The fathers and brothers of the Oxford Oratory have afforded me kind hospitality in their community for a week on my way back from Kenya. In the church yesterday I noticed two votives burning quietly beside the statues of Saints Peter & Paul behind the altar. June 29 is a holy day of obligation in Great Britain, and Fr. Daniel (parish priest and provost) thoughtfully prepared for the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. Wheeling my bicycle into the churchyard, I found him unfurling the papal colors over the portal. “In honor of the first Apostles of Rome,” he laughed, making oblique reference to the “Second Apostle of Rome,” St. Philip Neri, founder of the Oratory. Today is the 24th anniversary of my ordination, and the 64th anniversary of Pope Benedict’s priestly ordination, so I ask prayers for us both. I couldn’t be happier to have been ordained on this day, and 40 years after our beloved Pope Emeritus.

A Galilean fisherman and a Hebrew scholar built up the Church Christ had founded, buttressing it with their own blood. That Church remains the only free institution among all human establishments. The Church is free, meaning capable of building a rationally-ordered society, the “western” civilization of law, education, and social justice that serves as the basis of every ordered society. Christianity offers principles that allow every culture to develop to their full potential. Kenya, where I just spent ten days, has benefited immensely from the Christian principles of human rights and rule of law, and yet it remains distinctively African. But no matter where in the world you go, formal dress for men includes a necktie. This simple sign of self-respect and respect for others came through King Louis XIV, who adopted its use by the Croatian soldiers defending Christian France from the Ottoman Empire. I was charmed to see scores of boys kneeling to receive Holy Communion at the Oratory church yesterday in their tweed jackets and frumpy neckties. True enough, neither St. Peter nor St. Paul wore neckties, but in the world culture developed from the Church they developed, a tie expresses the Christian virtue of respect for the human person.

At the core of this culture is a reverence for the “laws of nature and of nature’s God” in the words of our own Declaration of Independence. At the core of Christian culture is law, and not a law that we have invented, but a body of law that we write in accord with God’s fundamental Law, discovered through the use of human reason. Since the French Revolution, however, Europe has led a movement to throw off Christian culture and its understanding of law and freedom. It seeks to redefine “freedom” as mere “free choice,” the ability to do whatever I please. Pope Benedict wrote that freedom conceived as the mere absence of obligation would “inevitably play into the hands of fanaticism and arbitrariness. Absence of obligation and arbitrariness do not signify freedom but its destruction.”

Last week our Supreme Court redefined marriage as personal “intimacy” rather than public “service.” If the marital bond is only private intimacy, it cannot possibly sustain our culture. If marriage is not at the service of the family, we will lose the primary means of social order. We will be left with only with the government. Ordering society by government regulation rather than family love has already been tried in Soviet Russia. It didn’t work.

I’m sure the five Supreme Court justices have been asked: if marriage is essentially private intimacy, how can the Court deny a marriage license to a mother and son who feel such intimacy, or five men and a woman, or two sisters, or any other group of people who feel “intimacy” and want a marriage license? No one can deny the real feelings and commitments of same-sex couples, and to deny them marriage licenses does not have to be done disrespectfully. But if two men can marry, why can’t anybody else? The answer cannot only be that we disallow polygamy and incest because they tend to destabilize society. Only the natural family, open to children, has the inherent capacity to freely order (e.g., without government control) our lives together.

I suppose, after the Court’s redefinition of marriage, American society will go on pretty much as it has for the last 40 years, meaning: basic stability but slow disintegration. In this case, however, a major pillar has been removed from the edifice of western culture, a column placed by SS. Peter and Paul many years ago which has stood fast through many culture wars. Perhaps the column will be replaced in a few generations, when we discover its lamentable consequences.

God only knows the future of our culture and our society. Let us pray to the twin Apostles of Rome, and to St. Philip, while we’re at it, the third Apostle of Rome, that God preserve us from evil. He will provide and protect, in ways that we cannot know, and so we must maintain our peace and joy. 

My time here in Nairobi (10 days to give a retreat to the Missionaries of Charity) gives me a more distinct perspective on Pope Francis’ new encyclical. My walks through the slum where the Sisters run a homeless shelter show a level of ecological and social degradation we don’t see in the United States. Living in this environment, I find the Pope’s analysis compelling.

He clearly defines the environmental situation as a “disaster” and a “catastrophe,” using the word “urgent” 15 times in the encyclical. Some would dispute how “urgent” the situation is, but when he cites studies predicting acute water shortages within “a few decades,” we in California can resonate.

But Pope Francis is a different kind of climate change activist. He sees the problem as essentially spiritual rather than environmental: “The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast.”  We are trashing the environment because we are trashing Him who made the environment, and ourselves who are made in His image. And this scandal is most evident in the poor. Our abuse of the earth, air and water is unconscionable because it keeps 40% of our human family in dehumanizing poverty. We should exercise responsible stewardship of the environment not because we worship the planet but because wasting and over-stressing air and water directly harms the poorest among us. Good Christians respect plants and animals, but they respect their fellow human beings above all. We in the wealthy nations hardly feel the effects of environmental stress caused by a profit-driven economy. But thick pollution chokes the air here in Nairobi as buses pour black smoke into the streets (kind of hard to ride a bike beside them!). I asked a Kenyan why his government does not regulate bus and truck emissions. He replied: “In the United States, you can afford clean air. We can’t.” Last week I made a new friend, Steve, who repairs shoes under an umbrella on a muddy street. He has five children and can find no other work. I had him repair my running shoes. He cannot afford a car, let alone a catalytic converter.

The Pope blames the “technocratic paradigm,” a belief that new technologies alone will solve every problem. His solution is conversion of heart, beginning with the natural family. The environment is collapsing because the family is collapsing. It is in the family that we learn to take only what we need, and to share with others at the table. Here in Kenya, the family is much stronger than in the United States. The physical environment is suffering (at least in the cities) but the social environment is quite healthy, at least for now. I rode my bike to the City Park yesterday to see the monkeys, which avail themselves of cast-off fruits from the market on the edge of the park. I went to visit “speaker’s corner,” a triangle of lush grass under a spreading acacia tree where folks rested and others practiced oratory. In the English tradition, this was a “common,” a green area owned by and kept green for the public. This year, sadly, the common had been opened up for parking and a large advertising billboard. Smoke and garbage and cars had replaced the green grass, and the acacia seemed like an embarrassed intruder into this newly-built market area.

I rode off to find the old cemetery I had discovered last year, hidden away in the middle of the park. I found the caretaker, Rafael, and his wife and three small children. “Karibu” he said in Swahili. “Welcome.” The City Council pays his salary, and he lives a simple but joyful life in the green sward of the cemetery, cutting back the grasses with his machete and keeping the tombs clean. We talked, the kids all told me their names and ages, and we prayed briefly for his family and the souls of the faithful departed (the men all doffed their caps as we prayed, and I was ashamed to realize I had not doffed mine—I snatched it off quickly!). What a beautiful family, I thought. Here is the core and foundation of Kenyan society, hope of stability for the whole political-economic-ecological matrix. People think the future of Kenya is its developing market economy, which is taking over the green areas, but it is right here, these five people, the God-given gift of the family.

Homily for the 12th Sunday of Ordinary Time 2015
 
“Who” is the question of the day. “Who,” not “what.”

“Who shut within doors the sea, when it burst forth from the womb?” asks the Lord of Job in the first reading. “Who then is this whom even wind and sea obey?” ask the apostles of the Lord in the Gospel.

The principle that tames the restless sea is a Who not a What; the Big Bang at creation’s beginning was the utterance of Someone, not something. And so St. Paul says in the second reading, “the love of Christ impels us….” Not the love of the sea or the air or the trees, as strikingly beautiful as they are, impels him to sacrifice his life. Not even the love of a human person, as deeply endearing as he or she may be, impels him to sanctity. It is the love of Christ that moves the planets and moves men to reverence the planets.

Pope Francis’ long-awaited encyclical on the environment came out on Wednesday, and it is a beautiful document. But it is less about the environment than about the One who made the environment. When it comes to hard decisions between human prosperity and environmental concerns, only the love of God will lead us to fully respect the planet He has given us. “The destiny of all creation,” he writes, “is bound up with the mystery of Christ.” We cannot understand or effectively respect the planet without respecting the planet’s owner, who alone completely understands his own creation.

The fundamental problem motivating environmental exploitation, the Pope writes, is “anthropocentrism” and the “technocratic paradigm.” In other words, ignoring God’s existence in order to exalt man and man’s technological powers reduces the environment to man’s control, and we don’t have a very good track record of managing things we attempt to control. History will show that the strongest man, in any society that denies God, eventually takes what he wants. Is it coincidental that the great atheistic societies of our time (Russia and China) have committed the greatest environmental degradation? If God does not exist, why respect his creation? And that includes other human beings…. We must ask the “What” questions: What causes global warming? What drives the economy and what makes environmental solutions financially viable? What can we do to reduce emissions? What political and sociological remedies can we apply? But those questions are subordinate to the primary question of Who. Who made all this? Who will help us respect what He has given?

I am spending the Feast of the Sacred Heart this year in Trinidad with the Missionaries of Charity. It takes me a few days to adjust to the different noises, temperatures, foods, and sleep schedules of their mission house. By now I am toughened up and enjoying my brief annual experience of missionary life.

The missionaries live with the poorest of the poor. This district is too dangerous for a white man to step beyond the barred and razor-wired compound; it makes me think of a military zone in Afghanistan or Iraq. Not bombs but rock and rap assault our convent and homeless shelter. The locals typically replace the back seats of their little cars with massive speaker systems. They ride through our neighborhoods with windows down, or they park on our streets with doors open, assaulting us with obscenely loud “music.” A truck depot backs up against our southern perimeter, and at times the music from employees’ cars thuds through our walls, shaking the windows in chapel and bedroom. Every so often I look up from my book: it is quiet! A momentary cease fire! I can hear the birds and the breeze. Then someone will drive by and unload another barrage at us.

The sisters have it right. Only the Sacred Heart can answer the spiral of violent despair whipping up in our collapsing world culture. Only the patient, understanding love from the Heart of Jesus can bring peace and joy to the war-zone here in the slums of Trinidad.

Just before I left last week to give my summer retreats to the sisters in South America and Africa, one of our parishioners came up to me. “Father, you travel to the ends of the earth to give these retreats...why don’t you give us a retreat, right here in your own parish?” That’s a good idea.

My retreat this year to the Missionaries of Charity is on the Holy Eucharist. It is entitled “Missa est,” after the last words the priest says at Mass in Latin, ite, Missa est. Literally translated,  those words mean “go, it is the dismissal.” The word missa in Latin comes from the word “mission,” and the Mass itself took the name of this word. When we say “Mass” we mean mission, and that means every person who attends the Mass is a “missionary.” He or she is sent out with these words ite, missa est to take Christ by word and sacrament into the world. The Mass has four movements:  it begins with penance (“Lord have mercy”); it continues into the Word (the readings); it reaches its consummation in the Sacrament (the body of Christ), and it concludes with the mission (go… and bring Jesus to others). Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity understand this missionary drive of the Mass. My prayer is that we at Star will more and more understand it too. We have begun Eucharistic adoration; we hear the missionary command, even in the original Latin, ite missa est. We are committed to being a Eucharistic people. Are we also committed to being a missionary people?

As I was writing this, I heard the sisters singing in the chapel: “we know we can love Jesus because we can love the poor.” “We receive Jesus in the Holy Mass,” Mother Teresa told her sisters, “and we receive Him in the poorest of the poor. It is the same Jesus.” Star of the Sea is not only committed to the Eucharist. We are also committed to the poor. Our efforts to love the poor, to touch the poor, has blossomed in the work of our St. Vincent de Paul Society. Thank you all for your love for Jesus in the poorest—it is proof that we are truly becoming a Eucharistic people.

Also being ordained today is a dear friend, Patrick Summerhays, in San Francisco, along with Cameron Faller. Both men are also local vocations, from Marin County. Please pray for all three of these good men, and for all those who are being ordained in this season of priestly ordinations. Cultural conditions notwithstanding, the number and quality of priestly and consecrated vocations continues to rise in our country; in Africa and other poorer nations ordinations have increased with explosive power. Never doubt that God the Father does not fail us in calling more than enough men and women to consecrated life; the number of those answering that call is on the rise again in our fair country.