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  • Saint Charles Borromeo, bishop

    Saint Charles Borromeo, bishop

    Today’s readings

    Five years ago today, I was ordained a transitional deacon, on my way to becoming a priest.  For me it was a very significant day: it was the feast of St. Charles Borromeo, and I was being ordained at the St. Charles Borromeo Pastoral Center.  So I feel like I have a bit of connection to St. Charles, who is the patron of learning.  I certainly depended on his intercession while in seminary, and there is a statue of him in the seminary chapel.

    St. Charles was a very bright boy and part of a well-connected Italian family.  His uncle eventually became Pope Pius IV, and he made Charles a cardinal, recognizing his intellect and devotion to the church.  He served for a while as the Vatican Secretary of State.  After his elder brother died, Charles made a definite decision to be ordained a priest – in those days one did not need to be a priest to be a cardinal.  Soon after he was ordained a priest, he was consecrated bishop of Milan.

    He didn’t take up residence in Milan for a while, though, because he had convinced the pope to re-start the Council of Trent after it had been suspended for ten years.  He worked hard to respond to the Reformation, and is credited with keeping the Council of Trent on track at a period when it was often in danger of breaking up.

    When he at last took up residence in Milan, he spent a great deal of his time reforming the Church there.  Although the reform was aimed at both clergy and laity alike, specific regulations were drawn up for bishops and other clergy: If the people were to be converted to a better life, the clergy had to be the first to give a good example and renew their apostolic spirit.  He himself was known to give a good example: he lived very simply and shunned any kind of personal luxury, he was known to feed thousands of the poor daily, at great personal cost, and he ministered to the sick and dying in the city during the plague.

    Saint Paul, in our reading from his letter to the Philippians today, said that he considered everything as loss because of the supreme good of knowing Jesus Christ.  Saint Charles Borromeo certainly felt the same, and acted on that word by living simply and caring for those in need.

  • Wednesday of the Thirty-first Week of Ordinary Time

    Wednesday of the Thirty-first Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Our first reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians this morning could well have been written to all of us today, couldn’t it?  He speaks of a crooked and perverse generation, and all we have to do is watch the news to see examples of that in our own day and age.  And so his challenge to them is one that we should take on as well – to “shine like lights in the world,” holding on to the word of life.  We do this by being people of prayer, people of service, people of witness, and above all, people of integrity.  In what way is God calling you to shine like a light in this dark world?

  • The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls Day)

    The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls Day)

    Today’s readings

    This time of year always brings to mind the people I have loved that are no longer with us.  I miss my grandparents, an aunt and an uncle who died way too soon, a great uncle who was a special part of our family.  In a particular way, I miss my dad who died a few years ago and who I always wish was here to talk things over with.  I think about them often, and I am very much aware each time I celebrate Mass that they are with me in a special way.  Yes, with time, the grief has subsided a bit, and the days are a little easier.  But the memories, great memories, are still there, and their absence still leaves a hole in my heart.

    But that’s okay.  That’s how grief works.  It might seem sometimes like it would have been better to live without love, but we know deep down that that’s not true.  Sadness and even death are temporary; love is eternal.  As the Church’s vigil for the deceased tells us, “all the ties of friendship and affection which knit us as one throughout our lives do not unravel with death.” We know that death only separates us for a short time, and even though there is that hole in our heart, the sadness that we feel is way better than never having loved at all, never having had our loved ones in our lives at all.

    Today, the Church gives us the grace of remembering all of our loved ones who have gone before us, marked with the sign of faith, and all the dead whose faith is known to God alone.  The Church is great in wisdom in giving us this feast every year.  Because even though on this day, we might shed a few tears, still we will have the grace of remembering the ones who have given us life, given us wisdom, those who have been Christ to us, those who have made God’s love tangibly present in our lives.

    But sometimes our relationships weren’t like that: sometimes there was abuse or a lack of love that gives people mixed feelings on a day such as this.  Even if the memories aren’t the best, and even if we struggle with the pain of past hurts mixed with the sorrow of grief, there is grace in remembering today.  Maybe this day can be an occasion of healing, even if it’s just a little bit.  Maybe our tears, mixed with the saving Blood of Christ, can wash and purify our wounded hearts and sorrowful souls.

    And I have to tell you that it won’t all go away today.  We are left with tears and loneliness, and that empty place at the table, and that hole in our heart, maybe even the pain of unresolved conflicts. But sadness and pain absolutely do not last forever, because death and sin have been ultimately defeated by the Blood of Christ. We can hope in the day that our hearts will be healed, and we will be reunited with our loved ones forever, with all of our hurts healed and relationships purified, in the kingdom that knows no end. The Eucharistic Prayer itself will tell us today that there will come a day when “every tear will be wiped away. On that day, we shall see you, our God, as you are. We shall become like you and praise you for ever through Christ our Lord, from whom all good things come.”

    And so we pray: eternal rest grant unto all of our departed loved ones, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.  May the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.  Amen.

  • The Solemnity of All Saints

    The Solemnity of All Saints

    (Mass with the school children)

    Today’s readings

    Did you hear that? Jesus says, “Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (And) blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.” Now I want to see a show of hands here: how many of you would like to be insulted, persecuted, and had mean things said about them? Nobody? Well…

    These days, not too many of us have to suffer like that for our faith. In the country in which we live, faith is more or less accepted, even though it’s not always lived out very well. If you’re a Christian, not too many people are going to give you a hard time or even kill you. But it wasn’t always that way. Especially back in the very early days of the Church, right after Jesus died and rose and ascended into heaven, things were hard for Christians. They were thought of as some kind of evil people or troublemakers. People were always trying to get them to give up their belief in Jesus. And when they wouldn’t give it up, they were often put to death.

    We call people who are put to death for their faith martyrs. There have been martyrs all through the history of the church: people who believed in Jesus and wouldn’t give that up just because people threatened them.  The Church has always believed that these people went right to heaven, because of what Jesus tells us today: “Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Right away, these people were remembered with great fondness and eventually there were enough of them that the church celebrated a day in remembrance of all the martyrs.

    Eventually, the Church believed that you didn’t necessarily need to die for the faith to be holy. And so the idea of saints began to include people who were popes, bishops, priests, nuns, and lay people who had done wonderful things or who had been known to be very holy people and dedicated to the faith. These are people who were poor in spirit, meek, hungry for righteousness, merciful to others, peacemakers, and all the rest. We started to look at all these people as role models, and we remembered them after their death.  We look for them to pray for us, to help us grow in holiness too.

    Each of us has a patron saint. Usually it’s a saint with the same name as you, or maybe you’ve picked some other saint whose story appeals to you for some reason. Some of us here have dressed up as patron saints.  All of these wonderful saints help us to know Jesus better. That’s why they are with us. These saints pray for us and with us every day of our lives. When we celebrate the Eucharist together here at Mass, they are praying with us up in heaven. Whenever we think about them, we can learn a little more about what it means to be close to Jesus and to be holy.

    But even these patron saints aren’t the only ones we celebrate today. Lots of saints have their own feast days, like St. Francis and St. Petronille.  But today is the feast day for the many unofficial saints: people who lived holy lives but never really attracted any attention. They might even be people you knew. Maybe these saints were your grandparents or great grandparents whose prayer life and witness has taught you about the faith. Maybe they were those who served in our armed forces heroically and with integrity. Maybe they were your neighbors who worked and lived with honesty and grace. Maybe she was the lady you knew from Church who was probably in pain just before she died, but never complained and was always cheerful. These holy men and women have made their families and their homes holy, and have painted our communities with holiness. They may never find their names on the list of the official saints, but they too are part of what we call the Communion of Saints.

    And the real good news of this celebration of All Saints today is that we are all called to be saints! Every one of us! It’s not enough to just think about the saints and admire them for being holy, poor in spirit, peacemakers, and all the rest. We have to become those things ourselves. Each of us is called to live a holy life. We do that by reading the Bible, by praying, by going to Mass, by becoming responsible people, by loving all the people in our lives, by reaching out to those less fortunate than ourselves, by staying away from anything that makes us love people less. We may not be saints yet, but we are on our way. Every day of our lives is a chance to become holier, to become that saint that God created us to be.

    And who knows, maybe in a couple hundred years, some other school children will be dressing up as one of you…

  • Saturday of the Thirtieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Saturday of the Thirtieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled,
    but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

    This is the second time this week that we have heard these words.  The first was on Sunday, in connection with the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the temple.  Then, on Wednesday, we heard something very similar: “For behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.”  If we miss the opportunity to grow in humility this week, then we are in serious trouble indeed!

    Think about what Jesus is asking the guests of the leading Pharisee to do.  He wasn’t just asking them to give their place to some other leading Pharisee, or someone socially more important than they were.  No, he was asking them to do something far more difficult: the “more distinguished” one among them was one who was in need or marginalized, people we would have a hard time greeting, let alone giving them our place at the dinner table.

    Think about going to a banquet and giving your honored place to someone homeless, an immigrant, a foster teenager – would you be so ready to even have dinner with these people?  Think about actually moving over to give them the honored place!  And Jesus has the audacity to ask us to do just that.

    Jesus humbled himself to become something far less than what he was, so that we could become far more than we could ever be.  He certainly has the right to ask us to do the same so that God’s will would be done on earth as it is in heaven.

    So who is God going to call us to minister to in some deed of generosity or word of encouragement or act of forgiveness today?  Will we be able to give our place to these people?  Will we be humble enough to move over so that they can move up?  If so, maybe we will find that God will exalt us all.

    “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled,
    but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

  • Saints Simon and Jude, Apostles

    Saints Simon and Jude, Apostles

    Today’s readings

    Today, we celebrate two apostles who, as often is the case, are relatively unknown except that they were followers of Jesus.  Jude is called Judas in Luke and in the Acts of the Apostles.  Matthew and Mark call him Thaddeus.  We have in the New Testament the letter of Jude, which scholars say 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.

  • Wednesday of the Thirtieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Wednesday of the Thirtieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    What does it take for us to be known by God?  After all, God forbid we’d be among those to whom he says: “I do not know where you are from.”  I think the answer comes in that last verse of the reading: “For behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.”  Which goes very much counter to our culture which encourages us to put “me first” – or even, “me only.”  If we wish to enter the kingdom, we have to identify ourselves with those who are marginalized, who are last in the eyes of the world.  For those are the ones who are first in the eyes of God.

  • Tuesday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time

    Tuesday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    The injunction for wives to be submissive to their husbands, given in our first reading, certainly offends our modern. That’s just not the kind of thing we say in this society –now.  Yet this was the norm in the society in which St. Paul ministered.  So that command would hardly have raised an eyebrow. What would have been shocking in St. Paul’s time was the reciprocal injunction to husbands to love their wives as they loved their own bodies. Indeed, St. Paul’s point was not to rile either husbands or wives, but more to promote the living of harmonious family relationships.

    So how would it look now? Today, I think St. Paul would insist that husbands and wives would live as equal partners, showing mutual respect, and living the love of Christ in their relationship. St. Paul would certainly say that men and women should work together to foster families in which God’s love could be shown and made manifest in the world through them. The real point of this reading, we must remember, is that the love of husband and wife echoes the love between Christ and the Church.

    May we all love one another as Christ loves his bride, the Church.

  • Monday of the Thirtieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Thirtieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    “Loose lips sink ships.”  That’s a saying that I learned somewhere in my early elementary school life.  I don’t think I fully understood what it meant at the time – all I appreciated was that it told me to keep my mouth shut.  But as I’ve lived and matured, I know very well that frivolous talk can be hurtful and even dangerous.  Our gift of speech is an important one: through it we communicate with each other and it is the basis of our being able to work and live in society.  But using speech in the wrong way can cause a whole host of problems.  We’ve all probably been in the midst of that in some way at some time in our lives.

    And so Saint Paul’s words to the Ephesians are probably good ones for us to hear today:

    Immorality or any impurity or greed must not even be mentioned among you,

    as is fitting among holy ones,

    no obscenity or silly or suggestive talk, which is out of place

    All of us, who are called to be God’s holy ones, have a very important responsibility to use our gift of speech wisely.  We must not engage in idle, frivolous, or even obscene speech, because this is out of place for those who follow the Lord.  But what I think is so important is what Saint Paul says needs to be on the lips of God’s holy ones – and that is thanksgiving.

    Big deal, right, of course we can speak about thanksgiving.  But the Greek word that is translated “thanksgiving” here is eucharistia – and we all know what that means.  The Eucharist – which is our thanksgiving – is always to be on our lips.  So that’s the lens by which we ought always to view the words we say: are our words Eucharist?  Are they thanksgiving?  Because those are the only words we need to be saying.

  • The Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    The thing is, you know, the Pharisee was quite right. His righteousness was beyond reproach. He has been innocent of greed, dishonesty and adultery. He has been more pious than even the law requires. Fasting was only required once a year, on the Day of Atonement, but he fasts twice a week. Tithes were only required to be paid on one’s earnings, but he pays them not only on his earnings, but also on all of his possessions, basically, he paid the tithe on his total net worth. He was probably quite right about his own righteousness, and he may well have been right about the failures of righteousness in the tax collector as well.

    And, in those days, tax collectors were despicable human beings. They worked for the Romans, were in league with the foreign occupation. They were told what they had to collect, and whatever the collected over and above that was theirs to keep. Now certainly, they were entitled to some income, so a modest markup would have been understandable – that was how they were paid. But mostly the modest markup was far from modest, and bordered on extortion. The tax collector in our parable today does not deny that he has participated in those activities. He does not even pray about anything he has done except for one thing: he has sinned. “O God, be merciful to me a sinner,” he says.

    Both of these men were right in what they said about themselves. From an objective point of view, they have presented themselves honestly before God and everyone. So what’s the problem? Where has the Pharisee gone wrong and how did the tax collector end up justified?

    It’s pretty easy to see what went wrong when we step back and look at the nature of their prayers. The Pharisee uses the word “I” four times. It’s all about him. The tax collector does not use the word “I” at all; he uses the word “me.” What’s the difference? Grammar lesson here: “I” is the subject, “me” is the object. So, for the Pharisee, it was all about what he had done through his own righteousness, and not about what God had done or could do. For the tax collector, it wasn’t about him at all. He acknowledges his sinfulness and asked God to have mercy. And that’s the second difference. The tax collector asks for something, namely mercy, and receives it: he goes home justified. The Pharisee asks for nothing, and that’s just what he gets: nothing.

    So I think today’s Liturgy of the Word is asking us a very important question: have you been aware of your need for a Savior? Because sin is exhausting. Anyone who has struggled with sin, or a pattern of sin, in their lives can tell you that. Those who have been dragged down by any kind of addiction or who have tried to work on a character flaw or striven to expel any kind of vice from their lives often relate how exhausting the sin can be. Sin saps our spiritual energy, weakens our resolve to do good, and causes us to turn away in shame from family, friends, and all those whose spiritual companionship we need in order to grow as Christians. That’s just the way sin works.

    But today’s Liturgy gives us very good news. Sirach says in today’s first reading that “The prayer of the lowly pierces the clouds; it does not rest till it reaches its goal, nor will it withdraw till the Most High responds, judges justly and affirms the right, and the Lord will not delay.” We see that very clearly in the parable in today’s Gospel. The lowly tax collector cannot even bring himself to raise his eyes to heaven. “O God, be merciful to me a sinner,” he says. It is the perfect Act of Contrition. He acknowledges his sin, he prays for God’s mercy. And God responds. He can go home justified.

    Just like the Pharisee and the tax collector, we have come to this holy placed to pray today. What is our prayer like?  Are there sins that have become a pattern for us? Do we have addictions that need to be worked out? Have we failed in some way in our daily life? What dark corners of our lives desperately need God’s light and God’s mercy? In what ways do we need a Savior? Have we asked for God’s mercy, or have we been like the Pharisee, asking for nothing and receiving exactly that?

    Pray the tax collector’s prayer after me: “O God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”