Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: Catholic Social Teaching

  • All Creatures of Our God and King

    All Creatures of Our God and King

    “All Creatures of Our God and King is one of my very favorite Catholic hymns. The tune is Lasst Uns Erfreuen, and it is also the tune for “Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones” (which is timely, with All Saints Day coming up this week!” The wonderful fall colors got me thinking along these lines today! This is one of many versions of the hymn seen on YouTube.

    The text for “All Creatures” is attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, which of course adds to its belovedness! The text for “Ye Watchers” is from John A.L. Riley.

     

    All Creatures of Our God and King

    All creatures of our God and King
    Lift up your voice and with us sing,
    Alleluia! Alleluia!
    Thou burning sun with golden beam,
    Thou silver moon with softer gleam!
    Refrain

    O praise Him! O praise Him!
    Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

    Thou rushing wind that art so strong
    Ye clouds that sail in Heaven along,
    O praise Him! Alleluia!
    Thou rising moon, in praise rejoice,
    Ye lights of evening, find a voice!
    Refrain

    Thou flowing water, pure and clear,
    Make music for thy Lord to hear,
    O praise Him! Alleluia!
    Thou fire so masterful and bright,
    That givest man both warmth and light.
    Refrain

    Dear mother earth, who day by day
    Unfoldest blessings on our way,
    O praise Him! Alleluia!
    The flowers and fruits that in thee grow,
    Let them His glory also show.
    Refrain

    And all ye men of tender heart,
    Forgiving others, take your part,
    O sing ye! Alleluia!
    Ye who long pain and sorrow bear,
    Praise God and on Him cast your care!
    Refrain

    And thou most kind and gentle Death,
    Waiting to hush our latest breath,
    O praise Him! Alleluia!
    Thou leadest home the child of God,
    And Christ our Lord the way hath trod.
    Refrain

    Let all things their Creator bless,
    And worship Him in humbleness,
    O praise Him! Alleluia!
    Praise, praise the Father, praise the Son,
    And praise the Spirit, Three in One!
    Refrain

    Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones

    Ye watchers and ye holy ones,
    Bright seraphs, cherubim and thrones,
    Raise the glad strain, Alleluia!
    Cry out, dominions, princedoms, powers,
    Virtues, archangels, angels’ choirs:
    Refrain

    Alleluia! Alleluia!
    Alleluia! Alleluia!
    Alleluia!

    O higher than the cherubim,
    More glorious than the seraphim,
    Lead their praises, Alleluia!
    Thou bearer of th’eternal Word,
    Most gracious, magnify the Lord.
    Refrain

    Respond, ye souls in endless rest,
    Ye patriarchs and prophets blest,
    Alleluia! Alleluia!
    Ye holy twelve, ye martyrs strong,
    All saints triumphant, raise the song.
    Refrain

    O friends, in gladness let us sing,
    Supernal anthems echoing,
    Alleluia! Alleluia!
    To God the Father, God the Son,
    And God the Spirit, Three in One.
    Refrain
  • Autumn in Naperville

    Autumn in Naperville

    St

    Autumn is here in Naperville and I love it. I didn’t think we would get many nice colors this year with the weather we’ve had, but there are some nice oranges and reds in some of the trees around here. These are right at the corner outside the Church and provide a nice backdrop, depending on where you’re sitting in Church!

  • Twenty-ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time: Project Gabriel

    Twenty-ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time: Project Gabriel

    Today’s readings

    Today’s Scriptures show us the importance of persistence in prayer. We all know that sometimes we come across issues in our own lives, or even in society, and when we pray, it takes a long time to see those prayers answered. We may well have experienced the exhaustion of Moses in our praying, and may have needed the help of others to stand next to us and support us in our prayer, praying with us and for us. For many of us, our prayer lists may well have grown exponentially as the years have worn on, and there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight.

    Even the dishonest judge answers the request of the widow who keeps coming to him. And we know that our God is far greater than the dishonest judge. He doesn’t answer our prayers just to mollify us and send us on our way. He hears our prayers and answers them in his way, in his time, for our benefit and his glory. We know that God often answers our prayers in ways more magnificent than we could have imagined when we offered them. Like the Psalmist today, we know that our help truly comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.

    Sometimes God uses us to answer the prayers of others. I am preaching at all the Masses this weekend to tell you about a way I think that is happening in our parish. As you know, October is Respect Life Month. Here in Naperville, this has been particularly important this year because of the opening of the Planned Parenthood Clinic in Aurora that provides abortions among its other services. It is the largest Planned Parenthood clinic in the nation and one of five abortion clinics in DuPage County. This year more than ever, we Catholics are called upon to witness to the sanctity of life from conception to natural death, to protect the lives of all of the most vulnerable members of our society, and particularly to advocate for those whose lives are ended by abortion.

    It’s one thing to say you’re pro life, to pray for the protection of life, and to vote only for people who support life. Those are important things to do, but quite frankly, if that’s all we ever do, we aren’t doing even close to enough. Studies have shown that eight out of ten woman who have had an abortion would have chosen not to have the abortion if it had not been for the lack of material resources and pressure from families or fathers. In most cases, the decision to have an abortion isn’t a “pro choice” decision at all: it is rather a decision made because these women feel they have no freedom and no choice. Brothers and sisters in Christ, we must make it very clear to all the world that no woman should ever have an abortion simply because she feels that is her only option.

    And so today, our parish is launching its participation in Project Gabriel. Project Gabriel is a network of parishes standing together in their commitment to answer the prayers of pregnant mothers in crisis by offering them various forms of assistance. In this area, Project Gabriel is coordinated by Woman’s Choice Services, a pregnancy center network operated in the Catholic Christian tradition, in cooperation with the Respect Life Offices of the Archdiocese of Chicago, the Diocese of Joliet and the Diocese of Rockford.

    Women hear about Project Gabriel through signs of life in the community, especially bumper magnets which say “Pregnant? Need Help? Please call us.” When she calls, a trained volunteer consultant will help assess her needs. Then she may be referred to a church community, like St. Raphael’s, where trained representatives called “Angels” will meet with her. Angels are friends, whose job it is to walk alongside the mother-to accompany her, pray for her and with her, and encourage her on her journey. They may also help her to meet material needs by identifying resources within the community.

    At St. Raphael, Project Gabriel will help mothers to make life-affirming choices for themselves and their babies by:

    ” Offering friendship, emotional support and prayer.
    ” Providing babysitting and offering rides to medical appointments.
    ” Giving pastoral care and counseling.
    ” Identifying resources for medical and prenatal care.
    ” Finding resources for financial assistance.
    ” And by uncovering resources for housing, education, adoption and employment.

    But don’t let that task overwhelm you. It is not the task of the Gabriel Project Angel to be a psychiatrist, analyst or social worker. What you will do is much the same as you might do for a niece or a neighbor. Just be there for her: Take her to lunch, pray with her and for her baby, call her each week, drive her to a doctor’s appointment or offer to baby-sit. In short, be a sister, a helper, and a friend.

    We need you to get involved to make Project Gabriel a success right out of the box. We need 40-50 volunteers minimally to get started, and you can help either as an angel or in a number of other ways. You can offer as much time as you wish, a little or a lot, depending on your availability and the ways you feel God is calling you. Today, we are asking you to do three things:

    First, take a bumper magnet and put it on your car so that women with pregnancies at risk will know there is a life-affirming option. Second, visit the welcome center today for more information and to make a donation to offset the costs of the bumper magnets and provide for the material needs of the mothers and families we will be reaching. And finally, fill out the forms in your pews right now, getting involved as an angel, or on our prayer team, or communications team, or material resources team, or any of several other teams on the list. Your involvement might be as simple as knitting a baby blanket or driving a woman to the doctor or collecting personal care items for expectant mothers. But perhaps you are a good listener and someone who loves companioning others on the journey; then you’d make a great angel. You can leave that filled out form in your pew, drop it in the collection basket, or drop it off in the welcome center today. If you need to pray about your involvement, feel free to take a sheet with you. But please fill one out and get involved – if not today, then soon – so that we can start helping bring life to the culture of death in this particular way.

    In his encyclical, The Gospel of Life, Pope John Paul II said, “Together we all sense our duty to preach the Gospel of life, to celebrate it in the Liturgy and in our whole existence, and to serve it with the various programs and structures which support and promote life.” Project Gabriel is a way for us to do just that. Please be sure to get involved, so that everyone will know that we are a community that supports life at every stage.

    Sometimes people’s prayer needs can be overwhelming. But maybe you are being called upon today like Aaron and Hur to support the hands of a pregnant woman as she prays for the opportunity to give life to the baby she is carrying. Please be an angel, and support this parish project today.

  • Holy Hour For Life

    Holy Hour For Life

    The basis for the movement to respect life, brothers and sisters, is the fifth commandment: You shall not kill (Ex 20:13). The Catechism is very specific: “Scripture specifies the prohibition contained in the fifth commandment: ‘Do not slay the innocent and the righteous.’ The deliberate murder of an innocent person is gravely contrary to the dignity of the human being, to the golden rule, and to the holiness of the Creator. The law forbidding it is universally valid: it obliges each and everyone, always and everywhere.” (CCC 2261) And that would seem simple enough, don’t you think? God said not to kill another human being, and so refraining from doing so reverences his gift of life and obeys his commandment.

    But life isn’t that simple. Life is a complex issue involving a right to life, a quality of life, a reverence for life, and a sanctity of life. Jesus himself stirs up the waters of complexity with his own take on the commandment. In Matthew’s Gospel, he tells us: “You have heard that it was said to the men of old, “You shall not kill: and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment.” But I say to you that every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment.” (Mt 5:21-22)

    We know the issue that has brought us here this evening. Planned Parenthood has quietly been building a large clinic in Aurora, very near to us here at St. Raphael. The clinic was set for opening on the 18th of this month, although that date may change, based on news today. That a large clinic which provides abortions may open in our area is abhorrent to us; we hate to think about that kind of thing happening so close to us. But the truth is, whether it’s happening next door or two states away, it’s still wrong.

    Our bishop has called us to spend this day in prayer and penance for the cause of life. He says, “Prayer is our most powerful weapon. Pray that the Gospel of Life will take root and flourish in the seven counties that make up our diocese. Pray for all pregnant women in need, particularly those who find themselves in seemingly desperate situations. Pray for a conversion of heart in those who support and work at abortion facilities. Pray for healing of those who suffer the impact of abortion.”

    I would like to invite us all to begin that prayer by examining our own consciences. We may proclaim ourselves as exemplary witnesses to the sanctity of life because we have never murdered anyone nor participated in an abortion. And those are good starts. But if we let it stop there, then the words of Jesus that I quoted a moment ago are our condemnation. The church teaches that true respect for life revolves around faithfulness to the spirit of the fifth commandment. The Catechism tells us, “Every human life, from the moment of conception until death, is sacred because the human person has been willed for its own sake in the image and likeness of the living and holy God.” (CCC 2319)

    And so we must all ask ourselves, brothers and sisters in Christ, are there lives that we have not treated as sacred? Have we harbored anger in our hearts against our brothers and sisters? What have we done to fight poverty, hunger and homelessness? Have we insisted that those who govern us treat war as morally repugnant, only to be used in the most severe cases and as a last resort? Have we engaged in stereotypes or harbored thoughts based on racism and prejudice? Have we insisted that legislators ban the production of human fetuses to be used as biological material? Have we been horrified that a nation with our resources still regularly executes its citizens in a futile effort to stop the spread of crime? Have we done everything in our power to be certain that no young woman should ever have to think of abortion as her only choice when facing hard times? Have we given adequate care to elder members of our family and our society so that they would not face their final days in loneliness, nor come to an early death for the sake of convenience? Have we avoided scandal so as to prevent others from being led to evil? Have we earnestly petitioned our legislators to make adequate health care available for all people?

    Because every one of these issues is a life issue, brothers and sisters, and we who would be known to be respecters of life are on for every single one of them, bar none. The Church’s teaching on the right to life is not something that we can approach like we’re in a cafeteria. We must accept and reverence and live the whole of the teaching, or be held liable for every breach of it. If we are not part of the solution, we are part of the problem. On this day of prayer for the sanctity of life, our prayer must perhaps be first for ourselves that we might live the Church’s teaching with absolute integrity in every moment of our lives.

    Our God has known us and formed us from our mother’s womb, from that very first moment of conception. Our God will be with us and will sustain us until our dying breath. In life and in death, we belong to the Lord … Every part of our lives belongs to the Lord. Whether that clinic in Aurora opens or whether it doesn’t, our call is the same. We must constantly and consistently bear witness to the sanctity of life at every stage. We must be people who lead the world to a whole new reality, in the presence of the One who has made all things new.

    Bishop Sartain ended his beautiful letter with these stirring words. I can think of none better to send us forth as witnesses to life. “May we never tire of proclaiming the dignity and worth of every human life. May we never tire of serving the vulnerable and their caregivers with generous hearts. And may we never cease to pray for the day when all people, and all societies, will defend the life of every human from conception to natural death.”

  • Labor Day

    Labor Day

    Today’s readings: Genesis 1:25-2:3, Psalm 90, 1 Thessalonians 4:9-12, Matthew 25:14-30

    5 1 joseph worker2The US Catholic Bishop’s Labor Day Statement reminds us that “Labor Day is a holiday with an important, but sometimes forgotten purpose. It was established in New York in 1882 as a day to honor work and workers and also a time to celebrate the contributions of the American Labor Movement. For too many, Labor Day has become just another day off or a time to buy school supplies, rather than a day to honor the hard work of school teachers, janitors, cafeteria workers, and others. Unfortunately, it often takes a horrible mining disaster or a terrible attack like 9/11 to remind us of the everyday heroism and hard work of people who still labor under the earth, who go into burning buildings, or who contribute to the common good by their everyday work and enterprise.”

    Today we celebrate the grace of human labor. Labor has always been central to the Church’s teaching on the meaning of life. We were created to be workers, sent forth to “be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on the earth.” God never envisioned his creatures to be passive and just soak up the atmosphere. We were created for a purpose, and it is the great project of our lives to figure out that purpose and embrace it.

    Created by God, we have also been gifted by God, given talents of many varieties. Those talents and gifts are never given to us just for ourselves. We cannot bury them in a hole, but must instead reinvest them in the kingdom of God to bring honor and glory to God’s name. All of our work is intended this way, so that our own labors are a participation in the ongoing creation of the world, a participation in the mission that God has entrusted to his creatures.

    It is this divine origin of human labor that has led the Church to teach tirelessly about the dignity and rights of workers. Among the many teaching of the Church on this topic, we are reminded that:

    • The economy exists for the person, not the person for the economy.
    • A fundamental moral measure of any economy is how the poor and vulnerable are faring.
    • All people have a right to life and to secure the basic necessities of life (e.g. food, clothing, shelter, education, health care, safe environment, economic security).
    • All people have the right to economic initiative, to productive work, to just wages and benefit, to decent working conditions, as well as to organize and join union or other associations.

    So we don’t have permission to write off human labor as some kind of necessary evil or a commodity to be bought and sold. We must instead venerate all labor, that of our own efforts and of others. We must also vigorously defend the rights and dignity of workers, particularly of the poor and marginalized. And we must always offer all of this back to our God who created us to be creators with him. May we pray with the Psalmist this day and every day, “Lord give success to the work of our hands!”

  • Monday of the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    There are so many places I could go with today’s first reading: it give us so many opportunities to look at leadership and the spiritual life. But I think what leapt out at me today is that Moses asks Aaron the exact right question: “What did this people ever do to you that you should lead them into so great a sin?” My moral theology professor in seminary, a crusty old Jesuit that never minced any words, told us that leading a person into sin is the worst thing one could do to that person. It would be better, he used to tell us, to murder them in cold blood. Now, I’m not sure I’d tell you to make that choice, but he has a point. Leading another person into sin is an act that erodes that person’s conscience, it takes them out of relationship with God and the Church. God forbid that any of us would ever lead another person into sin.

    I was thinking of this yesterday before I even knew what were today’s readings. Fr. Ted and I were talking on Saturday night about the new Planned Parenthood abortion clinic near Fox Valley Mall. He told me that Planned Parenthood didn’t even tell their contractors how the building would be used, because they knew some contractors would have objected and not worked on the building. Planned Parenthood led those people into sin, just as they lead so many into sin by counseling for abortion. Now, the fact that those contractors didn’t know what the building was used for mitigates their sin, but Planned Parenthood still bears the responsibility for doing that, because leading those people into sin was clearly their intent.

    To all of this, Jesus tells us that we must be the mustard seed and the leaven that brings forth the Kingdom of heaven. Even in the face of so much evil and malicious intent, just a small act of faith on our part can lead people to the Kingdom, which is our role as disciples. Saying a prayer for anyone going to the clinic might soften hearts and lead to life. A small donation to a group like Women’s Choice Services or volunteering in a Project Gabriel ministry might make it possible for a child’s life to be saved. We can be the parable that Jesus speaks of in today’s Gospel, announcing what has lain hidden from the foundation of the world, helping to bring people to the Kingdom, even one soul at a time.

  • Memorial Day

    Memorial Day

    Today's readings: Philippians 4:6-9 & John 14:23-29

    memorialdayMemorial Day originally began in our country as an occasion to remember and decorate the graves of the soldiers who died in the Civil War. Later it became a holiday to commemorate all those who had died in war in the service of our country. This continues to be the main focus of Memorial Day but this day has also become a time to remember not just those who died in war, but also all of our loved ones who have died. It is above all a time to remember.

    As a people, we tend to look for heroes in our lives. Our society gives us all kinds of heroes, most of them really pretty unworthy of the title. How many sports heroes have also been drug users? How many political heroes have also turned out to be corrupt? How many entertainment heroes have found their way into drug or alcohol abuse or have turned out to be flawed in other ways? We are all of us both saints and sinners. We are works in progress hoping for true redemption in Christ. We should therefore look up to those heroes in our lives who have been people of faith, even if they have been flawed in other ways.

    And so we remember today those who have been believers, those who loved God and, as Jesus commanded in today's Gospel, have kept his word. These are the heroes we would do well to pattern our lives after, as St. Paul says in today's first reading: "Finally, brothers [and sisters], whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing what you have learned and received and heard and seen in me. Then the God of peace will be with you."

    Those who have been part of our lives, and the life of our country, who have been people of faith and integrity are the heroes that God has given us. If we would honor them on this Memorial Day, we should believe as they have believed, we should live as they have lived, and we should rejoice that their memory points us to our Savior, Jesus Christ, who is our hope of eternal life.