​I live in one of America’s most secular cities, and we pride ourselves on our French restaurants. Our secularism comes largely from France, along with our escargots à l’ail gratinés. Did you hear the one about Descartes in a French restaurant? “Monsieur Descartes,” the waiter asked, “would you like the escargots à l’ail gratinés?” The father of the Enlightenment replied “I think not.” And he disappeared…. Certainly the French are clever people, and in some fundamental ways their laïcité (google it) has given us the secular city.
 
But something strange is happening in France this Easter. A record number of French citizens are seeking baptism—over 10,000 this year, compared with 5,500 last year. What to account for a 45% increase in those seeking the holy and Catholic religion in France, the birthplace of secularism? Another strange statistic: the annual three-day pilgrimage from Notre Dame in Paris to Notre Dame in Chartres has been steadily growing (from 16,000 two years ago to 18,000 last year). This year the number of registrations overwhelmed the computer systems, which had to shut down until after Easter! And not only in France: almost every diocese in this country has recorded steadily increasing numbers seeking baptism. Baltimore has reported a 28% increase, and Los Angeles a 38% increase. I just read that Malasia, of all places, had 2000 people enter the Church yesterday.
 
I have not a few French parishioners here in San Francisco, but my first one was an atheist. He was raised in Paris with no faith and came to San Francisco to work as an animator at Lukasfilms. He had a good job, a beautiful Swedish wife, a lovely apartment in a chic neighborhood, but he came knocking on the parish door. “Why do you want to be baptized?” I asked him. David replied: “because life without God doesn’t work. I grew up in Paris with steadily increasing social chaos, and my personal life has no fundamental meaning. I want to see if Christ can give me a fuller life.” David was baptized in 2016 and has since returned to France with his beautiful Swedish wife and beautiful three children, for which he thanks God unceasingly.
 
Yesterday I ran to Costco to pick up some fixins for the Easter Vigil reception. Twelve were baptized in my parish last night, and I needed some grapes and cheese to go with my French wines. I put my card up to the reader at the entrance and a nice Filipina smiled at me. “Thank you, Father,” she said. It made me feel all warm inside. Inside the vast Costco, I next approached a massive security guard. He was sitting, but I think he was about six foot five, and he looked straight at every person entering the store through his wrap-around black sunglasses. He was a black man, rippling with muscles, and looking as scary as the Terminator. I shyly waved at him, and he said, without cracking any kind of smile, “Happy Easter, Father.” I hurried on, rejoicing to have received the best Easter gift of all, the shared joy of a man who is not allowed to smile and not allowed to be religious. The six foot five security guard is there to scare people from shoplifting, but he knows, too, that life without God is dark and boorish. He knows, in his great heart, that Jesus rose from the dead!

​If I do not have the early Mass, I spend a morning hour in the chapel as our choir school practices on the third floor. As I rest with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, or read the daily Gospel, I often hear snatches of sacred music wafting from across the schoolyard. This morning, as I beheld the Sacred Host, two 8th grade voices floated through the walls of the chapel. They were singing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Pie Jesu. In 2001, The New York Times referred to Webber as "the most commercially successful composer in history.” If you’ve heard musicals such as Cats or Phantom of the Opera or Evita, you’ve heard his delightfully capturing melodies. While Sir Andrew described himself as an agnostic to the same The New York Times, his high Anglican boyhood has inspired pieces like the Requiem he wrote in memory of his father. It is from that Requiem that the two eighth grade girls we harmonizing this morning as I sat before Jesus.
 
“Pie Jesu” is a Latin verse from the Mass of the Dead (the “requiem”). The verse goes: “Tender Jesus, grant them rest….” Andrew Lloyd Webber, however, expands the verse for pious effect, repeating “pie Jesu” four times:
 
Pie Jesu, pie Jesu, pie Jesu, pie Jesu
Qui tollis peccata mundi
Dona eis requiem, dona eis requiem.
 
Pie Jesu, pie Jesu, pie Jesu, pie Jesu....
 
Webber wrote these verses, and this devout melody, for his father, who had died, and whom his son hoped would be granted eternal rest after a life of toil and struggle. Webber, the agnostic, hopes yet that “Jesu” (Jesus in the nominative case) will show tenderness to his father, because, in the face of death, no one else can. Death is the great leveler, but even agnostics, mostly, hope for some tenderness even after death. Only Jesus can do what no one else can when someone dies.
 
Today is “Spy Wednesday,” when the daily Mass gospel tells the tale of Judas, selling Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. Tender Jesus is betrayed and yet, going to His death, He is serene. He knows His Father will care for Him, as our Father cares for all His children. We do have a Father in heaven, and we do have a Savior on earth. I was looking at Him this morning, reading about the greatest tragedy in human history, but hearing a prayer for a tenderness that will undo even that tragedy.
 
May we all find Jesus in this year’s Sacred Triduum, and a blessed Easter to you all. 

Dear Readers,

The other day I hiked a few waterfalls in Yosemite (at this moment there are dozens in full force resounding throughout the Valley) but left a bag in the bear box at the backpackers' parking lot. If anyone plans to be in Yosemite Valley in the next 7 days, I would ask you to retrieve the bag for me (I can explain in detail where it is and what it looks like). Just call the parish office and I'll fill you in: 415-751-0450. Thanks!

Fr. Joseph Illo

Last night my parish school held its Spring Concert. Everyone got dressed up: 3rd grade boys in crooked bow ties, 5th grade girls in springy Easter dresses, 7th grade boys in manly jackets and sober ties, and 8th grade girls in elegant evening gowns. It is almost Easter, and while two 8th grade girls sang Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Dona eis requiem in the spirit of passiontide, many pieces portrayed the glory of Easter rebirth. Everybody was there, of course, and no parent would miss their own children singing, or playing a violin, or swinging a handbell, on our little auditorium stage. School concerts and plays are like family reunions for the school community, where even bitterly separated spouses share a room for an hour, putting aside animosity as their children sing with grace and beauty.
 
The Catholic school is the most important apostolate of the Catholic parish, after the sacraments themselves. No other service organization or ministry or social group reaches the depths and attains the heights of Catholicism like the parish school. Studies show that the parish school is three times more likely to surface priestly vocations in a parish than even the most exciting youth program.
 
Catholic schools can be the pastor’s greatest consolation, or they can be the pastor’s greatest frustration. A Catholic school can easily become quite independent of its parish, and it’s the pastor’s job to keep their schools faithfully Catholic. In many urban dioceses, the parishes are failing while their schools are flourishing, but not necessarily as Catholic schools. These have become schools with a parish attached, rather than parishes with a school attached.
 
The parish, however, must be the mother and inspiration of the school. If the parish fails in that maternal role, the schools gradually cease to be Catholic. They become simply less expensive private schools, usually controlled by small groups of determined parents rather than inspired by the pastor. A pastor can restore the Catholic identity of his school, but it will cost him dearly. To maintain the Catholic identity of his school will require much work and no little suffering from the pastor. But if he manages to do that, the school will be the parish’s greatest blessing and among the pastor’s greatest consolations. Bishops and pastors are tempted to back off when determined parents and teachers move their schools toward the world and away from the Gospel.  But a parish school is worth fighting for, and if the fight is won, it becomes the greatest source of positive energy for the parish.
 
The final number in last night’s concert was sung by all 90 students, who lined up along the perimeter of the auditorium. Our dear music teacher stood in the middle, facing the 270-degree arc of bright faces. As the children sang Dona nobis pacem in rounds, and the teachers glowed with love, and the parents smiled from head to foot. I too melted with affection, for the little boys and girls I used to know are now young gentlemen and ladies, pouring forth truth and beauty from innocent hearts. Well, not completely innocent, of course, but they are well on their way to heaven!

At today’s blessed 7am Mass of the Annunciation, five boys showed up to serve from our school. “You can tell he’s a good altar boy,” one of the sacristans told me, “because he serves the Mass not just for the chocolate.” There is a special drawer in the sacristy filled with fun-sized chocolate bars, and each server gets to choose one Baby Ruth, Snickers, Crunch, Mr. Goodbar, or Butterfinger after Mass. These treats are certainly an incentive to serve at the altar, but I evacuated the chocolate drawer on Ash Wednesday, and the boys are still coming to serve. Today, however, I replenished the drawer and announced, after the final blessing, that a Feast Day like today merits chocolate. They rushed the drawer and selected their poisons.
 
But I cannot join them, for I must fast, even on this feast day. I have eye surgery in an hour and must fast from midnight before the procedure. No one likes to fast, I suppose, but all Catholics used to fast from midnight before the morning Mass. That’s one reason Masses were as early as possible, and one reason we hope to get early surgery appointments. But if I can fast from midnight before my surgery, surely I can fast from midnight before receiving the Body of Christ.
 
I’m hoping my surgery will improve my vision today, and I would be grateful for a prayer or two from you. But in the long run, my eyes are not half as important as my soul. The blessed Eucharist heals my soul, while the surgeon today, hopefully, will heal my left eye. If I can fast for my physical healing, surely I can fast for my spiritual healing. Do American Catholics still fast? You bet we do—before our surgeries. More American Catholics are discovering the value of the fast before Mass, such as those five rug rats from the school this morning. Their Snickers and Baby Ruths tasted all the better for having been the first food of the morning, after they had received the Bread of Life at Holy Mass.

On the evening of March 19, 2000, the body of Cardinal Ignatius Kung Pin-Mei was brought into my parish to lie in state before the altar. The Cardinal Archbishop of Taiwan then led a rosary and offered a Mass in Chinese for the repose of the 98-year-old son of Shanghai who had spent 30 years in communist prisons (from 1955 to 1985). Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, I would often see pictures of Cardinal Kung around the house. My mother led prayers for him, telling us how he had disappeared into Mao’s prisons many years ago. No one knew whether he was dead or alive, or where he was, but we remembered him in our bedtime prayers.
 
Last night I attended a dinner with his niece, Agnes Kung, and thirty others who have not forgotten the gentle bishop of Shanghai who stared down the overwhelming might of Chinese Communism. Agnes spoke about her uncle much like my mother spoke about him in our little Pennsylvania farmhouse. She spoke rather too long for my brothers and me, who just wanted to go out and play, but who needed to know what Christians were suffering on the other side of the world. She taught us, through him, what it meant to be a Christian in a totalitarian regime. Today the Archbishop of San Francisco will offer a requiem Mass, preached by Cardinal Raymond Burke, in front of a catafalque, in the same sanctuary in which Cardinal Kung lay 25 years ago.
 
Mao Tse-Tung was confident that he could eradicate Christianity, and indeed all belief in God, from China. Even Confucian beliefs were not “Chinese” enough for him. When Kung Pin-Mei defended himself at his show trial with Confucian principles, the communists raged against any appeal to a power higher than the Party. Today in China the Vatican seems to have colluded with the Party, and each table last night was named for a Chinese bishop who has disappeared into the Party’s jail system in the last ten years. But Christianity goes underground when necessary, and the Catholic faith somehow survives every onslaught against its freedom.
 
We have not a few Chinese in our “OCIA” classes for people who want to learn more about the Catholic faith. They have all been raised without religion, other than obeisance to “the Party” and its Supreme Leader. But they are looking for a power even higher than Xi Jinping. They want God.
 
“We had 300 people at the noon Mass!” the sacristan reported on Ash Wednesday. That’s 70 more people than last year. I marvel every year how everyone—Democrats and Republicans, young and old, rich and poor, binary and non-binary—come through that door on the first day of Lent to get smeared with the sign of death on their faces. "There just has to be more to life than eating and drinking," they say, "and death cannot be the end. So let me take the Christian inoculation against death, and do penance for my sins against the natural laws. Who knows? Maybe the God of the universe will regard me with fatherly love?" Last Sunday the Archbishop presided over an OCIA service called the Rite of Election, the last step before becoming Catholic. In ten years of attending this service, I’ve never seen the cathedral’s 2500 seats completely occupied, with people standing along the walls.
 
It’s been 25 years since Ignatius Pin-Mei returned to the Father’s House. The faith for which he suffered waxes and wanes over the years. Remarkably, it is waxing at the moment. But we can be sure that it will never disappear completely, because after all the truth of God’s existence is in every person’s heart, somewhere, somehow. 

​​“What are you giving up for Lent?” the school children asked me at morning assembly on “Fat” Tuesday. Having just given them every last bit of chocolate from the rectory, I said “for starters, I’m not eating any white death until Easter.” Lent is dying to this world to live for the next, but it also makes this life a lot healthier. “But what else are you giving up?” they cried out. Later that day, one of the parish secretaries asked me what I was “doing” for Lent. I rubbed my chin and looked out the window. “Well, I suppose I’d better give up being impatient with parish secretaries….”
 
Lent is famous for “giving up” things. Fasting (giving up things) is an indispensable means to God (because our lives are so full of junk), but almsgiving (giving things) is another essential way to God. He ceaselessly pours Himself out like the sun, streaming life and light in every direction. We become like God when we do as He does, pouring grace and beauty upon all around us.
 
Lent calls us to a third holy practice, as you heard in yesterday’s Gospel: prayer. Prayer is listening, stilling our bodies and souls enough to receive what God gives. “In the silence of the heart God speaks,” Mother Teresa of Calcutta often said.
 
Which is why I recommend, warmly, a “digital fast” this Lent. Never has there been so much noise in the world. Most people on the planet live in bondage to screens and earbuds. My school works to correct this problem, requiring students to check in their phones at the beginning of the day. Stella Maris is a fone-free zone. One of our 8th graders recently visited a nearby high school. She was amazed at how dead the schoolyard was at lunch. Everyone, it seemed, was by themselves staring at a phone. No one was talking, and no one was playing.
 
The most pressing problem of our time is noise. Nonstop visual and auditory noise renders us all rather stupid. One gets the impression of zombies in public places rather than fellow travelers. We have made very little effort to discipline our consumption of digital distraction. Everyone complains about it, but we all reach for our phones at the slightest pause in activity. We were promised “connectivity,” and we got isolation. They told us the internet would make us more intelligent, and we became rather more stupid. Certainly digital communications is a great blessing, but we must use it with self-control. And that's where Lent comes in.
 
Lent is the time to enter silence, to stay with stillness, to resist the compulsion So consider a media fast, at least on Fridays, or perhaps for the entire season of Lent. No music or podcasts in the car, on the trail or the sidewalk; no flickering screens while waiting in the airport or the dentist office. After a few days you will begin to see people and things you have not seen for some time. You will begin to think more deeply and perceive wonders you have forgotten. You will begin to hear what you have been longing to hear, and you will find a joyful peace in hearing the echoes of God’s voice in His beautiful creation.

​Yesterday I was riding across “The Bridge” when a large Yang Ming container ship slid beneath me. I stopped the bike and snapped a picture of incoming fog swirling about a massive vessel steaming out for China. The name of the ship, I noticed as the stern swung into view, was the YM Uniformity. What is Yang Ming's “uniformity?” Certainly the crew must uniformly adhere to nautical rules to keep things ship shape on the long voyage. As a priest, I must submit to many rules that keep the Church on course for her long voyage through history. 
 
I assume a Chinese shipping company's vessel also requires “uniformity” in less desirable ways, such as paying lip service to the Chinese Communist Party. That means keeping uniformity in Supreme Leader Xi Jinping’s dictates and  even thinking with The Party. I’ll bet the crew, for instance, wears surgical masks most of the time, as many of my Chinese neighbors do while outdoors in San Francisco’s fresh ocean air.
 
The Chinese are a great people, having sustained a civilization for longer than any other cultural demographic on our planet. One of China’s strengths is a certain humble trust in authority that enables great numbers of people to work for a common purpose. This trusting submission, however, can be a weakness. A dear friend from Hong Kong still wears her surgical mask all the time. I asked her the other day: how is it possible that I have not worn a surgical mask for the last four years and have not gotten sick? She shrugged and said “I don’t know. Ask the doctors.” In other words, “ask the experts, who do the thinking for us.”
 
American culture has strengths and weaknesses too. I was amazed how humbly Joe Biden and Kamala Harris stood behind Donald Trump during the peaceful transition of political power last month. The United States of America has the longest surviving government on the planet. We kept the union together during a terrible civil war two centuries ago, and we somehow are keeping the union together during the current cultural civil war.
 
One of our weaknesses, however, is “non-conformity,” in the sense of a perverse insistence on individual rights. Our proud obsession with “free choice” is easily manipulated and monetized by clever people. In fact, we Americans have become, in my opinion, slaves to the “uniformity” dictated by the market and power politics. We think we think for ourselves, but a preponderance of Americans have the same tats, nose rings, earbuds, and lockstep answers to political questions. It seems that most of us have been letting “the experts” do the thinking for us.
 
The Yang Ming Uniformity slid under the Golden Gate Bridge yesterday stacked with containers full of stuff we don’t need. If there’s one thing America and China can agree on, it’s the supreme value of market share. Putting “uniformity” at the service of the human person requires all of us to put supreme value not on market share but on individual human beings. Every crew member on the Yang Ming Uniformity is a person of inalienable value, made in God’s image and ceaselessly loved by Him. Even one person on board that ship is of greater value than the entire Chinese economy. 

I was talking, or trying to talk, to an older friend in a crowded restaurant. She had trouble hearing me, and I had trouble seeing her. With the years, her hearing had declined and my vision had declined, and we discussed which was worse. We both agreed that we’d rather be blind than deaf. She observed that many artists, authors, and world leaders have gone on engaging the outside world even as their eyes disengaged, but deafness paralyzes people through a terrible isolation.
 
Every day I say a bright “hello” to at least one perfect stranger as I walk our city’s streets. Most people don’t hear me, however, because their ears are stopped up with little white pieces of plastic. Never before, I suppose, have so many peoples stopped listening to the outside world: a friend’s greeting, a bird singing, the wind in the trees, a dog barking, the waves on the seashore. But it’s worse than deafness, because everyone is hearing … something—a podcast, a piece of rap music, a Google ad, a political message. Never before has commercial media had the ear of just about everyone on the planet. Never before has it been so easy for so few to captivate so many. We don’t hear the sounds of nature as we run through the park; we hear what someone else wants us to hear, and we do what we are told rather than listen and think for ourselves.
 
It is said that Mark Zuckerberg, that young genius who so widely portrays our brief cultural moment, had a texting exchange with a fellow Harvard student in 2004: Zuck: “Yeah, so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard, just ask. I have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS….” Zuck’s Friend: “What!? how’d you manage that one”? Zuck: “People just submitted it. I don’t know why they ‘trust me.’ Dumb f*cks.”
 
Mark was only 19 at the time, and most of us have said far worse in the folly of our youth. I mention Mark’s youthful indiscretion to point out something he grasped at the dawn of social media: that most of us don’t want to think for ourselves. We really are “dumb;” that is, largely incapable of intelligent speech, because we do not listen well. We unthinkingly stop our ears to the sounds of Nature, and to Nature’s God, preferring to listen dumbly to every manipulative sound that either tickles our emotions or covers over our fear of the outside world.
 
One of our older parishioners came to me in tears the other day. An exemplary Catholic for 80 years, she told me she is losing her faith in God. She is frightened and depressed: her children have all left the faith, wildfires are destroying Los Angeles, a fascist antichrist has been elected president, we are destroying the planet, the economy is tanking, and a terrible unnamed virus is set to unleash at any moment. “Are you spending time with the people you love and keeping your mind engaged in the world?” I asked her. “Yes, of course!” she said with an anguished expression. “I’m on Facebook with friends many hours a day. I watch CNN all the time. I read the San Francisco Chronicle religiously….”
 
When will we “dumb f*cks” unplug our ears and again listen to the birds and the wind? We are so easily controlled. When will we believe more in what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears rather than what we are told to think and believe through our earbuds?