Homily

FR. BILL'S HOMILY AT TENT MASS (sorry for background noise, best I could do.)

If you take Jesus seriously, he is one of three things: 1. Evil, possibly possessed by a demon.  2. A totally crazed person who doesn't know what He is talking about (insane).  3. Who He says He is: God.
Lewis says the one thing you can't do with Jesus is exactly what people do today: water Him down and push His "eccentric" comments about divinity to the side, separating them from His "more sensible" teachings on the moral life and say: yah he was a good guy and we should admire Him.  You can't make Him just some kind of moral-spiritual guru without being dishonest about the rest of who He was and what He did and said.  No. you either 1. are afraid of Him, 2. pat Him on the head as a painless cuckoo, or 3. worship Him as God.

Pope Pius X, like Peter today, declares his faith in Christ as the one source of true human flourishing, as the Messiah who came to restore God's people, and even, as Peter would come to realize, the Lord and God Himself who loved His people so much as to become man and die on a cross to raise us to new life.  This is the point of Pius X's motto: Instaurare omnia in Christo. (Renew all things in Christ)

That also then, must be our anthem of life, our battle cry, our daily breath: You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.

Now 100 years after P. Pius X's death, we celebrate the same mystery here that He did.  We do not admire Jesus as some nice spiritual guru who gave us some good advice.  No, we worship Him as God.  Jesus is for us the Lord of our lives.  We say with Peter, "You are the Christ."

And with Pope Pius X, who by God's design was the instrument of a new springtime for the Eucharist at the center of the Christian life, we  gather especially for this great mystery of the Eucharist.

P. Pius XII, on the feast of our patron's canonization, said these words:
In the profound vision which he had of the Church as a society, Pius X recognized in the Eucharist the power to nourish substantially its interior life, and to raise it high above all other human associations. Only the Eucharist, in which God gives Himself to man, can lay the foundations of a social life worthy of its members, cemented by love more than by authority, rich in its works and aimed at the perfection of individuals: a life, that is, “hidden with Christ in God.”

A providential example for today’s world, where earthly society is becoming more and more a mystery to itself, and anxiously searches for a way give itself a soul! Let it look, then, for its model at the Church, gathered around its altars. There in the sacrament of the Eucharist mankind truly discovers and recognizes its past, present, and future as a unity in Christ. Conscious of, and strong in his solidarity with Christ and his fellow men, each member of either Society, the earthly and the supernatural one, will be able to draw from the altar an interior life of personal dignity and personal worth, such as today is almost lost through insistence on technology and by excessive organization of the whole of existence, of work and even leisure. Only in the Church, the holy Pontiff seems to repeat, and though Her, in the Eucharist which is ‘‘life hidden with Christ in God,” is to be found the secret and source of the renewal of society’s life.

Thus for us, in this Eucharist, we rely on the prayers and the faith of our patron, as we say anew today the words of St. Peter, "You are the Christ, Lord Jesus, and I place my life in Your hands!"