Today I am 28 years ordained, and Pope Benedict is 68 years ordained. A singular blessing of my priesthood is to have been ordained the same day as Joseph Ratzinger, and on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. Both Peter and Paul, the acknowledged pillars of the Church, died in prophetic witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. A priest is ordained for three tasks: to serve the world by confecting Sacraments as “priest,” delivering the Word of God as “prophet,” and governing the Church as “king.” We priests lament, and our parishioners complain, about how much time priests spend on “governing,” that is, administrative work. American priests and bishops have become more like business managers than men of prayer or preachers of the Word. It’s easier to spend our time on building projects and staff management than offering daily Mass, praying a holy hour, or saying a rosary. It’s safer to sit on committee meetings and attend social events than to speak on unpopular issues.

One of those issues has flooded San Francisco this week, and indeed this entire month, and indeed this entire country. We call it “Gay Pride.” Many Catholics celebrate “Pride,” having forgotten perhaps that pride is one of the seven deadly sins. How many of my parishioners will attend the Gay Pride Parade this weekend, and bring their children, and what is my responsibility as their pastor to apply the light of the Gospel to this issue? Certainly no Catholic priest or bishop wants to speak about the "Pride Parade" this Sunday, but an excellent article appeared on Archbishop Cordileone’s Catholic San Francisco website: https://catholic-sf.org/news/should-catholics-attend-pride-events. One of our young adults tweeted this article and received a flurry of heated opinions. She inspired me to include the following in my own Sunday bulletin:
 
Should Catholics attend "Gay Pride" events? The "Pride" movement began in New York to protest discrimination against people identifying as gay and lesbian. The "Pride" movement, however, has become mostly a promotion of behaviors that are contrary to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Some Catholics attend "Pride" events to support people who perhaps are still discriminated against. But we can work for justice without compromising the laws of God. Catholics should not participate in events that oppose the natural law or Christ's Gospel. The Gay Pride March is especially confusing to children. For a balanced and clear article in our Catholic newspaper on whether Catholics should attend Gay Pride events, please read this article: https://catholic-sf.org/news/should-catholics-attend-pride-events. 

Almost certainly some of my parishioners, and many non-parishioners, will express anger over this paragraph. Others will laud what they say is a prophetic witness. Regardless of praise or blame, however, a priest must provide specific and relevant Gospel truths for people’s daily lives. He must teach what the Church teaches, as is so splendidly done in the article I cited in Catholic San Francisco. One must ask why it took a young lay woman’s prophetic witness to motivate her priest to speak directly on a clear and present danger to his parishioners’ well-being. Thank you, dear laity, for your prophetic witness, and may you continue to inspire us priests and bishops to exercise our prophetic role.

Corpus Christi

After Pentecost and Trinity Sunday, the Church celebrates two “feasts of the Lord,” which extend the glory of the Paschal Season into the year. These feasts Corpus Christi, which we celebrate today, and the Sacred Heart on Friday. Thus we conclude the great Paschal Season that we began on Ash Wednesday almost four months ago. We began by fasting on Ash Wednesday and we conclude by eating the Body and Blood of the Christ today. We enter now the “Sundays after Pentecost,” which will take us through the summer and autumn to the First Sunday of Advent this year on December 1st. We make our way to heaven within the mystery of Pentecost, in the age of the Holy Spirit, between the first and second comings of the Messiah. But it is the mystery of the Holy Eucharist, the Corpus Domini, that sustains us during our pilgrimage to eternity. The Holy Eucharist is the Most Blessed and Beautiful of all the Christian Mysteries. Adoration (a Latin word ad orem meaning “into the mouth,” the mouth of God!) brings us into God’s very being.

SS. John Fisher and Thomas More

Yesterday was also celebrated the Feast of SS John Fisher and Thomas More, martyred in 1535 by King Henry VIII. Of all England’s bishops, John Fisher was the only one to remain faithful to the Church in the face of the King’s apostacy. Thomas More, Henry’s own Lord Chancellor and the most brilliant mind in the realm, also refused the King’s declaration against the Church, saying famously at his trial: “I am the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” These men died rather than compromise the truth, whom they knew as a person, Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. They echoed the serene faith that martyrs have made from the first centuries of Christianity. In the year 303 the Roman Emperor Diocletian made attending Mass a capital crime, just as Henry VIII did in England. One Sunday morning Roman soldiers arrived at the home of Emeritus, a Christian who had invited a priest into his home to offer the Holy Eucharist. The soldiers arrested 49 Christians and brought them before the local magistrate. “What did you not understand about the law?” he asked them. Emeritus famously replied to the judge: Sine Dominico Non Possumus. We can’t live without the Holy Eucharist. Life would be without purpose, without beauty, without goodness. We would have no reason to get up in the morning, to go to work, to be kind to our wives and children, to be honest in our business dealings. We would rather die. And they did die. The government put all 49 Christians to death in February of the year 304.

SB 360

​Religious persecution is on the rise in our own time. Will there come a time when Mass will be illegal in our country as it was in 4th century Rome and 16th century England? Last week a large color ad in the SF Chronicle advertised a legal firm for clergy abuse cases. Certainly, abusive priests must be brought to justice, along with all other criminal public servants. But what graphics did the ad use to describe abusive priests? It portrayed a priest’s hands breaking the Holy Eucharist over a silver chalice. Why did they choose an image of the Holy Eucharist to portray a horrible crime? Accuse the priest, accuse the hierarchy, but don’t accuse the Blessed Sacrament! A bill is rapidly making its way through the CA legislature, SB 360, which will put a priest in jail if he refuses to tell what he has heard in sacramental confession. The absolute confidentiality of confessional prepares the soul to receive the Holy Eucharist. I will read a letter from our Archbishop on this in a minute. But realize that an attack on the Sacrament of Confession is an attack on the Sacrament of the Eucharist. The time will come when all Catholics will have to choose between peace with Christ or peace with this world. We will have to make the choice the bishops of England had to make in 1530, and the choice Christians had to make in 4th Century Rome.
 
Is Christ’s Body and Blood worth fighting for? Yes it is. Without the Eucharist we starve. The social order will collapse without this spiritual sustenance. So let us begin by coming back to Mass and adoration, because most of us have already lost faith in the Eucharist: only 20% of Catholics in San Francisco attend Mass anymore. A Catholic population that has lost its hunger for the Bread of Life will lose the Bread of Life. Its priests and its churches and its schools and hospitals will be taken away from them, and their culture will fail. Because: sine Domenico non possumus. We cannot live without the Lord’s Supper.

Father’s Day

Today we celebrate two mysteries: that of fatherhood, and that of the Holy Trinity. First, Happy and blessed Father’s Day to all of us, not just to our fathers and grandfathers, but to all of us who have provided for, protected, and indeed procreated by their participation in God the Father’s gift of Himself.
We pray for all our fathers this entire month of June, the month also of the Sacred Heart, by placing their names between two lit candles in our sanctuary. I also invite you to place your father’s picture on the photo stand in front of the altar of St. Joseph, father of the universal Church. It’s not easy being a father these days, but we men have only to turn daily to God the Father to know how we can provide, protect, and procreate those entrusted to us by Him.

Trinity Sunday

Our second mystery is the greatest mystery of all, and the source of all fatherhood in heaven and on earth, the mystery of the Holy Trinity. From the catechism #234: “the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them all.” The mystery of the Triune God takes us down into the core of all being, into the essence of God’s inner dynamism. God is one, but within this fundamental unity, God is three, a community of persons. He is one, but never alone, an eternal exchange of love between Persons. Without reference to the communal God, human community will always fail.
 
There is only one God, who is above all things and through all things and in all things. St. Athanasius wrote in the 3rd century: “God is above all things as Father; he is through all things as the Word (Jesus); and he is in all things in the Holy Spirit.” Our best profession of the Holy Trinity is to make the sign of the cross well: intentionally, thoughtfully, prayerfully, joyfully. It is our testimony that Love—the eternal exchange of love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is at the core of all reality. In the rite of exorcism, for example, the priest continually makes the Sign of the Cross both over himself and over the penitent. When the diabolical approaches to separate you from God and those whom you love, to disfigure your relationships, it will see the mark of the Three-in-One and fall back. So make the sign of the cross often over yourselves and your children.

God’s Sacred Communion

The human person—you and I—are essentially wired for relationship, to live in community with others. We need to be close to at least some other persons, because the fundamental template of the universe is a relationship between three persons, Father Son and Holy Spirit. In a godly relationship of love, no one owns anything exclusively but shares even his own person with the beloved. He knows the joy of trusting the one who loves him or her. The Father trusts everything he is and has to the Son, who trusts his father in the Holy Spirit, as he said with his last breath on the cross: “Father, into your hands I entrust my spirit.” So Our Lord says in the Gospel today from the farewell discourses in John 16: “Everything that the father has is mine…” The Spirit too, has no identity apart from the Father and the Son, as Our Lord says in the same passage: “The spirit of truth will not speak on his own, but will speak what he hears.”
 
God is one, but God is never isolated: he is essentially a communion of persons. And each of us is one, an “individual,” but we never need be isolated, because God invites us into communion within Himself, especially when we receive “Holy Communion.” We come together each Sunday to become one Body by receiving the Body of Christ. A city like San Francisco can easily isolate people, but we always have a home here in the Church. This morning I was doing my morning prayers in Golden Gate Park and a homeless woman walked by pushing her cart. She was completely alone, and she was talking to herself. She wasn’t talking to another person, but only to herself. She was disturbing my prayers, in fact, but I should have just jumped up to greet her in the Lord. Alas, a missed opportunity to break through someone’s isolation. But be very sure that God never talks just to “himself;” he communicates always to another person. We do not have to be self-absorbed or isolated, because the Holy Trinity always invites us into His Communion. Let us pray for all the lonely people, and let us be a Sacrament to them of God’s sacred communion.

Last week the London Guardian reported that Pope Francis has decided to change the translation of the Lord’s Prayer from “lead us not into temptation” to “do not let us fall into temptation" (at least in the Italian translation). 
 
The Pope has authority to change, not the Lord’s Prayer itself, but the translations and theological interpretations of the Lord’s Prayer. However, the Holy See should do this carefully, clearly, and systematically, and unfortunately this was not done. For example, if you google “changes to Lord’s Prayer” you will find stories from CBS, NPR, The Economist, The Irish Times, the Huffington Post, Fox, and CNN, and every other unofficial and theologically-uninformed source, but nothing from the Holy See! The Vatican website has nothing about the Pope's change in how we pray the Lord’s Prayer, the “perfect prayer,” the most fundamental expression of the Christian faith. 
 
Having heard all about "changing the Lord's Prayer" on NPR or CNN but not from the Holy See, parish priests and bishops are scrambling to cobble some explanation for their people. In their Sunday homilies, thousands of priests will attempt to explain “what the Pope means," and most of us will not do a good job. But if the Holy See will not offer clarity, the lesser shepherds will have to do their best. Here is my attempt.
 
The closest text we have to Christ’s words (the Greek) clearly say “lead us not into temptation” or trial or test. Anyone who has suffered a test of faith through serious illness or death or betrayal or any of life’s sufferings will pray this prayer fervently. “Lord, you know best, but please: if there is any way I could avoid this cup let it pass from me.” Lead me not through this trial is of course Christ's own prayer the night before His crucifixion. Yes, the Pope’s native Spanish translation is a little inaccurate (No nos dejes en tentacion—"do not let us fall into temptation"), but the Greek is clear, and the theology is clear: we should pray, like Our Lord, to be spared great trials, but if it pleases God in His ineffable providence to lead us through “the shadow of the valley of death,” we should do our best to submit to his perfect will with joy.
 
The Church is suffering great confusion at this time, but even this confusion is a "temptation" that God permits for a greater good. In one of Isaiah's great Messianic prophecies, God was "pleased to crush his servant" (Isaiah 53:10, but please read the whole passage). Let us believe that He "leads" us through dark valleys only for our greater good. It is the stuff of which great saints are made. God “led” Mother Teresa through a dark night for fifty years, in which she felt that God had abandoned her, hated her, and condemned her to hell. “I am the most hated one,” she wrote in her diary. She had lost all sense of faith, and yet only this great “temptation” could open her heart to receive the infinite God. People wonder how Mother Teresa could love the poorest of the poor so deeply as to become one of them. The fifty-year long trial of faith through which God led her is the answer. By “leading us” through temptations, and that means going ahead of the one being led, "leading us by the hand," God leads us to heaven. 
 
Let us hope, in a time of anguish and confusion for the Church, a great trial in which many Catholics feel abandoned by their spiritual fathers, God will purify our faith in Him alone.

I want to report on a curious phenomenon in the life of Catholic priests. We are issued a prayerbook upon ordination called “the breviary,” which we promise to pray faithfully every day. We carry this book, usually in a leather cover, with us everywhere, and many priests refer to it affectionately as "my wife." It is called the “breviary” because it is a “briefer” form of the monastic liturgical office. Monks pray from it eight times a day for a total of about three hours, while we parish priests commit to five times a day totaling about an hour. The first of these “liturgy of the hours” (the prayers punctuate our day, sanctifying the “hours”) is called lauds, or “praises.” We begin the day praising God. Lauds consists of three psalms, a scripture reading, the “Benedictus” from Luke 1, and the Pater Noster, among other scriptures. I’ve been praying these same prayers every morning for 30 years, and you would think they would bore me by now. But—and here’s the curious phenomenon—they grow more fresh and thrilling year by year. Why am I not weary of the same old words? 
 
St. Augustine described Scripture as a limitless well. We peer into this well, we become dizzy gazing into the depths, and we never tire of discovering new beauty in these life-giving waters. Each morning the Scriptures in my breviary restore me to life. As I get older, a good night's sleep comes less easily.  After a fitful night, who can face the day’s troubles? But every morning, no matter how difficult the night has been, the breviary recovers the joy of a new day. Each morning, in the words of the prophet Jeremiah, "His mercies are renewed," and each morning our praises are renewed with them.
 
I can hardly believe my good fortune: I’ve been issued a device that restores my vitality every morning. Lauds only takes about ten minutes, and I usually pray it with the other priests in the church at 7am, but I can pray it anywhere, every day. Wherever in the world I am, simply taking that ten-minute soak in the Word of God restores the joy of my youth. We will run, and not grow weary, as the Prophet says in Isaiah 40:31. The Lord will renew their strength every morning, and they will soar like eagles. This is my personal experience of praying the breviary, and I find it amazing.

​A dear friend of mine, a marriage and family therapist who is married with seven children and many grandchildren, recently articulated the profound injustice of divorce. The decline of marriage and family, it seems to me, should be the Church's number one social concern, both for her own good and the good of all humanity. Here is my friend's clear thinking on why "God hates divorce" (Malachi 2:16):

"The breakdown in marital morality is also a major contributor to sexual and physical abuse of children.  Children living in a home with a parent and a non-parent partner are eight times more likely to suffer abuse. The emotional damage and inadequate supervision of children in broken homes also renders them vulnerable to predators outside the home.
 
"All our efforts to combat poverty, to address and prevent abuse, are as nothing in the face of this society-wide pestilence raging in our parishes and families.
 
"The Church needs a profound examination of conscience, repentance and amendment of life on how our failure to keep Christ’s commandments is wounding and killing children. The serious obligation to keep one’s marital vows and the sinfulness of breaking them is certainly the timeless teaching of the Church, spoken by the mouth of Christ himself."