<![CDATA[Fr. Joseph Illo's Blog - Blog]]>Sun, 16 Aug 2026 10:45:03 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[Of Birdsong and Backhoes]]>Sun, 16 Aug 2026 17:13:58 GMThttps://www.frilloblog.com/blog/of-birdsong-and-backhoes​Each morning before Mass, in my little Irish farmhouse in West Cork last month, I would do morning prayers on the porch as the sun rose over lush and verdant fields. At that time of day, my friends, the birds, get quite excited as the rosy-fingered dawn spreads westward. With the morning dew and the morning light glinting off their little wings, the swallows and warblers swoop to and fro over the green, chirping and calling out eagerly to one another. Birdsong is one of life’s great consolations, something of which cityfolk are deprived, but birds are not God’s only gift every morning. Like their bird cousins, the flowers also get excited about the coming of the sun, turning their bright faces happily to its fresh light and warmth.
 
From my little perch on the top of “Long Hill” in West Cork, however, a less pleasing sound came to my ears as the day progressed. Backhoes and power drills, growling diesel motors and vexing back-up beeps, would begin competing with the sounds of nature. Just outside my window in San Francisco, the same noise drowns out nature’s peace as the City has begun replacing aging water, power, and sewer lines. While they are at it, they are laying down fiber optic cable to keep everyone “connected” at warp speed. Because there are four different lines to be laid under our streets, the same stretch of road might be dug up and filled in three or four times.
 
I left the Big City a month ago to get some peace and quiet, only to find that rural Ireland is also digging up its country roads for the same lightning-fast internet cable. It’s certainly not as noisy in rural Cork, at Knockaghaduff in the townland of Gortnascarty, but it is a bit annoying. Fiber optic cable from San Francisco to Knockaghaduff is an impressive globalist ambition, but is it worth the money and the noise (not to mention the carbon emissions)? Real flowers and birdsong under the arching blue are free, and much more satisfying, than flickering images of flowers and birds on a little screen. I’m trying not be a luddite, but we do have to be careful about how much time we spend looking at that shiny black mirror (with a symbol of Adam’s Apple on it) rather than real flowers and birds.
 
In his 1980 book, Flor y Canto, Fr. Jose Luis Guerrero describes how the pre-Christian peoples of Mesoamerica treasured flowers and birdsong. Heaven for these people from the Incas in Machu Picchu, to the Ohlone's on the San Francisco Bay, was Flor y Canto, exquisite flowers and enchanting birdsong. Fr. Guerrero goes on to show how the Aztec dream of a “Flower World Paradise” was fulfilled at Tepeyac in 1531, when Juan Diego found fragrant blooms in midwinter on Tepeyac hill. A more recent book, Guadalupe and the Flower World Prophecy, paints an even brighter and more compelling portrait of the Mexica people’s ardent desire for a heaven filled with birds and flowers. Here in the fields of rural Ireland, the sun plays games with the rain, producing double rainbows, and flowers bloom while birds sing with joyful abandon. How innocent and pure they are! I want to be like these flowers and birds, singing to the glory of God! Unlike the dour-faced men digging internet trenches down the road, the birds soar far above a global economy. Consider, indeed, “the birds of the air and the lilies of the field,” and give thanks with a grateful heart! 
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Sister birds lined up and chattering away on a sunny morning outside my porch
]]><![CDATA[My Rainbow]]>Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:02:48 GMThttps://www.frilloblog.com/blog/my-rainbow​This morning I got my Irish rainbow. There are lots of rainbows in Ireland because it rains so much when it is sunny. The day will be bright and then some clouds move in and dump on the green grass, and bingo: you have a full rainbow, even a double arco iris.
 
Before the sun rose this morning, I was outside with my breviary, rejoicing in the Feast. Today is Our Lady of the Snows, commemorating the day in 435 when Pope Sixtus III dedicated the world’s first major church to Mary. It stands today, “St. Mary Major,” just down the street from the Coliseum, with superb mosaics above the main relic (a piece of Jesus’ crib), and a good place to go to confession (the Franciscans of the Immaculata are in the boxes pretty much all the time). Pope Sixtus elevated the church to basilica status in thanksgiving for something that had happened four years earlier, at the City of Ephesus in 431. The fathers of this great Council had declared Mary as Theotokos, Mother of God.
 
But the church that Sixtus consecrated on this day in 435 had been built several years earlier by another pope, Liberius. He built it on the spot of ground that its owner, John the Patrician, had found covered with snow on August 5th. In a dream the night before, Christ’s mother had told him to build on the land marked out by snowfall the next day. Snow marks the spot! Snow had never fallen in a Roman August, and never has since, so we call this church “Our Lady of the Snows.”
 
My own vocation to the priesthood began at Our Lady of the Snows when, in 1984, I got robbed on the 64 bus a few blocks from St. Mary Major. The stinkers took all the cash I had, and I thought my vocation was ruined. But a nice elderly couple let me have a room in their apartment just across the street from the basilica, and I stayed with them two weeks until a cashier's  check cleared to pay them back, and I could afford a more permanent lodging. I felt quite lonely in that big city, trying to make friends and study philosophy in a foreign language by day, and at night alone in my little room. But every evening, at 9pm, the great bells at St. Mary Major would ring across the street, and Rome would sing the Salve Regina, and the Mother of Christ would tuck us all in bed for the night.
 
Before the sun rose in Ireland today, I sat outside with my prayerbook, looking at the rosy-fingered dawn enflame swirling clouds to the east. From the first centuries, Christians have called Mary “the dawn,” a gentle brightening in the eastern sky, a sure sign that the Sun of Justice would soon arrive. At the Council of Ephesus in 431, the Church realized, and defined, that you can’t understand any man fully without knowing his mother. Jesus was a man, and so to know Jesus one must know Mary. She has come to earth since the Council of Ephesus at least twenty-five times to show us both herself and her Son, and marvelous are those apparitions!
 
She is God’s rainbow, brilliant with primary colors, the sign of His promise never to flood the earth again. I got my Irish rainbow again this year (along with my friend Mr. Fox, who showed up, loping through the grass just before dawn). Mary is God’s promise, and Jesus is the fulfilment of that promise. This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it!
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My little Irish refuge, safely under a morning rainbow
]]><![CDATA[Glimmers]]>Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:37:40 GMThttps://www.frilloblog.com/blog/july-15th-2026Last summer I took a three-month sabbatical in Ireland to write two books. One of them has been published (Star of the West, a history of our parish from 1776-2026, available on The Bookshelf opposite our Adoration Chapel and at the parish office). The other is entitled Mother of the Light, and I have returned to my little farmhouse in County Cork to prepare that manuscript for submission to a publisher. My secluded writer’s abode is found a few miles up Long Hill Road from Dunmanway, a village of 2000 souls dating from the late Bronze Age. One of my parishioners in San Francisco, Justin Murray, was raised in this village, and his sister lives here still. It’s a small world.

My Celtic refuge is owned by Donncha O’Cochlain, an Irish farmer who spent twenty-five years building homes in San Francisco, discovered Star of the Sea during Covid, and married our schools’ teacher and principal, Marisela Miranda. He took her back to Ireland with him to become a farmer’s wife and kindly offered me one of his farmhouses when he heard I wanted a quiet place to write. We couldn’t, however, agree on a name for the house, and on this side of the Atlantic homes have names. I wanted to call it “Weathertop” from The Lord of the Rings (because you can see the countryside in all directions from its summit), but he wanted to call it “St. Joseph’s House.” So we call it “St. Joseph’s House on Weathertop,” and I spent a wonderful hour of prayer this morning on its front porch.

Yesterday, on the plane, I watched an English action thriller called Shelter. I have to confess that I watch a movie or two on longer flights, not only to pass the time but also to better understand the society in which we live. But one must be very careful, because the vast majority of movies today are more or less poisonous. Shelter, like most movies today, shows a lot of killing, which stirs bloodlust in any normally-functioning male (when media figures wring their hands over violent crimes like school shootings, remember that most actors make lots of money promoting violence). This movie portrayed much violence but also a man trying to escape his violent past. He had “shed much blood” (in God’s words to King David) as a British special ops agent, but when an orphaned girl needs his protection, his heart is moved to shelter her from government assassins. Thus a fictional movie character's fatherly protection provides a glimmer of God’s paternal love for us. The world is charged with the grandeur of God, the poet says, and even a commercial movie can give a glimpse of the Father’s infinite love for that which He has created.

This morning in Ireland, God’s fatherly love, all bright and beautiful, glimmered and flitted around me: birds of many shapes and sizes, grasses and flowers, clouds and sky, cows and sheep, mountains and hills, windmills and smoke curling from my neighbors’ chimney. God is a hidden God, but He provides just enough visible goodness for us to believe in Him. I came here to write, but I see that it is all written already in the billowing clouds, the waving grasses, the quite neighbors, the soft breezes, the rustling leaves and the soaring birds. All of them speak to me of the God who made them, here in the silence of St. Joseph’s House on Weathertop.
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St. Joseph’s House on Weathertop
]]><![CDATA[Our Red Stripes]]>Wed, 08 Jul 2026 17:48:28 GMThttps://www.frilloblog.com/blog/our-red-stripes​Today I offered morning Mass at the Missionaries of Charity “Gift of Love” house, a former motel they have renovated for the poorest of the poor in San Francisco, men whom not even the city will take in. As I approached the altar, wondering what on earth I could preach about, I noticed a vase of red, white, and blue flowers beneath Our Lady’s statue. What a nice touch of patriotism, I thought. Here are the thoughts that someone, perhaps the Holy Spirit, put into my head for our valiant missionaries this morning.
 
I am delighted to see red, white, and blue flowers beneath Our Lady’s statue this morning! You sisters are exercising the virtue of patriotism, thanking God for this beautiful country. And it seems that Our Lady is patriotic too, because patriotism—gratitude for the patria, the “fatherland” God has given us—is gratitude to God Himself.
 
We Catholics live in two countries: the motherland in which we were born, and the eternal homeland which we aspire to reach after death. You fifteen sisters are living in the United States of America, even though most of you were not born here. You are also living in the Kingdom of Heaven, and never more so than when in this poor little chapel.
 
Last Saturday we celebrated the 250th anniversary of this nation, and many of you attended the Mass I offered last Monday on the 250th anniversary of our city. On June 29, 1776, San Francisco was born when Fr. Francisco Palou offered the first Mass at Mission San Francisco. Five days later, the United States was born when Thomas Jefferson signed the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. While Jefferson was a remarkable man, along with the other founders of our nation, he did not believe in the Christian God in the way we in San Francisco did in those years. The founders of our country were “spiritual but not religious,” so-called Deists, and most of them Masons, while the Spaniards who founded this City were convicted Catholics.
 
Among the great gifts we Catholics have received is a “sacramental worldview.” We see everything on earth as a foretaste of heaven. Life on earth is good, but not the best. The best is yet to come, and all the good things God has given in this age point to perfection in eternity. Catholics strive to see everything sub specie aeternitatis, “in the light of eternity.” I have a big TV screen at the parish with the letters “LG” on them, an appliance company whose acronym stands for “Life is Good.” Life is good, this electronics company tells us, when we buy enough of their touchscreens, cellphones, dishwashers, and microwave ovens. I like my LG television, but I have to remember that it is only a window into another, a better world. If our happiness is stacking up LG appliances, we will not be very happy.
 
In the Catholic calendar, July is the month of the Precious Blood, which we celebrate on July 1. In the civic calendar, July is the month of our nation’s independence, which we celebrate on July 4. Both celebrations are colored red. I stood at the altar on July 1 in red vestments, and your red daisies still grace the altar from July 4. The red stripes in the American flag stand for the blood shed by her soldiers, and the red on my vestments stands for the blood of Christ. The soldiers who fought our War of Independence offered their blood that their wives and children might have a better life; Christ offered his blood that His spouse and children might have eternal life.
 
St. Thomas More, the great English patriot, said at his trial that he was “the King’s good servant, and God’s first.” He is often misquoted as saying “I am the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” But the distinction between “and” and “but” is important, because More did not oppose loyalty to the King against loyalty to God. He insisted, even unto death in the Tower of London, that the only way he could be fully loyal to King Henry VIII was to be loyal first to God.
 
So it is with us Americans. Patriotism begins loyalty to God, and any “American way” that departs from the way of God betrays our country. Before America was our patria, God is our Father, and only within God’s fatherhood can our fatherland flourish. This deeper patriotism is the charism we Catholics must bring to America.
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Red, White and Blue in the Sisters' chapel this morning.
]]><![CDATA[Fatherhood]]>Sun, 21 Jun 2026 17:03:29 GMThttps://www.frilloblog.com/blog/fatherhoodToday is Fathers’ Day, that “second-class feast” in June established as an afterthought to compliment the First-Class Feast of Mother’s Day in May. But no foul, because fatherhood is a hidden virtue, a behind-the-scenes role, a subsidiary role in the Holy Family. St. Joseph, the best of earthly fathers, was a “quiet man” who avoided drama and quietly provided for Jesus and Mary. To get the job done means quiet focus rather than grandstanding.
 
But we live in a performative age, where children learn how to show off from the day their parents put a screen into their chubby little fingers. Life’s ambition is getting more clicks and likes than your classmates, and social media “influencers” are considered far more important than quiet men. Pride, rather than humility, is the sought after “virtue” in a performative age.
 
My city will become very noisy indeed the Sunday after Father’s Day in what the city fathers are pleased to call a “Pride Parade.” People will shout the regnant “virtue” of “pride” by flags flying, impassioned cries, queer dress, banging and honking, fist pumping and stomping, all to call attention to themselves.
 
Yesterday morning I happened to read Deuteronomy 22, in which the Children of Israel are prohibited from “crossdressing” under pain of stoning. Why is a man dressing like a woman a capital derelict in the Abrahamic Covenant? Because, as the footnote says, it rebels against the laws of nature and the Lord who made sexual differences. Cross dressing is a proud declaration that “I make my own day,” as the Instagram billboards proclaim, a middle finger to God the Father.
 
Many people suffer loneliness, lack of purpose, and life-confusion in the disastrous wake of the “sexual revolution.” Most of us have not grown up in stable families, with a father who loves his wife; the further down the salary scale you go the more likely you are to have been abandoned by your father. Most people under age 40 have been assaulted by obscenity, even sadomasochistic pornography, from well before puberty. Most young adults, as I hear day after day in confession and counseling, have not been protected from these things by their fathers.
 
And yet, we can begin again. Every day is a new day for us men to be good fathers. We have made mistakes, ourselves hurt by our own fathers’ mistakes, who were hurt by their fathers’ limitations. But every one of us can say, “it stops here.” Fatherhood is the neglected and misunderstood virtue, but notice, all you who believe in the Bible, that Christ describes God as a father, not a mother. Yes, of course, God is both mother and father to us, but motherhood is so naturally compelling a virtue that no one can disregard it. Fatherhood, on the other hand, needs focus and application.
 
There is a God, and we call Him “father.” Men, especially, have to apply themselves to believe in Him. We have to work at imitating His virtues, so manifest in the life of Jesus Christ. Happy Fathers’ Day to all my brothers in the one true Father of us all!
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A Peruvian painting of St. Joseph and his Son that hangs in my sitting room.
]]><![CDATA[San Francisco's Birthday]]>Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:13:03 GMThttps://www.frilloblog.com/blog/san-franciscos-birthdayIn two weeks San Francisco will be 250 years old, and I will be 35 years old [a priest]. Both of us (the city and the man) are as old as our first Masses. San Francisco began with a Mass on the banks of little Dolores Creek (at the corner of Dolores and 16th Street, now sadly bricked over), and Fr. Joseph Illo began with a Mass at Cristo Rey Monastery (at the corner of Stanyan and Fulton, now sadly closed most of the day). Fr. Junipero Serra came to San Francisco in 1777 to celebrate the first anniversary of its Mission, which was founded by his faithful lieutenant, Fr. Francisco Palóu. St. Junipero came to San Francisco as a relatively old man, towards the end of his life’s work of teaching, evangelizing, and founding churches. I came to San Francisco in 1983, as a relatively young man, just out of college, not knowing that God would ordain me a priest eight years later at the age of 29.

Father Serra was 63 years old when he came to San Francisco, and I am 64 years old today, trying my best to continue the work his friars began 250 years ago. God has given priests His own essential task of offering Word and Sacrament to the world. “Go out to every people,” Christ told his first eleven priests, “and tell them all that I have told you.” To be a priest is simply to “tell people what God has done for you.” Every priest is ordained with a burning desire to tell the world that Christ suffered and died for him, that He rose from the dead, and that His providence will always maintain the basic peace and order of our world in the midst of all our failures. We have nothing to fear, because there is an all-wise and beneficent God who reigns above the chaos. To be a priest is to assure the world that we can know where we have come from, and we can know where we are going.

To reach the deep and lasting happiness for which we long, Catholics must worthily receive the Holy Body and Blood of His Son. To be made worthy, we must confess our sins. The job of a priest is quite simple: to hear confessions and to offer Mass. I make bold to say that on these two sacraments the City of San Francisco was founded—in fact, so was the entire state of California, whose capital city of “Sacramento” is named for the Holy Eucharist. All of this started in San Francisco on June 29, 1776, and all of this started in my life on June 29, 1991. I thank God for this city, and I thank God for the priesthood, both at the service of Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist. 

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A sunrise Holy Eucharist on Half Dome in Yosemite
]]><![CDATA[A God with Heart]]>Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:35:02 GMThttps://www.frilloblog.com/blog/a-god-with-heartPicture
​My parish church in New Jersey, as I remember it, had a life-sized statue of the Sacred Heart on the front lawn. I wondered why Jesus’ heart was outside of his chest, and why He was pointing to it. Later on, I would see paintings of Jesus actually holding his heart in his left hand, offering it to the viewer. I couldn’t make much sense of that.
 
The Christian God is the first god, and I think the only god, with a heart, and who offers that heart to everyone, the good and the bad. We can’t make sense of the Absolute, the prime mover of the universe, who bridges the infinite gap between creator and created with personal love. One of the ways Christians try to make sense of God’s heart is with a statue of a man holding his cardiovascular organ outside of his body, offering it to the viewer.
 
The older prayers of the Catholic Church often call upon “Jesus who suffered.” The second question before baptism in the 1962 ritual, for example, asks: Credis in Iesum Christum, natum et passum (who “was born and who suffered”). His suffering is the most compelling reason to believe in a loving God. He suffered for me, He died for me, blood and water flowed from His open heart for me. God became man to suffer our human tragedies, indignities, and abandonment. No other god does this. That’s why we have a statue of the Sacred Heart in front of my church today. I will process past this statue on my way to a sung high Mass tonight, thanking God for offering His Heart for the life of the world.
]]><![CDATA[Half a Five Hundred Years]]>Fri, 29 May 2026 15:46:36 GMThttps://www.frilloblog.com/blog/half-a-five-hundred-yearsOur nation’s “SemiQuinCenntenial” (Half-Five-Hundred years) is just about a month away. To celebrate the 250th anniversary of July 4th, I recommend reading a good book on some aspect of American history. Anything by David McCollough will do. His book 1776, for example, delivers a good view from Washington’s little boat crossing the icy Delaware River on Christmas night 1776, but my favorite McCullough book is John Adams. After a family reunion in Kitty Hawk, NC, I read his The Wright Brothers with great delight. Nothing takes us out of the current cultural doldrums and toxic politics like a good read about some remarkable event in our American experience. Good history wonderfully clears the mind!
 
Here in San Francisco, in exactly one month, we will mark the 250th birthday of our City. It was on June 29th, 1776, that a Franciscan padre offered the first Mass at a spot by Dolores Creek that would become the San Francisco Mission. The mission building still exists, although the Creek has long been bricked over, and I will offer a Mass at Star of the Sea at 5:30pm on June 29th. It will be in Latin and in the form Fr. Francisco Palou offered it 250 years ago. In San Francisco, the month of June has become something other than the month of the Sacred Heart (which I will celebrate with a sung Mass on June 12). But it is an historical fact that the City of San Francisco began in the month of June with a Holy Mass, an hourlong ceremony in which Jesus Christ offers his Sacred Heart to His Heavenly Father on our behalf. It is my firm belief that San Francisco was born from the Heart of Jesus on June 29, 1776. All that followed--a Gold Rush in 1849, a “Summer of Love” in 1967, and a “Silicon Valley” in 1987—began with a Catholic Mission. That is how we began to be beautiful, and that is how we continue to be so.
 
I invite all of my dear readers who are within driving distance to a Solemn High Mass on June 29 at 5:30pm here at Star of the Sea. Our choirs will provide suitable music to the Most High, our servers will attend with bells and incense, and our priests will offer due sacrifice to God. I will preach on Saints Peter and Paul (whose feast it will be), the history San Francisco, and the priesthood (June 29th is my thirty-fifth anniversary). Fathers Blaise Berg and Vincent Woo will be assisting at the altar, with many priests in choir. After Mass, all are invited to a dinner in the parish center, at which Fr. Elias Guadalupe Ford, a young Dominican friar who grew up in San Francisco, will speak on the Dominican padres who took up where the Franciscans left off. I am looking forward to his talk, as I did my Master’s in history on the first Archbishop of San Francisco, a Dominican friar named Joseph Alemany.
 
All are welcome to both Mass and dinner: no tickets needed, but please call or email Mariella at the parish office (415-751-0450 / events@starparish.com) if you want to stay for dinner, and I’ll put out a plate for you and your friends. 
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]]><![CDATA[Nature Worship]]>Fri, 22 May 2026 17:37:54 GMThttps://www.frilloblog.com/blog/nature-worshipLast week I went camping with our tenth graders for the annual class trip. An environmental adventure company provided not only kayaks, food, and shelter, but also four wonderful guides. We set out from a bayside beach flourishing with flora and fauna of all types, paddled three miles toward the open ocean, and set up camp for the night. A strong sea wind prevented us from setting up camps further west, so we stayed at same beachhead from Monday through Friday. Our guides not only provided instruction on kayak and camp craft, but also prepared excellent meals (mixed with a little sand for texture) and even attended our first morning Mass on the beach. With irrepressible energy, the guides led us into a deeper awe of the natural world. Three of the four were raised Catholic and joined our evening rosary around the campfire.
 
Our guides manifested an impressive knowledge of biology, oceanography, astronomy, and zoology, along with many years of experience navigating ecological systems around the world. On a morning paddle, one of our guides described the fascinating biology of the seabirds spiraling about our little boats. We looked up in wonder as terns climbed into the bright blue, California gulls cried to one another, and pelicans dive bombed between our kayaks. Our guide explained how cormorants’ bones are solid so they can dive for fish under the water, while gulls' and terns' honeycombed (hollow) bones allow them to float above the water for surface food. Cormorants, like heavy sea planes, must preen their feathers free of water to lumber into the air, while gulls’ feathers, like the fins of a paraglider, shed water for quicker movement. Crabs and starfish, magnificent sea lions and cute little harbor seals, undulating eel grass and thick sea kelp, bishop pines and live oaks, sun and moon, rising and falling tides, sand and stars: all wheeled in magnificent coordination around us.
 
Our guides did not object to our Catholic religion, but they clearly ascribed to another religion. The open book of nature was their bible, and the open skies their cathedral. They were most at peace in the great web of nature, and striving to be one with the cosmos was their constant aspiration. Occasionally, in their instructive talks to us, they would express indignation at man’s irreverence and sacrilege toward the natural world, but most of the time they evangelized their young charges with sheer delight in the great out of doors.
 
I greatly admire John Muir, one of this country’s greatest naturalists. Muir immigrated from Scotland, one of Europe’s most enchanting landscapes, and found a lasting fascination with his “Range of Light,” the Sierra Nevada. I too have ranged many days and nights through California’s awesome mountain chain, but it was five days with four naturalists last week that showed me how powerful is the religion of nature. I can well understand now how one can worship elemental forces, and how the Greeks and Hindus and Norsemen made gods of the wind and sea and sun and moon.
 
But we who believe, rather, in one God, the Creator and Sustainer of all the universe, try our best not to stop at the natural world. As Paul says in the first chapter of his letter to the Romans, all the cosmos points to something greater than itself. Every drop of water, every galactic cluster, is sacramental, pointing beyond itself to a greater good. It’s not easy to go beyond the natural world, for the cosmic weight itself seems infinite, or at least beyond wonder. But it is not. What is beyond wonder is He who made it. It is hard, I say, to believe in what must seem to most as an invisible Man behind the curtain. What proof do we have of His existence? We cannot prove God’s existence, actually, but we have an abundance of evidence that the marvelous intricacies of the cosmos are not random. I desire a personal God who made the stars and starfish for sheer love, and as Thomas Aquinas says, no natural desire is unfulfillable. I have the desire because its fulfillment is attainable. There is something more even than this wonderful world.
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Sunrise atop Half Dome. Photo by Sam Flanders.
]]><![CDATA[Writing a Book about Work, and Working]]>Fri, 01 May 2026 17:59:07 GMThttps://www.frilloblog.com/blog/may-01st-2026Welcome to the month of May, and the day of St. Joseph. In 1955, Pius XII moved the Feast of “St. Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church” from the 3rd Sunday after Easter to May 1st and renamed it In Festo Sancti Ioseph, Opificis. Translated, that means “in the feast of St. Joseph, Workman.” Now, “opifcis” is a curious word for “worker” or “workman” (in the genitive Opificis, and in the nominative, Opifex). Pius XII didn’t choose the usual word for “worker” to describe St. Joseph, such as operator or operarius or laborator. He chose to describe St. Joseph as an opifex, which literally means maker of “sustenance” or producer of “wealth” (Opes = “wealth, goods, fruits” and facio = “to make, to produce). St. Joseph, under this title, makes wealth; he wins bread.
 
In the early 1950s, Marxist Communism was the cool thing. European and American intellectual elites lionized Stalin’s Soviet Socialist Republic and the satellite forms of communism in Eastern Europe, as well as Mao’s China. My dear father, educated at Columbia University in the 1950s, hung a five-foot red photograph of Mao behind his desk at the university (this was before the gulags, body counts, and economic devastation from Soviet and Maoist Communism became evident). Italy, where Pius XII lived, and much of Europe, were in real danger of becoming communist countries as workers across the continent struggled to feed their families in the ruins of two World Wars. But Europe was still deeply Catholic, so when the Pope put St. Joseph’s feast on Mayday and called him an “opi-fex,” Europe turned back from the promises of a Marxist paradise to the promises of Christ. Soviet communism’s captivating power simply faded away in Catholic Europe as workers turned to him rather than to Marx for answers and inspiration.
 
Karl Marx didn’t believe in a power higher than “the market,” which is composed of capital and labor, or, so to speak, of opes and facio. The human person for Marx was no more than a cog in a big labor machine that produced the “wealth of the nations.” For Karl, the worker had no dignity greater than what he make with his hands, so Marx put labor on a pedestal, exalting the “proletariat” and even calling for its “dictatorship.” As things turned out in Russia and China, the people got their dictatorship, but it was of the Communist Party elites, not of the proletariat.  
 
Marx wrote Das Kapital in a very comfortable place, the reading room of the British Library in London. He thought about, and talked about, labor, but he did very little with his hands beyond holding a pen. By contrast, we have not one written or spoken word of Joseph of Nazareth. He did, rather than talked. He worked with his hands, rather than simply thinking about working with his hands. He worked, not only for himself, but for two others, his little family of Jesus and Mary. But even more than working to produce bread for the table, he worked for the glory of God. He was a believer in a power greater than himself, and greater even than global economics.
 
Today I offered the early Mass in a Carmelite chapel of contemplative nuns. Monks and nuns are the kind of folks communists love to hate because the don’t “produce” anything. They are the consummate “leeches of society,” adding nothing to the economy but only taking. In this convent chapel, the priest faces the sisters but can see beyond them, through the large windows overlooking the City of Oakland and the Bay of San Francisco far below. As the sisters softly and sweetly chanted the Gloria, I could see a whole world of frenetic work behind them: big trucks rushing by on I-80, long freight trains rumbling along the Union Pacific Railway, cargo and passenger planes on their final approaches to Oakland and San Francisco airports, massive container ships steaming into port or heading out for Pacific markets, thousands of cars with workers in them rushing on their morning commute. This was Das Kapital in all its glory, the global economy at work in one of the world’s great centers of commerce.
 
Impressive, and yet, without those little nuns singing sweetly to the glory of God high above them, all this activity would be without final meaning. As Mother Teresa would say, “the moment we offer something to God, it becomes infinite.” The sisters were offering all the work of the San Francisco Bay Area, and in fact the entire global economy, to God. Without these quiet sisters, the world is just a rat race. By offering human activity to God, however, the sisters mystically render all that we do capable of eternal significance. Every day at work, if offered to God, brings us a day closer to eternal perfection. St. Joseph, so beloved and depended upon by the Carmelite Order, is truly an “opi-fex,” a maker of wealth, and not only temporal goods but the wealth that endures to eternal life.
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The Kensington Carmelites' altar for today's Feast of St. Joseph the Workman, behind which chant the nuns, and behind which one can see Oakland the San Francisco Bay far below.
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