Homily - 10 September 2017 - Does the dogma live loudly within you?

The Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)

Dear brothers and sisters,

Living as I now do on the near outskirts of civilization, I take great pleasure in watching the sunset from within the back yard of the rectory. I have only been with you just a few weeks, but already there is a great difference in the time the sun passes below the horizon. Whereas once the daylight began to fade after 8:30 p.m., now it begins to fade before 7:30 p.m., making it sometimes difficult for me to be home in time to see the glowing orb descend. As I look at the appearance of the sky, I know the great white death of winter will soon be upon us and my heart grows a little sad; as you see the appearance of the sky, you likely know the harvest will soon be upon us and your hearts probably grow a little happy.

The ancient Anglo-Saxons also knew something about the appearance of the sky and of the natural world. While we say the autumn season will not be upon us for a couple of weeks yet, they said autumn began on the seventh of August because it coincided with their harvest; the Anglo-Saxon word for autumn is haerfest, from which we have our word harvest, a season “bright, laden with fruits.”[1] The harvest, said the Anglo-Saxons, “is a joy to men, when God, holy king of the heavens, causes the earth to give bright fruits for nobles and the needy.”[2] All of this we know simply by looking around us.

Jesus once rebuked the Pharisees and the Sadducees who “asked him to show them a sign from heaven” to prove his identity (Matthew 16:1). He said in answer, “In the evening you say, ‘Tomorrow will be stormy, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to judge the appearance of the sky, but you cannot judge the signs of the times” (Matthew 16:2-3). Though nearly two thousand years have passed since he spoke those words, the truth of his words has not passed and we have sadly not grown wiser. If you do not think a persecution of faithful Christians is slowly building within these United States of America, you simply are not reading the signs of times.

As a priest of Jesus Christ, I have been appointed a watchman and I must warn you of a coming danger (cf. Ezekiel 33:7). The Senate Judiciary Committee sat this past Wednesday to consider the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett - a distinguished lawyer and professor, and faithful Catholic - to the 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals. During her confirmation hearing, a sitting U.S. senator said to her:

Why is it that so many of us on this side have this very uncomfortable feeling that—you know, dogma and law are two different things. And I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma. The law is totally different. And I think in your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for years in this country.[3]

Yes, a nominee for a federal court was told by a sitting U.S. Senator that her deeply held Catholic faith are troubling. She would never have dared to speak such words to a Muslim, a Jew, or a Quaker, but Catholics are fair game.

The Senator went on to say, “You’re controversial because many of us that have lived our lives as women really recognize the value of finally being able to control our reproductive systems. And Roe entered into that, obviously.”[4] She said this despite the judicial nominee’s insistence that “It’s never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge’s personal convictions, whether they derive from faith or anywhere else, on the law.”[5] She said this, moreover, because she is reading the signs of the times. She knows that each year the March for Life grows both longer and younger. She knows Catholics are and have been at the forefront of the growing movement to protect human life at every stage. The senator knows the generations after her will seek to undo the evil she supports and she and her colleagues will not let this happen quietly.

Another senator went so far as to ask the nominee pointedly, “Do you consider yourself an orthodox Catholic?”[6] He asked her this question despite Article VI of the Constitution of the United States, which declares:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Ask yourself this question: If the role of a judge is to apply the law of the land to cases heard before him or her, why is her faith being questioned at all? The question should instead be whether a nominee will apply the law as it is written and nothing more.

That is not what happened this past week in Washington, D.C. The implication behind the two senators’ lines of questioning is that a faithful Catholic is unfit to interpret American law. And if a faithful Catholic is unfit for such a high office, for what else is a faithful Catholic unfit in this country? Anyone who knows the history of this nation knows that Catholics were publicly persecuted for more than a century because it was believed that faithful Catholics could not also be good Americans. We fought long and hard to be accepted in this country and those days of persecution and discrimination may soon be upon us again because we remain unflinching in our recognition of the great dignity of all human life. Therefore, each of us must ask ourselves, “Does the dogma live loudly within me?”

Before we can answer this question, we must know what a dogma is. To put it simply, a dogma is “an article of faith proclaimed by a Council or the Pope as divine revelation contained in Scripture and Tradition.”[7] The dogmas of the Church are contained in the Creed, which we recite every Sunday and holy day. They are statements of faith that must be believed in order to be a Christian. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains, the dogmas “are lights along the path of faith; they illuminate it and make it secure. Conversely, if our life is upright, our intellect and heart will be open to welcome the light shed by the dogmas of faith” (89).

The dogmas of the Church should live loudly within each one of us because they each contain a different aspect of the life of Christ Jesus and of our salvation from sin and death. If the dogmas do not live loudly within us, we can be certain something is not as it should be, that we have hardened our hearts and have not bowed down in true worship or humbly knelt “before the Lord who made us” (cf. Psalm 95:8; 6). To accept the dogmas of the Church, to embrace the truth of the aspects of the life of Jesus and of his Church they enunciate and reveal, is to live the life of a disciple. This is why the dogmas must live loudly within each one of us. Jesus himself, “What I say to you in the darkness, speak in the light; what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops” (Matthew 10:27). The Christian faith is not meant to be kept quiet and so the senator’s attempted insult was paradoxically a mark of high praise.

If someone tells us the dogma lives loudly within us, we should “sing joyfully to the Lord, and acclaim the rock of our salvation” (Psalm 95:1). If someone tells us the dogma does not live loudly within us, we should be concerned because it would mean we have not yet begun to reflect the love of Jesus in our words and deeds. This is why Saint Paul tells us today to “owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another” and for which reason he reminds us that “love does no evil to the neighbor” (Romans 13:8, 10). The dogma will be known to live loudly within us if we listen to Saint Augustine, who said:

The rule of love is that one should wish his friend to have all the good things he wants to have himself and should not wish the evils to befall his friend which he wishes to avoid himself. He shows this benevolence to all men. No evil must be done to any. Love of one’s neighbor works no evil. Let us then love even our enemies as we are commanded, if we wish to be truly unconquered.[8]

Let each of us, then, not harden our hearts to the Lord, but allow them instead to melt before his the gaze of his mercy and be set aflame with the fire of his love. May all who see us or hear of us know us to be men, women, and children who love Jesus. May they know us to be people within whom the dogma lives loudly! Amen.

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[1] Menalogium, in Eleanor Parker, “‘On haerfest ham gelædeđ’: Anglo-Saxon Harvests,” A Clerk of Oxford, 7 August 2016.

[2] Old English Rune Poem, in ibid.

[3] Senator Dianne Feinstein, in “Democrats and ‘Dogma’: Are you now or have you ever been an ‘orthodox Catholic’?”, The Wall Street Journal, 7 September 2017.

[4] Ibid., in Matt Hadro, “Concerns of ‘Anti-Catholic bigotry’ as judicial nominee questioned about faith,” Catholic News Agency, 7 September 2017.

[5] Amy Coney Barrett, in ibid.

[6] Senator Richard Durbin, in ibid.

[7] YouCat: Youth Catechism of the Catholic Church, trans. Michael J. Miller, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 90.

[8] Saint Augustine of Hippo, Of True Religion, 87. In Thomas C. Oden, et al, eds., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, New Testament Vol. VI: Romans (Downers Grove, Illinois: Inter Varsity Press, 1998), 320.

Homily for the First Sunday of Lent - 5 March 2017

N.B.: A few grammatical and editorial corrections have been made to the text of the following homily.

The First Sunday of Lent (A)

Dear brothers and sisters,

Earlier this week, the Holy Father Pope Francis announced his prayer intention for this month of March and asked us a direct question: “How many of you pray for persecuted Christians?”[1] So important is this question to Pope Francis that the Holy See produced a short video to accompany His Holiness’ prayer intention “that persecuted Christians may be supported by the prayers and material help of the whole Church.”

So many of our fellow members of the Body of Christ experience daily something of what the Lord Jesus experienced in the desert, “harsh conditions, utter loneliness, and the gnawing discomforts of hunger” and, more than this, the “assaults of [our] archenemy, the devil.”[2] We make their situation more desperate by frequently giving too little thought to them.

In his brief message accompanying this video, Pope Francis said:

How many people are being persecuted because of their faith, forced to abandon their homes, their places of worship, their lands, their loved ones!

They are persecuted and killed because they are Christians. Those who persecute them make no distinction between the religious communities to which they belong.

I ask you: how many of you pray for persecuted Christians?

Do it with me, that they may be supported by the prayers and material help of all the Churches and communities.

These words of the Holy Father stand as a stark challenge for each us during these days of Lent. Grateful for the riches of his merciful love and confident in the certainty that “because [Jesus] himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted,” so many of our brothers and sisters willingly endure great hardships for the sake of his name, while we all too often grumble about not being allowed to eat meat one day of the week, which we sometimes forget or even give in to social pressure (Hebrews 2:18). It rather puts things in perspective, does it not?

Some Catholics seem to be under the curious impression that they must eat fish on Fridays during Lent, which, of course, is incorrect. While we are obliged to abstain from eating meat each Lenten Friday, this does not mean we have to eat fish; though the eating of fish has because customary, it is not required. Here many ask why we are allowed to eat fish and not meat.

Some – speaking from an anti-Catholic bias – have claimed the Church first allowed us to eat fish on Lenten Fridays to support the fishing industry in the middle ages. This, however, is not true. In his book, A Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England, Ian Mortimer includes a chapter on “What to Eat and Drink.” In this chapter, he notes, quite rightly, that

The medieval Church [that is, the Catholic Church] used to restrict the eating of meat on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, as well as in Advent and Lent and on the vigils on certain saints' feast days. In 1549 Edward VI [a Protestant] reestablishes Fridays and Saturdays as nonmeat days, as well as Lent and other religious feasts. In 1563 Elizabeth's government [which was also Protestant] imposes fasting on Wednesdays too, including a prohibition on slaughtering animals. There is an important difference compared to pre-Reformation [that is, Catholic] times, however: avoidance of meat is no longer a religious observance but secular law. The purpose of fasting on Wednesdays is specifically to encourage the eating of fish, to support the fishing industry.[3]

It was, then, the Protestant government of England and not the Catholic Church that banned meat and allowed fish to support the fishmongers. If this is case, why did the Church allow our ancestors in the faith to eat fish, but not meat, on certain days?

For the Church, the reason for the forbidding of meat and the allowing of fish was less temporal, much simpler, and more spiritual than that of the secular government. In his Liber Festivalis, which he wrote in the late 1400s, John Myre explains that “when God, for Adam’s sin, cursed the earth and the land, he cursed not the water; wherefore it is lawful for a man to eat in Lent that which cometh of the water.” In fact, centuries earlier, Saint Isidore of Seville, who died in 636, wrote in his De Ecclesiasticis Officiis, "We are certainly able to eat fish, because the Lord accepted one after the resurrection. Neither the savior nor the apostles have forbidden this."[4] From this, we see that the non-eating of meat and the eating of fish was – and is – intended as both a penance, a small communal sacrifice offered lovingly to God, and a reminder of God's merciful and victorious love.

When we fail to realize this connection, when we fail to see the value and importance to our fasting and abstinence, it is because we have become, like our first parents, too focused on ourselves and on our own pleasures. “Adam was placed in Paradise, and there, seeking pleasure, he fell.”[5] How often do we, too, fall into sin by seeking pleasure and running from the Cross instead of seeking union with God? Unlike Adam, Jesus “was led into the desert, and there, by constant fasting, overcame the devil.”[6]

In these days of Lent, then, let us not seek our own pleasure, but let us go with Jesus into the desert. Just as he fasted out of love for us, let us fast out of love for our persecuted brothers and sisters who grow more numerous each day.

If we focus our thoughts and our prayers not on ourselves but on others, we, too, can, with the help of divine grace, overcome the sin of self-centeredness and experience the joy of salvation (cf. Psalm 51:17). This is why Pope Francis has asked the Holy Spirit this Lent to “lead us on a true journey of conversion, so that we can rediscover the gift of God’s word, be purified of the sin that blinds us, and serve Christ present in our brothers and sisters in need.”[7]

Let us then ask the Lord to help us acknowledge our sins, to forgive our sins, and to cleanse our hearts so that his compassion may be ours. Moreover, “let us pray for one another so that, by sharing in the victory of Christ, we may open our doors to the weak and poor. Then we will be able to experience and share to the full the joy of Easter.”[8] Amen.

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[1] In “Pope’s Prayer Intention for March: Support Persecuted Christians,” Vatican Radio, 2 March 2017. Accessed 4 March 2017. Available at http://www.news.va/en/news/popes-prayer-intention-for-march-support-for-perse

[2] Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture: The Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2010), 74.

[3] Ian Mortimer, A Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 215.

[4] Saint Isidore of Seville, De Ecclesiasticis Officiis, 1.44[45].2.

[5] Saint Anthony of Padua, Sermon for the First Sunday of Lent, 4. In Paul Spilsbury, trans., Sermons for Sundays and Festivals, Vol. I: General Prologue, Sundays from Septuagesima to Pentecost (Padua: Edizioni Messaggero Padova, 2007), 73.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Pope Francis, Message for Lent 2017, 3.

[8] Ibid.

HRH The Prince of Wales: For many, following Christ is "a daily stark choice between life and death"

For some years now, His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales has remained one of the few persons of high status to speak out against the increasing persecution of Christians throughout the world, particularly in Iraq and Syria. Thus far, his pleas on behalf of our brothers and sisters in Christ and of other persecuted groups have gone largely unanswered.

Three days ago, Prince Charles spoke out yet again and made a plea for us to remember those seeking to escape such persecution.

Please take a few moments to watch the video message he recorded at St. James' Palace:

Please also consider making a donation this Christmas to the papal charity Aid to the Church in Need which has a special concern and care for those suffering for their fidelity to Jesus.

What can we do?

His Eminence Donald Cardinal Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington, recently published a book titled, To the Martyrs: A Reflection on the Supreme Christian Witness. I have not yet read this book, but I am looking to reading it when I find it (ordering things to be sent to Rome isn't always worth the frustration and delay that comes with it).

That said, Patti Armstrong has read the book and wrote a review of it in the National Catholic Register. The part of her review that most interests me concerns what we can do to assist those members of the Body of Christ suffering for the name of Jesus:

“When atrocities happen, there are many guilty parties,” Wuerl stated. “There are perpetrators, and there are those whom Thomas Merton called “guilty bystanders.”

He reminds us that St. Paul taught: “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.  Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (Corinthians 12:26-27).

Rather than feeling powerless, Cardinal Wuerl’s book has inspired me to do more.  He offers suggestions on how every Christian can act on behalf of the suffering members of the body of Christ.

• Pray for them Daily.  “This is the most pressing need. Are we praying that persecuted Christians will remain strong in the face of unimaginable pressures to abandon the Faith?”
• Write Legislators and media.  Where are the voices of parliaments, congresses, campuses, business networks, community leaders talk show hosts, news programs, editorial columns, etc.?  “Each of us simply needs to use whatever forum available to make our voices heard.”
• Contribute financially.  Give to one of the many organizations that help Christians in persecuted lands.
• Seek out refugees in our cities and help them settle in their new home.
• Pray for the persecutors.
• Leave no spiritual stone unturned.  Light a candle, have Masses said, have a group rosary, offer up your own suffering, and pray the Chaplet of Mercy.  These latter suggestions are my own, but the point is, that we can pour our spiritual energy into supporting persecuted Christians.

Good recommendations, all. For your financial contributions, I recommend Aid to the Church in Need, the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, the Franciscan Foundation for the Holy Land, and the Knights of Columbus.

Please, do not forget our brothers and sisters!

More people signed a petition against Target than against the persecution of Christians

The Catholic News Agency reported yesterday that a petition with more than 400,000 signatures was presented on Friday to the office of Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations. CNA quotes the president of CitizenGO, Ignacio Arsuaga, who said the petition implores the United Nations "to declare what’s happening right now with ISIS in Syria and Iraq a genocide."

Now, you might think that such a petition with so many signatures should be a sign of hope that something may actually soon be done to stem the growing tide of persecution against Christians throughout the world. You might thank that people's hearts might finally be feeling compassion for the more than 200 million Christians enduring persecution throughout the world.

However, if you consider that more than 700,000 people signed a petition against Target for its decision to allow customers to use the restroom of their choice, one has to wonder if Christians - at least in the United States - have actually embraced the teaching of the Apostle Saint Paul that "if one member suffers, all suffer together" (I Corinthians 12:26). How can it be that more 300,000 people signed a petition against Target than signed one against the global persecution of Christians?

N.B.: I am not suggesting here that people's concerns about public restrooms is unwarranted; I think it is justified and I share some of these same concerns. However, I do not think this issue more important or of greater significance the persecution happening before our very eyes. The images and the stories are not all difficult to find, some of which the Catholic News Agency shared two days ago.

For more than two years now I've been trying not to think that the majority of people simple do not care about what is happening throughout the world. I can't understand how people could be more concerned about which celebrity is dating whom more than they care about Christians - and others - being crucified, drowned, beheaded, starved, and driven from their homes. But this seems to be the sad reality of the day, as demonstrated in one simple picture I took Friday night while the Bishop of Aleppo spoke at the Fontana di Trevi of the terrible plight of his flock:

What occupies the concerns of modern man? Himself. What will it take before our we hearts away from ourselves toward others? May it please God to so touch our hearts that our apathy turns to true compassion!