One Commandment
[Note the St. Francis icon] A lawyer asks a tricky question: Of the ten commandments of Moses, and of the 613 lesser commandments, which is the one law I cannot break if I want to get to heaven? “This is the One,” Our Lord replies: “Love God.” Love God with all your heart (emotions and affections), with all your soul (prayers and sacrifices), and with all your mind (intellect and will). Love God with everything you’ve got. But, Jesus continues, there is a Second Commandment: love your neighbor as yourself. “Neighbor” comes from the German word “Nahe” or “near:” “he who is near you”. Could be on a bus, or at work, or at your kitchen table. You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your “neighbors”—they just show up, and often enough, at rather inconvenient times.
 
Jesus insists on this second commandment, because it’s the only way by which we know we are loving God in real time, beyond just thinking about it. God is a hidden God, a God of silence. If I don’t love him, he doesn’t throw a fit. If I don’t render him just praise every Sunday at Mass, he doesn’t cut me off. But if I don’t call my mother on Sunday, she will scold me. If I irritate my roommate, he will let me know about it. If I don’t pay my electric bill, someone will cut off my power. Neighbors keep us accountable, because how I love my neighbor is how I love God. Show patience to that anoying woman at work or that nasty man at Safeway, Jesus says, and you show kindness to me. Love your wife when she’s screaming at you, and you love God.

One Law; Three People to Love
So we have two commandments, two people to whom we must show loving kindness: God, and the guy next door. But there’s a third person, and Jesus names that person too: yourself. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” How much do I love myself? A person who treats others badly might say that he is loving others as he loves himself—he just doesn’t love himself very much. God commands me to love every person, including that person who lives inside my own skin. So, we have three to love: God, neighbor, and self, in that order. Some people, especially those who have had rough childhoods, may need to learn to love themselves before they can love others, but it is certain that love of God comes before everything and everyone. And loving God is essentially spending time with Him in prayer. Time is love, even for human relationships. I don’t love God if I don’t come to Him every Sunday in Holy Mass, or spend an hour in adoration. Hanging a rosary from my rear view mirror is not love; taking the time to pray that rosary is love.
 
The Holy Rosary
Yesterday about a thousand people attended Mass at the cathedral to honor Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, whose feast we celebrate tomorrow. They walked with the archbishop, praying the rosary as he carried the Holy Eucharist through the streets. At Civic Center he led a third rosary and then blessed San Francisco with the Blessed Sacrament. Homeless people walking by, tourists strolling down Market Street, billionaires driving by in their Lamborghinis—all of them were blessed yesterday. Many of you took the time to be there. But most of us didn’t. I want to challenge you to spend real time in prayer when the Church calls you to do so. That begins with Sunday Mass but includes also other forms of public, communal prayer. Let’s make even greater efforts to pull together as Catholics in public prayer.
 
We celebrate Our Lady of the Rosary on October 7 because, on that day in 1571, Europe was saved from a Muslim invasion in the gulf of Lepanto. The undefeated Ottoman navy outmanned the Christian forces by almost 2 to 1, and as the ships engaged in the greatest naval battle in history a strong east wind was driving the invader’s ships into the Christian fleet. St. Pius V asked every man, woman and child in Europe to pray the rosary that day for protection. The soldiers themselves held a sword in one hand and a rosary in the other. Just after 12 noon the wind changed, and Our Lady obtained victory for our forefathers. Do you want to be free, and do you want our country to be free? It’s not as simple as it was in 1571. The invader today comes not through ships but through our children’s smartphones and school curricula.  We fight a moral battle, and it is the rosary, not gunpowder, that will defend us. Pray the family rosary, and Our Lady will keep you safe. In Spanish they say sin ella nada; con ella todo. “Without her nothing; with her everything.”

Faith and Reason

Almost every high school student, and every college student, are taught that faith and science are incompatible. Religion, they are told, is nothing more than primitive superstition. No intelligent and sophisticated person takes the bible seriously. What about you? Do you believe that every word of the bible is inspired by God and without error? Have you studied the bible so as to understand what “inspired” and “inerrant” mean? “Inerrant” means that the Bible reveals truths deeper and more essential than historical or scientific facts. Some of those deeper questions include, for example, whether there is a God, an intelligent order to the universe. Is human life greater than physical existence? Are we nothing more than meat machines, or do we have immortal souls? Most high school and college students know the atomic table and basic calculus but cannot fathom these fundamental questions of human existence.
 
How and Why

​Our first reading is from the book of wisdom: “The deliberations of mortals are timid, and the earthen shelter weighs down the mind.” Our “earthen shelters”—our bodies—clamor for food and entertainment, which distract our minds from penetrating the deeper mysteries of life. We rarely get below a surface understanding of life, which, in any case, a market economy and an atheist culture reduce to animal compulsions: food, sex, and violence. “Scarce do we guess the things on earth, and what is within our grasp we find with difficulty.” Mathematics, astronomy, physics, and all the natural sciences, which are relatively simple, measurable, sensible—but even these we must toil at. “But when things are in heaven,” the Holy Scripture continues, “who can search them out … except you had given wisdom?” The deepest intellectual knowledge, an integrated understanding of all reality—what we call wisdom—comes only with God’s help. The empirical sciences like math and physics can explain how things work, but only God can reveal why we are here in the first place. The how we are here is much less vital to us than the why we are here. Only God open our minds to first principles and final ends.
 
Pope Francis in his first encyclical, Lumen fidei, says faith is an act of the intellect superior to that of unaided human reason, because it is illuminated not merely by empirical observation, but by love. Mother Teresa, for example, aided by her faith in the Love of God, understood reality on a grander scale than those who analyze things only in terms of politics and economics. She could see the broader connections, the “mega-stories,” the deepest relationships between things and peoples. Without faith, our intellects are hamstrung. If you think our current leaders seem less intelligent than the founders of our nation, you are probably right. 250 years after Thomas Jefferson wrote that a free democracy orders itself according to the laws of nature and of nature’s God, we are trying to order our lives together without reference to God. Without the higher science of faith, we cannot understand the fundamental laws of nature and the social order. Social disorder, chaotic politics, and public violence will increase as we reject divine Wisdom.  
 
God Alone

​We know how we exist (at least on a physical, molecular level), but how is not enough for the human soul. “Deaths by despair” (drug overdose, alcohol poisoning, suicide, overeating, and clinical depression) have increased dramatically in the last 20 years, especially among millennials. Time magazine reported in June that drug-related deaths among 18-34 year olds has risen 108% between 2007 and 2017 (36000 millennials died of despair in 2017). There does exist a fundamental reason which orders all existence, an ultimate purpose toward which everything moves, Jesus says, and I am He. We have all come from God, and we are returning to God. Your focus on God must be absolute if you are to make it through this life to heaven. And so “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” Should my own mother mean more to me than God, I must “hate” her, that is, crucify my attachment to her. It is not my mother I hate, but my own disordered attachment to her that I hate. God alone must be my all in all. Nothing and nobody can take His place.
 
Today, September 8, is also the feast of the Birth of Mary, nine months after December 8, the Immaculate Conception. Her Immaculate Heart understood what the human mind, crippled by original Sin, can never understand. Her wisdom is God’s wisdom; her love is his love. Let our minds be single-hearted like hers, the Immaculate Heart, letting nothing and no one come between us and God.

Love God, love neighbor

Our Lord tells the parable of the Good Samaritan in response to a lawyer’s question: “what must I do to have eternal life?” Christ replies with a question: what does God command? The lawyer answers “Love God. Love your neighbor.” Our Lord nods in approval. Do this, and you will live. But as lawyers are wont to do, he has another question: “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus answers with the parable of the Good Samaritan, which dramatically shows who is my neighbor, and how to love him. Answer: Everyone is my neighbor, and I love him by meeting his basic needs with my time and money. As Mother Teresa said, “you must touch the poor; you must give until it hurts” (until you feel it). The lawyer got it right: love God and love neighbor. But it is in the doing that we often fail. Twice Our Lord tells the lawyer to “do”: “do this and you will live;” “go and do likewise.”
 
Loving God first, and then our neighbor for the love of God, is more than just a feeling. Is anyone not moved to compassion by images of a wounded and dying person? The news media, and the entertainment industry (which are hardly distinguishable these days), monetize our compassion. We want to know if people are suffering in Syria, or in Eritrea, or in Odessa, Texas. We want to see the suffering and feel the compassion, because compassion is a naturally good feeling. But do we do anything about it? “Which of the three was neighbor to him?” Jesus asks the Pharisee, who replies, “the one who showed him mercy”—the one who gets dirty, bloody, and sweaty to help a poor man who is dirty, bloody, and sweaty. St. Augustine says that the Samaritan represents Our Lord, and the dying traveler represents Adam. God felt compassion, as we all do, but further, he acted on that compassion. He came down from heaven and bled for us on the cross.

Myron of the stinking rags and beatific smile

Some of you may remember a homeless man who would come to our parish named Myron. He lived in a tent on 12th Avenue, and Jean and Arnold Low brought him breakfast every day for 22 years. That’s compassion! On the morning of October 27th, 2016, they brought Myron’s breakfast, but no sound came from the tent. They went to Mass and came back to find the food untouched, and his stiff body inside the tent. Myron used to attend our Masses covered in filthy dreadlocks and stinking rags. He kept to the back of the church and no one wanted to be near him for very long because of his smell. But Myron beamed the most radiant smile, and people would put up with his odor just to receive that smile. His name in Greek, Myron, means sweet oil, as in “myrrh.” “That’s what my mother named me,” he would say with a smile.
 
The Hebrew word for Myron is Mashiach, which was translated Christus in Greek. The Messiah Jesus Christ is the Anointed One, bearing the fragrance of healing oil to the world. Our Myron was definitely not sweet smelling, and yet his sweet smile healed us all. 700 people came to his funeral. He was certainly an outcast, one of the city’s many street people, psychologically imbalanced, thrown away and forgotten. Among the many truths contained in the parable of the Good Samaritan is that the poor anoint us. God saves us from self-absorption through his beloved poor, if we take the time to see them, to talk with them, to “touch” them. St. Vincent de Paul said that “those who love the poor in life not be sad in this life and will have nothing to fear in death.”

The poor enrich us

​Of course, serving God in the poor is work. The Good Samaritan had to change his travel plans to help the beaten man. He got blood and sweat smeared on him, and perhaps even other bodily execrations, by hauling the helpless broken body of this man onto his own donkey. But there is a kind of blessing, a grace and a joy, that comes only by surrendering to a poor man’s need. God gives us the poor to slow us down, to smell the sweet scent of His presence along the road. We can’t help every broken person, but if we never stop to help another man, we remain the poorest of men.
 
The poor closest to us, however, are those we live and work with. There is a person in your house, or with whom you work, who annoys you. You avoid him or her, which is in many cases not unreasonable. But there are times when you should not avoid an annoying person. God wants to bless you through that person, but you need to surrender a bit of your time and attention. Smile at annoying people every time, and give them your patient attention from time to time. Mother of Jesus, help us to be patient and attentive to those who need a smile and perhaps a helping hand.

One Fixed Purpose

Every Mass is first of all an act of supreme worship, the unbloody offering of Christ’s infinite sacrifice to His Father. But every Mass also teaches at least one lesson necessary for salvation. That doctrine is often given in the opening prayer, as in today’s teaching about heaven and hell: “O God, who unite the minds of the faithful in a single purpose, grant … that, amid the uncertainties of this world, our hearts may be fixed on that place.” All the time, money, and energy the Catholic Church as spent since her founding 2000 years ago should be focused on a single purpose: saving souls. There is a heaven and there is a hell, and we must get to heaven. In Noah’s time, Jesus warned his disciples, the people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, right up to the day the flood. In other words, obsessed by food, drinks, and sex, they didn’t see the tsunami coming until it was too late. They were dumb animals, lemmings running off a cliff in one big herd. A meaningless death in this life is bad enough, but far worse is that it leads to eternal death. We will live in the next world as we have chosen to live in this world.
 
Hell

Hell does exist, and so does Satan. Scandalously, the superior of the Jesuit order, Fr. Arturo Sosa, said last week the devil is merely a symbol. The International Associations of Exorcists—whose members have daily and incontrovertible evidence to the contrary—corrected him: “The Church, founded on Sacred Scripture and on Apostolic Tradition, officially teaches that the devil is a creature and a personal being, and she cautions those who, like Father Sosa, consider him only a symbol.” Why does the Church correct priests who teach that hell and Satan do not exist? Because if I don’t tell you there is a big black hole in front of you, you will fall into it. Hell is a big black hole, as Our Lady of Fatima showed to the three shepherd children in 1917. “We saw as it were a sea of fire. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, … floating about in the conflagration … amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear.” Our Lady looked tenderly at the children and said “You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. Many souls go to hell because no one prays for them.” Jesus says, repeatedly, that the road to hell is broad and easy, and that many go that way. “Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you, will try to enter and not be strong enough.”
 
Heaven

If there is a hell, there is also a heaven, but it’s not easy to get there. “Certainly,” writes St. Jose Maria Escriva, “only those who make a serious effort can reach the goal of salvation… our passions will always pull us downwards; we will have to defend ourselves against self-defeating urges.” We must know what we are up against: the world, the flesh, and the devil. We cannot get to heaven without God’s grace, but neither can we get to heaven without “striving” for it. Someone asked St. John Vianney once, “how do I get to heaven,” and replied “straight as a canon ball.” We must fix our hearts on “that place where true gladness is found,” in the words of today’s opening prayer. We are developing a classical school here at Star of the Sea in which all learning will be oriented to one goal: getting your kids to heaven. “We educate for heaven, not for Harvard.” Our school will get your kids into Harvard, but surely if they get to Harvard and not to heaven all is lost. What will you do, Jesus asks, when you see others in the Kingdom and “you yourselves cast out”?
 
“Whom he loves He disciplines”

Like a good father, God helps us get there, giving us faith and hope and love, “infused” virtues which push us inch by inch toward heaven. But God’s graces are not always pleasant. We sometimes need strong medicine to overcome our damnable frailty. “Do not disdain the disciplines of God,” we are instructed in the second reading. Discipline is not punishment but a necessary means of human development. “At the time, all discipline seems a cause not for joy but for pain, yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness.” True enough. The US Marines say “pain is weakness leaving the body.”

So “strengthen your weak knees” the Bible tells us. “Steady your drooping hands.” When someone or something knocks you down, get up. Crawl, if you must, to the holy strength radiating from the tabernacle. Go to Mass; come to adoration; pray the rosary; read the bible. Facebook cannot deliver true gladness. Google cannot save your soul. Twitter cannot give real love. Cast yourself not on the paltry consolations this world offers, but into the arms of God’s mercy. Depending entirely on God, and holding tightly to His Holy Mother’s hand, you can sustain any blow, and grow stronger for it, strong enough, when your time comes, to enter the narrow gate, and to recline at table with God and his angels.

St. John Vianney

Today is the feast of St. John Vianney, patron saint of parish priests. He was quite simply the best parish priest the world has ever known. He almost didn’t make it through seminary, however, because he kept flunking his Latin exams. They consulted the bishop, who asked: “Is this young Vianney pious? Does he say his rosary well? Is he devout to the Blessed Virgin?” “He is a model of piety,” replied the seminary rector. “Then ordain him!” Fr. Vianney was assigned a small country parish in the village of Ars. “There is not much love of God in that parish,” the bishop told him. “You will bring it there.” He got lost on the way to his new parish and asked a boy named Antoine for directions. Antoine pointed the way, and Fr. Vianney told him “you have shown me the way to Ars. I will show you the way to heaven.” When he got to Ars he found that very few people were going to Mass, so the young priest spent much of his first year praying in the church. Soon people began coming back to Mass, even if just to see a prayerful priest. They also came to confession in such great numbers that Fr. Vianney would spend up to 16 hours a day in his cramped, unheated confessional. Eventually 20,000 people a year were coming to him from all over Europe, such that the French government had to build a special railway to the little village of Ars. The devil told him once “Ah, Vianney: If there were three such priests as you, my kingdom would be ruined.” If you do not know this priest, you would do well to read about him, and then you can say to us priests, “why can’t you be a little more like the Cure d’Ars?”

Greed is Death

St. John Vianney died in 1559 a completely spent man. He lived on two or three hours’ sleep a night, and just a few potatoes each day, giving almost all his time and focus to saving souls. The saints whom God calls to such extraordinary lives witness to simplicity. We really don’t need much to live on, and surplus food, entertainment, and luxury distracts us from the one thing necessary. A woman asked John Vianney once “how do I get to heaven,” and he replied “straight as a cannonball.” All three readings today warn against greed, which is essentially a loss of focus on the one goal of life, which is heaven. Today we have access to virtually unlimited distractions and historically unparalleled levels of comfort and security. To get to heaven, St. Paul says we must “put to death the parts of you that are earthly: immorality, impurity, and the greed that is idolatry.”  Jacopone da Todi, in 1265, described it even more acerbically: “obsessive avarice, a worm that knows no rest, erodes the mind with endless preoccupations.” It breeds discontent and dissatisfaction; it poisons our inner thoughts with envy and resentment; greed is a cancer that spreads its fibrous tentacles into every dimension of our lives. But the Bible gives a cure, which I will show you at the end of this homily.

God calls in the debt

​The first reading from the book of Qoheleth declares rather drearily “Vanity of Vanities.” Nothingness eventually claims everything on earth. All the prettiest things in life are no more than shiny bubbles that disappear within a few seconds. Don’t worship any bubble, because your bubble will burst soon enough. In Jesus’ parable, a man has worked very hard to amass so many things that he has to build bigger barns to store them: Mister Storage. Does anyone in this church not have stuff in storage somewhere? In Jesus’ parable, God “demands” the life of that man, just as he was moving his stuff into bigger barns. The literal Hebrew words are that God “calls in the debt.” Our possessions, and our very lives, are on loan from God, and he can call in the debt at any time. So how do I free myself of greed? “Put to death, then, the greed that is idolatry,” St. Paul writes. We kill greed by giving a portion of what we have been given away. When I tithe a portion of my goods, I declare my freedom from those things. The same goes for time: if I give God an hour a week in quiet prayer, or the rosary, or daily Mass, He gives me many more hours in return. I don’t know how it works, but I know it works. “Don’t worry about money,” Mother Teresa said. “God has lots of it.” So do we believe in the Prosperity Gospel? You bet, but we want to be prosperous in what matters to God. Like St. John Vianney, we want to lay hold of heaven with both hands. We will not let go of God no matter what, even if that means letting go of a lot of other things that separate us from Him. 

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.

A New Priest

We welcome Fr. Michael Rocha to the Catholic priesthood, and to our parish, for his First Mass. Our new priest grew up in Modesto and began serving Mass as a boy in St. Joseph’s parish, in which I served for 12 years. Now our former altar boy will offer the Supreme Sacrifice as a man, in persona Christi capitis. He has become a father, and will, God willing, become more fatherly as he learns to serve the Church qua sacerdos. We welcome Fr. Michael’s family as well: his mother Emilia and his twin sister Michelle, along with all the aunts and uncles and cousins. Fr. Michael’s father returned to God a few years ago, and so we remember the soul of Frank Rocha as his son offers the Holy Sacrifice at our altar. To our guest priests and seminarians, in particular Fr. Patrick Summerhays, archdiocesan vocations director, and Fr. Chrysostom Baer, prior of St. Michael’s Norbertine Abbey, and other guests. Many thanks to our festival choir as well, led by Mary Ann Carr-Wilson, and to the Knights of Columbus for providing the barbecue after Mass.

Where are we going?

Our Lord’s words in the Gospel contain a little pun. Expedit vobis ut vadam…. “It is better for you that I go,” but literally “my going out expedites you,” from ex (out) and pedes (foot). So, literally, he says “my departure moves your feet out.” We’re all getting out of town together! But … where are we going? Our Lord gently chides the apostles for not asking this basic question: “None of you have asked me where are you going?” The fundamental question in life, it seems to me, is “Where am I going?” Certainly, I’m on the road to somewhere. If you feel a bit lost at times, ask yourself: Where have I come from, and where am I going? The fathers of the Church answered this question in terms of exitus and redditus: We came from God, and we are returning to God. The priest is ordained precisely to remind every living soul of this first principle and final end. In fact, he himself, following Christ himself, leaves home in search of souls, and then returns “home” (to God), dragging his net full of fish. “You will be fishers of men,” Jesus told Peter.

The Smell of the Sheep

Fr. Michael will report for his first assignment in Epiphany Parish, about 25 minutes from here. He will take on the menial duties of a parish priest, entering into the mundanities of every soul that comes through the doors of his church. A priest certainly takes on the “smell of the sheep,” but sheep sometimes do not smell so good. Far more importantly than simply smelling like the sheep, the priest offers sweet-smelling sacrifices to God on their behalf. God wants to sweeten the smell of the sheep through his priests. The priest encounters the people where they are at, but in faithfully bringing them the Word of God, the Sacraments of Christ, and the tender Mercy of our Father, the priest brings the sheep beyond this world’s paltry pastures into the shining fields of eternal joy. Meet the people where they are at, O priest, but do not leave them there! Fr. Michael has been ordained, that is, fundamentally ordered and oriented, toward Christ: both to be Christ and to bring Christ. And it is the priest’s intense interior life--his fidelity to prayer--that enables him to deliver Christ’s word, sacraments, and charity. To remind himself of this, he puts on the Roman collar during the long hours he will work every day, and he puts on priestly vestments during his liturgical service. May God give our new priest the grace of faithful perseverance until he himself enters the splendor of eternal life!

She covered him with perfect obedience

​It is to be noted that Fr. Michael is 100% Portuguese. It was to his people that the Mother of God appeared 102 years ago in what many popes have said is her most decisive apparition. Her simple request was that we make good confessions, receive Holy Communion devoutly, and pray the rosary faithfully, because nothing can touch a man of prayer. We pray today that Fr. Michael remain a man of prayer, a man of the Eucharist, close to the Mother of God. She protects the sacred priesthood of all who call upon her day and night.
 
Finally, I want to relate a strange phenomenon at the ordination ritual yesterday. Fr. Michael put his hands into the Archbishop’s hands to promise obedience, which is the most costly of all the promises any of us make to God. The new priest put his hands into the hands of the Archbishop, who then asked him: “Do you promise obedience to me and to my successors?” There was a moment of silence in the Cathedral as we all wondered: will Michael submit himself in all things to the will of God, through his superiors? Will he submit himself to his pastor, to his bishop, and to the Church's teachings in everything? “God came to earth to obey,” wrote St. Jose Maria Escriva, “and to obey men.” Just then, in the silence, a bell began to ring. It was eleven o’clock, and the cathedral bells began to ring out the Ave Maria before striking the hour. As we all listened to Our Lady’s theme on the bells, the young priest answered “Yes,” echoing Mary’s yes to the angel. Fiat. “Let it be done to me according to thy will.” As the new priest made this leap of faith, I could see the Mother of Christ covering her priest’s imperfect obedience with her perfect obedience. Let it be done to you, Fr. Michael, as God has said. May you go with God, and may you lead us to Him by your holiness of life.

 
Mother’s Day
A blessed Mother’s Day to the mothers and grandmothers among us. It’s amazing, really: fatherhood waxes and wanes, but motherhood stays consistent. A few years ago the National Ad Council began plastering ads on freeways and TV networks urging men to “take time to be a Dad today,” and every few months new billboards promoting fatherhood appear in the City. I haven’t yet seen billboards urging women to be good mothers. And so many thanks to our dearest mothers, and don't forget our grandmothers, many of whom are raising their grandchildren. Many of our mothers and grandmothers may be far from us or already passed from this life, but we can still give them the best gift of all: a prayer. I’m going to say a second rosary today just for my mother, and of course I hope all of us will remember our mothers in this Holy Mass.
 
Good Shepherd Sunday
​We call the fourth Sunday of Easter “Good Shepherd Sunday” because of its Gospel. I am the Good Shepherd, Jesus says. “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” Since 1963 the Fourth Sunday of Easter is also the World Day of Prayer for Vocations. You get what you pray for, and if we don’t pray for good priests and nuns, we won’t get them. The word “vocation” comes from the Latin vocare, “to call,” which itself comes from the root word vox or “voice,” as in “My sheep hear my voice.” Most people, however, are listening to anything but the voice of God on their little white headphones. So on this 56th World Day of Prayer for Vocations, the Church asks us to pray that the sheep hear and answer God’s voice. May the gentle voice of the Good Shepherd be heard above today’s incessant devices and ideologies.

Longing for the Voice
A vocation is a voice from another world, but it’s not unlike the voice of our mother or father. At age 17 I left home for college. My mother drove me to Harrisburg, PA, and handed me my suitcase as I climbed aboard the train for Penn State. I had been the commencement speaker three months before at my little country high school. University Park’s 40,000 students seriously disorientated me, and at times my homesickness was acute. One night the terrible realization that I was homeless—that I could never return to my boyhood—overwhelmed me. At that moment, through the darkness of my dorm room, I heard my mother’s voice from far away. The voice was clear and unmistakable, just the way she used to call me for dinner: “Joe…!” Home was irrevocably beyond my reach, but my mother could still call my name.

Thirsting for the Word of God
In the first reading, the whole town comes out to hear Paul and Barnabas. They thirst for the Word of God, which was calling them home. Like the multitudes that listened to Jesus, and the immense crowds who traveled days to hear the Reverend Martin Luther King or Pope John Paul II, they hungered for the Word of Life. In the Second Reading, the Apostle John sees a huge crowd whom no one could count from every nation and race who have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb. They follow Him wherever He goes. At age 12 I heard the Word of God through aunts and uncles who said I should be a priest. In college I heard the Voice again through a vocations director who encouraged me to enter priestly formation. It was a call that burned even more intensely when I became still in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. I entered the seminary at age 24 and have never looked back. This coming Saturday three young men, one of whom began serving my Masses 18 years ago in Modesto, will be ordained to the Holy Priesthood at 10am in the cathedral. I encourage you to support these new priests by attending their ordination. They are entering the priesthood in a time of terrible conflict and disarray in the Church. They need our prayers.

A Man of Prayer
​An older priest once told me in the seminary: “Joe, I hope you will persevere. And just remember, nothing can touch a man of prayer.” He meant especially the Holy Eucharist and Our Lady. A priest who spends an hour before the Blessed Sacrament every day and prays his rosary will persevere. And so will we all. Let us honor Mary, the Mother of God, in this Eucharist, by crowning her queen of the Church and queen of the clergy. I invite now Mr. Spencer Christensen to carry his three-year-old daughter Agnes to will crown our statue of the Blessed Mother. 

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.