Sex and Money

Some say a priest should never preach on sex or money. I even would say that our bank accounts are more private than our bedrooms. How many of us would be comfortable seeing the details of our finances published in the parish bulletin? Before going any farther on this topic, let me just say that money is good. Wealth is a blessing, but blessings can quickly become curses because God gives his children blessings to be shared. If we hoard rather than share our blessings, they rot, and they infect us. If I keep all my love to myself, or never share my talents, or do not give time to others, and if I hold tightly to all my money, these blessings become curses. Share your blessings and they bless you; keep them to yourself and they curse you.
 
Love of Money

We are on the third and last of our annual stewardship commitment weekends. Two weeks ago we planned how we would set aside some time for God in prayer this year; last week we planned how to share some of our talents in building our community; this weekend we plan what financial gifts we will return to God. Someone joked last week that the time and talent weekends were a dress rehearsal for the really important one, the money talk. In a way he is right. Wealth has a more stubborn grip on us and needs greater attention. St. Paul says in 1 Tim 6:10 that the love of money is the root of all evil. Pretty strong words. I remember my seventh grade history teacher asking us why we went to war with England in 1776. We didn’t know, so he drew a huge dollar sign on the blackboard. All wars are driven by money, he said. In fact, greed drives almost all conflicts, from marriage disagreements to world wars. That’s why it’s crucial that we Christians free ourselves from the love of money by giving a portion back to God. Tithing frees us from wealth’s tyranny.
 
Question: Does God need our money?
Answer: Obviously not, because he owns it all in the first place. In an absolute sense, even the Church does not need our money. It’s God’s Church, and he can run it without our money if he needs to. Don’t get me wrong. Your pastor still has to pay the electric bill, and your gifts support the Church in some very important ways. But God does not command us to tithe because He needs our money. He commands us to tithe, rather, so that we will learn to trust Him. Tithing helps free us from the love of money (so does prayer). The more we love money, the less we can love God and love our friends. In other words, we don’t give to a need; we have a need to give. And most of us Catholics have a long way to go in this department. The average Catholic gives just under 1% of our income away, but God asks for at least 10%. I don’t think we Catholics are inherently stingy, but I think we don’t think our money has much to do with our spiritual lives. We just don’t plan or even think about tithing. That’s why I’m bringing it up today.
 
Five Wise and Five Foolish

Let’s look briefly at the Gospel. Five wise and five foolish bridesmaids. The wise ones planned ahead. They loved the bridegroom enough to plan for him. When he arrived at Midnight, they were ready to go with him. Planning is an act of love. “This parable,” writes one author, “illustrates the kind of preparedness Jesus expects of his disciples.” How many of us plan our gifts to God and his holy Church? We could plan our time better, for example, and get to Mass a little earlier. We could plan our tithe better too. Most of us toss into the basket whatever we have in our pockets. We give God pocket change. Is that all He means to us?
 
Last year at this time I planned my tithe, and I did it again yesterday. I realized that over 12 months I’ve become negligent and thoughtless. And my circumstances have changed—we priests got a small raise in salary, but my tithe was not adjusted accordingly. After communion today, after we have received the Body of Christ, God’s supreme gift of Himself, I am going to lead us in a little spiritual exercise of planning our financial gifts to God. Planning my tithe yesterday hurt a little. I realized I was not giving what I could be giving, that I had a little too much extra money hanging around: money that rots and spreads infection. Mother Teresa once said “what would we do with extra money? Bank it? I’d rather die!” Those of us God calls to live in the world do need bank accounts and money in savings, but how much? Let’s let God guide us to greater freedom by submitting even our finances to His perfect will.

What we value in life

Today is our annual Stewardship Commitment Sunday. Every year we take stock of our personal relationship to God by considering the manifold blessings He pours upon us and how we share those blessings. God gives us an abundance of Time, Talent, and Treasure. Do we return a portion to him in grateful praise? Do we make gifts of our Time in prayer, our talent in charitable service, and our treasure in financial gifts to others? How we spend our time and money is the real indicator of how we are seeking happiness in life. Show me your day planner and your visa account and I will show you what you value in life. Today we look at all God has given us and plan gifts in return.
 
All time, all energy, and all wealth are God’s, and it all returns to Him, sooner or later. Why wait until “later,” on the day of our death, when we will have to surrender everything? I heard of a priest who died with a million dollars in the bank, which he willed to Mother Teresa’s sisters. But how much more wonderful to have given that money personally while he was still alive! Most of us will die regretting the time we did not spend with the people we loved. Let’s examine our souls this Sunday so we don’t die regretting anything.
 
Time is Prayer

They say time is money. Certainly time is the most precious resource we have. We Americans, in fact, and especially we San Franciscans, seem to have a lot more money than time. We are always strapped for time. But God gives us 70 or 80 years of time on this earth to prepare for heaven. He gives us 168 hours a week. What do we do with that time? If we don’t spend any of it with God in prayer, we cannot be very healthy or happy. Prayer opens me up to God’s blessings, and makes me capable of loving others. But God is patient. He doesn’t pout or complain if we miss Mass on Sunday, or don’t show up for our weekly holy hour, or neglect the Rosary, or never open his Bible. He does not nag us, so we must be mature in planning our time with him. After communion, I will lead us in a practical exercise—filling out a prayer planning form—the first of our three stewardship commitments.
 
Talent: Are we building up the Church?

​We also consider “talent:” what strengths has God given us, and how do we use these talents to support others? Most of the talents we share with others will be outside the parish—helping our children and spouses, friends and colleagues. But for Catholics the parish is also a vital community. A Catholic is happiest when he or she commits some degree of service to the local parish. Social and service groups like the Knights of Columbus, Filipino, Chinese, or Latino clubs, our Mother’s Club and Young Adults fellowship, our Legion of Mary: these give us scope to exercise our talents right in our home parish. Teaching catechism to our children, serving on a parish advisory board, volunteering in our school or preschool, or serving the homeless are other ways to help build up the community.
 
In the Gospel Jesus points out that the Pharisees preach well but they don’t put their own good intentions into practice. “They lay up heavy burdens but will not lift a finger to help others carry them.” To be Catholic, to be Christian, to be human is to lift a finger to help others carry life’s burdens. It is simply good stewardship. Jesus says the Pharisees do not “practice what they preach.” I’m sure they had good intentions, but somehow, they didn’t act on those intentions. They were not faithful to their own beliefs. In the words of my favorite animated movie, Horton Hears a Who, “I meant what I said and I said what I meant; an elephant’s faithful 100 percent.” I’d like to be a little more like Horton and a little less like the Pharisees. Jesus calls us to walk with each other, to work with each other. Christian stewardship is walking with each other on the long road to heaven, helping each other to be strong on this journey.
 
Allow Our Blessed Mother to guide your prayer and your charitable service. She appeared many times to simple folk, most recently to three shepherd children in Portugal, always with one goal: to lead them in prayer so as to be more charitable to others. “Pray the rosary,” she said, “so that people will not lose their souls.” Let’s make a quick prayer to her as we plan our gifts.

Note: Below is the prayer planning form (Stewardship of Time Commitment Form) that we used at Mass

Who am I to Judge?
Last week in the Gospel Jesus said “if your brother sins against you go and tell him his fault.” We we must “judge” whether a brother or sister is doing right or wrong—and we must communicate that judgement to them in loving correction. Pope Francis calls fraternal correction “mark of love, a mutual service that we must render to one another.” His famous quip “who am I to judge” cannot mean that we should not judge others’ actions, but that we are not to judge wrongly, with a condemnatory attitude. Jesus did not condemn the woman caught in adultery, but he did correct her: “Go and sin no more.”
 
Forgiveness
In today’s Gospel passage, which directly follows from last week’s reading, Jesus repeats that we not condemn anyone. No one is beyond God’s mercy, and no one should be beyond our mercy, even if they sin repeatedly against us. Society today is generally quite confused about when and how to judge others. On the one hand, we cannot judge another’s behavior, and on the other hand, we are the most litigious society in history. We have more lawyers per capita than at any time in history, and those lawyers make a living judging and condemning others. The reality TV show “Judge Judy” makes lots of money exhibiting judgmentalism for millions of viewers in a small claims court.
 
Jesus’ way, however, is quite different from the false “non-judgmentalism” of our secular society. Our Divine Lord tells us that judging right from wrong is a simple duty, but even as we judge a sinner our forgiveness for that sinner must be limitless. “How many times do I have to forgive ‘my brother’”? Peter asks. First noticed that he calls the offender “my brother.” The conviction that the wrongdoer is a brother or sister makes real forgiveness possible. So: how many times must I patiently forgive him before slapping him down? Jesus says not seven times, but 77 times: biblically, that means “forever.” Always. You forgive him as many times as he hurts you. To illustrate this, Jesus tells a parable. A man owes the king (God) a “huge amount”—in the Greek, 10,000 talents. A talent was 6000 denarii, and a denarius was a day’s wage. So, he owes the king 60 million days wages. If he spent his entire lifetime working for this king, he would only be able to pay .003% of his debt. He would have to work 375,000 years to pay the debt. In other words, Jesus is saying it is impossible for him to pay back the debt. So what does the king do? He forgives the debt. Jesus did that on the Cross for you and for me. Great news! But the parable continues: the forgiven servant meets a fellow servant, a “brother,” who owes him 100 denarii (60,000 times less than he had owed the king). He refuses to forgive, and so the King throws him into jail “until he pays the last penny.” That is, he will be in jail for 375,000 years, which is the Biblical way of saying “forever.” In other words, hell. Heaven if you forgive, hell if you don’t forgive. Seems pretty clear.
 
Christian Forgiveness
Clear, but not easy. As I said last week about fraternal correction, it is not easy either to correct or to forgive a brother. The First Reading puts it succinctly: “wrath and anger are hateful things, but the sinner hugs them tight.” How hard it is to forget even the smallest grievance! I still remember K. J. from the 7th grade, who borrowed a dime from me at school lunch, and still hasn’t paid it back. He still owes me ten cents! “Could anyone nourish anger,” Ben Sirach asks, “and expect healing from the Lord?” Why would God forgive your infinite debt if you don’t even forgive a ten cent debt? Every time we pray the Our Father, we say we hope for forgiveness in the measure we forgive others. If you want forgiveness, give forgiveness. If you want peace, give peace.
 
On Tuesday I leave for Fatima with 50 pilgrims. Our Lady showed the three children a vision of hell in July 1917. “You have seen hell, where poor sinners go;” she explained. “Make of everything a sacrifice for those souls.” The greatest sacrifice, probably, is to forgive someone who really hates you: a business partner who robbed or sued you. An ex-spouse who took your children away. A current spouse who has been unfaithful. If we can manage to throw a prayer up to heaven every so often for them, then we can hope for forgiveness from God. Then we will know what forgiveness feels like! Our Lady of Fatima, help us to forgive as your Son forgave us from the Cross! 

 Football

As summer winds down America’s thoughts turn to football. Thanks be to God at least we can all agree on the basics of football! And one of those basics is this: the best defense is a good offense. Our Divine Lord says this, too: “You are Peter, and upon this Rock I will build my Church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.” We can read Christ’s words in two ways. The Church is a fortress whose gates will never be stormed by hell, but the Church is also a battering ram whose force the gates of hell cannot withstand. Bishop Robert Barron points out this second interpretation in his Magnificat magazine reflection for today, and we will consider both ways of reading today’s Gospel.

A Good Defense 

First, the Church is a stronghold of truth and goodness. Christ built her as a safe refuge for his sheep, for He himself is the gate. Over the centuries, Catholic churches have served as sanctuaries for those fleeing persecution. This week, for example, 10,000 people fleeing South Sudan’s vicious civil war have sought protection inside the Catholic cathedral in Wau, South Sudan’s second largest city. The Church provides safe haven for those seeking truth, goodness, and beauty. Here on noisy Geary Boulevard, people step inside our parish church day and night to find peaceful refuge from the city streets. The Catholic Church is peaceful and beautiful, however, not just as a kind of religious Disneyland, but because she teaches eternal truths. She teaches these Gospel truths in her doctrines and sermons, but also in her architecture, her painting and music, and all her arts. In our day, irrational ideas about sexuality and marriage, so-called “gender theory,” confuse and harm many. In this confusion, the Church defends the dignity of the human person, as she has from the Roman Empire to the Soviet Empire. Is the Church perfect? Not in her human dimensions—weak or confused leaders often make mistakes and even commit crimes. But in her divine mission of providing truth and beauty to the human race, the Lord who established her keeps her from essential error.

A Good Offence

The Church is also an effective offense against error and injustice. She doesn’t only hunker down behind defensive walls but she also sallies forth bearing the banner of truth, goodness, and beauty. When Jesus said that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against” the Church, he is also saying that the Church herself is the “aggressor.” The enemy cannot prevail against our attack. We storm the gates of darkness, we rush the strongholds of injustice and error, and we break into enemy camps to free those in captivity. The Church frees those in bondage to depression, to alcohol and drugs, to pornography —in bondage to error, the great error of pretending there is no God. Loneliness and despair, born of atheism, is killing so many today. Did you know that suicide is now the second leading cause of death for teens and young adults in our country? A few years ago a young man threw himself off the Golden Gate Bridge. Police found this note back in his apartment: “I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.” If God does not exist, there is no reason to smile. There is no reason itself, just irrational human error. The Church launches a frontal attack on the dark fortress of atheism, on a rescue mission to free those in captivity. Jesus assures us that the gates of hell cannot prevail against her.

Fr. Kolbe Breeches the Gates

​The Church must provide defensive measures, but the Church must also go on the offensive, when lives are in danger. We receive truth and beauty here at Mass, but we must go then into the streets to bring those saving truths to those in bondage. That’s why a small group, that should be larger, attends the 9:30 Mass every other week, but then goes out into the City, on the offensive, if you will. Our St. Paul Street Evangelization brings Christ to the Clement Street Farmer’s Market with sweet smiles and beautiful rosaries and kind words. That is the kind of winning offensive we launch, with patience and charity and truth. I finish with the tale of St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan friar who died in Auschwitz in 1941, whose feast we celebrated two weeks ago. He had established the largest friary in the world, over 700 brothers, just outside of Warsaw, a sanctuary in the midst of societal collapse (the Nazis had already invaded Poland). The Gestapo arrested him in early 1941, sending him to perhaps the greatest fortress of darkness in history, Auschwitz concentration camp. One morning the camp commander, Rudolf Hoess, decided to choose ten prisoners for starvation. The last man he picked wept for his wife and children, and Fr. Kolbe calmly walked toward the Nazi commander. “I will take that man’s place,” he said. “Who are you?” the commander asked incredulously. “I am a Catholic priest,” Kolbe replied. Hoess stepped back in fear, but accepted the offer. Kolbe died for that man, and for all men. He had breeched the gates of death by letting Our Lady lead him into the enemy camp itself. By dying for another man, he freed the prisoners of Auschwitz.  A survivor said word spread like wildfire through the camp, giving men hope and a reason to live. Kolbe loved Our Lady above all. “Immaculate Mary has sent us into this camp for a great purpose,” he told his brothers. Let Fr. Kolbe inspire us to do the same. The gates of hell cannot prevail against truth and love.

Hoarders

Much attention has focused recently on the phenomenon of hoarding. Some people simply cannot part with anything, moving about their homes through dirty tunnels. Hoarding is a phenomenon of a throw away economy that produces billions of tons of cheap products. Everyone who has things in storage (I do, in a friend’s garage at least) is a bit of a hoarder. I was impressed when 31-year old Brendon Ford moved from our rectory on Tuesday to the Dominican Novitiate: everything he owned fit into a mid-sized sedan. How many pickup trucks would you need to move your stuff?
 
Let’s talk about spiritual hoarding. We Catholics are the spiritual children of the Jewish nation, themselves chosen to receive the law of God—“blessed are you, O Israel, for what pleases God is known to you!” We have received that law, but inestimably more, we have received the gift of justification, the sacraments, and the New Covenant of grace. God has given us the fullness of truth; God has given us the Eucharist! But do we hoard the Gospel? Do we keep these infinite graces to ourselves, where they do little good, or do we distribute them as good stewards? We have been chosen, but not for ourselves. We have been given all this so that we may have the joy of giving it to others. The law of the gift: what you give away is renewed within you. When you try to keep God’s gifts tightly in your hands, it turns to dust. Faith is only faith when it is given away. Don’t just keep the faith—spread it!
 
And so “My house,” God says through the Prophet Isaiah in the first reading, “shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.” The Jews were not chosen for themselves, and neither are we. We are chosen to bring God’s law of love to all the nations. “The foreigners …. Them I will bring to my holy mountain; their offerings will be acceptable on my altar, for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.”
 

Giving it away

​That’s why our community came up with $250,000 to build a public chapel open for the entire city 24 hours a day. Last week two Spanish-speaking women were trying to get into the chapel. “Their sister is a regular in the chapel but they love it too, so I let them in and encouraged them to register with the chapel to get the code. How wonderful these ladies from the Mission felt welcome in our chapel! How wonderful that many tourists, and Hindus and Muslims and atheists come off Geary Blvd to find a quiet spot in our open church. Silence is the beginning of prayer and the beginning of peace. “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”
 
In our Gospel today, Jesus goes into the pagan territories of Tyre and Sidon, and a Canaanite woman, calls out: “Have pity, Lord, Son of David.” He ignores her. “Send her away,” the disciples ask him, and then he denies her outright: “I was sent only for my own, the lost sheep of Israel.” The woman persists: “Lord, help me.” And he goes even further by insulting her: “why should I throw good food to a dog?” The woman does not miss a beat: “Please Lord, even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from their masters’ tables.” So finally Jesus breaks, and I think he breaks into a big smile. “O woman,” he exclaims, “great is your faith!”
 
This faith is not mine to hoard, but mine to give away. I have received it to give it. That’s our parish and every Catholic parish. That’s why one of our parishioners leads a small group to the Clement Street Farmer’s Market every other Sunday, to give the faith. Will you join her? That’s why 150 of us have taken an hour of adoration every week, to keep this chapel open for all the city, to pray for the city in a dedicated hour every week. Will you join us? That’s why many teach children’s’ catechism on Sundays and RCIA on Mondays and Bible study on Tuesdays. They know what they have received and gratefully give it to others. That’s why a group of men just formed a Knights of Columbus chapter here, and a four of our women a mother’s group, and why our young men serve at the altar and our young women sing in the choir, and our young adults pray the rosary every Tuesday night together. Will you join them? Or will you simply hoard your faith? Let His house be called a house of prayer for all nations!

Every time the Gospel is solemnly read at Mass, Our Divine Master speaks to us. As we hear also in the Gospel acclamation at today’s Mass: “Receive the Word of God, not as the word of men, but as it truly is, the Word of God.” In today’s Gospel, Our Lord says to us what he said to the Pope and the bishops at the opening Mass for the Synod for the Family on October 4, 2015.
 
He says, “I say to you, whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful) and marries another commits adultery.” Many good Catholics have asked me with if they can receive communion after getting a divorce. Christ’s words today clearly answer that question. A divorced person may receive communion and all the graces the Holy Eucharist brings. However, if one marries a second person, without having proven the unlawfulness of the first marriage (annulment), he commits adultery. A hard teaching? Yes, but a teaching that leads to life. These are God’s words, not man’s.
 
I think it providential that in the Gospel for the day the Synod opened in 2015 Jesus made the same point. After hearing this, many at the Synod were reassured that God had given spouses the gift of “indissolubility,” the grace to be faithful to spouse and children until death. But some at the synod, in particular many of the German bishops, argued that marriage is not indissoluble, and so a divorced and remarried Catholic should receive Holy Communion. Other wealthier countries began to side with the German prelates. The bishops of Germany receive billions from a government “church tax” on those who identify as Catholic. If the bishops insist on difficult teachings, much of this revenue stream would dry up as taxpayers leave the Church. The Church in Germany is awash in money but its parishes are largely empty. In contrast to the German hierarchy, the bishops of Africa vigorously defended Christ’s obvious and constant teaching on marriage at the Synod. The Church in Africa is so poor that many parishes hold Mass under a tree because they cannot afford a building. These Masses, however, last three hours and are packed.
 
Pope Francis has called for a Church of and for the poor. Africa, not Europe, is that Church at the moment. When it comes to the Gospel, the poor have much to teach the wealthy. Let us look to Catholic dioceses that are faithful, robust, and poor in spirit, often poor in body too, for a path to Christian renewal. 

I am a Dead Man

Last week I preached on hell, and this Sunday I will speak on death. Normally we talk about the “last things” in November, but last Sunday Jesus spoke of going to hell (“Gehenna”) and this week Paul gently chastises us: are you not aware, brethren, that you have been “buried with Christ?” Baptism is not, for Paul, a cute ceremony for babies with flouncy white gowns, perfumed oils, and flickering candles. Baptism is a death: “we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death.” These days, we can barely even pronounce the word “death.” Almost no one dares say “she died.” We have to tiptoe around the fact lest we be accused of insensitivity. We say “she passed….” Not even that she passed away, but simply “she passed.”
 
So first of all, we have to be able to say the word “death.” And we are “dead” in two senses. First, we are dead men walking because, if we will all die in 40 or 50 or 80 years, we might as well be dead now. What will come is already here. I just marked my 26th anniversary of ordination, and those last 26 years seem to have come and gone in a blink of an eye to me. But where will I be in another 26 years? I’ll be dead, most likely. Note well that I am young compared to many of those in our parish. If you are mildly offended that I point to your age, and that you will probably die before me, we need to have this little talk about death. The world as we know it, and especially ourselves, as St. Paul says, is passing away. “Soon,” in the grand scheme of things, we will all be dead. So we might as well think of ourselves as dead already.

Baptism has Killed Me

But we are dead in another, far more important, sense. We are dead because “we have died in Christ through baptism,” as St. Paul writes in the second reading. The word in Greek means “immersion”—that is, drowning. Baptism’s triple immersion plunges us under the earth with Christ for the three days he lay in the tomb. Water kills, but water brings life as well. And so Paul goes on to say “we were buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised form the dead we too might live in newness of life.” The old life, before baptism, is not worth living. It is really a living death to exist on this planet without God, captives of original sin. We go to work, we eat, we drink, we party, as zombies if we do all that without a greater purpose, without relationship to God, shackled to our own lusts and compulsions. So Paul says we rise from baptism not just to continue our former life but to “newness of life.”
 
Baptism is an inoculation against real death, which we call hell: an eternity apart from God and his family of saints. How does an inoculation or vaccination work? The nurse puts a little bit of a pathogen into our bloodstream, which awakens our natural defenses to annihilate the pathogen. By tasting a little of the sickness, we overcome that sickness. In baptism we taste death, but the grace of God awakens in us to destroy that death. By this grace, sin becomes bitter to our taste, and we are freed to choose always the good, the true, and the beautiful. Baptism makes eternal life possible by giving us the capacity to refuse sin and the eternal death to which sin leads.

The Sign of Death is My Life

​“Consequently,” Paul concludes, “you too must think of yourselves as dead to sin and living for God in Christ Jesus.” Every time we sign ourselves with holy water we make that sign of death over us. After all the cross is a sign of death. The first century Romans mocked early Christians for choosing the sign of the cross—like choosing an electric chair or a gas chamber for one’s church logo. We chose the cross as our sign because we chose death, the death of Christ, in order to reach eternal life. When death comes for us—that is, when sin knocks on our door—we chose death rather than sin. When lust grips us, when anger throttles us, when despair chokes us, we say simple: sorry, I’m already dead. You cannot hurt me. A dead man does not fear death. I have died with Christ, and my motto is “death but not sin.” We are dead to sin.
 
May Our Lady of Fatima, who called the world to prayer and penance, give us the joy of choosing death over sin. Death to my own will, so that I may live fully free in this world and forever in the next. 

The Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

Today we celebrate the external feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which is properly celebrated on the Friday after the Sunday after Corpus Christi. The Church often celebrates beloved feasts more than once—we just can’t get enough of them! On the Feast of the Sacred Heart, we call to mind how our Lord thinks about us all the time. We are always in his heart. The graces we receive daily from God’s thoughtfulness, however, come at a price, as we are reminded in the Gospel today. There is no love without suffering. A soldier thrust a lance through Our Lord’s Sacred heart as he hung on the Cross; blood and water gushed from his open side. Why would blood and water flow in abundance from a corpse? First, because Jesus, though dead, lives forever, and his heart never ceases to beat, his blood never ceases to flow, for the people he loves. Second, the Church is born from Christ’s wounded heart in the sacraments of water and blood--Baptism and the Holy Eucharist--pour upon the world. Christ’s heart is open to all men and women. It is never closed.

Immaculate Heart of Mary

The Church celebrates also the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary the day after the Sacred Heart, although this year the Nativity of St. John the Baptist superseded it. But let’s reflect a little on the Immaculate Heart of Mary, since we missed it this year. Jesus in his infinite love sent his Holy Mother to three shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal, six times in 1917. On June 13, she said to the children:
 
“I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated.” All of the evils came to pass: Russia spread her errors to all of Eastern Europe, Asia, and South America (especially Cuba). Nations were annihilated (Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, etc.). More Christians were martyred from 1917-1989 than died in the entire world over the previous 19 centuries. The Holy Father was shot by what seems certainly to have been a Soviet-motivated agent on May 13, 1981, but beyond that one attack, Pius XII, Paul VI, and JPII suffered terribly in the brutal persecutions of the Church under communism.

Prayer and Penance

But it was the July 13 apparition at Fatima that, in the words of St. John Paul, “summed up the whole 20th century.” She gave the children three visions, which Lucia called the three “secrets” because Our Lady instructed her not to reveal what the children saw immediately. She allowed the children to see hell, but only for a few seconds—any longer would have caused them to die of fright, as Lucia said later. Our Lady has assured the children that they would go to heaven if they continued leading good and holy lives. Seeing hell for themselves moved the children to pray and do penance for poor sinners.
 
Our Lady had assured the children: “In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.” Although Russia is more Christian now than at any time since 1917, the triumph of the Immaculate Heart has yet to happen. The West is moving rapidly away from God, even beginning to persecute Christians and peace has yet to come among nations. The eternal destiny of many souls—heaven or hell—depends on the Church’s intercession.  We must continue to pray, do penance, and make our communions of reparation. I have decided to begin promoting the Five First Saturdays of reparation, for which our Lady specifically asked at Fatima. We choose first five Saturdays in a row to attend Mass, pray the rosary, spend 15 minutes of meditation on the mysteries, and make a good confession. I have been negligent in promoting the first Saturdays; may Our Lady forgive me. Let us dedicate ourselves to real prayer and penance. The best penance is to accept patiently, even gladly, the sufferings God allows in our lives. May the evil one in our time be checked by Our Lord’s Sacred Heart. May many may be won over from sin by the Immaculate Heart of Mary, cause of our Joy.

Pentecost How was your Lent? Remember getting your ashes way back on March 1st? The Feast of Pentecost brings Ash Wednesday and the entire 90-day Lent-Eastertide cycle to its fulfilment today. And what did the Son of God accomplish by going to the Cross and back, and finally sending the Holy Spirit upon us? He accomplished a perfect sigh of love.

A Sigh of Love

As Bishop Barron, quoting Archbishop Fulton Sheen, mentions in a commentary: from all eternity the Father looks at the Son and the Son looks at the Father. What each sees is utter perfection and beauty. Each sighs his love for the other, and this shared breath is the Spirits Sanctus, love breathed back and forth between Father and Son. The Holy Spirit is a sigh of love, born of beauty. We begin life breathing, so to speak, in union with our mothers, enclosed in their wombs, under their hearts, two hearts beating as one. Once born, we take our first breath of this world’s air and begin to cry, seeking to regain closeness to the maternal heart. We grow older, taking deep breaths, learning to receive and give love, but learning also that all human love is limited. Most of us eventually find love in a particular person, a boy or a girl whose beauty captivates us. We long to breathe together, to become one beating heart again. But this love, only human, disappoints us.

A Refining Fire

Pentecost draws us into the perfect love between the Father and the Son. Their sigh of love fills the world: “a driving wind” fills the house in which the apostles were. They begin to speak with this same breath, speaking only one word: “Jesus.” Jesus is my all in all, as Mother Teresa put it. “Only by the Holy Spirit,” St. Paul testifies, “can anyone say that Jesus is Lord.” Only by the Holy Spirit do we even know that we have a Savior, one who can purify our hobbled human love. The Holy Spirit, however, is not only oxygen to people who are suffocating, but also the fire that feeds on that oxygen. Not only a strong driving wind filled the house, but fire filled the air above the apostles. The sigh of love between Father and Son becomes a fire animating the entire world. Human love needs to be purified. The human embrace can only be fruitful—can bring us to “flourishing” to use a popular word—by virtue of the Holy Spirit. A man and a woman in love humbly ask God’s permission to enter a true embrace, begging the Holy Spirit to fill them on their wedding day. Only after they make their vows before the God’s altar may they kiss. Recklessly entering a “relationship” without first begging help from the Holy Spirit will disappoint us, and eventually hurt everyone around us.

The Sacred Heart

June is the month of Pentecost, and also the month of the Sacred Heart, whose feast follows Pentecost by three weeks (this year, June 23). Jesus opened his heart to us from the Cross, his supreme act of love for his Father. It is when he breathed his last with the words “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,” I think, that the Father most loved his Son. God’s love died, and we buried it, on a Friday afternoon, but the Father raised it up again. To “love without limits” (St. Maximilian Kolbe’s aspiration) is now not only possible but certain. But human love must be enclosed within the Sacred Heart, which pours itself out for mankind both from the Cross and on Pentecost.

The Immaculate Heart

​Finally, the month of June also is also the month of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, whose feast day occurs the day after the feast of the Sacred Heart. In Christ’s Mother, we return to Our Mother. Even the Beatles knew that “Mother Mary comes to me” in times of trouble. When we pray to God in and through Our Lady, we recover the lost love we had in the womb of our earthly mothers. Let pray this June, beginning with the Feast of the Holy Spirit, and marked by the Feasts of the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts, brings us the joy of knowing Jesus. 

Mothers’ Day  A blessed Mother’s Day to all dear women who give themselves in love to their husbands and their children. I am flying home tonight to see my mother and father—she’s 85 and he’s 91 and they’ve been married 63 years. We wish we could love our mothers as much as they love us!

Fatima in 1917   One hundred years ago yesterday, on May 13, 1917, a beautiful Lady came from heaven with a message for earth. She appeared to three simple children in Portugal as they watched over a flock of sheep, and they were afraid. Three flashes of light seared a cloudless sky before she appeared, frightening the children. She said: “Do not be afraid.” It is the first thing almost every visitor from heaven tells a visionary, not only in the Bible but in almost every vision since. This Lady told the children there was no reason to be afraid, because she had come from heaven, where they had a place prepared for them.
 
All of Europe was paralyzed with fear the day that beautiful Lady appeared. The First World War had been raging for three years, unleashing a carnage history had never believed possible. Entire cities were blown apart. Whole populations were forced to leave their homelands. 16 million human lives were destroyed. The new mechanized warfare poured death from the air, crushed farms and villages under massive tank treads, cut men down like weeds with machine gun fire, and burned the lungs of entire battalions with mustard gas. The beautiful Lady appeared to reassure a world at war: “This war will soon end, but we must pray. A worse war will come if we do not pray.” The war did end by November of the next year, but a worse war did come, and still men do not pray.
 
​America in 2017   America in 2017 is not unlike Europe in 1917. The nation is in the grip of a culture war that has destroyed much of what America once held dear. Our respectful political discourse, our pleasant and safe neighborhoods, our Christian approach to social life have been largely destroyed. Many more than 16 million human beings have been killed, not by enemy fire, but by our own hands, sanctioned by our own Supreme Court. Hitler horrified the world by practicing eugenic population control, but our laws now provide for the sterilization and abortion of the poorer classes. The middle class, in fact, is disappearing as cultural elites consolidate their wealth and power. Fear and outrage dominate the newsroom and the classroom. Corrupt leaders have weakened our faith in government and in the Church herself. We are afraid of looming terrorism, economic collapse, and climate change.
 
Who is stoking these fears? Certainly not God nor His Holy Mother. They bring us nothing but peace and joy. In his canonization homily yesterday, Pope Francis called on the 500,000 pilgrims to follow the example of heroic virtue lived by St. Francisco and St. Jacinta, particularly their insistent prayer for sinners and their adoration of "the hidden Jesus" in the tabernacle. We too must pray. It is here, together at Mass, and at home, praying the rosary with our kids after dinner, and in our weekly holy hour before the “hidden Jesus” that we will find our peace. So many have committed themselves to a deeper, more consistent life of prayer here at Star of the Sea. Let us continue what we have begun, in obedience to our dear Mother at Fatima: Pray the rosary, my dear children. Pray, pray, pray.