not hurt us. Death does not hurt us. Only unbelief hurts us. Suffering and death must strengthen our faith, that we may not fear, but rather believe in the Resurrection and the Life, Jesus Christ our Lord.

The Shroud

​Tonight you will hear a man who has spoken all over the world over the last 20 years on the greatest scientific evidence of Christ’s resurrection. Jack Sacco worked for several years producing programs at EWTN. A friend asked him to do a program on the Shroud of Turin, and he replied “hasn’t science proven that a fake?” His friend asked him what “science” he was referring to, and Jack said simply “well, I saw it on the evening news.” So Jack began analyzing the data for himself, and found not one shred of evidence that the image of a man crucified and risen was a forgery. This linen cloth records the scourging and the nails, but it also records some sort of flash of subatomic energies released after this man’s death. Christ has died, but Christ has risen!

A Gift and Responsibility

Yesterday the Archbishop consecrated our new Eucharistic Adoration chapel, which we have named for St. Joseph. I wish to thank all our benefactors, both those who gave money and those who gave time and service in this 2-year, $250,000 project. We now have a beautiful St. Joseph Chapel that will be open day and night for Eucharistic adoration, and it will grow more beautiful as we practice good stewardship of this inestimable gift of the Eucharist. Our parish has been given this gift, and this responsibility, to provide a public adoration chapel for the City of San Francisco.

Eucharistic Joy

Today is Laetare Sunday, meaning “joy” from the introit, “rejoice Jerusalem.” We find joy at Mass and in our new chapel, because there we find Our Divine Lord. We will find Jesus in our friends and families, in our work and school, and on the streets and marketplaces of our city, but only if we find him here first. They told us in the seminary to make a Eucharistic holy hour every day, and I’ve been doing that, by the grace of God, for 30 years. Sometimes I miss, but without that holy hour I can’t imagine persevering in my vocation. Many mornings I enter the chapel in our rectory a broken man, a sad middle-aged man, and an hour later I come out a new man, full of joy and peace. In the Latin Mass the priest prays Psalm 42 before ascending the altar: “I will enter the sanctuary of God, the God who restores the joy of my youth.” A priest by definition is an “old man” (the literal meaning of presbyteros in Greek), but every time a priest enters the Eucharistic sanctuary, he becomes a young man again. Just being in the presence of the Sacred Eucharist, God stills my heart. I realize that I don’t have to save myself or anyone else. I don’t have to fix anything in anyone’s broken life, or achieve success in this parish. I can rest in the certainty that it is His Church, not mine. The Eucharist gives us the simple joy of a child, without which no one can enter the kingdom of heaven.
 
After the Mass itself, the most important thing I do in this parish is just “sitting” an hour a day with Jesus. Just being there, listening, learning to trust, recovering the joy of knowing Jesus, I am renewed each morning as a man, as a priest, and as your pastor. That is true for you too. If you spend an hour with the Blessed Sacrament, you will remain forever young.

St. Joseph

In today’s Gospel Our Lord provides bread for the people, the miracle of the loaves. The Lord provides his children with bread, just the way his father on earth, St. Joseph, provided bread for his own Holy Family. Last night we reestablished the tradition of St. Joseph’s table, because last Sunday was St. Joseph’s Day, and our new chapel is dedicated to St. Joseph. In fact, we dedicated the chapel, and fed the crowds afterwards at St. Joseph’s Table, on the feast of the Annunciation, when we celebrate the Bread of Life entering into the womb of the virgin Mary. St. Joseph is so important to this parish, both as the spouse of Mary and as the “nutritor Domini,” he who fed the Son of God with bread from his table. St. Joseph fed the Bread of Life; he provided for Him who provides the beasts with their food; he clothed Him who clothes the lilies of the field. We must entrust our parish, and our families, and our souls, to the guidance and protection of good St. Joseph.

Our Lady of the Annunciation

​Yesterday, as I said, was the Feast of the Annunciation, the first mystery of the Holy Rosary. When Mary said Fiat to the angel, the Holy Eucharist entered her body, just as we say amen at the altar rail and the Lord’s body comes into us. Mary’s was the first First Holy Communion. She was the first tabernacle, the first monstrance, the first Eucharistic procession in history, as she bore the Word Made Flesh in her womb. We find her in the Eucharistic chapel too, the tender mother of God made man. In this parish named for the Mother of God, we have consecrated a Eucharistic chapel to St. Joseph on the Feast of the Annunciation, Laetare Sunday. May Jesus give us joy each time we enter that bright chapel. Thanks to all of you, in Christ Jesus, for dedicating your time to prayer before the Blessed Sacrament.

Welcome

Fr. Matthew and the entire O’Donnell family, Fr. Dass, pastor of St. Christopher’s, priests and deacons of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, priests from the Diocese of Stockton, priests of the Norbertine order, Father Kolbe Missionaries and lay volunteers: greetings in the Lord Jesus Christ.

1. My First Meeting
2. 
   

As Fr. Nelson said last night, Alice O’Donnell has many children. I am one of them, and furthermore, I am a priest because of Alice O’Donnell. Let me tell you how it went. The summer after High School, I wanted to work on our cousins’ ranch in Utah, but my devoutly Catholic mother said “if you spend a month with the Mormons, you also have to spend a month with the Catholics.” She had read about a month-long retreat for young men in Southern California called the “YMI.” So it was that a country boy from Pennsylvania was met by Mrs. O’Donnell and her enthusiastic assistants at curbside LAX (it is the O’Donnell policy never to park at airports) in late July 1979. She hustled me into the old family station wagon where we sang hymns to Our Lady as she took the wheel in the worst traffic I’d ever seen. My life as a son of the Blessed Virgin Mary had begun.
 
Mrs. O’Donnell took me to a chapel where the Blessed Sacrament was exposed on the altar. I had never seen such a thing, and didn’t even know what “real presence” meant. My home parish had not seen a monstrance or even a statue of Our Lady since 1965, but somehow it felt so good getting up at 3am just to look at Jesus, and let him look at me. To my embarrassment, I discovered that the other 11 guys knew the mysteries of the rosary, and I did not. I quietly asked one of the old Salesians to teach me, like Nicodemus coming to Jesus at night. I wasn’t sure I didn’t still want to be a Mormon—they seemed to have a lot of things right, like large families and good values, but the YMI soon put me straight.
 
Alice O’Donnell had brought me to a Eucharistic chapel, which brings us to the Gospel for her funeral Mass. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven,” Jesus says. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, you do not have life within you.” I think most Catholics do not know that. I certainly didn’t. But Dick and Alice O’Donnell lived for the Eucharist within the mystery of Our Lady’s immaculate Fiat, and they made it their business to bring others to those saving mysteries. Next week, on March 25, at my parish in San Francisco, Archbishop Cordileone will consecrate the city’s first public perpetual adoration chapel in many years. We have many to thank for this, but I personally trace it back to a little chapel in Rosemead, California, in the summer of 1979, to a lady in a well-used station wagon who had just dropped off a 17-year-old boy for his first exposure to Perpetual Adoration. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, you do not have life within you” said the Lord, and this woman wanted all her children to have this life within them.
 
Where is she now?

“The souls of the just are in the hand of God,” says the Book of Wisdom. “They seemed to have died” (in the eyes of the foolish), “but their hope is full of immortality.” How can we thank our parents for saving us from the foolishness of thinking that God would let us die? We can thank them by giving the same saving faith to our own children. All of it, which is just what Mrs. Alice O’Donnell did. Like another mother to me, St. Teresa of Calcutta, Alice just sort of assumed you wanted all of the Catholic faith. Why be a cafeteria Catholic when you could have it all? Women like this serve up the simple and complete faith, and they make sure their children eat all their dinner.
 
These souls, the Book of Wisdom continues, “shall dart about as sparks through stubble.” It recalls to me many a Christmas or Easter night at the O’Donnell home. We priests would meet Matt after our last Masses for the drive down to West Covina. We’d burst through the front door at Edith Street around 8pm. Mom O’Donnell would be darting about, talking more than listening, trying not to get too excited that so many children and grandchildren, and even three or four priests had come for Christmas, and especially her own Fr. Matthew. She would laughingly scold us, she would point out certain ironies of the human condition, she would gently chastise her sons (never her daughter), and we felt right at home. And we would smile, and know that our home on Edith Street pointed to a better home, where the Lord will reign over us forever. “Because,” the Book of Wisdom tells us, “Grace and mercy are upon his holy ones, and his care is with his elect.”
 
Grace and mercy

Mrs. O’Donnell showed us who was Full of Grace, “as the morning rising, fair as the moon, terrible as an army set in battle array.” “If God is for us,” St. Paul tells us in Romans 8, “who can be against us?” Mrs. O’Donnell also showed us a slightly-built Franciscan priest from Poland, around whom all Hell raged in 1941, who lit up the darkness within each of us by singing hymns to the Immaculata. Many years ago Alice’s daughter Ann led me to St Maximilian Kolbe’s cell at Auschwitz, where we sang hymns to the Immaculata, just as he did with the other nine as they died of starvation. The cell walls melted away, it seemed to me, and death fled before the morning rising. “Who or what will separate us from the love of Christ?” Mom O’D led us to St. Maximilian, who led us to Our Lady, who leads us to the Holy Eucharist, our pledge of eternal life.
And so we have gone on with our own lives. Dad O’Donnell got sick and almost died, and then he died. Mom O’Donnell missed him but had her children and grandchildren to look after. Since Dad’s death, though, Mom began to look more towards the life of the world to come. We went on with our lives, busy with our children and our parishes and our careers. But Mom O’Donnell was still here on Edith Street, with her statue of the Immaculata on the lawn, and St. Joseph and the baby Jesus.
 
Now she too has gone to God, and we too think a little bit more about the day we will die. “I’m not dying,” St. Therese said, “I’m entering into life.” With every good person that dies, we believe a little bit more in life, and a little bit less in death. Death is just a moment, and even when our dying stretches over some months or years, it is a nothing, really. God has called us to eternal life, and that’s the only real thing.
 
Alice O’Donnell gave me two things—two things that my own mother had given me but to which I didn’t pay much attention. Sometimes it takes another person, in another place and another time, to give you what your own parents had been giving you all along. My own mother knew this, and that’s why she sent me to California in 1979 to the YMI. There, Alice O’Donnell led me to the Holy Eucharist within the Immaculate Heart of Mary. She gave those two gifts to so many of us.
 
I now ask you, with Fr. Nelson, to join me in praying for her soul. No one is perfect when we die—the Missionaries of Charity prayed for Mother Teresa’s soul until she was beatified. Let us pray for the eternal repose of Alice O’Donnell, in the sure and certain hope that those who die in the Lord will be brought one day to the fullness of paradise. We believe she will see Jesus and Mary face to face, with St. Maximilian Kolbe, St. Therese, her own Dick O’Donnell, and the full communion of saints. May her soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in peace. Amen.