Subversive power - God's wisdom

Homily recording (Sat night): Click Here

This feast of the exultation of the cross in many ways is the foundation of our parish. This Catholic community would not exist, unless it were for devotion to the holy cross, inspiring a congregation of religious priests and brothers that started in France, moved over to the United States and started a University in this area, establishing a strong Catholic presence. This parish was run by priests of the Holy Cross order for about 40 years and for much longer before that on the farm.

Paul speaks of the cross as a folly of God that is greater than human wisdom.

I am just starting a book called quiet which speaks to the subtle and often unnoticed power of being introverted in a society where extraversion and flaring personality are so often praised.  One example of such quiet strength is Rosa Parks, an absolute introvert that became a critical witness of the African-American civil rights movement.  Human wisdom wouldn't expect such a humble, simple person to be the watershed of such a huge event in American history. But that just shows how God works.

I just finished once again the first episode of Father Robert Barron's Catholicism series, an excellent set of DVDs containing 10 one-hour sessions on the Catholic faith.  Standing in the coliseum where Christians were once persecuted at the behest of the emperor, Father Barron talked about the power of God through Christ's cross and resurrection, and told a little anecdote about World War II. Pope Pius the 12th, after making some scathing criticism's of Joseph Stalin and Russia, apparently retorted back, "... And how many divisions does Pius the 12th have?" But the power of the Spirit is greater then the power of the sword, as we see in the fact that the successor of Joseph Stalin was overturned and overthrown by the successor of Pius the 12th: John Paul the second, who stopped the flow and broke the foundation of communism without a single bullet.

He spoke of the cross as a very interesting new type of battle that God uses to stop the terrible cycle of violence that we so often experience in our world. The early Christians would use the cross as a symbol of victory, even though the cross was so clearly a symbol of defeat and destruction and fear. This was a way that they would simply show them what for, to get in their face so to speak. It is a subversive act because the Romans would use the cross precisely to instill fear, saying "if you mess up, you will end up like this." The Christians held up the cross and said "we aren't afraid of that. You can't hurt us, God has already conquered death!" 

 I think the same thing applies to what has happened in recent weeks, and what  happened 13 years ago this past Thursday, in regard to terrorism.  What is going to conquer such a nebulous monster as the corruption and perversion of the human spirit? Nothing other than the power of God in the witness of his Son's victory over evil by the cross! Certainly indeed we respond prudently to stop the spread of this evil, with the guidance of our church's leaders, face-to-face. But at the same time, we must not give in to the mind of this world: that the force of power and domination alone is enough, when we know that God's power is not shown in such a way.

Another important part of today's salinity is the transformation of human suffering. So many people in our world despair about suffering. Euthanasia, suicide, and other illnesses are clear signs that people cannot make meaning out of suffering. They get caught in it, and fall to despair.

But today we recall that Jesus suffered. She knows intense pain, intense isolation, intense betrayal, absolute rejection and animosity. He took all of that upon himself, bearing our curses, and now has turned them into something that can save us. If only we do not run away from suffering. We cannot avoid it, we were made for it to some degree. Our longing heart finds suffering in our world no matter what path we take, no matter how good we have it.  Suffering comes to every single one of us, so what are we going to do with it? If we want it to eat us alive, it can. If we wanted to draw us closer to God, to make us live happier lives, to transform our vision of the world, and to teach us to love, it can. Today from this cross we receive that sacrament of love poured out for us.   Even in an imperfect world where our hearts will always suffer, let us allow the holy cross to be the source and center of our lives and of our joys. 

Capital punishment in some ways is a sign of weakness within a society, since  it is a testament that they cannot truly win over a person's mind & soul.

In Anticipation of Tomorrow's Feast - My Friend's Cross and the New Life it Brings

Please watch this video if you haven't seen or heard about the Comeau family.  Also, a homily about Josh.

Stop and pray a Hail Mary for them all.

In Christ,
~Fr. Terry


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Fraternal Correction

Homily audio from 10:30 Mass: Click Here

          In the  Lord of the Rings, one of the greatest images for the Church is found in the house of healing after the great battle.  There, the king heals, and the wounds of the past darkness are healed.  People are healed together and through each other.

          Today the readings speak of what is traditionally known as "fraternal correction," which literally means setting your brother back on the straight or right path.  In our world we might refer to it as calling someone out or to the carpet, or "being real," but the readings make a clear emphasis that this is not about a power-game to humiliate another or put ourselves on higher ground; rather, it comes from a sincere concern for the good of another.

          We talked about this a lot in seminary and learned how to practice it to some degree.  I remember one retreat the director spoke about the need for genuine correction in these words (kind of paraphrased): if your brother seminarian - who one day may be called by God to be a priest and be called "father" after God the Father and be called "another Christ" (alter christus) - if he is out of line and won't listen to reason when you try to speak to him, fraternal charity (in fact what Paul talks about today as the only true fulfillment of the law) charity demands that you take that brother out for a walk, and beat the snot out of him and replace it with some good sense!

          Now that was really a joke but he was stressing that we often quit too early on correction, and sometimes the cost of silence is too high, like with a priest, who role is so critical for people's spiritual lives!!

          Perhaps a better example of today's gospel is what I heard a friend do at a Notre Dame football game.  A couple people in the stands were clearly intoxicated, disruptive, and using foul language.  He  and those with him turned around and told the men to cut it out. They snapped back and in a minute or so were back at it.  They corrected them again, with others in the area joining in, and it worked for a fee more minutes. But after the mouths kept going they got the ND ushers who took those fools away.  Like Jesus says, "if they still don't listen, then treat them as you would one of the USC fans." That's the new translation for the word "pagan."

          Fraternal correction is one of the casualties of individualism and relativism in our country.  With the weakening of universal truth - especially in morality - people feel it is more difficult to confront problems and bring them face-to-face with another.  On top of that, individualism has created such isolation that we might not even feel connected and close enough to many people in order to call them to something greater.

          We as Christians are meant to be much more than that.  We are meant to be different from the rest of the world, and different in a good way.  The Christian community of Matthew's time saw the whole Church as a family. They called each other brothers and sisters just like we hear St. Paul say almost every week in the second reading.  And they followed Jesus' wisdom for caring for "the family" by observing fraternal correction.    

          In the family this should be easiest, but even that is not always easy.  We can at times try to correct our siblings, and hopefully we provide direction for our children.   A family is supposed to be on the same team and working for each other's health, such that one member's success is everyone's, and my sibling's spiritual illness is not her problem, but our problem. 

          Saint Paul uses the image of the body to emphasize how we are all connected, and how we rely on each other.  If one part suffers, all parts suffer, so we should work to remove any poisons or ailments from our body.

          And that connectedness and mutual relationship that a body has within itself is critical for fraternal correction.  We have to trust each other in order to take constructive criticism.  If we don't know that the other person wants what is best for us (and if we don't have the humility to confess that we aren't perfect) then we will not be able to move forward.  In many ways it is that stability that comes from trusting each other that sets the foundation for healthy correction.  So we have to spend time with each other, and we have to be vulnerable with who we really are.  With the erosion of family bonds by both divorce and the hyperactive modern lifestyle, how much time do we allow the family to relax together??  Do we truly share our lives and talk about our passions and aspirations, working out our problems together in mutual support?

          That bond that we need to do all this starts here at this Mass.  When we began Mass, we confessed our sins honestly.  We then let ourselves be taught by the word of God and soon we will profess the faith that unites us.  We can trust each other and help each other especially because in the Eucharist, we are one body in Christ, who wants us to be a house of healing for the world.

Homily for Sunday

Audio from Sat night: click here

Today's Gospel passage follows directly from last week.  Matthew reminds us very clearly of our weak humanity in the example of St. Peter.  One moment he claims Jesus as the Christ, the next he is telling Jesus what he thinks it means to be "the Christ."  All of the sudden, after feeling like he's on top of the world, Simon, whose new name is now Peter as head of the Church, gets called "Satan."  That's almost as bad as biking into Rome on the feast of Saints Peter & Paul and receiving a blessing from Pope Francis only to find out 15 minutes later that all your luggage is stolen! (if this could ever happen, right?)  No, Peter clearly has it way worse.  But isn't that possible for all of us?: One week we are good, the next we are on our faces.

Despite our pomp and circumstance, our big words and prideful actions, we are awfully small and not as strong as we think we are.  We are fragile and can do really senseless things without humbly placing ourselves beneath God's grace.

Ultimately, pride and a fear of the Cross get in the way of our true happiness, to be found only in humility and love as self-sacrificial gift.  We have to like Paul says, be transformed by the renewal of our minds.  Western society, especially in the United States, founded on individual dignity and rights, has idolized the self: whatever I want, my rights, my dreams, my sense of truth and of right and wrong.  This must be transformed, Paul says, into spiritual worship: God's will and dreams and truth and right (which ultimately are so much more beautiful, life-giving, and satisfying than anything we can come up with).

But this renewal is not easy.  Even I as a priest can, in my weaker moments, be afraid of the cross.  And as we grow up we become very capable of rationalizing how we run from the Cross and embrace our pride.  As a priest, I could easily say: "I've sacrificed X, Y, and Z for God so I know the cross - I've done my part."  But that's not really true.  Those sacrifices aren't real until I live year-in and year-out in faithfulness to them.  The same thing for marriages.  The vows made one day only take meaning in real life: the Cross is either embraced or abandoned when the spouses have to choose each other again and again, especially when it becomes difficult.  The reason that more marriages end and more priests run away from their flocks in the first five or ten years than in the next thirty or even fifty is because it is there that they choose to follow their fears or to follow their Lord.

And even if following Christ means obeying His Will, carrying our Cross and dying to ourselves, we will discover, especially at Mass, that we are not alone, and that the story does not end there.  Here from this altar is the fruits of the Christ's Cross: His resurrected body and blood given to us, a love stronger than death.  As we profess with Peter that Jesus is the Christ, the Lord of our Life, we find that we are never alone, that our suffering has meaning, and we taste the promise that awaits those who love as He loved.

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!"

Homily for Sunday

LISTEN HERE

Sometimes God waits.  Sometimes He doesn't give us an answer right away in order to test our faith.  It can be hard to take but it ultimately helps us to live closer to Him.

Saturday morning (yesterday) in Chicago for a wedding of a high school buddy and a wonderful lady from Louisiana, I ran from the hotel to my uncle's coffee shop.  Since he was gone, I had a nice little talk with one of the baristas.  I told her I was a priest etc, and she asked the question about how I felt about not marrying. I've shared my thoughts on it as I have many times before, and finished it with a funny quote I've heard from another priest. When a married man asked him about how he could do that, the priest made it very easy to follow.  He said, "Think of it this way: when you got married, you said no to every other woman in the world except your wife.  Well when I got ordained, I said no to every other woman in the world, and your wife."

But this is in fact a serious question for anyone discerning their future vocation: is God calling me to a fruitful love in married life or in a life of consecrated celibacy??  For me I always felt like I could be celibate or married - I could be happy in either way of life and God could help me to live both freely, totally, faithfully, and fruitfully.

In seminary, this was a long, slow question for me.  It felt like forever.

I wanted an answer, but it really took me years to get to that point of saying, "Yeah, I think this is what God wants me to do."

Years. Waiting for years for one of the most important decisions of your life is not fun.  It eventually demands a lot of dying, of abandoning to what you want,  your plans and timeline, and finally realizing in a deep way that you have to let God be God because you are not.

I would say that is my point today and one of the messages of today's gospel.  This Gospel seems tough for our western ears to hear because it seems Jesus is treating this woman like dirt.  But he is not, really.  He is just testing her faith. She is a pagan who is more a true Israelite than many of the Jews. Paul in Romans is very interested in how the Gentiles are saved, and we see the same dynamic in the Gospel: Jesus came for the Jews first, and later the Gospel will go to the pagans.  But this woman shatters those typical lines that we draw, as she manifests a faith greater than so many others.  As her words don't earn an immediate response but only bring on a nagging sense of unworthiness and dismissal, she perseveres.  She gets louder until she gets a response.  She is a true member of Israel.

I'm sure many of you had to wait and wait for an answer to a deep question in your life.  Does that mean that God doesn't care? No.  Does it mean that you should just drop the subject? No.  It means you are invited to place an even deeper trust and faith in Him.  A simple faith that says, like the woman today: "Lord, help me."  Here is where I am hurting or in need.  Please, do what you will.  I know you know best.

If you can do that, then the Lord will indeed respond to your request - in His own time, in His own way.  But it will bring you closer to Him and therefore closer to your true happiness.

Homily for 19th Sunday of OT

I RECORDED THIS HOMILY AT THE 10:30 MASS - CLICK HERE TO LISTEN

Fear is often where God is
Our Holy Father receives a lot of accolades for his stunning use of symbolic action to teach and preach the Gospel.  The actions, it is said, speak louder than words.  I wonder, do we often listen to his words?  Do you think he chooses them with any less care and concern?  I think we should read what he has written and hear what he says.  I wonder how many people in the world, if they really listened to what Pope Francis says, would be shocked and afraid by what he asks of us?  What he is emphasizing and what he challenges of us is not always easy to stomach:
- "How I would like a Church that is poor and for the poor!"
- We must "get out of ourselves and go toward the peripheries."
- (at Lampedusa) "the globalization of indifference has taken from us the ability to weep!" 
- "It is not a good strategy to be at the center of a sphere. To understand we ought to move around, to see reality from various viewpoints."  
- "In virtue of their baptism, all the members of the People of God have become missionary disciples"

Paul says he is sad for the Jews - those who should have "gotten it" and were once a part of God's great plan but turned away when they were challenged. Perhaps he, like Pope Francis, would be saddened by those Catholics who treat the church and their faith like a time card (in and out and back to real world) or like  aspirin (take a few only when you need them).

I can become afraid with the Pope's challenges.  All of us have a limit to our comfort zones.  Mine is short in many ways.  Sometimes I feel courageous but in other areas not at all.

I can go to a hospital, kneel down and hold the hands of a dying person even when they might be very contagious.  I can kiss the forehead of a 70-something woman waiting for cancer to take her home to Jesus. But I have a whole lot of trouble giving a holy card to the person at the cash register or saying "I'll pray for you" to a stranger.  Or going to that person that doesn't look all-together and speaking to them face to face, learning their story, bringing up how God can help them.  That's hard for me, and we all have things that are challenging demands.

Then I think of what Christians in other areas have to go through and I feel like my challenges are nothing in comparison.  The Christians in the Iraqi city of Ninneveh are leaving without food, water, or money in order to keep their lives.  Churches are bombed and people are threatened with death for becoming Christians in Nigeria.  No matter where we are and what we are doing, there's always the temptation to give in to fears.  But we were not given a Spirit of fear.

But fear is present in today's readings, and God is there alongside it. Elijah is literally running for his life away from an army, and now God calls him to go back and carry out His work again without fear. In the Gospel, the apostles carry out the challenging demand to cross the sea against the storm, their fears bring them the greatest consolation.  In the midst of those fears, knowing that Christ has called them to it, they find Him right there in it.

Jesus says "do not be afraid."  God is with you in your fears; He is greater than them; He is in control of the chaos we often experience. When doing His will is difficult, look around and find Him and listen to His sometimes still, small whisper that says "do not be afraid!"
What storms do you have in your life right now?  Find Jesus in them, and like Peter put your faith in Him, then the storms won't matter anymore.