Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Author: Father Pat Mulcahy

  • The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)

    The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)

    Today’s readings

    “Give them some food yourselves.”

    Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Catholic worship is our celebration of the Eucharist. We state very strongly that it’s not just a symbol, not just a nice memory. It is the actual Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of our Lord. We know that we are spiritually in the presence of our Lord whenever we receive Communion or adore the Blessed Sacrament. But even more, we believe that, in the Eucharist, we become what we receive: we become part of the Mystical Body of Christ, and in that Body we all become one. We Catholics believe that the Eucharist makes us one, and because of that, it is good for all of us to come together as one to celebrate this feast of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ.

    On this feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, we are called to take comfort in the many ways God feeds us. We know that when we pray “give us this day our daily bread,” we will receive all that we need and more, because our God loves us and cares for us. But to really trust in God’s care can sometimes be a bit of a scary moment.

    It was certainly scary for the disciples, who asked Jesus to “dismiss the crowds” so that they could go into the surrounding cities and get something to eat. They were afraid for the crowds because they had come to the desert, where there was nothing to eat or drink. They were afraid for the crowds because it would soon be dark and then it would be dangerous to travel into the surrounding cities to find refuge and sustenance. And, if they were to really admit it, they were afraid of the crowds, because all they had to offer them were five loaves of bread and two fish – not much of a meal for Jesus and the Twelve, let alone five thousand.

    But Jesus isn’t having any of that. Fear is no match for God’s mercy and care and providence, so instead of dismissing the crowds, he tells the disciples to gather the people in groups of about fifty. Then he takes the disciples’ meager offering, with every intent of supplying whatever it lacked. He blesses their offerings, transforming them from an impoverished snack to a rich, nourishing meal. He breaks the bread, enabling all those present to partake of it, and finally he gives that meal to the crowd, filling their hungering bodies and souls with all that they need and then some. Caught in a deserted place with darkness encroaching and practically nothing to offer in the way of food, Jesus overcomes every obstacle and feeds the crowd with abundance. It’s no wonder they followed him to this out of the way place.

    The disciples had to be amazed at this turn of events, and perhaps it was an occasion for them of coming to know Jesus and his ministry in a deeper way. They were fed not just physically by this meal, but they were fed in faith as well. In this miraculous meal, they came to know that Jesus could be depended on to keep them from danger and to transform the bleakest of moments into the most joyous of all festivals. But even as their faith moved to a deeper level, the challenge of that faith was cranked up a notch as well. “Give them some food yourselves,” Jesus said to them. Having been fed physically and spiritually by their Master, they were now charged with feeding others in the very same way.

    “Give them some food yourselves.”

    The Twelve certainly thought that was easier said than done, but how do we feel when we hear that command? Because, let’s be clear about this, it is a command for us as well. I just think this quote jumps off the page at me. Give them some food yourselves. Religious people often expect the proverbial deus ex machina, the “god out of the machine” that appears in some literary works when things go awry and sets everything right. God is expected to do all the heavy lifting while all we need to do is keep people in our thoughts and prayers. But that’s not how any of this works. The life of the disciple is not some contrived ancient drama, and God is not a literary device that we can employ when we’d rather not take care of people.

    The way prayer works when we notice a need is that we ask God to help us to make the situation right. What can we ourselves do to make things right? The answer to that depends on our proximity to the problem, our station in life, and the resources we have. If we see a disaster in a far away place, like the wildfires in California earlier this year, our best effort might be to raise funds to assist those most in need, as we did for our Lenten Service Project this year, raising over $15,000 to assist those in the poorest areas of the LA Wildfires. But maybe we are a little closer, and we can go to a soup kitchen to provide a literal meal. Perhaps our situation gives us free time to go on a mission trip, bringing the love of Christ to those who need so much assistance. The list goes on. We need to take Jesus’ command to “give them some food yourselves” seriously, because he wasn’t just joking around.

    Jesus has come to supply every need. In Jesus, nothing is lacking and no one suffers want. All the Lord asks of us each Sunday is to gather as a sacred assembly, to unite in offering worship with Jesus who is our High Priest, to receive Holy Communion, and then to go forth to share the abundance of our feast with others who have yet to be fed. After the crowd had eaten the meal, that was the time for them to go out into the surrounding villages and farms – not to find something to eat, but to share with everyone they met the abundance that they had been given. So it is for us. After we are fed in the Eucharist, we must then necessarily go forth in peace, glorifying the Lord by sharing our own abundance with every person we meet. We too must hear and answer those very challenging words of Jesus: “Give them some food yourselves.”

    In our Eucharist today, the quiet time after Communion is our time to gather up the wicker baskets of our abundance, to reflect on what God has given us and done for us and done with us. We who receive the great meal of his own Body and Blood must be resolved to give from those wicker baskets in our day-to-day life, feeding all those people God has given us in our lives. We do all this, gathered as one in the Eucharist, in remembrance of Christ, proclaiming the death of the Lord until he comes again.

    Give them some food yourselves.

    Que el Cuerpo y la Sangre de Cristo nos mantengan seguros para la vida eterna.  May the Body and Blood of Christ keep us all safe for eternal life.

  • Friday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Saint Paul writes that he put up with persecution from all sides: from his own people as well as the Gentiles. He was beaten often, endured hazardous journeys and perilous weather, as well as every kind of deprivation. His experience was definitely extreme, but others who lived the faith in those days were also subject to persecution, torture and death. Our experience isn’t quite like that, is it? However, persecution like this does happen occasionally in some parts of the world.

    But there is a subtle kind of persecution that we often must endure. We know that even if our society is not openly hostile to living the Gospel, it might be just one step short of that. Life is not respected in our society: babies are aborted, the elderly are not respected or given adequate care, children are not raised in nurturing families, people are hated because of their race, color or creed. Faith is ridiculed as the crutch of the weak. Hope is crushed by those who abuse power. Love is diminished by the world’s shabby standards of loving. Living the Gospel is costly to anyone who would want to be taken seriously in our culture.

    To all of us who come to this holy place to worship this morning and who hope to work out our salvation by living the Gospel, Saint Paul speaks eloquently. He speaks to us as our intercessor today: “Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is led to sin, and I am not indignant?” He points us to our Lord Jesus who paid the ultimate price for the Gospel, and reminds us of what our Gospel proclaims to us today: that in living that Gospel, regardless of its cost, we store up for ourselves incredible treasures in heaven, because it is in heaven that our heart resides.

  • Thursday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Back when I was a seminarian intern, I had been visiting a parishioner at a local nursing home every week. I got to know her and her husband, and prayed with them often. One day, she was in the hospital, and I visited her there. Her husband told me she had been nonverbal: she hadn’t said anything for the last few days. So after talking a bit, we prayed – the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. I had invited her to pray along in her heart as best she could. When we got to those prayers, she began to pray them softly with us, and her husband had some tears of joy. Me too.

    I always say that we need to have a “prayer toolbox” for when times are difficult and we don’t know what to say or how to pray. And so it is glorious that Holy Mother Church has passed on some wonderful prayers, including the Lord’s Prayer, which he gave us in our Gospel this morning. When we don’t know what we are to pray or how to express our needs to God, these wonderful prayers do all that for us. Thanks be to God.

    So it’s good if we learn our prayers early on in life. Because if we have grown up saying them, we will never lose them, and they will be a comfort to us in good times and bad, up to our dying breath. So when times are difficult, it’s freeing to say, “Thy will be done…” When we don’t know what’s best for us, it’s best to say, “Give us this day our daily bread…” When we feel crushed by our sins and ashamed of our past, it’s healing to say, “forgive us our trespasses…”

    Today, let’s pray the Lord’s Prayer, as often as we pray it, with intention and attention. And let’s give thanks to Our Lord who entrusted these words to our hearts.

  • Tuesday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

    Tuesday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today’s Gospel is one that’s certainly very familiar to us. But if we’re honest, every time we hear it, it must give us a little bit of uneasiness, right? Because, yes, it is very easy to love those who love us, to do good to those who do good to us, to greet those who greet us. But when it comes right down to it, Jesus is right. There is nothing special about loving those we know well, and we certainly look forward to greeting our friends and close family. So this is the culmination of all the “You have heard that it was said…” / “But I say to you…” passages we have been hearing in the Gospel readings at daily Mass over the last week or so. Because this whole line of thinking, just as everything else in the Gospel, all boils down to love. We have to love, even love those who we’d rather not.

    Loving those we’ve rather not is a tall order, and we would naturally avoid that kind of thing. However that’s not what the Christian life is about. We know that, but when we get a challenge like today’s Gospel, it hits a little close to home. We all have that mental list of people who are annoying or who have wronged us or caused us pain. And to have to greet them, do good to them, even love them – well that all seems too much most days.

    And yet that is what disciples do. We’re held to a higher standard than those proverbial tax collectors and pagans that Jesus refers to. We are people of the new covenant, people redeemed by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And so we have to live as if we have been freed from our pettiness, because, in fact, we have. We are told to be perfect, as our heavenly Father is perfect. It’s a tall order, but a simple act of kindness to one person we’d rather not be kind to is all it takes to make a step closer.

  • Saturday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time

    Saturday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I love the first line of today’s first reading: “The love of Christ impels us…” More poignantly, that can be translated, “The love of Christ urges us on…” Saint Paul then talks in detail about how Christ’s love accomplished the work of death for all of us, so that our death doesn’t have to be the end of the story for us. That love of Christ urges us all on, impels us to lay down our lives for others, indeed it demands that we love in the same way as we are loved. That needs to be the theme of our life’s vocation, whatever form that vocation may take. It is the task of every authentic vocation to love others into heaven.

    That’s been where the fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel has been taking us this week in ourGospel readings. Jesus says, “You have heard it said…” and then follows up with, “But I say to you…” On Thursday, murder, the fifth commandment, became much more urgent when Jesus insisted it encompassed anger, bigotry, and hatred. Today, the eighth commandment, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” is more urgent when Jesus insists that the commandment demands devotion to the truth, not swearing a false oath certainly, but also living in such a way that swearing an oath at all is unnecessary. We who follow the Truth in the person of Jesus should never be in a position where our dedication to the truth is called into question.

    So we cannot be those who “live your truth” as the pop culture commandment goes. Because we don’t have our own truth, we have Jesus, and that’s all the truth we need. And we are impelled, urged on in that truth, because that Truth is found in the love of Jesus Christ.

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  • Saint Anthony of Padua, Priest and Doctor of the Church

    Saint Anthony of Padua, Priest and Doctor of the Church

    I’m not sure if it’s that I’m getting older or that I have too many things to keep track of, but I find myself losing things, or losing my train of thought more often than I used to. I’m often grateful to Saint Anthony on those occasions! Saint Anthony is probably one of the best-known Catholic saints. As the patron for finding lost objects, I’m sure so many of us have prayed, “Tony, Tony, look around, something’s lost and can’t be found.”

    But the real story of Saint Anthony centers around finding the way to Christ. His journey as the servant of God began as a very young man when he decided to join the Augustinians, giving up a future of wealth and power to follow God’s plan for his life. But later, when the bodies of the first Franciscan martyrs went through the Portuguese city where he was stationed, he was again filled with an intense longing to be one of those closest to Jesus himself: those who die for the Good News.

    So Anthony entered the Franciscan Order and set out to preach to the Moors – a pretty dangerous thing to do. But an illness prevented him from achieving that goal. He went to Italy and was stationed in a small hermitage where he spent most of his time praying, reading the Scriptures and doing menial tasks. But that was not the end for Anthony’s dream of following God’s call. Recognized as a great man of prayer and a great Scripture scholar and theologian, Anthony became the first friar to teach theology to the other friars. Soon he was called from that post to preach to heretics, to use his profound knowledge of Scripture and theology to convert and reassure those who had been misled.

    So yes, Saint Anthony is the patron of finding lost objects, but what I really think he wants to help us find, is our way to Christ. As a teacher, a scholar and a man of faith, he was devoted to his relationship with God. And so his intercession for us might go a little deeper than where we left our keys. Maybe we find ourselves today having lost track of our relationship with God in some way. Maybe our prayer isn’t as fervent as it once was. Or maybe we have found ourselves wrapped up in our own problems and unable to see God at work in us. Maybe our life is in disarray and we’re not sure how God is leading us. If we find ourselves in those kinds of situations today, we might do well to call on the intercession of Saint Anthony.

    Saint Anthony, pray for us.

  • Thursday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I don’t know about you, but I always get nervous when Jesus starts out saying “you have heard it said that…” because he always follows up with “but what I say to you is this…” And what he says is usually quite a bit more challenging that what we previously heard said. What he is doing here, though, is freeing us from the strictness of the law and opening our eyes to its spirit.

    So in Christ, it’s not enough just not to murder, we must also respect life in every way. We can’t just be content with not murdering or aborting, although that’s certainly a good start, but we must also be sure to tear down any kind of racism, hatred, or stereotyping; even refusal to forgive someone. We must make safe all those who live on the margins for any reason. The stranger or alien among us is to be protected. We must care for the elderly and sick and never let them be forgotten. We must never be so angry that we write people off and hold grudges. Murdering takes many forms, brothers and sisters, and we must be careful to avoid them all or be held liable for breaking the spirit of the fifth commandment.

    We should shine the light of God’s spirit on all of our laws and commandments and be certain that we are following them as God intended. As Saint Paul said in today’s first reading, “For God who said, Let light shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to bring to light the knowledge of the glory of God on the face of Jesus Christ.” May we all be free to follow the spirit of God’s law and be transformed from glory into glory.

    So here is a question for our reflection today: how can we be more faithful to the life-giving spirit of the fifth commandment?

  • Tuesday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time

    Tuesday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    As many of you know, I enjoy cooking. And so our Gospel reading’s reference to seasoning resonates with me quite a bit. Sometimes you can under-season a dish: when you’re cooking, if you don’t add seasoning as you go along, at the end you can never put in enough salt or pepper to make it taste right. Sometimes you can over-season a dish, too. And then all you get is salt taste, and you’ve ruined what you were hoping for. But when you get it just right, the salt you’ve added brings out the other flavors in a dish and everything just tastes the way it is supposed to taste.

    And Jesus wants us to think about that today in terms of the Christian life. Jesus doesn’t want us to be under-seasoned. We need to add seasoning all along the way: during the journey of our life, we have to be seasoned with the sacraments and with scripture so that we can come to the banquet just right. And we can’t be over-seasoned either. We have to, as St. Benedict teaches us, pray and work. Otherwise all our prayer and scripture end up all in our heads and never in our hearts, and that’s not right.

    I think, too, today about the people that “season” our lives. All of those who God has given to us to be part of our lives flavor our lives in ways that can’t be duplicated. We are blessed to have each other to lead us to Christ and to accompany us in good times and in bad. We will never regret what we have given to others in terms of sharing time or experience, in terms of praying or working together. The grace of being salt and light for each other is so preferable to being the bland consumers our society would have us be.

    So here is a question for our reflection today: who in our lives needs our salt and light today?

  • The Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church

    The Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church

    Today’s readings

    Today, the Church celebrates the relatively new memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church. This memorial occurs each year on the day after Pentecost. Pope Francis, of blessed memory, extended this feast to the Universal Church in 2018. Before that, it had a long history in Poland, and it was Saint John Paul II who commissioned a mosaic of Mary, Mother of the Church, at Saint Peter’s Basilica.

    The image of Mary, Mother of the Church, has its origins in the Gospels, and in Sacred Tradition. At the foot of the Cross, Jesus commended Saint John to Mary as his mother, and her to Saint John as her son. The Church has seen this as Mary welcoming all members of the Church in the person of Saint John, and relating to them as mother. This gives strength to the Tradition that since Mary is the Mother of Jesus, the head of the Body, so she is also the mother of the members of that same Body.

    Mary also prayed with the disciples in the Upper Room for the coming of the Holy Spirit, as we saw in our first reading this evening from the Acts of the Apostles, and as the Spouse of the Holy Spirit, she became the mother of the Church as it came into being. Mary is the one who guides the Church as Mother by interceding for the Church in our need, by pointing us to the leadership of her son Jesus Christ, and by giving us comfort and encouragement in times of need and crisis. Mary is indeed our Mother and because of that grace and comfort, we are truly blessed.

    And so today, we pray with Holy Church, that Mary would continue to intercede for us and bring us to her Son, Jesus. We strive to follow her example of faith and love, to serve the people God puts in our lives. We give witness by our actions that the Gospel is a valid way of life for all people, and that our Lord continues to act in our world for the good of all.

    Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. Mary, Mother of the Church, pray for us.

  • The Solemnity of Pentecost

    The Solemnity of Pentecost

    Well, Church, happy birthday! Today is the Solemnity of Pentecost, the birthday of the Church, because on this day, Jesus and God the Father sent the Holy Spirit on the first Apostles to enliven them and enable them to preach the Gospel.

    Today, we celebrate the joy of the Easter season for the last “official” time. It’s not that we don’t celebrate the joy of Easter every day, certainly every Sunday, but we do it with great joy in these special Easter days. For fifty days, we’ve been celebrating our Lord’s resurrection, his triumph over the grave, and his defeat of sin and death. We’ve been celebrating our salvation, because Christ’s death and resurrection has broken down the barriers that have kept us from God and has made it possible for us to live with God forever. In the last week, we’ve been celebrating our Lord’s Ascension, with His promise that though He is beyond our sight, He is with us always. And today, today we celebrate the wonderful gift of the Holy Spirit, poured out on the Church, who breathes life into nothingness to create the world, who recreates the world with power and might, and who pours out the power of forgiveness on a world hardened by sin.

    The Hebrew word for Spirit is ruah, with is the same word they use for “breath.” So the Spirit who hovered over the waters of the primordial world also breathed life into our first parents, giving them not just spiritual life, but physical life, and life in all its fullness. The psalmist today makes it very clear that this Holy Spirit is the principle of life for all of us: “If you take away their breath, they perish and return to their dust. When you send forth your spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth.” (Ps. 104:34).

    It is this same Spirit that is poured out on our world, which often times doesn’t look very life-giving. This world of darkness of sin, of war and terror, of poverty and injustice, of sickness and death; this world can be recreated daily when the Spirit is poured out on hearts open to receive Him. This Spirit bursts forth from the believer into action: working in various forms of service, works and ministries to proclaim, not just in word, but most importantly in deed, that “Jesus is Lord” (1 Cor 12:3). Indeed, we can only make that proclamation if we have received and live in the Holy Spirit. The preface today makes that same claim: “This same Spirit, as the Church came to birth, opened to all peoples the knowledge of God and brought together the many languages of the earth in profession of the one faith.” We can’t say anything good about God, or the faith, either individually or as one, except in the Holy Spirit.

    It is this same Spirit that is given to create the Church as Jesus breathes on the apostles on the evening of that first day of the week. In today’s Gospel reading, the Holy Spirit is given for the reconciliation of the sinner. Our Church picks up this theme in the Sacrament of Penance when the words of absolution tell us that “God, the Father of Mercies, through the death and resurrection of His Son, has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins.” Because it is in the forgiveness of rivalries, it is in the healing of broken relationships, it is in the restoration of peace and in the pardoning of sinners that God’s plan for creation is most fully realized.

    That same Holy Spirit who hovered over the waters at the creation of the world now hovers over the Church. The apostles first received that Holy Spirit, but now it is poured out on us as well. Nothing that is truly good can be conceived of, nor realized apart from that Holy Spirit. As the sequence [which we sing tomorrow, but not today at the vigil Mass, tells us: “Where you are not, we have naught, nothing good in deed or thought, nothing free from taint of ill.” It is the Spirit who gives life, both physical and spiritual. It is the Spirit who speaks in our prayer, putting those prayers in our hearts in the first place, and uttering all of our inexpressible groanings when we cannot pray ourselves. It is the Spirit who gives gifts to enliven our works and ministries. It is indeed the Spirit who gives us faith to cry out, “Jesus is Lord.”

    Having gathered today in this place on this great Feast, we now pray for not only an outpouring of that Holy Spirit, but also for the openness to receive that Spirit and the grace to let that Spirit work in us for the salvation of the world. We, the Church, need that Holy Spirit to help us to promote a culture of life in a world of death; to live the Gospel in a world of selfishness; to seek inclusion and to celebrate diversity in a world of racism and hate; to effect conversion and reconciliation in a world steeped in sin. Brothers and sisters in Christ, if people in this world are to know that Jesus is Lord, it’s got to happen through each one of us. One life and one heart at a time can be moved to conversion by our witness and our prayer. Let us pray, then, that the Holy Spirit would do all that in us.

    Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit, and they shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth. Amen.

    Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!