notYesterday, Divine Mercy Sunday, all three of us priests heard many confessions. It was the best day of the year to make a good confession! At 3pm we all abandoned ourselves to Jesus’ tender love for us in making the devotions to the Divine Mercy, and I cannot thank enough our own Thelma Query and her little team for organizing these prayers.
 
In my own life Christ’s revelations to St. Faustina are taking on more importance as I see the accelerating decline of our societies. I’ve read history all my life (my MA is in California history) and it’s not hard to recognize how many of our societal dynamics match those that immediately preceded great wars, particularly World War I. Many observers far more astute than me consider some form of global conflict inevitable in the near future. I may or may not live to see it, but the conditions in which we now live cannot sustain a peaceful social order forever. As in the first decade of the 20th Century, we enjoy unprecedented wealth and technology but increasingly lack the social consensus on how to use it. Cultural fabrics are fraying, and if it feels like we are the edge of social collapse (notice, for example, how many movies over the last ten years portray global apocalypse and social Armageddon), it is because we are.
 
A significant number of our fellow Americans no longer believe in God, and most Europeans (to whom the world still looks for cultural standards) have lost faith in anything beyond “science.” Many of these conditions preceded the Great War in Europe, which would spread from 1914 throughout the world until its final denouement in 1945. It was between the World Wars that Jesus began speaking with a poor nun in a convent only a few miles from the Polish village of Oswiencim, a name the Germans would change to “Auschwitz.” In those years, Germany led the world in science and technology, her universities setting world academic standards and her politics defining global power. Germany’s universities and her technology, however, could not by themselves sustain a peaceful social order. Human intelligence that does not refer to a point beyond itself—that pretends that it is self-creative—always leads to chaotic power struggles. Put two people in a room without a higher authority and they will eventually end up killing each other.
 
Christ’s Divine Mercy is that higher authority. He is essentially a heart overflowing with love for each of us. Without Him, we simply cannot live in peace with each other. Western culture is living on the fumes of faith, attempting to order our lives together without reference to our first principle. This Sunday in my parish I will pass out images of Christ’s Divine Mercy along with prayer cards. I also highly recommend Fr. Gaitley’s excellent video series on FORMED.ORG. Jesus, I trust in Thee!

Yesterday was Earth Day, and the day before that was Easter, and today is Easter too. In fact, the  entire Easter Octave is "one day." The Octave represents eight days in our time but gives us a foretaste of the Endless Day in the life of the world to come. Every day this week we say Haec dies quam fecit Dominus; exultemus et laetemur in ea!Haec dies quam fecit Dominus; exultemus et laetemur in ea: "This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it".
 
I usually spend a few days after Easter Sunday with a few close priest friends, in community. One or another of our many kind parishioners lets us camp out in a vacation home for a few days, and this morning I woke up to birdsong and ocean waves. After washing up I went downstairs to read over the day's Gospel, which on Tuesday of the Octave tells of Mary Magdalene weeping at Christ's tomb. "Woman, why are you weeping?" the angel asks. A minute later Jesus asks the same thing, and to both Mary replies "They have taken my Lord...."

Jesus speaks her name, "Mary," and she clings to him. He pushes her back with the famous words noli me tangere.... "Don't touch me.....yet." The Lord certainly does not forbid us to touch him--he has actually commanded us to eat his flesh and blood at least once a week. But to Mary Magdalene on Easter morning he says "stop holding me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father." There is a time for embraces, and a time to pull back from embracing. God often keeps us at a distance. He hides from us much of the time. Why?
 
As I thought about this Gospel, I heard a ruckus outside the window. A male Canadian goose was pursuing a female, aiming his lowered head at her while she adroitly sidestepped his advances. But she did not fly away. She wanted what he was clumsily offering, but ... not yet. There was a courtship dance to be engaged before love could be consummated. Nearby two other Canadian geese with their fuzzy little chick looked indulgently at this ritual, which they no doubt had undergone a few weeks previous.
 
Love is delicate. Men are not naturally delicate, and women are not much better. God must teach us the delicate art of love. As a recent movie (The Dating Project) pointed out, the "hookup" culture has largely replaced the art of lovemaking. In a marketing-generated mentality of "owning it, now," we imagine we can control love, much as we imagine we can control human life (we call that "birth control"). But in fact love, and new life, is a gift to be received, not a product to be purchased. 
 
Canadian geese know this. Jesus taught Mary Magdalene patience, to wait for love rather than grasping for it. Love taken by force is never very satisfying. The beloved must be pursued, yes, but never "taken." Love, and the life it naturally generates, are much better received as a gift than "owned."

Rachel Fulton Brown weighed in on the Notre Dame fire yesterday, as probably hundreds of thousands have done over the last 36 hours, including your scribe in this blog post. Rémi Brague describes the fire as a kind of 9/11 moment for France. “Where were you when Notre Dame was burning?” I was hurriedly entering my church for noon Mass when an agitated knot of ladies tried to stop me. “Your church is burning!” one of them gasped. I looked up as I crossed under the transept towards the sacristy, but I didn’t see my church burning.

And yet Notre Dame is my church, and a mother church for any who have stood beneath her wheeling Rose windows or caught a first glimpse of her buttressed towers from across the Seine. The Cathedral of Paris is the mother church, much as St. Peter’s is the father church, of Christendom and Western Civilization. A few years ago, I had a five-hour layover at Charles de Gaulle, which they call the “Paris Airport.” In fact, it’s a good hour on the fast train from downtown, but I figured I would have 45 minutes in Paris if I got through the immigration lines quickly. I went straight to Notre Dame, wandering through the semi-darkness, reading memorial wall plaques from 1163, watching young people make their confessions to priests waiting in the cathedral’s curious glass confessionals, peering into the smoked glass reliquary of the crown of thorns. And of course, standing before the great North Rose, feeling as if I were falling into eternity.

Rachel Fulton Brown asks the question: why should we rebuild Notre Dame? Restoration donations have almost exceeded $1 billion, and we certainly have the technology. France’s agnostic President confidently declares the national monument will be rebuilt “more beautiful than ever” within five years. But can we build what the Faith of our Fathers built? Can we do what the medieval masons and glazing artisans did without their love for God, for Our Lady, for the Gospels they so winningly portrayed in glass and stone? “In the middle ages, it wasn’t the building of stone, glass, and wood that mattered,” Fulton writes. “It was the worship offered therein.” The most ordinary parish church becomes beautiful when people pray within it. Only faith in God and love for his Church can restore Notre Dame’s essential beauty. The burning of this monument is a national referendum for France: are we still Christian enough to rebuild a Catholic church?
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We priests have the unspeakable privilege of leading our communities in the Paschal Triduum over these next three days. While the highest liturgies of Christian worship will not take place in Paris’ cathedral this year, they will in every simple parish church, and in the modernist Cathedral here in San Francisco. What makes our lives beautiful is not stone and glass, but the depth of our prayer to God, the leap of the heart that looks up and into God, who is beauty itself. We all hope that Notre Dame can recover her essential beauty, but that beauty is ours for the asking right in our little parish churches, or even in our own rooms, if we enter deeply into the mysteries of these next three days.

Holy Week is properly marked by silence and emptiness. The Church asks us to pause this week. Stop what you are doing and listen to God’s Word. We patiently bear the entire Passion reading twice this week: on Palm Sunday according to St. Luke and on Good Friday according to St. John (in the older form of the Mass all four Passion accounts are read, in Latin). We are asked to empty our bodies through fasting and clear our minds by listening.

Visual silence also brings the Christian deeply into the Paschal Mystery. By ancient tradition we drape images in purple from Passion Sunday to Easter Sunday. In my parish we pray morning and evening prayer in front of a large image of Our Lady. Our parish iconographer, Pavel Tikhomirov, wrote this icon two years ago in deep blue on brilliant gold leaf. The image brings mother and child into dynamic visual presence between ambo and altar. We turn to this image to pray the angelus every morning, noon, and evening.

On Passion Sunday I took my usual place in the front pew to do my holy hour. I turned to the icon to greet Our Lady and her Son, but they were not there! Mind and body were briefly disoriented. Where was I? What day was it? Was I in the right church? Not content with simply draping the image, our valiant sacristan had removed it entirely. A great hole gaped back at me, an emptiness that leads into the Paschal Mystery. For in truth, I must become blind before I can see. I must become empty before I can be filled. I must die before I can live.
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It is good, at certain times of the year, to keep silence and stillness. Only in deep stillness can we perceive God’s presence in the world now and recognize his definitive return at the end of time.

One of my parishioners got out of an Uber yesterday and said how sad it was that we are closing the school. I explained that we are not closing the school but suspending classes for a year to do a feasibility study and develop a curriculum, marketing strategy, and business plan. “But the Uber driver,” she replied, “said that Star of the Sea School is closing after 110 years.” Such is the narrative in local papers and social media, a story some are promoting presumably to hamstring our Classical Catholic School.

We are not closing but "rebooting." It is not what I would have wanted, and in fact many of us spent ten months, and sustained a $700,000 deficit, trying to maintain classes uninterrupted as enrollment sank. The deal breaker, for at least a vocal group of parents (who do not attend the parish), was restoring the school as a ministry of the parish. For many years the school had run itself functionally independent of the parish. One parent posted on social media, for example, that “Star of the Sea School and the adjoining church share a name and real estate, but not leadership and members. The two organizations are technically separate, and most of the students and their parents are not members of the church.” Exactly. The fact that some parents would think a parish school was “technically separate” from its parish called for some healthy reintegration.

It is quite understandable how, in such a situation, some would resist parish oversight. In the end, those opposed to integration were vocal enough to sink enrollment. My heart goes out to students and families who must find another school, especially those who wanted to stay at Star of the Sea.
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But, God willing, it is not the end of our School. The search has begun for an educator with experience in starting a classical school eager to meet the particular challenges at Star of the Sea. We are welcoming resumes, and, with God’s help, will build on our fully-enrolled preschool to resume upper classes with an Integrated Classical Program beginning August 2020.

Passion Sunday

In the more ancient tradition, Lent is progressive. It begins with Septuagesima three weeks before Ash Wednesday, followed by four weeks of Lent proper, then two weeks of Passiontide (beginning today) and finally the Paschal Triduum. Holy Saturday, the last day of our 70-day preparation for Easter, is marked by emptiness and almost total silence: no liturgical prayers, altars and churches stripped, and tabernacle doors gaping ajar, empty. The Crucifix is draped in purple from today until Good Friday, and statues covered until the Easter Vigil. Today is also known as “Judica” Sunday, because the introit or entrance verse comes from Psalm 42, the same verse used for the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar. “Judica me Deus, et discerne causam meam de gente non sancta.” Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause against a godless people. These words stay on Our Savior’s lips throughout his Sacred Passion. Tu Deus fortitudo mea, “you O God are my strength.” In his masterful Passion of the Christ, Gibson puts these words on Jesus’ agonized lips as he faces his trial and execution.

“I Am”

Our Gospel is taken from St. John Chapter 8, which begins with the woman taken in adultery. Jesus had pardoned the woman in the verses leading up to this Sunday’s reading, but he also commands her to sin no more. This act of forgiving sin, which we Catholics take for granted every time we enter a confessional, drove the Pharisees and legal scholars to fury against Jesus. They accuse him of everything under the sun: You are a Samaritan (an apostate). You are insane. You are possessed. Jesus patiently, but firmly, corrects their absurd charges, but finally speaks the one word that is sure to get him killed, the unspeakable tetragrammaton: I AM. It is this Name that Moses heard on Sinai, the name of Yahweh. “Before Abraham came to be,” Christ says,  “I AM.”  Thus He declares his eternity and his divinity. He leaves no room for equivocation: either he is a madman, claiming to be divine, or he is all that he says he is: the eternal and consubstantial Son of God. The Jews picked up stones to kill him.

God’s Shame

Jesus abscondit se. Consider the indignity of the Christ having to hide himself. The Lord of Lords and King of Kings, having pronounced his divine Name, must dodge his enemies like a common thief and hide down some dark alley. He doesn’t have to hide himself, of course, but in obedience to his Father’s will, he accepts the humiliation of every man who must run and hide from his enemies. Our frailty must often hide or flee certain evils we cannot prevent--misunderstandings, social awkwardness, and the consequences of our own miserable sins. Every morning when we put on clothing, we hide our bodies from shame and sin. When we enter the confessional we hide our sins from others and hide our face from the priest. And  yet, we long to be free of shame, for a day when we will no longer have to run and hide. But that day is not yet. In this life, as we must endure shame, let us endure it with Him. Our Redeemer’s shame, freely chosen, heals our shame.

Keeping the Lights On

​Tourists flock to our city to tour the sex districts and Pride Parades, which pride themselves on their shamelessness. “We have nothing to hide” men say, prancing naked down Castro Street. And yet, the newspapers shame us with pictures of homeless defecating in our streets and camping in front of apartments that rent for $6000 a month. The poverty in our wealthiest cities testifies to original sin, that something is fundamentally wrong with humanity. Many people are desperately trying to fix our problems, but no one has finally succeeded. San Francisco, like any wealthy city, desperately needs Christ, who alone can heal our essential shame. The powers of darkness have convinced most people in our city that we don’t need God: all we need is Google. But technology and the money with which it floods this city is not enough. Every inhabitant of our city needs the Word of God, and the Sacraments of God. And when they come back to God, we are here for them. At least once a month someone comes to Star of the Sea from the wasteland of agnosticism. They come because the doors are open, and the Eucharist blazes from the altar. A Russian orthodox priest last week told me how grateful he is to see our large and prominent church open with the Holy Sacrament shining out across Geary Boulevard. “Christ is blessing the entire city from your altar,” he said. We’ve got to keep the church doors open and the lights on. The human soul needs more than what we can see and taste. We need God. The Church today faces real enemies, men and women who have declared that (as an attorney in Orange County told a prelate) “we will not stop until the Catholic Church is destroyed.” They cannot destroy what God sustains, but they can certainly infiltrate it with poison from within and batter it with lawsuits from without. This Sunday I will ask you to make a gift to the Archdiocese in its Annual Appeal. Our parish goal is $82,000, and many of us are able to make a 1% gift, or $820. Why do we give to the Church beyond our own parish? We give so that the Archbishop can keep the doors open and the lights on in all three counties of Marin, San Francisco, and San Mateo. God will not be silenced, if we can help it.

My parents gave me a brand new bike with banana-seat and sissy bar for my tenth birthday. I would ride it to school like a Corvette, ‘driving’ home for lunch with Mom and Dad occasionally. But one day a buddy ran up to me. “Hey, Illo, someone pushed over your bike!” I ran back with him to see my beautiful bike on the ground. My friend picked it up for me.

On Thursday our maintenance man Dennis ran up to me. “Hey, Fr. Illo, someone pushed over your bike!” I ran with him to the front sidewalk, where I park my scooter. But someone had already picked it up for me! It was standing upright, although the left mirror was pushed in and the plastic frame bent out of shape. I display on this blog the picture Dennis had taken of it on the ground.

Thursday was a hard day. The previous afternoon I had to inform my school faculty and parents of the Archdiocese’s decision to suspend most of our classes next year due to low enrollment. Over the past year some families have been expressing acute unhappiness over my decision to implement an Integrated Classical Program, and to further to integrate the school as a ministry of the parish. Unhappiness spreads quickly in a school, and most of the families ended up not enrolling their children for next year. The first thing that happened the day after announcing the suspension of classes was my scooter getting knocked down. The next thing that happened was the arrival of news cameras. They spent the entire day interviewing the acutely unhappy parents. Some want to make sure most of San Francisco is unhappy with Fr. Illo and his vision of a traditional Catholic school.

​A few weeks ago someone threw down our outdoor statue of Mary. Dennis, our ever-patient maintenance man, dutifully disposed of the shattered pieces. The vandal also threw a lovely potted plant onto the sidewalk, destroying plant and planter. We mourned the loss only two days, however, because on the morning of the third day a bright new statue of Our Lady had replaced it, along with a new plant. We don’t know who placed it there. Our benefactor remains anonymous, and I didn't even have to ask for a new statue.

Otherwise tolerant people seem unable to tolerate Christianity these days. They are smashing Catholic statues and toppling Catholic institutions. But other people, quietly and anonymously, are stepping up to rebuild them overnight.

[Conversion story & photo used with permission]

Lent is a time to prepare for Easter, but more than Easter, a time to prepare for baptism. Four adults in our community are preparing for this at the Easter vigil on April 20. Normally we don’t baptize even infants between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday but last week, on the Third Sunday of Lent, I baptized a man. Cy Sharif was born in Tehran but has been living in San Francisco many years. He is dying of cancer and quite scared of entering that undiscovered country from which no man returns. I’ve seen some inspiring conversions and adult baptisms but Cy’s desperate longing for the faith was most the most beautiful of all. With cancer overcoming him, Cy hovers at the edge of a black abyss. He called our parish for a priest to baptize him, and so I entered his room to find a desperate man who has glimpsed the possibility of eternal life. The priest asks the dying man: “What do you ask of God’s Church?” No one has had time to instruct Cy in liturgical proprieties, so I supply the answer to my own question: “Faith.” Yes, the dying man gasps. Yes, I want faith. I want to believe in God, in a life beyond this life! I continue, according to the Roman Ritual, with these words: “What does faith offer you?” Again the dying man cannot precisely articulate, but knows that whatever faith in God offers is what he needs. The answer in my ritual book is “Eternal life,” and Cy affirms his desire by repeating those words. He utters his great longing, reaching for a final lifeline as he slips under the waters of death. “Please, yes, I want to live! I want to live forever with people who love me….” The priest continues with the Roman ritual, words that dying men have heard for centuries, words that have been pronounced over infants and over adult catechumens in the darkness of our churches on Easter night. “If you would enter into eternal life, then, do you promise to keep the commandments: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul, and with all your strength? And will you love your neighbor as yourself?” Cy begins to weep. He is dying, but he wants the death and rebirth of baptism before he slips beneath the dark waters of death to this world. I baptize and anoint him with Chrism. And now he is ready for viaticum, the Bread of Angels that will accompany him through the realm of the dead. How he longed for that Eucharist! When a dying man so thirsts for Christ, when he visibly hungers for the Holy Eucharist, we all find a bit more faith in our own hearts. Welcome home, Cy Sharif.