​To smile or not to smile. That is the question. In our parish refectory portraits of the parish’s ten pastors over our 125-year history gaze sternly from the north wall. Well, the first five pastors gaze sternly. In 1894, San Francisco’s first native vocation became the first pastor of Star of the Sea. In his rough woolen coat, buttoned up to his wide Roman collar, Fr. John P. Coyle looks past the camera as if considering how to best raise a parish from the sand dunes and horse farms of what was then called “The Extended Area.” His successor, Fr. Philip J. O’Ryan, a son Ireland, looks directly at the viewer with focused determination. Resolved to rebuild a community on a new continent, Fr. O’Ryan shepherded the growing parish through the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, producing one of San Francisco’s most dynamic Catholic communities.
 
And so the portraits march through the new century, all unsmiling men of determination, until we get to Msgr. Charlie Durkin, who in 1995 became pastor of what had become a declining parish. He sports a somewhat imbalanced smile, seemingly unsure of how to project gaiety into the Catholic priesthood. In fact, Msgr. Durkin was removed from his pastorate on charges of homosexual activity with minors. From Father Charlie on, all of the pastors make heroic efforts to smile into the camera, including my own picture. For this wall of history, I choose a snapshot that sports my most winning smile. After all, we want to win souls for Christ, and we do so with honey better than vinegar.
 
This morning I was working my way through the Book of Ecclesiastes. “Vanity of Vanities,” the sage begins. “All is Vanity.” In Chapter 8 he denounces levity. “Better the day of death than the day of birth,” he writes. “Better sadness than laughter, a severe face confers some benefit…. For laughter makes a fool of the wise man and merriment corrupts the heart.”
 
Our Jewish fathers considered it bad form to smile. Chuckling and chortling, for a good Hebrew, were to be used sparingly. And yet Nehemiah told the Israelites (in Chapter 8 of his book) not to weep or give into sadness, for “rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength.” The distinction is between a smile artificially projected to the outside and a smile naturally emanating from within. A contractor friend told me yesterday how difficult it was to renovate the wealthiest homes in San Francisco. “The owners are such miserable people,” he said. An LG Smile (“Life is Good,” especially when you can afford LG Home Theatre systems for your house) is unsure of itself, but a smile radiating from “the simple joy of knowing Jesus" (Mother Teresa's words) cannot fail. This life is a “Vale of Tears,” but how is it that the saints radiate joy in the depths of this Dark Valley? Mother Teresa’s canonization portrait shows a radiant smile, even though she was an old woman in the slums of Calcutta. “Let us always meet each other with a smile,” she wrote, “for a smile is the beginning of love.” Mother Teresa was not thinking of the plastic smile we get from greeters at Walmart (God bless them!).
 
“Some time ago,” she recalls, “a big group of professors from the United States came to our house in Calcutta. Before leaving, they said to me, ‘Tell us something that will help us to become holy.’ And I said to them, “Smile at each other’ (because we have no time even to look at each other). And one of them asked me, ‘Are you married, Mother Teresa?’ I said, ‘Yes, and I find it sometimes very difficult to smile at Jesus for He can be very demanding.’”
 
Should we smile for our portraits, or present a rather more sober aspect? I return to the book of Ecclesiastes. “For everything there is a season. There is a time for tears, and a time for laughter.” Wisdom consists in knowing when and how to smile. I would say, especially as the social order careens into steep decline, that we should sober up a bit. We should laugh a little less and apply ourselves a little more to the great needs of our moment: to rebuild and to restore right worship, true wisdom, and a sober assessment of first principles and final ends. This will allow true joy to radiate from us.

 
5000 Men
Most of us have had our breakfast, and most of us are thinking about lunch already (as you sit through my morning sermon). Food consumes a good deal of our thoughts. Today the Gospel describes one of Our Lord’s more popular miracles, the feeding of 5000 men, not counting women and children. If these men brought their wives and children (and Jewish families at that time were large), then the crowd would be well over 30,000. All of these people were fed with the one dinner surrendered by one boy, a dinner of five “barley loaves” (the size of large dinner rolls) and two fish. Not until October 13, 1917, would more people witness a miracle together, when 70,000 saw the miracle of the sun at Fatima, Portugal. The multiplication of loaves is the most “popular” miracle of the bible—popular in the sense that the most people saw it, and also popular in the sense that it enjoys wide appeal, because we are all foodies at heart.
 
Doubt
But this most spectacular of miracles begins with a question, and a doubt. In fact, the question is asked three times in today’s scriptures, beginning with the first reading, from Second Kings. “A man from Baal-Shalishah brings Elisha, the man of God, 20 barley loaves. “How can I set this before a hundred people?” he asks. Elisha insists: do it. “And when they had eaten, there was some left over.” 600 years later Philip the Apostle asks Jesus the same question: “there is a boy here with five barley loaves, but what good are these for so many?” Jesus replies: “have the people recline on the grass.” 30,000 men, women and children eat their fill, with 12 baskets left over. Our take away is that we can, and we must, trust God, because He provides.
 
But the miracles did not stop with Christ’s resurrection and ascension. Among many saints, Fr. John Bosco, an Italian diocesan priest who founded the Salesian Order in 1859 to provide schools for the street children of Italy’s industrial cities, also witnessed God’s providence. One day he began handing out bagels for 300 boys from a basket that had a few dozen. With great wonder they saw him distribute to all the present, with bagels left over. Another time he began distributing some roasted chestnuts to 650 young people. The supply never ended, again with some left over. In 1848 the sacristan forgot to put hosts on the altar for a Mass with hundreds of young people. Don Bosco raised his eyes to heaven, prayed and then began distributing Holy Communion. Without breaking the Hosts, Don Bosco was able to give Communion to all the boys. Closer to home, Raymond Arroyo told the story of Mother Angelica from this pulpit a few years ago. She ordered a satellite that cost $250K because she needed it but didn’t have the money. It arrived, and she couldn’t pay, so she went into the chapel and said to Jesus “Your transmitter is here.” A phone call came in with that precise amount just as the truck driver was getting ready to take the satellite back.
 
God Never Loses
I attended a remarkable conference last week, the Napa Institute, in which the speakers clearly defined the unprecedented loss of faith in our time, the coordinated efforts of media giants, universities, and world governments to discredit and erase Christianity. But these speakers even more clearly defined the hope within us, one of them quoting St. Josemaria Escriva: “God never loses. Not even one battle.” If it seems like we have lost the culture war, that the culture of death has overcome the gospel of life, if it seems that our children and our college students are helpless against dictatorial ideologies that destroy their families, their minds, and their very identities, do not doubt God’s providence. Jesus is Lord, and He never loses.
 
His Image and Likeness
But back to the question and the doubt: “where can we find enough food?” Why did the Lord ask St. Philip that question? “He said this,” St. John tells us, “to test him, because he himself knew what he was going to do.” These men needed to know that they cannot possibly, ever, feed the hungry without God’s help. Every Sunday half a dozen people in our parish spend a few hours and a few hundred dollars preparing sandwiches, burritos, and fruit for the street people. They go into the tenderloin to feed the lower classes who have been given opioids and abortion, gender ideology and racial ideologies, in place of God’s truth and God’s love. Rosa and Saori and Kevin and Claudia and Eva give them sandwiches, coats, blankets, and a loving smile, but they would never dare do this before spending an hour or two before the Blessed Sacrament, and attending the Holy Mass. The people that serve the poor best, like St. Francis and Mother Teresa, are the people that pray the most. God never loses, but we will lose unless we depend entirely on Him. With God, all things are possible, and all things are bright and beautiful, even the filthy street encampments in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. People are always beautiful, because they are God’s image and likeness. Let us pray.

​A blessed Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Tradition holds that on this day in 1251 Our Lady appeared to St. Simon Stock, a Carmelite priest, giving him the brown scapular. In my morning prayers I recalled to how many Carmelites I am indebted: my own mother, who is a Third Order Carmelite, to Carmelite monasteries in San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, and Lincoln, Nebraska. They pray for us, especially the priests of the Church, day and night.
 
On my thirtieth anniversary, I offered a Sung Latin Mass in the Carmelite monastery here in San Francisco, where I offered my first Mass 30 years ago. Today, on the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Pope Francis issued regulations severely restricting the celebration of this form of the Mass. It is a pity.
 
It is a fact that the parishes that offer this form of the Mass, especially in Europe and North America, are flourishing. There are many reasons why my parish has come through a year of severe lockdowns with greater Mass attendance and more weekly income than before, and that we are one of the few parishes in the Archdiocese, if not the only one, that has seen a 30% increase in attendance and offertory. But one of the principal factors is undoubtedly that we are the only parish in the City that offers the Latin Mass every day, and a sung Mass on Sundays. If Rome wants the Church to grow, our prelates need only look at parishes and institutes that are flourishing, and ask themselves, without fear, why they are growing. 

My mother has been a Third Order Carmelite for 50 years, and I’ve worn the Carmelite scapular for 40 years. That little bit of brown wool under my shirt, worn from the shoulders, draping my heart and back, reminds me that I am clothed in God’s grace. When my Mom and Dad baptized me at three weeks old, the Lord clothed me in righteousness. Catholics use simple things—“sacramentals”—to keep us straight on the “royal road” to heaven. (In California El Camino Real, now Route 101, running the length of the State, was named not only for the King of Spain but principally to remind us that we are pilgrims “on the way” to the King of Heaven.) Easily distracted, we need reminders throughout the day, like the tiny amber reflectors embedded in our highways, to keep us from veering off the road. A simple thing—a bit of brown wool, a piece of silver medal, a crucifix above our beds, a picture of Mary over the kitchen sink—helps refocus us on our final goal and defining purpose in life.  
 
My mother is a Third order Carmelite, and I offered my First Mass at Cristo Rey Carmelite Monastery in San Francisco on July 1st, 1991. Seven years ago I was assigned to a parish just a few blocks from this monastery, and a week ago I offered my 30th Anniversary Mass in their chapel. A few of the sisters from my first Mass are still in the community, along with a lot of younger Carmelites.
 
There are probably Carmelite sisters not far from you, although you don’t know it. They live quiet and unknown lives, but you would be surprised how many Carmelite monasteries have been established in every corner of the world. The nuns at Cristo Rey have been quietly praying for us on Parker Avenue since the 1920s, when they escaped the persecutions in Mexico. In the early 90s they founded a daughter house in Las Vegas, which later moved to the rolling farmlands of Nebraska (a quieter place). Today that monastery is brimming with young sisters and has established half a dozen daughter houses throughout the country. Next year I will preach the annual novena to the Carmelites in Nebraska, culminating in their renewal of vows on July 16, 2022, the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
 
To prepare, I’ve decided to study the seventeen or so approved apparitions of our Lady throughout history, hoping to understand the common threads in her messages. God asks his Mother to speak to us from heaven, and I want to be able to articulate what God is telling us through her. My yearlong study will help me better develop my own parish as a shrine of Our Lady, featuring 14 side altars, each to a different Marian apparitions. For each of these altars, I will prepare a pamphlet with the history of the apparition and the essential message she delivered to the world at that time. I’m convinced that the messages at Fatima (both from Our Lady in 1917 and from the Angel of Portugal in 1916) summarize her messages throughout history, applying them in a specific way for our own time. “Many souls fall into hell because they have no one to pray for them,” she said, addressing the widespread decline in religious practice of the last hundred years. The youngest of the three children, Jacinta, was dying in a Lisbon hospital when Our Lady told her that “war is a punishment for sin.”  "Fashions will come that will offend Our Lord very much; priests must be very pure and concentrate on saving souls; more souls go to hell through sins of impurity than any other sin.” We understand these words better than in 1917, when Europe was still essentially Christian, and the “sexual revolution” had not yet been launched. But Marxism and Gnosticism were already gaining ground in 1917, the third year of World War I and the first year of the Soviet tyranny. “Russia will spread her errors throughout the world,” she told the children, “the good will be martyred, various nations will be annihilated, but in the end, My Immaculate Heart will triumph.” We are now witnessing the long-term consequences of global atheism, spread by the wealthiest and most powerful nations. 
 
God is not silent. He speaks through His Church, but that Church, like our social order, is coming apart at the seams. It will never be completely undone, but while confusion reigns at the highest levels of the Church, I am turning to the words God has spoken to us through Our Lady. She speaks in the simplest terms, but with marvelous depth, like the rosary itself, as John Paul described his favorite prayer: “marvelous in its simplicity and in its depth.” A few beads, a bit of brown wool. The Word of God is not complicated. Even the simplest souls can understand it.

What the Almighty cannot do
A blessed and Happy Fourth of July to you all. Patriotism is a virtue, a joyous act of gratitude to God for the gift of our homeland. In the Gospel, our blessed Lord returns to his own homeland, Nazareth, but is “amazed at their lack of faith.” Because of their refusal to believe, he “was not able” to perform any mighty deeds among his own people. But: is there anything God can not do? Isn’t he all-powerful? In an absolute sense, God could force the people to believe in Him, but the Gospel shows us that He will not force us to love Him. He waits for us to choose Him freely.
 
Rebels
Ezekiel calls us all “rebels,” obstinate of heart, to whom He will send his prophet. Since that Original Sin, all of us have perversely refused God at one time or another. Those who signed the Declaration of Independence were called “rebels” by King George in 1776, but truly we are all rebels before God. Fortunately for us, however, God loves “rebels” enough to send us a prophet, an emissary to speak to us, to reason with us.
 
I would like to quote from Ann Burleigh’s commentary in the little monthly devotional Magnificat. “In God’s plan of history,” she writes, “that mysterious drama that unites God’s providential care with our freedom—there are particular moments that reveal with glittering clarity that God is in charge. For Americans, Independence Day marks the anniversary of such a moment."
 
“On July 4, 1776, members of the Continental Congress approved Jefferson’s magnificent Declaration of Independence, proclaiming ‘these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ For the first time a nation sprang forth, not simply from the bond of people living together in a place for years, but rather from an idea, the principle of the truth of the human person as sacred and unrepeatable. “The Declaration acknowledged our origin as beings made by God, with rights God himself gave us… Our liberty arises not from us, but from the one who made us."
 
“Independence Day honors not our own artificial schemes of liberty and equality but the founding principle of natural law that alone protects who we are: each one of us chosen, loved, and created as free beings by God our Father. No other authority will do: nothing other than divine truth provides proper grounding for ordered liberty. On God’s authority, then, the American founders in 1776, ‘with a firm reliance on the Protection of divine  providence,’ ventured forth in the great experiment, mutually pledging ‘to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.’”
 
Human Freedom
In other words, our freedom comes from God: no lesser authority is capable of respecting the human person or rightly ordering a society of free persons. If we forget or deny that it is God, not politics or technology or any human agency, that grants human freedom, we will revert to slavery, to “might makes right,” which is exactly what we sought to escape in 1776. The British Empire declared that our freedom was a gift of the king, and that the might of the Empire’s military would enforce the king’s will. The colonists declared, on this day in 1776, that they would follow a higher power than the king or the government or even the military. If we deny God’s authority, we place ourselves back under the authority of the government and the military.
 
All people of good will, but especially Christians, and especially the priests and bishops of the Church, must insist on this prophetic truth: God exists, and he sends prophets to reveal to men the ways of true freedom.
​
Let me read the preamble to the Declaration that we celebrate today: “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them….” Our founders declared that equality and human rights are granted by “nature’s God,” not the king.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Our rights are endowments, gifts, from God. Only He can give and sustain life, freedom, and human happiness. To break these natural laws—for example, to legalize the killing of the unborn or the elderly, or to outlaw religious practices—is to revert back to “might makes right.” Only God, however, is capable of “making” what is right. That was what our founders said to King George. It is what they say to us, still, today.