Lent: dust to dust

Forty Days: Jesus spent 40 days in the desert, and we spend 40 days in Lent. We began this holy season of cleansing, sacrifice, and joy five days ago by getting our ashes. On Ash Wednesdays in New York City, where I attended seminary, we would spend all day at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, marking ashes on people’s foreheads. Everyone came: the cabbies and the power brokers, office workers in smart business suits and tennis shoes, news anchors and opera stars from Times Square, street cleaners and Wall Street financiers, homeless folk and the Park Avenue elite. All stood shoulder to shoulder in line, patiently waiting to get a smudge of ashes under the great gothic arches of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. All alike confess the universal truth: I am not perfect, I will die someday, and I need God’s help. Now is the time to turn back to God.  I gave a dollar to a homeless man yesterday at a red light on Park Presidio. Homeless people often see life with wonderfully simple clarity. He asked me if I was a reverend. I said, yes, sort of, that I was a Catholic priest. “I’m a Baptist,” he called out, “and I believe in God, because he is my savior.” I looked into his dancing blue eyes as the light turned green. “But don’t get me wrong,” he chuckled as I pulled away. “I backslide from time to time!” There is no one in this church that does not backslide, and God is here to push us back up the slide.

Temptations

In today’s Gospel, our blessed Savior enters the wilderness of our sin and its consequences, a zone of death, to fight for us. It is a wilderness full of beasts and angels, the best and the worst of our human race. Jesus goes into the desert to rescue the beasts and transform them into angels. He is tempted by Satan, as we are tempted, in three ways: First, by pleasure. You are hungry, Satan points out, for this or that satisfaction. You can have that satisfaction just by asking for it; your Father in heaven would not deny you this simple pleasure. With Jesus, we reply: God’s word, and God’s will, is my bread, and my only pleasure. I will discipline my body so my soul can be filled. Keep your Lenten fast—the spiritual riches you will receive are worth the price. The Second Temptation is to having it my way. Throw yourself down—you have a right to do what you want, and someone will catch you. I saw a skateboarder the other day flying down the hill on Geary right through traffic—no brakes, completely unprotected—almost like a death wish. It was a sheer assertion of his will to do what he wants with his life. And we say in reply: my life is not my own, but I am a steward of the gift God has given me. Give alms, for in giving your life to God and others rather than throwing it away on your own will, you entrust it to God, who will keep it safe for you. And finally the third temptation, to power. By bending a knee to Satan, Jesus could have unlimited worldly power. By bending a knee to this culture, we could gain mastery over a dimension of it. But God calls us not to conform, but to reform, to go against the tide rather than assimilate to this world. The world, anyway, is passing away. SO in Lent we pray more and more deeply. We pray to God, not to Satan, and we dedicate ourselves to disciplined prayer.

Parish Mission

Our Parish Mission next week will focus on Our Lady, Ark of the Covenant, and Jesus, the divine presence in that Ark. He is always within her. The closer we draw to Mary, the closer we draw to Jesus inside of her. There is no authentic devotion or life in Christ that ignores or disowns his Mother Mary.

Msgr. Arthur Calkins, a Vatican expert on Our Blessed Mother, will preach Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights at 7pm. We will expose the Blessed Sacrament after his talk, and conclude with benediction. A priest will be in the confessional during adoration. There is wonderful grace in simply coming to a mission, because it is God’s will that we do this during Lent. I hope you can come. Let us pray to Our Lady now in the words of Mother Teresa:

 

Ora et Labora

“Prayer and work” are the rhythm of the Christian life. Mother Teresa expressed this beautifully on the little “business cards” she would give out: “Prayer is the fruit of silence; faith is the fruit of prayer; love is the fruit of faith; service is the fruit of love.” It’s a kind of chain reaction—silence leads to prayer, which leads to faith, then to love, and finally to serving others. Authentic prayer will inevitably lead to service. A Christian who prays but does not serve is kind of a dud, a “failure to launch.”

In today’s gospel, Jesus is weary of the crowds and just wants to get away by himself. The previous day the “whole town” had been gathered at his door for a free cure, and he must’ve been exhausted. We’ve all had days when everyone needs something from us. So the next day Jesus gets up very early and goes alone to a deserted place to pray. But before long Peter and the others find him and order him back to work: “everyone is looking for you!” Jesus simply says, “let us go…for this purpose I have come.” God came to earth to serve, and during our time on earth we must serve with him. There’s certainly plenty of work to be done.

Only a Shadow

The Catholic Church in San Francisco is but a shadow of what she once was, and I suppose that is true in most of our big cities. I realized this most forcefully last week with the storm of protest against our altar boy policy, but it became much more apparent when I saw Archbishop Cordileone attacked for requiring Catholic school teachers to teach Catholic doctrine. These protests are generated by the secular media, of course, but what surprised me was how quickly and cruelly our own parishioners joined in. For CBS to belittle Catholic belief and practice is understandable; for a Catholic to do so is dysfunctional and disobedient. If Catholics side with the media against their own archbishop, then we must say that the Church in our city has somehow failed. In 1939 France and Germany were still “accommodating” the National Socialists in Germany even as the Reich’s armies overran Poland; our Church has also been complicit to some degree in the rise of the increasingly militant “dictatorship of relativism” in this country.

My People are Dying

“The people are dying for lack of knowledge,” cried out the prophet Hosea (4:6). “They don’t know me, and so they don’t want me” Jesus said to Mother Teresa in 1946. People are dying because they have not found a credible witness to Christ. Last year 38 people jumped to their deaths from the Golden Gate Bridge, down from 46 the previous year. Jesus spent from morning to night healing these people, principally by witnessing to the love God has for them. He commands us to work with him.

“But father, I’ve tried to bring my children back to Mass!” many lament. True enough: it’s downright difficult to serve people who don’t want our services. The 50 Catholic parishes in San Francisco offer hundreds of “services” every Sunday, and most are mostly empty. So let us begin with silence and prayer, as Mother Teresa counsels on her “business card.” His bishop assigned St. John Vianney a dying parish in 1818 with these words: “there is little love of God in that parish.” Fr. Vianney sat in the confessional and no one came. He offered Mass and no one assisted. So he gave himself over to prayer, spending long hours in his silent church. Eventually people started coming, because they knew they needed what he had to offer.

Prayer through Our Lady

As always, we turn to Our Lady. She knew she could not save even one soul, so she gave herself over to prayer. Her prayer was: “Let it be done to me as you say.” We who have faith will avoid the terrible discouragement of seeing our society lose its faith by repeating those words, and turning to Our Lady for consolation and strength. 

I wish you a blessed and merry “Little Christmas,” as the Irish call January 6. In the south of Ireland, so Wikipedia tells us, the men all take on the household duties on this day while the women go to parties or shop for those after-Christmas bargains with their sisters, mothers, aunts, and daughters.

Herod wants to be a star

The Wise Men followed the Christmas Star and, on this day, find Jesus all brightly shining under the Star’s beam. King Herod also saw that star, but what did it mean to him? Absolutely nothing. Poor Herod (first, his name is positively frightful) considered himself a rising star in the Roman Empire. He became governor of Galilee at age 25, and to consolidate his position banished his first wife and their son, sent hundreds of priests to their deaths, and finally murdered his second wife and their children. And of course he killed all the baby boys in Bethlehem in a fanatical attempt to maintain control. He spent his life seeking to be a star rather than to follow a star, leaving a trail of blood, destruction, and anguish behind him.

Wise Men look up not down

No one can see the arresting beauty of the Star, or the Babe, or his Mother, unless he looks up, beyond himself. The Wise Men looked up, studying the heavens. They prayed to God rather to themselves. “For me, prayer is a surge of the heart, a simple look turned toward heaven; it is a cry of recognition and of love…” wrote St. Therese. They recognized God, while Herod recognized nothing familiar in this world, a stranger to himself and a monster to others.

There’s only two ways to go in this life: up or down. I can be a Herod, or I can be a Wise Man. I can choose to complain, to rant, and to despair, or I can choose to thank God, to edify, and to rejoice in the life God has given me. This joy is not just the power of positive thinking; it is “a cry of recognition and of love.” We recognize that God loves us, and that nothing is beyond Him.

No one wants to be a Herod, not even Herod. No one wants to kill babies, or their own wife and sons. But unless we study the heavens like the Magi, we will sink with him into that chaos. Prayer enlarges the heart and makes it capable of receiving the infinite God. Take the trouble to pray, to look up instead of down, to seek and expect joy. Take the trouble to stop in the church, or stop at an open window, and to look up instead of down. 

The Angelus Prayer

Does anyone recognize the Collect for today’s Mass? “Pour forth, we beseech you O Lord, your grace into our hearts that we to whom the incarnation of Christ, your Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by his passion and cross, be brought the glory of his resurrection?” It is the “Angelus Prayer,” which Catholics for centuries have prayed three times a day. In Europe all the church bells ring at noon, as do our own bells here at Star of the Sea, calling us to this prayer. We would do well to regain this tradition.

The Angelus prayer reflects today’s Gospel, which is the Annunciation, the precise moment in which the eternal Word became incarnate. The mystery of the Incarnation stands at the head of all the Christian mysteries. This first mystery of the rosary contains all the other mysteries within it. God became man, so that man might become God. We ‘become God’ not because we are capable of anything great, but because God shares his divine life with us. It is by his own gracious will that He brings us into himself. “God does not choose the qualified; he qualifies those whom he chooses.” It is only for us to surrender to that perfect will.

Total Surrender

No human being had ever, or has ever, or will ever perfectly surrender to God except the Blessed Virgin Mary. Only she who was conceived without original sin could do this, and she did do it. The rest of humanity is trapped in the fears, addictions, and dysfunctions of Original Sin. But the wonder of Christmas is that one person did completely surrender to God’s perfect will in loving trust.

God has always loved us, but we have not always loved God. It was at the precise moment when the young maiden of Nazareth chose to trust him completely that the world changed. The human and divine wills, for the first time in the history of our race, perfectly aligned, and she became the mother of all the living, humanity’s solitary boast, our one great merit to become children of God. That’s why Christmas is not just about Jesus, and the US Post Office doesn’t just have a Christmas stamp with Jesus, but a picture of Jesus and Mary, Mary holding Jesus.

Thank you for participating

Most of you know me, and I know most of you, and it’s sure good to be back in Modesto. You know, I took a parish in San Francisco this year, and it’s nice being in the city, near the beach, the museums, the fascinating parks and restaurants. But I miss Modesto. When I moved from San Francisco to the Valley in 1991, I would go back to the city about once a month. Now that I’m back in the city, I go back to Modesto about once a week! It was so good to be back on Thursday for Fr. Tony’s funeral, to be with my brother priests whom I’ve known for 30 years, to the warmth of a loving parish community.

Fr. Mark asked me to give two talks on marriage and family life. The title of tonight’s talk is “Defending marriage,” because marriage is worth defending, and needs a strong defense right now. Without marriage and family (an all marriages are families, even if they cannot have their own children), our society collapses. It’s been collapsing for decades, but in the last few years we are seeing an accelerated, systemic collapse of marriage and family. This triggers the collapse of a civil society’s basic structures, such as trustworthy government honest business, and functional education systems. A citizenry that does not have the benefit of growing up with father, mother, and siblings is trapped in a perpetual adolescence. Tomorrow’s talk will be on Sanctifying Marriages, because marriage & family are ongoing, labor-intensive projects.  Click here to read more...

I am pleased to see two seminarians at Mass this morning—Cameron Polette entered the archdiocesan seminary from our parish in August and is home for the long weekend, and Ivan Ruiz, our new Oratorian seminarian, is serving the Mass. I also see a U.S. Naval lieutenant in uniform, presumably here for Fleet Week. Thank you for your service to our Country. We are all looking forward to the air show this afternoon with the Navy’s Blue Angels.

 A Paralytic

In today’s Gospel, just as Jesus is getting out of a boat on the Sea of Galilee, some men lay down their paralyzed friend on the dock, right in front of Jesus. And Our Lord goes to the root of the problem: he cures the man’s sins. Only after healing his sins does he heal his paralysis. We take two lessons from today’s Gospel.

Paralyzed by sin

Our First Lesson: the paralyzed man’s friends make a bold move by plopping him down right in front of Our Lord. They don’t give Jesus any choice but to face their friend, and they don’t give their friend any choice but to face Jesus. St. Thomas Aquinas writes: “the paralytic symbolizes the sinner lying in his sin; just as the paralytic can’t move, so the sinner cannot help himself.” Many of our friends trapped in sin—addictions, anger, compulsions—simply cannot get beyond their demons. We’ve all had periods ourselves when we need someone to help us out of a situation—a divorce, a depression, an addiction. But the first thing we must do for a sick friend is to pray for him, because all sickness comes ultimately from sin. Sometimes more direct action is necessary, such as taking a buddy to an AA meeting, or insisting that he got to confession, or talking to him quietly about how he is treating his wife and children. I mentioned to a nice lady yesterday how much I miss seeing her husband at Mass. “It makes me so sad that his business keeps him so busy on Sunday’s, but I don’t want to pressure him,” she said sadly. “Well,” I suggested, “after 30 years maybe it’s time for a bit of well-placed pressure.” I don’t know what she said to him last night, but this morning he was at Mass. It made my heart leap with joy, and I’m sure she was all smiles too. We must never give up on helping others regain holiness.

All Healing goes through the Soul

And this brings us to our Second Lesson: the Sacrament of Penance. This sacrament heals paralyzed limbs and hearts. Imagine paralysis in the ancient world, before motorized wheelchairs, handicapped ramps, and automatic doors. A paralyzed man had to lie on his back for the rest of his life, staring helplessly up at the sky. Does Jesus cure this helpless man’s paralysis? Yes, but only after he forgives his sins. He points out that mortal sin is worse than paralysis. Indeed, it is sin that paralyzes. The first thing in any distress—physical, emotional, or spiritual—is to go to confession, and to pray before the tabernacle. Jesus heals the man’s paralysis with a word, not only indicating his divinity, but showing how external paralysis only manifests the root problem: the internal paralysis of mortal sin. The first thing in any sickness is to get to confession, because the soul is infinitely more important than anything else. If our souls are all right, the rest of us will be perfectly all right.

Kolbe: A Pure Heart, a strong body and spirit

St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish priest who died in Auschwitz in 1941, got tuberculosis at age 17, and lived with only 25% lung capacity for the rest of his life.  But this infirm man founded and oversaw the largest friary in the world (Neopokolanow, near Warsaw, with 700 men). At the time of his arrest in 1941, he was managing the largest printing concern in Poland. He survived three months in Auschwitz at hard labor and almost no food, and in the end saved the life of another man by taking his place in the starvation bunker. Where did he get his extraordinary strength? Not from his weak body, but from a pure soul, a heart cleansed of sin.

The way to all health is through our souls. Before we go to a physician or psychologist, we must go first to God. If our country is sick, and she is, let her look above all to her soul. Yesterday 3000 people followed the Archbishop in a Eucharistic procession to United Nations Plaza, where we prayed the rosary. President Obama had left the City just hours before along that same route. I was hoping he could’ve joined us for the rosary. Imagine President Obama praying the rosary with Archbishop Cordileone. Imagine what that would mean to the health of this country. Our Lord wishes to cleanse, heal, and strengthen us, but we must first confess our personal sins, and repent of our national sins.

Let us pray to the Blessed Mother, that she bring our sick and suffering souls to her Divine Son. Let her lead us to share her purity, and the glory God has bestowed upon her, and all the saints, among whom are we, in the making.

From Whom every family is named

St. Paul kneels before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. God defines the family because he created us. We did not create ourselves. The secularism in which the United States is awash rejects this fundamental truth; namely, that I am not God. It is by His authority that I even exist, and by His authority that the human family exists. Paul “kneels before the Father,” he bows to that authority, so that he might know the breadth and length, the height and depth, of the love of Christ, which surpasses all knowledge. Catholic schools and universities, in a better time, valued love more than knowledge; in a better time Catholic priests taught their parishioners and Catholic parents taught their children, that God created us for one purpose: to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, so as be eternally happy with him in the next.

But our faith has diminished as we have become wealthier and more educated. Oh that we could be wealthy, educated, and faithful to God! Why is it that economic prosperity almost always leads to loss of faith? As western culture loses its faith in God, the family, in particular, becomes incomprehensible. If we do not “kneel before the Father” with St. Paul, we will not be capable of “comprehending” the breadth and length of Christ’s love. We will become progressively stupid and loveless, that is, less civilized. For all the rhetoric about going green and being natural, our relations with each other have become unnatural, because we have rejected the laws of nature and nature’s God (as the Declaration of Independence states in the first paragraph).

Charity

San Francisco was once a city of strong Christian families. Its hundreds of churches bear witness to a more faithful era. How can we speak truth to a culture gone secular? I tell you, we can only do so with heartfelt charity. No one will listen to a Christian who does not speak with charity. In his letter to Nancy Pelosi and others who attacked him for defending marriage, Archbiship Cordileone wrote these words last June: “Please do not make judgments based on stereotypes, media images and comments taken out of context. Rather, get to know us first as fellow human beings. I myself am willing to meet personally with any of you not only to dialogue, but simply so that we can get to know each other. It is the personal encounter that … softens the heart.  In the end, love is the answer, and this can happen even between people with such deep disagreements. That may sound fanciful and far-fetched, but it … is possible. … I know this from personal experience.”

Legalism v. Charity

In the Gospel Jesus is attacked, like our good Archbishop, for an act of charity. At a Sabbath dinner party he sits opposite a man suffering from dropsy. “May I heal this man, even though it is the Sabbath?” he asks the Pharisees. They remain obtusely silent because they are legalists: they love the law more than the man. Jesus heals the man and then asks the sullen Pharisees if any one of them would rescue his own son or even his work animal ox on a Sabbath. They cannot answer him without surrendering their proud self-sufficiency. They would have to say, with St. Paul, that the law cannot save us. Only God can save us, and it is He who makes the laws. His supreme law of charity trumps all other laws, and this is something all of us find hard to live with.

Those of us who love the Latin Mass are particularly prone to legalism. The many rubrical laws of the Mass, however, are at the service of charity. If we follow every liturgical law of the Mass but are not moved to greater charity, meaning patience, heartfelt affection, and thoughtfulness to our brothers, the law is pointless. It becomes an obstacle to God, as it did in today’s Gospel.

The good news is that we can keep the disciplinary laws of the Church and the supreme law of charity. God does not command mutually exclusive laws. We can be faithful to the high standards of Christian morality without violating the highest law of charity. It’s all about how we say things: either with the loving heart of a mother or father, or the harsh demands of a Pharisee. We must turn, above all, to Our Lady for inspiration and intercession in achieving this delicate balance. She was supremely delicate among all women. She knew the right words, and will teach us how to speak, even to our enemies.

On this day, September 14, in the year 335, the Emperor Constantine dedicated a basilica over the site on which was discovered a Cross. Constantine’s mother, the Empress Helena, had made a pilgrimage to Rome nine years earlier. With imperial resources, she was able to locate the long-lost hill of Calvary, upon which a second-century temple to Aphrodite had been built. Deep below its foundations she found three crosses, one of which was discovered to have healing powers.

St. Helena got back to Constantinople and convinced her son to erect a basilica over the spot on which Christ died and was buried. In 335 the basilica was finally ready, and the priests lifted high the Cross of Christ with this chant: “Ave Crux, spes unica!” Hail O Cross, our only hope! Behold this cross, an instrument of the vilest pagan torture, now become the jeweled sign of our salvation. No tragedy, no suffering, no evil can overcome redeeming health this Cross affords to those who believe. In the presence of this Cross, hope shines into the darkest despair.

Once I came upon a terrible accident on I-580. A woman had lost control and rolled her little Mazda into the median. Both her girls were dead, and the paramedics brought me to her just after they had told her this. I held out a 3-inch wooden cross from my emergency kit. She wordlessly pressed that cross to her lips as EMTs lifted her into the mediflight.

In September 2001, a fireman found steel beams twisted into a perfect cross in the wreckage of World Trade Tower #2. It became an icon of hope in the midst of the most senseless tragedy of our time.

Today your priests, and your Archbishop, will clothe themselves in red vestments. It is on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross that Archbishop Cordileone has chosen to visit our parish, and to offer the sacrifice of the Mass here in our sanctuary. We welcome him, and we adore the Holy Cross with him. May we cling to the Cross of Christ, like that unfortunate mother on the freeway. May we Hail the Cross of Christ, our only hope!z

A Samaritan traveler was moved with compassion at the sight of a broken and bleeding man. Is there any one of us who is not moved to compassion when we see images of wounded and dying people in Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, and Gaza? What if we were to see a beaten man slumped against the church wall this morning? Compassion is a natural and effortless feeling, but it is one thing to feel compassion, and quite another to act, to make the sacrifices required to lift another man up. “Which of the three was neighbor to him,” Jesus asks the Pharisee. He replies, “the one who showed him mercy”—the one who gets dirty, bloody, and sweaty to help another who is dirty, bloody, and sweaty. St. Augustine identifies the good Samaritan with Our Lord, and the dying traveler as Adam. God felt compassion, as we all do, but further, he acted on that compassion, even shedding his blood.

Myron

Yesterday before the 4:30 Mass I was contentedly doing my prayers in front of the tabernacle when I heard someone talking out loud in the back of the church. It was a homeless man, and I gave thanks that homeless men feel welcome in our church, even though he was irritating me. On the steps after Mass two nice parishioners were welcoming me to the parish and out comes our homeless man. He was covered in filthy dreadlocks, dressed in stinking rags, and beaming the most radiant smile I’ve seen since Mother Teresa. Both parishioners knew him—“he’s been coming here for years,” they said—but neither knew his name. I went over to him to ask his name. “Myron,” he smiled. “That’s the name my mother gave me.” The name means sweet oil in Greek, as in “myrrh,” and I told him so. “That’s what my mother named me,” he repeated with a smile.

The stench of poverty

The man’s name was Myron, meaning “the anointed one,” the one who bears the fragrance of perfumed oil. The Hebrew for Myron is Mashiach, which became Christus in Greek. The Messiah Jesus Christ is the eternally Anointed One, bringing the fragrance of healing oil to the world. What about our San Francisco Myron? He is not sweet smelling. And yet his smile healed me. He is certainly an outcast, one of the city’s many street people, psychologically imbalanced, thrown away and forgotten. We see him every Sunday, we don’t know his name, and yet his name is an anointing.

The poor anoint us

Among the many truths contained in this famous parable of the Good Samaritan is that the poor anoint us; God saves us from ourselves through his beloved poor, if we take five minutes to acknowledge them. St. Vincent de Paul said that “those who love the poor in life will have nothing to fear in death, as I have seen on many occasions myself.” It is a poverty to ignore the poor, for they are Christ. But seeing God in the poor takes a persevering faith. It takes getting past the wall of stench that rolls off Myron’s neglected body. Mother Teresa once told a young volunteer to wash a dying man. He was almost stifled by a peculiar stench as he washed the man, but soon the smell became fresh and sweet. He described this phenomenon to Mother Teresa afterwards. “What you smelled at first was not his filth,” she told him, “but your own. In washing him, God was washing away your own selfishness, your own sin. That initial stench was you, not him, but God washed it away.”

I imagine the Good Samaritan 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. He let his life be disrupted, his plans changed. God needs to disrupt our lives at times, and he uses the poorest of the poor to do it. There is a kind of blessing, a grace and a joy, that comes only by surrendering to a poor man’s need. We can’t pick up the pieces of every broken person’s life, but if we never stop to help another man, we remain poor ourselves. Jesus’ last words to us in today’s Gospel are “Go and do likewise.” I’m sure you have, and if so, you’ve known the joy of loving Jesus in his distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor.

A Good Mother

How can we be consistent, however, in serving Christ in the poor? By imitating Our Blessed Mother, who took the broken, bloody, sweat-encrusted body of her son from the cross and held it in her arms. Holding tightly onto her hand, we can go to Calvary, like St. John. We can face poverty in others, and poverty in ourselves. The next time God asks you to help a poor person, or even talk to someone you don’t want to talk to, say a Hail Mary, and you will be able to do it.

Dominus Flevit

“Dominus Flevit.” Jesus wept. On a hill overlooking Jerusalem sits a small chapel built in the shape of a tear drop, called the Dominus Flevit chapel. It is said that from this spot Jesus wept over a dying Jerusalem. “If only you knew the time of your visitation,” he cries out. “If only you knew what makes for peace.” Jerusalem (the names means “city of peace”) still does not know what makes for peace. Friday, after the briefest of cease-fires, Hamas struck Israel with mortars and Israel responded with aircraft, tanks, and gunboats. Nearly 2000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed since July 1 in the Holy Land. “Israel started this war,” Tariq Ali said Friday in London.

Who did, in fact, start “this war?” Who started the war in Syria, or in Iraq, or in Egypt? Who started the war in Ukraine, in Nigeria, and in North Korea? Who started the deep divisions in our own country? The answer is: I did. I started this war, and I can end this war, with God’s help. “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being,” wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Who started the war in your marriage, in your place of employment, or in your home? Someone once asked GK Chesterton to write an essay on “What’s wrong with the world,” and he wrote back two words: “I am.” The question is not who started this war, but who will end this war?

Terms of Peace

God stood at the gates of the city, offering terms of peace, and the people crucified him. These people were not essentially different from us in San Francisco. Like St. Peter, we deny the Lord, probably daily, at least in small ways. He who denies a smile to someone in his own house denies Christ; he who calls his brother a fool calls Christ a fool, and is liable to Gehenna. Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, and he weeps over San Francisco, even over those of us who attend the Latin Mass. This Gospel is meant for us.

Prayer

What then, brothers, must we do? We must insist on true religion, which is the only way to peace in the world. Man needs God. The first act of true religion is prayer. The entire Catechism of the Catholic Church leads to the fourth part, the art of prayer. First of all, pray the rosary, and pray it as a family. Fr. Driscoll and I, your two new priests, are trying to pray the rosary every day together, and it’s not easy.  You can’t always pray the rosary with others, and it’s better to pray it alone than not at all, but try to pray it together at least a few times a week. Come to confession at least once a month, and try to make a Eucharistic holy hour once a week. And finally, assist at Mass as often as you can—only the Eucharist can save the world. The rosary, confession, and adoration prepare us for the Mass, and extend its graces. So: build your prayer life around Our Lady and the Holy Eucharist.

Charity

Once we have developed our interior life, we must then strengthen our brothers. We do that by practicing heartfelt charity—a simple smile, a helping hand, a listening ear. Not great things, but small, everyday things with great love. Washing a sink full of dirty dishes can express more charity than buying someone a new car. Finally, don’t forget that “instructing the ignorant,” “consoling the doubtful,” and “admonishing sinners” are works of mercy, necessary acts of charity. There is a lot of ignorance and doubt and sin in our city. We have a lot of work to do, work that we can only undertake after we have developed an intense interior life and learned heartfelt humility and patience with others. The city and the nation depend on us to promote true religion. I saw a full-page ad in the New York Times some time ago. It was a picture of the twin towers on a sunny day with the headline: “Imagine a world without religion.” But true religion did not take those towers down, and we already know what the world without religion looks like. It looks like the Nazi Holocaust and the Soviet Gulag. The world is moving away from true religion, and we must insist on its irreplaceable benefit to the common good.

In all things, we turn to Our Lady. We must learn to pray as she prayed, and learn to love as she loved. May she guide us in building a civilization of love.