This morning an unusually large number of penitents arrived for the early Mass: people who got up early or rearranged their schedules to get on their knees for ashes before work. In the older form of the Mass, the ashes are blessed and applied to our bowed foreheads before Mass. Of the five prayers prayed in blessing and supplication, my favorite is the second one, in this loose translation:

O God, who not death but the penance of sinners desires: kindly regard the frailty of our human condition. In your goodness vouchsafe to bless these ashes which we receive upon our heads in token of our lowliness, hoping to obtain your mercy. May we, who know that we are but ashes, and that because of our depravity will return to dust, obtain pardon for all our sins, and the good things promised to the penitent. Through Christ our Lord.
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What brought these good people to church just after dawn was the hope that God will honor His promise, and fill us, at last, with good things. Fr. Mark and I went up and down the altar rail, imposing ashes upon the heads of young and old, rich and poor, healthy and sick. Some of the foreheads were smooth and supple, and some were gnarled and petrified. They will all certainly be dust before long, but we dare receive the ashes in hope of life beyond ashes. We make bold to look death steadily in the face, to speak to it as “sister death” which Christ our Lord has tamed, refashioning it as a doorway into eternal joy. How precious are the foreheads God’s people, their shining eyes, now downcast, but longing for eternal life! 

Three Masses
Today I offered three Masses. The first was a Latin High Mass in a hotel room, at a conference for the Sacred Liturgy in Monterey. As the mighty Pacific roared before us, we sang of the Lion of Judah, whose oceans of mercy are never spent. The second Mass was on a sidewalk, in front of San Francisco’s abortion clinic. As passersby hurled insults and threats at us, we prayed to God for the grace to love our enemies. The third Mass is right now, with all of you, in a beautiful church on Geary Boulevard, built by Irish horse farmers in 1914. Although we are few in number, a remnant will never cease to offer the Holy Mass until Christ returns on the clouds of heaven.
 
Loving our Enemies
It is about that second Mass that I would like to speak. Lent begins in just three days, and will stretch fifty days from now until Easter. Then we will celebrate Eastertide for another fifty days until Pentecost. A vast river of grace spreads before us, one hundred days, a full third of the liturgical year. Lent itself is forty days long (not counting Sundays), and so a group called Forty Days for Life spends every day of Lent praying in front of abortion clinics. The Forty Days for Life folks of San Francisco asked me to begin the season with a Mass in front of Planned Parenthood in our city. We set up the altar, spread the vestments, and lit the candles. Before Mass I pointed out that the Gospel of the day, from the Sermon on the Mount, commands us to love our enemies. Jesus urges us to pray for our persecutors. “So if anyone insults you during Mass today,” I told the thirty people gathered on the sidewalk, “do not respond to them. The Lord, in today’s very Gospel, commands us to turn the other cheek.” Thirty seconds after I said that a tall, white man came up to me, got in my face, and said “you should be ashamed of yourself!” Immediately I replied to his face “and you should be ashamed of yourself for promoting the killing of babies.” The man walked away, and I turned to face my congregation, who were regarding me silently. “OK, OK,” I said to them: “he got me. I’m sorry. Well, do what I say and not what I do… Next time I’ll turn the other cheek.”
 
You are that Temple
We began Mass, and a lector read from the First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians. “Do you not know, brethren, that you are the temple of God. If anyone destroys that temple, God will destroy that man.” At those words I stopped breathing. It was prophecy against the people working the clinic in front of us. God vows to destroy those who destroy innocent human life. Suddenly I realized that we were at the clinic not only to pray for the unborn children, and for their mothers and fathers. We had come to throw ourselves between the abortion industry and the wrath of God. We were interceding also for the physicians and attorneys and staff of Planned Parenthood, who unknowingly stand on the edge of a black chasm. Surely no one who profits on the death of innocent lives will not be brought to justice, if not in this life than in the next. All of us are sinners, of course, but “do you not know, brothers, that God will destroy the man who destroys his temple?” I began to pray for my enemies in a whole new way. And I realized, again, that if I pray for my enemies, I won’t have any. That’s why Jesus commands us to do so. As much as my enemies hurt me, I do not want to see God destroy them. We have at least this common ground between us, that we all long for peace and reconciliation. We all want to love and be loved.
 
If you want love, give love. Love your enemies, and you won’t have any. May God grant us the grace!

Two years ago several young men from our Young Adults Fellowship asked to meet with me. “We want to learn how to be men,” they said. So about six of us met one night to plan the best way to do that. Most of them (all “millennials”) came from broken homes, where Dad was either long gone or otherwise not able to educate his sons to be good fathers. Most young men today also thrash about in the swamps of various compulsive addictions, most of all internet pornography. Stability is also an issue: the jobs these men have in the big tech companies downtown fly them about from Beijing to London and back every other week (presumably in the name of slowing climate change), and so they have trouble being present to any local community. The essence of fatherhood, I think, is being there. To advance in the ways of manhood and paternity, I asked our young men to do three things: serve at the altar when you attend Mass, plan an outing with your brothers every other month, and join the Knights of Columbus.

Most of them did, in fact, join the Knights of Columbus. All of them came to the monthly meetings a few times, but all of them dropped off except one. And that one young man is engaged to be married. The other young men still help with events, and do the fun stuff with their brother Knights, but they won’t come to meetings. What they cannot tolerate in these meetings is the unpleasantness of listening to another guy talking. Meetings are a necessary evil, and I’m not looking forward to our Parish Council meeting tonight, even though we all like to be together. What everyone finds difficult in meetings is listening to another person who likes the sound of his or her own voice a bit too much.

To be a man, to be a husband and a father, and to be a priest, one must learn to listen patiently. Patient listening—letting someone finish—is quite difficult for people accustomed to entertainment “on demand.” If I am used to switching a podcast on and off at my pleasure, it’s very hard for me to sit through a 90-minute meeting listening to others drone on.
Isn’t it telling, therefore, that the one young man who can sit through a Knights of Columbus meeting has committed himself to a woman for the rest of his life? I look around at the other men at the Knights of Columbus meeting … they are all married, except for two of us priests, who have also had to learn how to listen patiently.
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I’m sure the wives of these men have had to learn with even greater dexterity how to listen patiently. But as for our young men, who long to be happily married, but can not seem to tolerate listening to others speak seemingly interminably: perhaps the best preparation for marriage is a Knights of Columbus meeting.

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. If you haven’t been to this little mountain town in France, make it your aim to visit her charming grotto beside the River Gave. Three years ago I lead a parish pilgrimage to Lourdes, as you can see in the photo above. We took our place in line at the baths, and I ended up with a bunch of Sicilian peasants. Silently we waited in the drafty room, reduced to skivvies, wondering how cold the water would be. These men of callused hands and stocky limbs, some with honest-looking tattoos, were true European Catholics: tough, but gentle as lambs in the presence of the Mother of God. We went naked as babies into the womb of the earth, but returning from the saving waters, we marveled at how quickly we dried off. I’m alive to tell the tale, and the healthier for it!

Let me speak a little more on the Traditional Latin Mass, perhaps the greatest patrimony of Christian Europe. First, why Latin? Naturally folks wonder why anyone would pray in a “dead” language. In fact most world religions use a “prayer language.” If I may quote Wikipedia on the matter: “A sacred language, ‘holy language,’ or liturgical language is any language that is cultivated and used primarily in religious service or for other religious reasons by people who speak another, primary language in their daily life.” Thus Jewish people pray in ancient Hebrew; Muslim people pray in Classic Arabic; the Orthodox pray in Slavonic, Hindus pray in Sanskrit, and … Catholics pray in Latin.

​But why? Because prayer is not merely a casual conversation. It is addressed to Almighty God, and a sacred language indicates that we are communicating with the Sacred. Latin is a kind of “linguistic veil” in the Sacred Liturgy that points to a mystery, a knowledge beyond the literal. Most people think that Vatican II did away with Latin, but the opposite is true. The Council encouraged a greater use of the modern languages but also that the people pray the essential parts of the Mass in Latin. People resist Latin in the Mass because they think we need to know the literal meaning of the words, but you don’t need to know the meaning of every word in the Mass. Prayer is meant to be mysterious, a communication with an infinite, and infinitely mysterious, God. He is always greater than we can understand or imagine. Latin helps us remember that we don’t know everything, even in English. For example, who understands the literal meaning of “this is my body,” or “love your enemies”? There’s always more to know, and the use of a sacred language keeps us in wonder.

Redemption and Purification

Forty days ago the priests of the Church made this solemn proclamation: “The 25th day of December, when ages beyond number had run their course, … in the 13th century since the people of Israel were led by Moses from Egypt… in the 194th Olympiad, in the year 752 since the foundation of Rome, in the 42nd year of Caesar Octavian Augustus, the whole world being at peace, Jesus Christ, son of the eternal Father, was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judea.” Today, the Feast of Our Lord’s Presentation in the Temple and the Purification of his Most Holy Mother, brings the Christmas cycle to its fitting conclusion. You can take down your Christmas trees now. We leave Christmas joy behind to prepare for another 40-day season, the time of Lent, which will begin on the 26th of this month. Our Savior is born; he is presented to God in the temple; he grows in strength and wisdom before men; he carries his cross and dies; he rises from the dead, and he sends his Holy Spirit to build up the Church until his Second Coming. In today’s mystery, the fifth Joyful mystery of the rosary, Joseph and Mary bring their child into the temple, in obedience to the Law of Moses: every firstborn male must be redeemed of his sin by a temple sacrifice. But this child has no sin, nor does his mother. The Redeemer is redeemed in order to redeem the world. It is we who are presented in the Temple today, we who are redeemed at this Holy Mass. His offering renders every human offering to God valid.

The Sons of Levi

No priest but Christ alone can offer “due sacrifice” to God. What I or any other priest offers at this altar is worthless if not placed in the chalice of His Sacrifice. “For He is like a refiner’s fire, the fuller’s lye. He will purify the sons of Levi, … that they may offer due sacrifice to the Lord.” Levi, one of the twelve sons of Jacob, became the first priest of the Old Covenant. All the boys of Levi’s tribe became priests, offering daily sacrifices in the Jerusalem temple. But not every son of Levi was faithful. In fact, no priest but Christ himself is absolutely faithful; no priest but Jesus Christ can offer ‘due sacrifice.’ Some Catholic priests have even become agents of the demonic. Christ came to purify “the sons of Levi,” and we crucified Him. But God’s turned evil to good, because it was precisely on the Cross that Christ established the priesthood of the New Covenant. He, in fact, purified the sons of Levi.

Paternity

​God calls his Catholic priests to fatherhood, to generate spiritual sons and daughters, and that is why a priest dedicates himself to celibacy, to one spouse, to the Church. Evil hates paternity even more than it hates maternity, because God is a Father. Especially in these last times, evil has hamstrung the virility of our men. Atheism has convinced men to surrender their natural powers of generativity. I visited Russian in 2002 and was surprised to see almost no men in the shops, the factories, the churches. “Where are the men?” I asked. “In their rooms drinking,” was the usual reply. Today, in America, few men marry, and fewer have children. “Where are the men?” “They are in their rooms staring at the internet, covered in Cheetos dust.” Few men become priests, and fewer become good priests. How are men using their natural virile powers, their God-given forces of generativity? Evil hates paternity, because God is a Father. Evil focuses all its power on suppressing and ridiculing fatherhood.
 
Today Christ comes into his own Temple to refine the priests. He restores their paternity of priests who have become lazy and unfaithful the their spouse, Holy Mother Church. He turn the hearts of fathers to their sons. This purification costs Christ his life. Did you think the restoration of paternity would not provoke a backlash among the powers of darkness? “Behold, this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, a sign of contradiction—and you yourself a sword will pierce.” He, the exact representation of the Father, does not flinch from the scourges of evil, and neither does his Mother. The survival of the Church today rests upon the shoulders of her priests, and the survival of our culture rests upon the shoulders of its men. He will purify the sons of Levi, and she will be a mother to her priests. There will always be some saints among us, through whom God will work his wonders. Let us be among their number.