Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Author: Father Pat Mulcahy

  • Friday of the Thirtieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Thirtieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    It could have been jealousy.  Or maybe they just felt threatened.  Either way, the Pharisees had lost sight of the mission.

    You could see how they would have been jealous: here they are working long and hard to take care of the many prescripts of their religion, attending with exacting detail to the commandments of God and the laws that governed their way of life.  But it is Jesus, this upstart, and not them, who is really moving the people and getting things done.  People were being healed – inside and out – and others were being moved to follow him on his way.  That had to make them green with envy.

    And, yes, they probably felt threatened.  The way that he was preaching, the religion he was talking about – well, it was all new and seemed to fly in the face of what they had long believed and what they had worked so hard to preserve.

    But how had they gotten here, how did they lose the way?  Because what Jesus advocated was really not a different message: it was all about how God loves his people and that we should love God and others with that same kind of love.  That message was there: buried deep in the laws and rules that they were so familiar with, but somehow, the laws and rules became more important than the love.

    The Pharisees wanted to preserve their religion and the way of life they had lived for so long.  Jesus wanted to make manifest God’s love, forgiveness of sins, and true healing.  It’s not that the rules of religion are not important, but the underlying message and the greatness of God cannot be overshadowed by legalism.  That is the argument in today’s Gospel; that is the argument that ultimately brought Jesus to the cross.  He would rather die than live without us; he paid the price that we might be truly healed and might truly live.  As the Psalmist reminds us today: Praise the Lord!

  • Saints Simon and Jude, Apostles

    Saints Simon and Jude, Apostles

    Today’s readings

    There’s a great scene in one of my favorite movies, “The Princess Bride,” when Vizzini and Inigo Montoya are sword fighting, and Vizzini keeps using the word “inconceivable.”  After a while, Inigo says, “You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”  Well, today we celebrate the feast of two apostles whose names do not mean who we think they mean!

    Jude is called Judas in Luke and in the Acts of the Apostles, but he’s not that Judas.  Matthew and Mark call him Thaddeus.  We have in the New Testament the letter of Jude, but scholars say it is not written by the man whose feast we celebrate today.  Saint Jude is perhaps best known as the patron saint of the seemingly-impossible, reminding us that in God, all things are possible.

    Simon – and this is not the Simon who Jesus later named Peter –  was a Zealot, a member of a radical party that disavowed all ties with the government, holding that Israel should be re-elevated to political greatness under the leadership of God alone.  They also held that any payment of taxes to the Romans was a blasphemy against God.

    Neither of these men held any claim to greatness here on earth; they found their glory in following Christ.  Their joy was, as St. Paul instructs us in his letter to the Ephesians, in that their citizenship was in heaven, as it is for all of us.  We are merely passing through this place, and our task while we are here, as was the task for Simon and Jude and all the apostles, is to live for Christ and to live the Gospel.  The reward for them, then, as is for all of us, is in heaven, their and our true home.

    Their message, as the Psalmist says, goes out to all the earth.  Blessed are all of us when we catch that message and live that message, following the way to Christ Jesus.

  • Tuesday of the Thirtieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Tuesday of the Thirtieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Fall is a season where we really see a lot of change, especially in our region.  Leaves are changing, the air is getting cooler, the hours of sunlight are rapidly diminishing.  It makes us grateful for the bits of life that we still see, because we know that the winter is coming and we will be groaning in eager anticipation of spring.

    So maybe we can resonate with what Saint Paul is saying in today’s first reading.  His basic message is that nothing is perfect yet; we are not where we should be – perfection is still in the future for all of us.  We see that our own lack of perfection has repercussions that touch all of creation.  There will come a time when God fully reveals everything and we will see ourselves and the entire world through God’s eyes.  That is the reward of the Kingdom that we all eagerly hope for. But we are not there yet.  We, along with all of creation, groan in anticipation of what will be revealed in those days.

    In Masses for the dead, the Third Eucharistic Prayer says, “There we hope to enjoy for ever the fullness of your glory, when you will wipe away every tear from our eyes.  For seeing you, our God, as you are, we shall be like you for all the ages and praise you without end, through Christ our Lord, through whom you bestow on the world all that is good.”  That’s the promise.  It will be like the mustard seed, come to full growth, that becomes a large enough bush to provide shelter for the birds of the sky.  It will be like yeast mixed through three measures of flour until it leavens the whole batch of dough.  Then, as the preface for the feast of Christ the King says, Jesus will present to the Father “an eternal and universal kingdom: a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace.”

    Put very simply, the best is yet to come for all of us, and for all of creation. In these waning days of the Church year, we continue to long – no, groan – for the day when everything will come to fruition and the Kingdom of God will be revealed in all its resplendent glory.  We have this as our hope – we don’t see it yet – but as Saint Paul says, who hopes for what one sees?  We have hope that one day we will enter into the glory of the Kingdom because we will have become holy by being caught up in the One who is holiness itself.

  • The Twenty-ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twenty-ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    At the heart of today’s Gospel reading is the question of whether we as disciples of Jesus are willing to go where he’s leading us.  Much could be said about the posturing of James and John to get the good seats in the kingdom.  But as Jesus tells them, they didn’t even know what they were asking. They had no idea what the kingdom would look like. They even missed the fact that it was in some ways already there.  But their ambition is not the point here.

    The point, as Jesus illustrates, is that his kingdom is not one of honor and glory, at least not in the way that James and John were thinking.  His kingdom is about suffering and redemption, and then honor and glory.  To get to the good stuff, you have to go through the cross.  And the most honored one is the one who serves everyone else. 

    The problem is that service always sounds great to us, until we actually have to do it.  Then there are plenty of other opportunities to do something or nothing that stand in our way.  We may have the best intentions, but never get around to making them happen.  And we all live busy lives, so it’s so easy for us to put those plans to be of service on the back burner.  

    Or maybe when a service opportunity comes around, we might think, “well, that’s not the way I want to serve.”  The project might seem too hard, or too messy, or take too much time.  Service always requires something of us.  Real service might even require much of us.  But if it doesn’t, is it really service at all?

    Here’s the thing: As the disciples found out, living in the kingdom was an all or nothing proposition.  Places at the right and left of Jesus aren’t just awarded on the basis of one’s good looks or engaging personality.  Those disciples, all but one of them, would give their lives for the kingdom and for Christ.  That has to be the lens through which we view our own lives of service and discipleship.  That has the be the direction that we take our lives.

    I got to thinking about people I know who got this.  One of the ones I always think about is our family friend Mike.  Mike owned the service station that our family used ever since we moved into the suburbs from the city.  Mike was the kind of service station owner that, if you came in for a tune up, he’d call and tell you that you didn’t need one and he’d just charge you for two new spark plugs and an oil change to save you some money.  He would also often do service on cars for people in need at little or no cost when the parish called him to do it.  When he died, there were seven priests at his funeral, and the funeral home and the church were packed.  Mike always did what he could to be of service.

    I had a funeral on Friday of a man who wasn’t a regular church-goer.  But having gone through our parish school, he must have learned enough of what Jesus is calling us to do today, that he was a Navy veteran, a member of the Patriot Guard, a volunteer firefighter, spent weeks cleaning up after Hurricane Katrina, and drove a truckload of water to Saint Louis when the Mississippi River flooded.  He did what he could to help people in need.

    Jesus in our Gospel reading today is calling us all to come to the table, to put on our aprons, and help serve everyone else. That flies in the face of our entitlement, it tears down the notion of looking out for number one, it means that inconvenience for the sake of others has to become a real option in our daily lives.  Honestly, not all of us, probably none of us, will have to give our actual lives for the kingdom.  Even if we would have to, I’m not sure we are ready to get up there on the cross and die for the sake of the ungodly.  Instead, we have to find little ways of love that build up others and take them on despite the millions of other things clamoring for our attention.

    Yesterday was our “Make a Difference Day.”  It was an amazing day where over five hundred of our parishioners came together to do projects in and around the parish.  On a beautiful fall Saturday morning, there was some sacrifice involved in giving up that time to make rosaries, rake leaves, give blood, collect donations, help on the mobile food pantry, make mats for the homeless out of old plastic shopping bags, make comfort blankets for Linden Oaks, install memorial bricks on the Stations of the Cross pathway, clean the pews here in church, pray in Adoration or for the unborn at the memorial crosses, and so much more.  I’m so grateful to everyone who participated in one way or another!  Yesterday was a good start, but there are always opportunities to be of service in big and small ways in our parish and in our community.  

    Jesus told us that whoever wishes to be great among us must be the servant of all. He himself did not think he was above washing the feet of his disciples on his last night on this earth. We are called to follow his ways if we want to follow him to the kingdom. “For the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.”  If that’s true of our Lord, then it has to be true of us who would be his followers.

  • Saint Teresa of Avila (Teresa of Jesus), Virgin, Mystic, and Doctor of the Church

    Saint Teresa of Avila (Teresa of Jesus), Virgin, Mystic, and Doctor of the Church

    Mass for the school children.

    Today we celebrate the memorial of Saint Teresa of Avila, also known as Saint Teresa of Jesus.  Saint Teresa was a mystic, one who had deep experiences of prayer that enabled her to have visions.  She was known to have a very deep relationship with Jesus.  She once wrote, “We need no wings to go in search of Him, but have only to look upon Him present within us.”

    Teresa was born in Avila, Spain, and was the third of nine children.  When she was just thirteen years old, her mother died.  So her father sent her to an Augustinian convent to be educated by the nuns there.  After about two years, she became very ill, and had to return home to her family.  During that time, she began to think about what she wanted to do with her life, and decided to become a nun.  She wanted to join a Carmelite convent, but her father would not give her permission to go.  So she snuck out one night to join the convent, and her father gave his permission.

    The convent was huge.  It had 140 nuns, each of whom had a large space to live including a bedroom, kitchen, and a guest room.  Some of the nuns even had maids!  Eventually during this time, she found the busy convent a hard place to have a life of prayer.  One day, she was praying before a statue of the wounded Christ and was meditating on his sufferings, and had a deep experience of Jesus’ love.  That was when she decided the convent was keeping her from the real work of prayer that she was called to, and began to dream of a small convent where the nuns lived simple lives.

    Along with Saint John of the Cross, and some others, she set out to reform the Carmelite order, founding the order known as the Discalced Carmelites.  “Discalced” means “shoeless” because the nuns wore no shoes in the chapel, recognizing the holiness of the ground there.  She traveled extensively to promote the reform, and eventually founded sixteen monasteries of women who were drawn to her love of Jesus and love of people.  She wrote extensively and is known as a Doctor of the Church.  A Doctor of the Church is a saint whose writings and teachings have had a profound impact on the Church.  There are four women who are known as Doctors of the Church.  The others are Saint Therese of Liseaux, Saint Catherine of Siena, and Saint Hildegard of Bingen.

    Saint Teresa’s life was heavily influenced by her reflection on all that Jesus suffered for us.  Whenever we see the Cross, we too should remember Jesus’ love for us, because it never ends and that love can change our lives.  As Saint Teresa wrote, “If Christ Jesus dwells in a man as his friend and noble leader, that man can endure all things, for Christ helps and strengthens us and never abandons us. He is a true friend.”

  • Thursday of the Twenty-eighth Week of Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Twenty-eighth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    It certainly seems like Jesus was being a little harsh with the people in today’s Gospel reading.  They weren’t even alive, most likely, when the prophets were killed.  But the prophets were, indeed, killed by their ancestors, and now they are building memorials to those prophets, while still ignoring the prophets’ message.

    And the thing is, they could have had an “out.”  They could have been forgiven for those ancestral, societal sins, by simply turning to the Word of God present among them, repenting of their sins, and entering the kingdom of God.  But, instead, predictably, the Pharisees and scribes try to detain Jesus, the Word of God, and interrogate him, so that they could have something against them

    We have to be on the lookout for any trace of this behavior in us.  We can’t double down on the sins of those who have murdered the prophets by neglecting the poor and the marginalized and refusing to be of service to others.  We have to put our worship into practice and distance ourselves from the scribes and Pharisees who focused on lip service to the law and their own convenience, rejecting the word of God proclaimed to them.

    And we have to be particularly observant of the prophets we have heard, because, unlike those who murdered the prophets who just heard the word of God, we have the Word of God, Jesus Christ, in our midst: on our tongues and in our hearts.

  • Tuesday of the Twenty-eighth Week of Ordinary Time

    Tuesday of the Twenty-eighth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Like many of you, when I take a vacation somewhere with natural beauty, I am always amazed at it.  For several years, my family used to vacation up in Wisconsin, on the shore of Lake Michigan.  I was always in awe to see the sun rise over the lake, or after a rain, to see the sometimes double rainbows that appear.  Whenever I am in awe like that, I think about our wonderful creator God who put all that in place.  I am always doubly convinced that nothing like that could ever have come about as the result of chance or coincidence or random serendipity.  I am reminded that God is beauty itself, and that this is a dim reflection of Eden, or perhaps just a glimpse of the beauty of the Kingdom.

    So how is it that some people miss that?  It’s too bad that they do, because today’s first reading seems to suggest that we will all be held accountable for God’s revelation in nature.  Even if someone is not churched, they must still be able to see God in nature, and would thus be held accountable for knowing and acknowledging the creator God.  The Church recognizes this revelation and prays that it would be a first step in bringing a person to the Gospel.

    For those of us in the Church, we are responsible for acknowledging and loving the beauty of God all around us.  We should see God in every created thing and in every created person.  We do not then, as St. Paul warns the Romans, worship the created thing.  Instead we worship and glorify our Creator who made beauty known among us and let that beauty be part of the revelation of his love for us.

  • Pope Saint John XXIII

    Pope Saint John XXIII

    The firstborn son of a farming family in Sotto il Monte, near Bergamo in northern Italy, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was always proud of his down-to-earth roots.  After his ordination in 1904, Fr. Roncalli returned to Rome for canon law studies.  He soon worked as his bishop’s secretary, Church history teacher in the seminary, and as publisher of the diocesan paper.

    His service as a stretcher-bearer for the Italian army during World War I gave him a firsthand knowledge of war.  In 1921, Fr. Roncalli was made national director in Italy of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith.  In 1925, he became a papal diplomat, serving first in Bulgaria, then in Turkey, and finally in France.  With the help of Germany’s ambassador to Turkey, Archbishop Roncalli helped save an estimated 24,000 Jewish people.

    Named a cardinal and appointed patriarch of Venice in 1953, he was finally a residential bishop.  A month short of entering his 78th year, Cardinal Roncalli was elected pope, taking the name John after his father and the two patrons of Rome’s cathedral, St. John Lateran.  Pope John took his work very seriously but not himself.  His wit soon became proverbial, and he began meeting with political and religious leaders from around the world.  In 1962, he was deeply involved in efforts to resolve the Cuban missile crisis.

    His most famous encyclicals were Mother and Teacher (1961) and Peace on Earth (1963).  Pope John XXIII enlarged the membership in the College of Cardinals and made it more international.  At his address at the opening of the Second Vatican Council, he criticized the “prophets of doom” who “in these modern times see nothing but prevarication and ruin.”  Pope John XXIII set a tone for the Vatican II when he said, “The Church has always opposed… errors.  Nowadays, however, the Spouse of Christ prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity.”

    On his deathbed, Pope John said: “It is not that the gospel has changed; it is that we have begun to understand it better.  Those who have lived as long as I have…were enabled to compare different cultures and traditions, and know that the moment has come to discern the signs of the times, to seize the opportunity and to look far ahead.”  “Good Pope John” died on June 3, 1963. Saint John Paul II beatified him in 2000, and Pope Francis canonized him in 2014. Five years ago, I had the opportunity to celebrate Mass at the tomb of Saint John XXIII in Saint Peter’s Basilica.  What a privilege to be in the presence of a pastor-saint who loved the Church enough to set her on a course of renewal in what many of us would consider to be our retirement years!  It’s a great reminder that we’re always called to be productive disciples no matter what our age.

  • The Twenty-eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twenty-eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today’s gospel reading is a rather heartbreaking story, to be honest.  The rich young man is obviously a follower of the law and a religious man, because he is able to talk to Jesus about his observance of the law.  But when Jesus tells him to let go of what he has in order to gain eternal life, he walks away dejected because he has so much.  We don’t know what ultimately happens to the rich young man.  Maybe he did go and begin the hard work of letting go, selling his possessions and giving to the poor.  And maybe he just couldn’t do it.  But at least he knows what he has to do.

    I think that far more heartbreaking than this story of the rich young man is the story of modern men and women, rich and not-so-rich, young and old alike.  I am more heartbroken for these because as much as the rich young man in the gospel story asked what he had to do to gain eternal life, too many of today’s men and women have lost the desire even to ask the question.

    I hope your heart is breaking too.  These are not words of joy and blessing that Jesus is speaking to us today.  They are words of challenge.  He wants to light a fire under us and smack us full force out of our complacency.  “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!”  So many people are not with us here at Mass today.  Whether it’s soccer or football or work or sloth or whatever, they are missing, and our gathering is the poorer for it.  Many of them will feel guilty about missing, perhaps some of them will even confess it.  But far too many of them don’t care or don’t even know that they should care.  How hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!

    People today, even maybe some of us gathered here today, are so greatly focused on getting ahead, becoming rich in the things of earth, skyrocketing careers, being well thought of – we are so embarrassingly rich in all these ways.  But none of those things are going to get us into heaven, into the kingdom of God.  We are all being told today to go, sell those paltry, fading glory things and give to those who are poorer, so that we can all enter the kingdom of God together.  Will we too walk away, like the rich young man in the gospel, dejected and depressed because we have too much to let go of it all?  How hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!

    In this respect life month, we might find we are too rich in other ways as well.  We may cling to the way that we’re thought of and so encourage or at least look the other way when a mother ends a pregnancy.  Or we’re so concerned about the value of our homes and the safety of our riches that we tolerate the death penalty.  Or the care of a loved one takes us away from our work so we don’t care for those loved ones the way we should.  But we are a people who are gifted with life from conception to natural death, and we are called to reverence that life and celebrate that gift.  We have to let go of anything that gets in the way of that.  How hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!

    Taking hold of the kingdom of God necessarily means we have to let go of something.  That is the clear message of today’s gospel reading.  What we have to let go of is different for all of us, but clearly there is a rich young man or woman in all of us, and we have to be ready to give up whatever gets in our way, or what we will end up letting go of is the kingdom of God.  And that would be truly, horribly, unforgivably heartbreaking.

    “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!”

    And so what do we do?  Do we give up, throw up our hands, and walk away dejected because we know it’s all too much – that what we have to let go of is beyond our capacity to do it?  Certainly not.  For us, truly, it may be impossible.  But nothing is impossible for God.  God hears that desire for eternal life in us and opens up the way to salvation.  He gave his Son to live our life and die our death and rise to new life that lasts forever.  That same glory is intended for all of us too.  All we have to do is let go – as frightening as that may well be for us – let go, and let God worry about the implications of it all.

    And Jesus points out that this will not be easy.  Those who give up their riches to follow him will receive blessing, but also challenge: they will receive “receive a hundred times more now in this present age: houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and eternal life in the age to come.”  There will be persecution in this life.  Not everyone will get why we are letting go.  And that makes the letting go so much more difficult.  But the rewards of a hundredfold here and a million-fold in the kingdom are worth it.

    So let’s pray with this Gospel reading now.  I’d like you to close your eyes and put the stuff that you’re holding onto in your hands.  Whether they are possessions, ambitions, improper relationships, patterns of sin, whatever they are – put them in your hands and close your hands around them.  Hang on to them tight, and try to remember why they are important to you.  Then, imagine Jesus, coming to you, reaching out to you, offering you eternal life – everything you ever hoped for.  Do you reach out and accept it, dropping the stuff you were hanging onto?  Or do you keep hanging on and let the Lord pass you by?  Spend a little time now, quietly, speaking to Jesus about what you’re hanging on to, and ask him for the grace to let go of all that, and accept what he really wants to give you.

  • Friday of the Twenty-seventh Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Twenty-seventh Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I love that Jesus uses that phrase “the finger of God.”  If things are done by “the finger of God,” it shows a God who is active in our world and interested in our well-being.  It can be hard, sometimes, to see that.  We get caught up in all the complexities and tragedies of daily life.  But God is still at work, if we can pause and look around and see that.

    Joel the prophet in our first reading is calling on the people to get themselves right so that they can witness God’s power.  Joel foretells the Day of the Lord which will be full of darkness, gloom, and somberness.  The people will need to fast and pray and cry out to God in order to be ready for it.  Those who are ready will be like the dawn spreading over the mountains and will become a “people numerous and mighty,” by the finger of God.

    In the same way, Jesus is able to cast out demons by the finger of God.  But the fickle crowd doesn’t want to see that, and so they throw crazy accusations that Jesus is acting by the power of Satan.

    Our hearts are certainly not as hard as theirs are, so we would never refuse to see God at work in a given situation.  But we do tend to be distracted enough to miss the “finger of God” at work in the craziness of our day to day business.  The Psalmist has the right idea today: “I will give thanks to you, O LORD, with all my heart; I will declare all your wondrous deeds.”  Let’s be on the watch today, then, for those wondrous deeds, recognizing the finger of God at work in our lives.