​A blessed Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Tradition holds that on this day in 1251 Our Lady appeared to St. Simon Stock, a Carmelite priest, giving him the brown scapular. In my morning prayers I recalled to how many Carmelites I am indebted: my own mother, who is a Third Order Carmelite, to Carmelite monasteries in San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, and Lincoln, Nebraska. They pray for us, especially the priests of the Church, day and night.
 
On my thirtieth anniversary, I offered a Sung Latin Mass in the Carmelite monastery here in San Francisco, where I offered my first Mass 30 years ago. Today, on the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Pope Francis issued regulations severely restricting the celebration of this form of the Mass. It is a pity.
 
It is a fact that the parishes that offer this form of the Mass, especially in Europe and North America, are flourishing. There are many reasons why my parish has come through a year of severe lockdowns with greater Mass attendance and more weekly income than before, and that we are one of the few parishes in the Archdiocese, if not the only one, that has seen a 30% increase in attendance and offertory. But one of the principal factors is undoubtedly that we are the only parish in the City that offers the Latin Mass every day, and a sung Mass on Sundays. If Rome wants the Church to grow, our prelates need only look at parishes and institutes that are flourishing, and ask themselves, without fear, why they are growing. 

My mother has been a Third Order Carmelite for 50 years, and I’ve worn the Carmelite scapular for 40 years. That little bit of brown wool under my shirt, worn from the shoulders, draping my heart and back, reminds me that I am clothed in God’s grace. When my Mom and Dad baptized me at three weeks old, the Lord clothed me in righteousness. Catholics use simple things—“sacramentals”—to keep us straight on the “royal road” to heaven. (In California El Camino Real, now Route 101, running the length of the State, was named not only for the King of Spain but principally to remind us that we are pilgrims “on the way” to the King of Heaven.) Easily distracted, we need reminders throughout the day, like the tiny amber reflectors embedded in our highways, to keep us from veering off the road. A simple thing—a bit of brown wool, a piece of silver medal, a crucifix above our beds, a picture of Mary over the kitchen sink—helps refocus us on our final goal and defining purpose in life.  
 
My mother is a Third order Carmelite, and I offered my First Mass at Cristo Rey Carmelite Monastery in San Francisco on July 1st, 1991. Seven years ago I was assigned to a parish just a few blocks from this monastery, and a week ago I offered my 30th Anniversary Mass in their chapel. A few of the sisters from my first Mass are still in the community, along with a lot of younger Carmelites.
 
There are probably Carmelite sisters not far from you, although you don’t know it. They live quiet and unknown lives, but you would be surprised how many Carmelite monasteries have been established in every corner of the world. The nuns at Cristo Rey have been quietly praying for us on Parker Avenue since the 1920s, when they escaped the persecutions in Mexico. In the early 90s they founded a daughter house in Las Vegas, which later moved to the rolling farmlands of Nebraska (a quieter place). Today that monastery is brimming with young sisters and has established half a dozen daughter houses throughout the country. Next year I will preach the annual novena to the Carmelites in Nebraska, culminating in their renewal of vows on July 16, 2022, the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
 
To prepare, I’ve decided to study the seventeen or so approved apparitions of our Lady throughout history, hoping to understand the common threads in her messages. God asks his Mother to speak to us from heaven, and I want to be able to articulate what God is telling us through her. My yearlong study will help me better develop my own parish as a shrine of Our Lady, featuring 14 side altars, each to a different Marian apparitions. For each of these altars, I will prepare a pamphlet with the history of the apparition and the essential message she delivered to the world at that time. I’m convinced that the messages at Fatima (both from Our Lady in 1917 and from the Angel of Portugal in 1916) summarize her messages throughout history, applying them in a specific way for our own time. “Many souls fall into hell because they have no one to pray for them,” she said, addressing the widespread decline in religious practice of the last hundred years. The youngest of the three children, Jacinta, was dying in a Lisbon hospital when Our Lady told her that “war is a punishment for sin.”  "Fashions will come that will offend Our Lord very much; priests must be very pure and concentrate on saving souls; more souls go to hell through sins of impurity than any other sin.” We understand these words better than in 1917, when Europe was still essentially Christian, and the “sexual revolution” had not yet been launched. But Marxism and Gnosticism were already gaining ground in 1917, the third year of World War I and the first year of the Soviet tyranny. “Russia will spread her errors throughout the world,” she told the children, “the good will be martyred, various nations will be annihilated, but in the end, My Immaculate Heart will triumph.” We are now witnessing the long-term consequences of global atheism, spread by the wealthiest and most powerful nations. 
 
God is not silent. He speaks through His Church, but that Church, like our social order, is coming apart at the seams. It will never be completely undone, but while confusion reigns at the highest levels of the Church, I am turning to the words God has spoken to us through Our Lady. She speaks in the simplest terms, but with marvelous depth, like the rosary itself, as John Paul described his favorite prayer: “marvelous in its simplicity and in its depth.” A few beads, a bit of brown wool. The Word of God is not complicated. Even the simplest souls can understand it.

What the Almighty cannot do
A blessed and Happy Fourth of July to you all. Patriotism is a virtue, a joyous act of gratitude to God for the gift of our homeland. In the Gospel, our blessed Lord returns to his own homeland, Nazareth, but is “amazed at their lack of faith.” Because of their refusal to believe, he “was not able” to perform any mighty deeds among his own people. But: is there anything God can not do? Isn’t he all-powerful? In an absolute sense, God could force the people to believe in Him, but the Gospel shows us that He will not force us to love Him. He waits for us to choose Him freely.
 
Rebels
Ezekiel calls us all “rebels,” obstinate of heart, to whom He will send his prophet. Since that Original Sin, all of us have perversely refused God at one time or another. Those who signed the Declaration of Independence were called “rebels” by King George in 1776, but truly we are all rebels before God. Fortunately for us, however, God loves “rebels” enough to send us a prophet, an emissary to speak to us, to reason with us.
 
I would like to quote from Ann Burleigh’s commentary in the little monthly devotional Magnificat. “In God’s plan of history,” she writes, “that mysterious drama that unites God’s providential care with our freedom—there are particular moments that reveal with glittering clarity that God is in charge. For Americans, Independence Day marks the anniversary of such a moment."
 
“On July 4, 1776, members of the Continental Congress approved Jefferson’s magnificent Declaration of Independence, proclaiming ‘these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ For the first time a nation sprang forth, not simply from the bond of people living together in a place for years, but rather from an idea, the principle of the truth of the human person as sacred and unrepeatable. “The Declaration acknowledged our origin as beings made by God, with rights God himself gave us… Our liberty arises not from us, but from the one who made us."
 
“Independence Day honors not our own artificial schemes of liberty and equality but the founding principle of natural law that alone protects who we are: each one of us chosen, loved, and created as free beings by God our Father. No other authority will do: nothing other than divine truth provides proper grounding for ordered liberty. On God’s authority, then, the American founders in 1776, ‘with a firm reliance on the Protection of divine  providence,’ ventured forth in the great experiment, mutually pledging ‘to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.’”
 
Human Freedom
In other words, our freedom comes from God: no lesser authority is capable of respecting the human person or rightly ordering a society of free persons. If we forget or deny that it is God, not politics or technology or any human agency, that grants human freedom, we will revert to slavery, to “might makes right,” which is exactly what we sought to escape in 1776. The British Empire declared that our freedom was a gift of the king, and that the might of the Empire’s military would enforce the king’s will. The colonists declared, on this day in 1776, that they would follow a higher power than the king or the government or even the military. If we deny God’s authority, we place ourselves back under the authority of the government and the military.
 
All people of good will, but especially Christians, and especially the priests and bishops of the Church, must insist on this prophetic truth: God exists, and he sends prophets to reveal to men the ways of true freedom.
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Let me read the preamble to the Declaration that we celebrate today: “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them….” Our founders declared that equality and human rights are granted by “nature’s God,” not the king.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Our rights are endowments, gifts, from God. Only He can give and sustain life, freedom, and human happiness. To break these natural laws—for example, to legalize the killing of the unborn or the elderly, or to outlaw religious practices—is to revert back to “might makes right.” Only God, however, is capable of “making” what is right. That was what our founders said to King George. It is what they say to us, still, today.

​Today is the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, the 70th priestly anniversary of Pope Benedict, and my 30th anniversary. How blessed we were to be ordained on the feast of the pillars of the Church! Those pillars will stand, and the Church will perdure, through every storm. The storms, however, are increasing in intensity, perhaps more than at any time in our history. The “postmodernism” that drives our elites is fundamentally anti-rational and cannot tolerate an institution that promotes the human ability to rightly reason. As Pope Benedict wrote in 2010, “To resist this eclipse of reason and to preserve its capacity for seeing the essential, for seeing God and man, for seeing what is good and what is true, is the common interest that must unite all people of good will. The very future of the world is at stake.” These are pretty strong words, and a clear call to action for all Christians.
 
Along with most priests, my share in the priesthood has been a steep uphill climb through the wastes of postmodernism. God has given me a strength and endurance for mountains, and I really enjoy a good climb. In the priesthood God has afforded me many stunning vistas, with the summit almost always in sight. The gradient, however, is steepening for all believers. The postmodern rejection of western intellectual principles, with its consequent disorder and violence, has the Church as one of its main “cancel” targets. Increasing opposition from outside the Church affects Church leadership from within as well.
 
My own experience, in three dioceses over thirty years, has been of superiors who begin with pure intentions but get mired in ecclesiastical and worldly power struggles. In 1991 the new Bishop of Stockton, Donald Montrose, wanted to do something about the abysmal catechetical establishment in his diocese. Children were getting almost no usable Catholic training in “CCD” programs, Catholics school children were abandoning the sacraments in droves after graduation, and parents knew hardly anything about the Catholic faith. He formed a catechetical institute and appointed a few zealous and well-formed priests to teach in it. But he also hired a mildly leftist nun from Los Angeles as coordinator. Within two years all of us were short-circuited by the old liberal establishment. This same dynamic has played out over and over in my time as a priest.
 
Priests who challenge the deeply-established spirit of the world within the Church will be always opposed and undercut. I am better aware, at this stage in my life, of my own limitations, but the fact is the Church is made of imperfect priests like me. You can’t win a war without an army, and an army is made up of men with limited capacities. How can we strengthen and support our priests in this long and demanding campaign to evangelize a Church that is ever in need of reform?
 
Priests need fraternal support, akin to the “band of brothers” that develops in a well-run military. The vast majority of priests do not have this, do not know how to get it, and do not even know they need it. My own parish weathered the unjust restrictions on church attendance better than most because we had five priests in the rectory who prayed twice a day together and took at least one daily meal in community. With our combined strength, we were able to find ways to provide the sacraments despite the restrictions. Without fraternal support, however, many priests—especially younger priests—will simply give up.
 
My own hope, on the day of my ordination, is to see bishops and priests forming supportive communities. It has been done in many dioceses, but not in most. It can be done in every diocese, and without it, we will lose many more priests, and many more souls. Please pray for this intention, and encourage your own priests and bishops to make the sacrifices necessary to form priestly fraternity.

A man was ordained on June 29, the subject of new book by Kevin Wells (author of The Priests We Need to Save the Church, 2019). On the feast of Saints Peter Paul, 1957, Aloysius Schwartz, the son of a door-to-door furniture salesman, was ordained in Washington, DC. He asked to be sent to "the saddest place on earth:" South Korea after the war. He arrived in Seoul to find blank-staring children picking through hills of garbage and paper-fleshed orphans on streets like leftover war shrapnel. "Everywhere I could see squalor, shacks, shanties, slums and refugees. I remember passing a beggar on a street corner, wrapped in rags, his hand outstretched, rocking softly back and forth, and whispering to himself "a chuwo, a chuwo" (so cold, so cold)."  Kevin Wells will be speaking at the seminary on July 28, and then at our parish at 7pm. Reading Wells' biography of Fr. Schwartz (Priest and Beggar) the best ordination anniversary gift I could have received.

When I was 12 years old, reading the biography of Fr. Walter Ciszek, With God in Russia, made me burn with desire to be a priest. Last week my heart began to burn as I read the life of Fr. Aloysius Schwartz. Kevin Wells will tell the story of this priest on July 28. No ticket or reservation is required, and we will have wine and cheese at 6:30pm in the Greenway. The books will be available sale and signing after the talk (and maybe some leftover wine and cheese!).  For more information about this event, click here.

I’ve been listening to San Francisco’s wonderful classical music station, KDFC, for 35 years. This morning the amiable radio host wished listeners a happy Father’s Day, so I extend his greeting to you all. Candles have been burning in front of a little Father’s Day altar in our sanctuary for the month of June, as did a little Mother’s Day altar for the month of May. Fathers and mothers are both essential to human flourishing, and I was delighted to hear our classical music station honoring fathers today.
 
It’s only reasonable to support fathers of families, but it occurred to me that the low-grade disdain for paternity so prevalent in popular movies, songs, and school curricula has not made it to San Francisco’s classical music station. For that matter, the usual woke themes are wholly absent from KDFC. I’ve never heard “Black Lives Matter” or “The Genderbread Man” or even “Gay Pride” on this station. Why, I wonder.
 
Could it be that the type of people who listen to classical music simply will not put up with ideological propaganda? On Thursday I watched a baseball game on TV with some friends. Every third ad promoted either “Pride Month” or “BLM.” The camera lingered on the Levi’s sign in the stadium, proudly draped in rainbow colors. These ideologies, cloaked in “social justice” themes and most profitable to corporate America, annoy but achieve their goal of indoctrinating the masses. We all speak the same language, a language foisted upon us by the wealthy. This indoctrination, this annoyance, however, is wholly absent from San Francisco’s classical music station, thanks be to God. It suggests that the folks who fund it don’t believe in it, or at least want to hear it. I’ve been told that Steve Jobs would not allow his own children to use an iPad. He provided his kids with a rigorous classical education rather than issuing the Chromebooks he sold to middle and lower class America. He was a good father to his own children.
 
Men of America: be good fathers, be smart fathers, and provide your children with the real thing!

Every December I send about 150 Christmas cards, but I receive around 300, along with a few dozen birthday cards (my mother brought me into the light of day on a December 4). I put some of the cards on my mantle and take them down on February 2 (Candlemas). Before consigning them to the recycle bin, I read all of them once more. Toward the end of March, I begin putting Easter cards on the mantle. On Trinity Sunday I take these down, read them again, and consign them to the recycle bin. The pictures on the cards are lovely (I can’t help but keep three or four of them on my bookshelf all year) and the messages from so many dear friends lift my heart.
 
This year I’m a little behind. I didn’t take my Christmas cards down until Ash Wednesday, and I didn’t take my Easter cards down until last week. All of them—about 400 cards—are held in a large box, awaiting a final reading, which I began yesterday. I thought I would look all of them over quickly in one sitting, consign them to recycling, and move on with my life. But these cards require a little more time—a lot more time, actually.
 
Each card is a treasure, to be reflected upon and savored for some moments. Each card bestows a particular love from a particular soul. God have given me to know so many people over 30 years and seven priestly assignments. Dear priest friends, parents and those elderly who become a priest’s spiritual parents in every parish, parish and school staff members, beloved lay friends from every parish, religious sisters and brothers, bishops past and present, and even some names I cannot place but who express love and gratitude for services rendered in the past.
 
When we are tempted to feel useless and to think our lives meaningless, when we are tempted to give into sadness at the world’s rejection and the loss of particular friendships: when we fear we have no place or purpose in life, we must think on how many people God has in fact given to us, who love and understand us. Some of us receive 300 Christmas cards, some of us receive three, and some three thousand. But everyone has some friends, some people whom the good God has given them as kindred souls and fellow pilgrims. I have to remember, and to recalibrate, every day: I will give thanks for what I have been given and refuse to complain about what I have not been given.

​Yesterday I rode my bike past the Santa Cruz police station. An American flag fluttered at the top of their flagpole, and just below it, a rainbow flag. I was reminded that it was “pride” month.
 
Of what are we so proud as Americans? Are we proud of our unnatural and disordered sexual practices? Are we proud that we have corrupted our children and robbed them of stable family life? Are we proud that so many of our teenage boys, growing up without a supportive father--most of them poor African-American children--bear the burden of sexual confusion? Are we proud that 25% of our girls have been molested by the time they reach 18? Are we proud that the leading cause of death among young people in America is despair (suicide, drug overdose, gang violence, and alcohol poisoning)? Are we proud of the fact that the corporations that bankroll “Pride” have grown unimaginably wealthy while most Americans are growing poorer?
 
I am told that some Catholic priests and bishops promote “pride month.” June, for the Catholic Church, is the month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It is not the month of unnatural sexual practices. Are the clergy proud to have paid out four billion dollars of the people’s money for priests’ and bishops’ sexual assault on boys? If we want love, we know where to find it: in the divine and sacred heart of Jesus, reflected in the lives of married couples, priests, and single people who struggle to be faithful to God's will. We all struggle with what life has given us. My heart goes out to those who have endured difficult, lonely childhoods and struggle as adults to integrate their lives. We all struggle. It is God alone who can help us. His Sacred Heart is open to all of us who long to love and to be loved. 

A Sacred Thursday
Today is Corpus Christi, although for many years the feast has been transferred to the following Sunday. Corpus Christi, however, is properly celebrated on Thursday, because it was on Thursday that the Lord instituted the Most Holy Eucharist at the Last Supper. In moving this feast to Sunday, we lose the sense of a sacred moment in history, a particular day (Thursday) on which the Lord instituted the Sacrament of His Body and Blood at the Last Supper. The older calendar celebrates Corpus Christi on Thursday for those who can come (we had about 40 at Mass this morning) but celebrates it again the following Sunday, for all the faithful. I find the older practice more practical—it provides the feast both for those who can participate on the very day itself, but also for everyone on the following Sunday. It provides the opportunity, also, for some of us to celebrate the great feasts twice, because … once is never enough!

Responsible for My Blood
The feast of the Body of Christ was promoted by St. Thomas Aquinas, who composed the hymns for this Mass in the 13th Century, after the Eucharistic miracle at Bolsena (blood stains manifesting on a Mass corporal, now kept in the chapel at Orvieto, north of Rome). Thomas’ friend, Pope Urban IV, made it a universal feast in 1264. Thomas’ poem, the Lauda Sion, is the longest sequence in the Roman liturgy.
 
The Epistle for today is from 1 Cor 11. The Apostle Paul hands on the faith he has received, that “the same night Christ was betrayed, He took bread and wine, offered thanks, and said ‘this is my body and this is my blood.’” Therefore, Paul continues, whoever eats and drinks the Body and Blood unworthily “shall be guilty of the Body and Blood of the Lord.” My own Archbishop has pointed out that very few Catholics understand what “worthy” reception of Holy Communion means. It doesn’t mean you have to be a saint to receive the Eucharist, but it does mean you have to “recognize” (in Paul’s words) the Real Presence. That “real presence” is essentially in the Sacred Species, but not limited to the Sacred Host and Precious Chalice. It is also in the entire Body of Christ, in every human person created in the image of God. As Mother Teresa said, “every person is Christ,” and “the Blessed Eucharist we receive at morning Mass, and the bodies of the poor we touch later in the day on the streets—it is the same Jesus.”
 
If a Catholic were to receive the Body of Christ at Mass, and then order the killing of innocent persons later in the day, he or she would be receiving the Eucharist “unworthily.” That Catholic would not in fact be “recognizing” the Real Presence at Mass because he or she is not “recognizing” the presence of God in other human beings. Catholic lawmakers who promote slavery, or abortion, or genocide—any killing of innocent human beings—should not present themselves for Holy Communion. Taking the Eucharist thus “unworthily,” they would be guilty of the Blood of Christ—not only killing innocent human beings, but killing Christ Himself, who said “what you do to the least of my brethren, you do to me.”
 
And this is exactly what is happening today. The nation’s most powerful lawmaker, and the nation’s most powerful executive, receive Holy Communion with great fanfare, and later in the day promote the killing of innocent children.

Eucharistic Coherence
My Archbishop publicly called all Catholic public officials to “Eucharistic coherence” (in the words of Pope Francis) in a May 1st Pastoral Letter. If you say you believe in the Body of Christ at Mass, he pointed out, you must respect the Body of Christ in all people outside of Mass. If you can’t do that, you should not receive Holy Communion, until you do learn to respect all human life.
 
He was immediately accused of “politicizing the Eucharist,” even by some brother bishops who should know better. What he is actually trying to do is keep these officials from becoming guilty of spilling the Blood of Christ. If the Speaker of the House, or the President of the United States, promotes the killing of children, they kill Christ. They cannot at the same time kill Christ and receive Christ in Holy Communion. The Body of Christ, St. Paul points out, is not a source of life for such people, but a condemnation unto death. God is not mocked. We don’t break the laws of Nature, and of Nature’s God. We break against them. Let us pray that all Catholics, but especially those entrusted with the Common Good, recognize the Body and Blood of the Lord.

A few days before I was ordained to the priesthood at age 29, I spent a night in prayer at my home parish of Our Lady of the Visitation in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. It was something young men used to do before becoming a knight, and I certainly wanted to become a knight of Our Lady, for Christ.
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Today, the last day of May, we celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of the Visitation, recalling that Mary, just after she had conceived the Redeemer of the World, “set out and traveled to the hill country in haste” to her cousin Elizabeth, who was with child. She became, in Mother Teresa’s words, “a carrier of Christ’s love.” God gives every woman a womb, a fist-sized muscle that “carries” a child for nine months, and as the child becomes quite burdensome, the muscle stretches and grows stronger. Our Lady carried the Redeemer of Humanity over rough roads and steep hills to her cousin Elizabeth, and she bears the burden of her Son still, from heaven. In sculpting his famous pieta, the marble figure of Mary carrying the body of her crucified son from the Cross, Michelangelo made Mary’s dimensions larger than life (she would be six feet tall if she stood, much taller than the Christ in her lap). He also depicted her at about age 25, youthful and strong enough to bear the burden of Redeemer, who said “take my yoke upon your shoulders, for my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”
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The Collect for today, as I pointed out to Mother Teresa’s sisters at morning Mass, echoes her command to the Missionaries of Charity to “be carriers of God’s love.” The prayer begins “Almighty, ever-living God, who, while the Blessed Virgin Mary was carrying your son in her womb….” A woman carries her children physically in the strong muscle of the uterus, but for the rest of her life, she carries her children in her heart, helping them bear the burdens of the day. We men, we priests, must help the women in our lives carry those burdens. We must be knights of Our Lady, and knights for all ladies.
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One June 29th I will mark 30 years of my priestly ordination. It will also be the 70th year of Pope Benedict’s ordination. But closer to home, my parish will celebrate two other ordinations: Fr. John Chung is ten years ordained, and Fr. Mark Taheny is 25 years ordained. We will celebrate all three of our anniversaries together, on June 26th, at the 4:30pm Mass in the parish, at which the rector of our seminary, Fr. Mark Doherty, will preach. A reception will follow in the hall, a potluck. I’m inviting you, if you can make it. There is no cost, but folks must reserve at our parish website (www.starparish.com) and as a bonus, we will celebrate the first week anniversary of the first man to be ordained from Star of the Sea in 30 years. Cameron Pollette, who grew up a few blocks from the parish, will be ordained on June 19, and will concelebrate the anniversary Mass on June 26.
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In lieu of the customary gifts to priests on their anniversaries, we three priests are asking folks to make gifts to Stella Maris Academy, our newly-opened school, at which 75% of students in our inaugural year will be on tuition assistance. I hope to see some of you on June 26—see our parish website for more details.