Today is Gratitude Day. It is the feast of Corpus Christi, the celebration of “Thanksgiving,” the solemnity of the Holy Eucharist, a Greek word that means “thanksgiving” and a divine liturgy that expresses man’s supreme act of gratitude to our Creator and Savior. In the traditional form of the Mass, which I offered this morning, the priest prays these words from Psalm 116: Quid retribuam Domino pro omnibus quae retribuit mihi? (“What will I give to the Lord in return for all that He has given to me?”). And the answer is: gratitude. Just thank Him. Learn to say “thank you” to others, and especially to the Father from whom all blessings flow. Carl Trueman wrote a stirring article about gratitude today, perhaps not knowing that it would be posted on the Solemnity of Corpus Christ, the Catholic Feast of Gratitude. You can read it HERE.
 
We had planned a Eucharistic procession tonight that will take the Eucharist into the streets. After the morning Mass, however, the sacristan told me that our sidewalks are spotted with rotting piles of human feces. I went out to have a look, and what I saw made me angry. I marched up to the vagrants sprawled out in the nearby public parking lot. “Did you crap on my sidewalk?” I demanded of a mild-mannered man. “Not me,” he said sheepishly. I’m fairly sure he was either lying or mentally unaware. A masked man in a beat-up pickup, which had “City Street Cleaners” painted on the side, was sweeping up the garbage around the vagrants. I marched up to him: Do you get paid to clean the streets?” I demanded. “Yes,” he replied sheepishly. “There are several piles of human feces on the sidewalk on which our schoolchildren have to walk every day to school. The parents complain. We all complain, but the city does nothing. Can you clean it up?”
 
He said he could and went over to scoop the poop. I was angry at the vagrants, angry at the street cleaner, and most of all angry at wealthy San Francisco politicians who have made our city a “socialist paradise.” But I remembered, at the last minute, to thank the poor Filipino man in his beat-up pickup truck who is getting paid $35 an hour to clean up the mess.
 
It’s easy to be angry at the obtuseness, the greed, and the irrationality of those who currently rule our culture. It’s easy to be angry at God, actually. But today is a day to look up, not down. To look up at the sky, the clouds, the trees, the sun and the moon and the stars; to look up as the priest lifts high the Holy Eucharist, which will bring us to the highest heavens. “Give thanks in all circumstances,” the Apostle Paul urges us.
 
Thank you, Lord, for the poor Filipino man with the mask in his old pickup, thank you for the vagrant man in the parking lot, thank you for my school, and my friends and my brother priests, and for the Mass I just celebrated. “What return shall I make to God who has given everything to me?” Certainly not anger or resentment. I will thank the Good God; I will try to thank the Good God, for everything that he has given to me!

The blossoms of May are coming to their end, and yesterday was the last solemnity of Our Lady’s Month. Delicate white roses blushing with roseate hues framed Our Lady’s statue for the fourth Sunday of May. They are the art and craft of our parish florist, Thelma Query, who has refined her work over the last 20 years. Her altar guild launders linens, counts candles, manages messes, and, best of all, provides floral adornment for the church. Thelma gets paid a bit to be our parish secretary and bookkeeper, but she has never asked reimbursement for the buckets of blossoms she purchases every Friday at San Francisco’s sprawling Flower Mart. A thriving floral culture is her weekly gift to God and community.
 
My Church is a garden. My little parish is a living, breathing, blooming community. People come from all over the City to enter this garden, in the heart of which the creator and sustainer of all life reposes in a golden tabernacle. He comes to us in every Mass, into our very hearts through the delicately parted lips of those who receive Him with inexpressible joy. Receiving this eternal food, we grow tall and strong, we blossom and bloom, we breathe and we swim in seas of glory.
 
I counted the living plants in our church this morning. Thelma and her elves had adorned its three altars and 25 shrines with 22 vases of roses, 30 orchid plants, 12 pots of succulents, and 18 urns of green leaf plants. Another eight vases of roses and potted plants bedecked the adoration chapel. That’s ninety flowerpots with hundreds of living plants. About seven hundred people come to Mass at Star of the Sea every week—at least one flower for each.
 
Mary Magdalen, on Easter Sunday, thought Jesus was a gardener. She was looking for her Lord in the garden in which He had been buried, but the living, breathing, blooming man in front of her could not be the tortured, bleeding, dead man she had seen crucified three days before. Jesus is indeed a gardener, and the Church is His garden. We are his blossoms. How lovely to enter a church that portrays not only the crucified sacrifice of the Gardener, but also the blooming life that follows the Passion, the precious faces of each who come to receive new life from God at His altar.

Harrison Butker Have you heard his 20-minute commencement address? Most have not, but almost everyone has heard others lobbing opinions about it. If friends or relatives or co-workers spit out the word “misogynist” regarding this speech, I think the best response is to ask if they have actually heard it. It only takes 20 minutes, and an open mind. Archbishop Cordileone made this observation: “[Harrison Butker’s] call for young Catholic men to put their vocations as husbands and fathers first could not be more important. Surely we spiritual fathers can ponder his call to us too. Faithfulness is the way. Read the speech…. [link provided].”

The speech was addressed to Catholic college students, not atheist journalists or cautious politicians, so the intended audience should be kept in mind. And we would not expect the Kansas City Chief’s kicker to speak like a polished professional. He speaks as you would expect a football player to speak, which is a little rough, taking some risks, and from a passionate heart. And he speaks as an all-in Catholic to an all-in Catholic college, which understandably makes those less committed to Catholic doctrine upset.

According to this doctrine, we did not make ourselves. God made us, male and female. According to Christianity, God gives men and women distinctive gifts so that they can complement each other, which we call “love.” Male-female love reflects the eternal exchange of love between the distinct persons in the one God. It is this love between persons that powers the universe. Love between different persons gives meaning to life; love makes the world go round. “We were created for greater things:” Mother Teresa said, “to love and be loved.” A woman loves in a different way than a man loves, the Superbowl-winning kicker said, and a man’s gifts are different from a woman’s gifts.
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During his speech, Butker broke down in tears when he spoke about his wife, the mother of his children. I’m sure hardened feminist and angry transgender activists found that embarrassing and unprofessional. But what man who has given his life to a woman would not break down in public when speaking about her? Only a man without a chest. Most of us, in this hollow time, have holes in our chests. Some don’t even have anything in their chests where their hearts are supposed to be. Someone has ripped their hearts out. Many of these poor people end their own lives in despair, or take other’s lives in desperation. But every one of us has the ability to come home to God. The Father has made a place just for me within the eternal love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And in that place is my Mother Mary, waiting for me with untold tenderness. God has provided all this for me, and for you, and that is all Harrison Butker was trying to say (in my opinion).

May 13 marks 107 years that the Mother of God came from heaven to console three very poor children. If this sounds like a fairy tale to you, it sounds like a fairy tale to me as well. Therefore, all the more do I wonder at what actually happened in a farming village of Portugal in 1917. It would be a fairy tale except for the fact that 70,000 people, including the most convinced secularist news reporters (notably the Lisbon daily O Seculo), saw and felt events that everyone could only describe as “supernatural.” The Lady, so the children said, would provide a “great sign” that would convince most people that she was from God, and that is what happened on October 17, 1917.
 
The three people who claimed to see and hear Mary at that time were very poor. Lucia, Francisco, and Jancinta were the poor children of poor farmers in a poor village. The wealthy and powerful Marxist mayor of that district did not believe these poor people, but the Church has always been essentially of, for, and by the poor. The wealthier and more powerful the Church becomes, the farther she drifts from God. “Blessed are the poor, for they shall see God,” said the poor founder of our faith.
 
Joy filled me this morning as I offered a morning Mass for Our Lady in a convent chapel here in San Francisco. I was the only white, middle-class person in the room. The sisters were all from Mexico, and of the six folks at Mass, two were Latino, two were black, and two were Asian. In their beautiful simplicity and humility, these people of color were all delighted to be together at a Mass of Our Lady. They have very little in this world, but they are not angry or sad. Rather, they rejoice to stand together before Someone greater than themselves.
 
I go to the Symphony, I have lunch at Linked-In Headquarters, I wander the corridors of power at City Hall—none of these places are as “colored” as a Catholic Mass. Truly, the Catholic Church is “here comes everybody,” and truly, it is at the Lord’s Supper that the poor and marginalized gather, not to complain or demand, but to simply love and be loved. How wonderful it is to be a Catholic!

We begin the month of May with affectionate gratitude for St. Joseph the Worker. He provided bread for his wife, the all-beautiful Mary, and his divine Son Jesus, through the work of his hands, but all his work was inspired by love for his Child and the Mother of his Child.
 
This morning I asked our 65 schoolchildren if anyone was named Joseph, so I could give them a chocolate bar for their namesday. Lamentably, not one student—male or female—had received the name Joseph. One student finally remembered that his great-grandfather was “Joseph,” so he got a chocolate bar. That’s the best we could do, but we could do better. Name at least one of your children after Joseph, either first or middle or confirmation name! The Archdiocese of San Francisco has not one parish named for St. Joseph, a fact which I have lamented to Archbishop Salvatore Joseph Cordileone more than once, and to which I attribute at least some of the grievous masculine deficit plaguing this City of St. Francis.
 
St. Joseph worked because he loved. Love makes even the most arduous tasks light, and the most bitter work sweet. It helps to remember how much we love those for whom we work when the going gets tough. And love cannot be simulated.
 
Last week a curious incident happened at Catholic Answers in San Diego, that excellent center of apologetics and catechesis. Catholic Answers had unveiled their AI chatbot “Fr. Justin” to answer all Catholic questions, but CA defrocked “Fr. Justin” two days later when the algorithm began dispensing “sacramental absolution” through people’s phones. Leah Libresco Sargeant has offered a good analysis HERE. AI is certainly useful, but to avoid misusing it, we need to understand what it can and cannot do.
 
The Christian faith is not mere information, artificial or otherwise. The Christian faith is love, not delivered simply in book form, as information, but handed on from one person to another person. Only a person can give you the faith, not a machine, because only a person can give you love. We receive the Lord Jesus from our mothers and fathers, from our priests and our friends, and not merely from the Bible or even less from a chatbot. As Leah writes in her article, “Someone approaching the Church is always asking a double question--what does the Church say about this topic and does Jesus love me? The second question is usually asked and answered implicitly. It can’t be built into a prompt—it requires the personal witness and presence of another human being.”
 
AI can be helpful to the Church in the way search engines have been helpful. But AI can never replace a priest, or a parent, or a grandmother. Catholic Answers (God bless them for venturing out in AI—nothing ventured, nothing gained!) has taught us something quite valuable as we enter the next level of data processing. Machines can’t fully “think” because “thinking” in its fullest sense requires truth, and truth can only be fully received in love. To “know” someone is to “love” that person, and anything less than “truth in love” is simply data processing.
 
Benedict XVI, probably the Church’s most powerful intellect of our time, wrote his third and last encyclical on “truth and love,” Caritas in veritate. Trust no love that is not truthful, and accept no truth that is not spoken in love. We look to St. Joseph, today, as a man who loved not artificially but from the heart, proving his love through honest human labor. Even the most spectacular forms of data collection and processing can not replace the most humble manual laborer, a person who can do what no machine can do: he can love another.