[Happy Feast of St. Joseph the Worker. I figured I’d better work a little harder today so I took both Masses, but of course had the “payment” for my labors in celebrating this feast in both Latin and English, with two beautiful but distinct congregations. The French sisters who attend our Latin Masses gave me one of their famous homemade fruit tarts in honor of my namesday. In the Latin prayers for this feast, the word premium which means “payment” or “reward.” There’s nothing wrong with honest pay for honest work—God pays a just wage, for the laborer deserves his reward. Marxist socialism, in which everyone gets the same pay no matter how much or little labor they accomplish, demolishes the just relationship between labor and capital. St. Joseph restores it!

​Following is my First Holy Communion homily from yesterday.]

First Holy Communion  
Today our children will receive their First Holy Communion. The Lord Jesus Christ will come to them in his full body, blood, soul, and divinity, drawing them into himself unto life everlasting. He will give them a foretaste of the eternal banquet of heaven, seating them at his table and feeding them with His own self.

Emmaus

So it was for the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus, this mysterious story told only in the Gospel of Luke: they sit at table with God, who feeds them with his own body and blood. Two men are leaving Jerusalem, utterly sad, disappointed, and confused. “We had hoped this Jesus would save us, but our own leaders crucified him. Our own people—our own government—destroyed all our hopes.” They were leaving Jerusalem, the Holy City, to return to their former way of life. They had given up on God because they thought God had given up on them. Then He sidles up to them on the road…. We might walk away from Him, but he will not walk away from us. Jesus opens their minds to the Scriptures and their hearts begin to burn. “Did you not know that the Messiah had to suffer?” Here in a world gone wrong (a world disabled by original sin), there is no love without suffering. As St. Therese said, we were born to suffer, because we were born to love. “Stay with us,” they beg him, “for night is almost upon us.” He does stay with them for dinner, and as he takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them. They suddenly recognize him, and he vanishes from their sight, but they no longer miss Him. They don’t need to see him with their eyes because they have the Sacred Eucharist, the Holy Bread that is his body, blood, soul, and divinity. They rush back to Jerusalem, to the Holy City, to begin their lifelong apostolate of spreading the faith.

The Mass

The story of Emmaus is the story of the Mass. In the first part of the Mass (the Liturgy of the Word) Jesus opens our hearts through the Scriptures, and in the second part (the liturgy of the Eucharist) we recognize him in the breaking of the bread. Word and Sacrament. These are the twin engines that power our faith and hope of eternal life. These are the two gifts these children, and all of us, receive today. Never miss a Mass, dear people. Never miss a Mass.

Had to Suffer

Finally, Jesus tells us that the Messiah had to suffer. Here below, there is no love, no loyalty, no commitment without suffering. No pain no gain. Our faith is built on sacrifice—the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, and our own sacrifices united with His. The Mass is essentially a sacrifice, because it is the highest expression of love. The Mass is not just a happy meal, a gathering of friends, a party with balloons and dancing. It is a meal, yes, but a sacred banquet of disciples, where the host feeds his guests with his own body. The Mass is a sacrificial meal, which is why everything in the Mass should look different from everyday life. The way the priest and servers dress for Mass--the way we all dress--should be distinct from how we dress for the beach, for work, or relaxing at home. The inside of the church—the architecture, the windows, the paintings, the furniture—should look sacred because it communicates the sacred of God. The books, the vessels, the very bread and wine should be different than what we buy at Target or Safeway, because they bear the eternal sacrifice of God.
 
Adoration

​You receive your first holy communion at Star of the Sea today, dear children. May it not be your last communion. Never miss a Sunday Mass, if you can possibly help it. Make the sacrifice to come to Mass. Make the sacrifice to come also to Eucharistic adoration. It is not easy to be faithful to the Mass every week for the rest of your lives. Nor is it easy to be faithful to prayer, especially prayer in our Eucharistic chapel. But God will help us. Pray to Our Lady too, that we will offer our sacrifice to Jesus in deep love, so that we can properly receive his deep loving sacrifice.

Divine Mercy Sunday

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

Peace I give to you

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

We all need more silence

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

My greatest hope

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

Welcome

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

The Easter Vigil

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

Our Final Loneliness

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

The Holy Eucharist

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

The Priesthood of Jesus Christ

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

Adoration

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

​We have been offering the Mass ad orientem for about a month now at my parish. It’s been quite positively received, with no complaints from parishioners and lots of contentment.
 
I had offered the Novus Ordo Mass ad orientem occasionally in convent chapels, but never on a regular basis in a parish. Now that it has become the norm in my parish, I’ve discovered a few things. For one, I have come to relish both speaking to the people and speaking to God within the Mass. Before, the distinction between immanence (addressing your peers) and transcendence (addressing the Completely Other) was lost. Now the two dynamics of sacred worship have come into sharp focus. Now I turn to the people with a more precise intentionality, and I think they more intentionally respond. The congregation is a bit awakened when the priest turns to face them, to look at them and say directly “lift up your hearts.” Likewise, I turn to the altar to pray to God with greater focus and intention. I enjoy a greater freedom, a deeper peace in looking up into the large crucifix, the marble archwork, the stained glass above me.
 
These more precise liturgical movements clarify what I’m doing at what moment. When I’m praying the Eucharistic prayer, in the name of the people, I can almost feel their prayers streaming through me to the Father. I feel like a true priest, standing on their behalf before the throne of mercy, facing the seat of judgement as first among equals. The directness with which I now pray the Eucharistic prayer has surprised me. The personal enjoyment I feel with the people in those moments of dialogue is refreshing. In praying the Mass this way, I feel at once closer to God and closer to the people. It’s really beautiful. 

Jesus dismisses death

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

Where were you?

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

Jesus shudders and Jesus weeps

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

The Shroud

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