Homily - 31 May/1 June 2025 - The Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord

The Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord

Dear brothers and sisters,

It seems a strange question to ask of the Apostles: “Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky” (Acts1:11)? They had just seen Jesus “lifted up” and taken from their sight” (Acts1:9). The one to whom they devoted three years of their lives “blessed them [and] parted from them and was taken up to heaven” (Luke 24:31). They had never seen this happen with anyone else. What else were they supposed to do except stare up in wonder and awe? What would you have done?

MS M.648 fol. 123v

There is an important lesson for us in Jesus’ Ascension into heavenly glory, one we too often overlook; it is the importance of the human body. If the creation of the human body by God was not enough for us to recognize the dignity of the human body; if the breath of God being breathed into the human body to enliven it was not enough for us to recognize the dignity of the human body; if the only Son of God taking on human flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary was not enough for us to recognize the dignity of the human body; then surely the fact that the Son of God and Son of Mary took his human flesh with him into heaven should be enough to make us understand the dignity of the human body. It is so important that Jesus did not leave it behind or discard it; he took it with him because, being human, he could not do otherwise.

Today’s Solemnity, aside from highlighting an important moment in the life of the Lord, focuses our attention on what it means to be human: “The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual.”[1] To put it perhaps more simply, to be human is to be a union of body and soul. This is why the Second Vatican Council said,

Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity. Through his very bodily condition he sums up in himself the elements of the material world. Through him they are thus brought to their highest perfection and can raise their voice in praise freely given to the Creator. For this reason man may not despise his bodily life. Rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and hold it in honor since God has created it and will raise it up on the last day.[2]

This is why the sin of abortion is so unspeakably horrendous and why turning someone’s earthly remains into jewelry is so dreadful; both deny the God-given dignity of the human body. This is also why the sin of physician-assisted suicide or so-called euthanasia – literally, “good death” – is so unspeakably horrendous.

This past Thursday, the Illinois House of Representatives debated SB1950, a piece of legislation titled, “Sanitary Food Preparation.” Despite being described as “AN ACT concerning health,” much of the bill concerns the enshrinement in law of a medical doctor’s legal ability to violate the Hippocratic Oath he or she took to do no harm; instead, the legislation seeks, at the patient’s request, to allow physicians to do great harm by prescribing medication to actively kill his or her patient.

What does a food sanitation bill have to do with suicide, you might ask. Nothing, except by way of a legislative amendment; namely House Amendment 2, which is nearly eleven times as long as the original bill. SB1950 cleared the House of Representatives on a purely partisan vote; it now moves to the Illinois Senate for approval by that body before going to the Governor’s desk.

Before I say more, let me first say a word to those who have contemplated or attempted suicide: “May the eyes of your hearts be enlightened, that you may know what is the hope that belongs to his call” (Ephesians 1:18). You are loved by God. You have been made in love, by love, and for love. Loved suffered for you. Love died for you. Love rose from the dead for you. Love ascended into heaven for you. Love did all this so you might know how very much you are loved.

At his inaugural Mass, Pope Leo XIV proclaimed, “Brothers and sisters, this is the hour for love!”[3] This is truly the hour for us to love each other, especially those who live without hope. This is the hour for us to open ourselves to receive love from one another and from God. This is also the hour for us to share love with those who feel far away from love.

Even as the government rightly puts resources behind suicide prevention – and has even recently created a mental health hotline to prevent suicides – the General Assembly wants to legalize one form of suicide. What sense does this make? How can any suicide be justified and encouraged?

The State of New York is also considering legalizing euthanasia, which led Timothy Cardinal Dolan to point out this legal double-standard:

I can’t help but shake my head in disbelief at the disparity in official responses. Our government will marshal all its resources to save the life of one hopeless and despondent man. Yet it may conclude that some lives aren’t worth living — perhaps due to a serious illness or disability — and we will hand those despondent women and men a proverbial loaded gun and tell them to have at it.[4]

 

The Archbishop of New York urged lawmakers to prevent - and not to assist - suicide.

Here in Illinois, Blase Cardinal Cupich, the Archbishop of Chicago, also called out the double standard in healthcare, saying:

I have to ask why, in a time when growing understanding of the deteriorating mental health of the U.S. population – and particularly among our youth – caused the country to create the 988 mental health crisis line, we would want to take this step to normalize suicide as a solution to life’s challenges. While the bill sets parameters for assisted suicide, the data from places where assisted suicide is available are clear. Rates of all suicide went up after the passage of such legislation. These rates are already unacceptably high, and proposed cutbacks in medical care funding will add to the burden faced by those contemplating suicide.[5]

It makes no sense at all to encourage people away from suicide by means of a weapon or a bridge and at the same time to tell them they may commit suicide through a physician.

House Amendment 2 purports to deal with “the full range of end-of-life care options;” what it actually amounts to, however, is purposeful and sanctioned medical killing.[6] No sane person who understands the human person as a union of body and soul could ever refer to killing someone as “end-of-life care.” Even the government does not do this, which is why the mental health hotline exists.

Wherever such legislation has been passed, both within and without the United States of America, physically and mentally ill patients have been pressured to commit suicide with the help of a doctor to save money or to no longer be a burden on others. Let us remember: no human being is ever to be looked upon as a burden, but as someone to be loved, someone made in the image and likeness of God with an inherent value, dignity, and worth that cannot be taken away. This must be stressed in every moment of life, especially when life seems unbearable.

If we consider today’s Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord, we can learn another important lesson in addition to the sacredness of the human body: the importance of being with the Father, for Jesus took his human body to the right hand of the Father (cf. Ephesians 1:20).

…there is no doubt at all of what mattered most to Christ – his Father. The first word we hear from him is, “Didn’t you know I must be in my Father’s house?” The last word before he died on the Cross was, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.” The first message he sent to the Apostles after his Resurrection was, “I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” A good hundred times we find him talking of or to his Father. He makes him the object of his life: “I do the will of him that sent me”; he makes him the object of ours: “No one comes to the Father but by me.” At death our welcome will be, “Enter into the joy of my Father.”[7]

But such a welcome cannot be ours if we have not died in friendship, in communion, with our Father, with his Son, and with their Holy Spirit.

The Father clearly commands, “You shall not kill” (Exodus 20:13; Deuteronomy 5:17). Jesus takes this command a bit further yet. In no uncertain terms, Jesus says, “The Father and I are one” (John 10:30). So it is that Jesus also commands us not to kill (cf. Matthew 5:21-22). Because Jesus is “the way and the truth and the life,” anything directly contrary to his commands and teachings must be opposed (John 14:6). Jesus says to us, “You are my friends if you do what I command you” (John 15:14). If we wish to die in friendship with God and be welcomed into the Father’s house, we must die in friendship with Christ; we must keep his command against killing.

The Church strongly opposes physician-assisted suicide because each of us, body and soul united, “is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.”[8] It remains for us never to forget this, and to help others know it. Amen.

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[1] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 362.

[2] Gaudium et Spes, 14 § 1; in Catechism of the Catholic Church, 364.

[3] Pope Leo XIV, Homily, 18 May 2025.

[4] Timothy Cardinal Dolan. In Tyler Arnold, “Cardinal Dolan Urges New York lawmakers: ‘Prevent, don’t assist, suicide,” Catholic News Agency, 30 May 2025. Accessed 30 May 2025. Available at https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/264451/cardinal-timothy-dolan-urges-new-york-lawmakers-prevent-dont-assist-suicide-in-op-ed?fbclid=IwY2xjawKn2XBleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFGOFVvZGF2Zm9sNDc2M3NaAR6v0_KMMvOi__FohiD5wFGRk3mzzlw-oVevyh8MP9k3Yl1w2wTc4zXDU6sUtg_aem_jiQP_QeXyLzoTr1fENAxZw

[5] Blase Cardinal Cupich, “Statement of Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, archbishop of Chicago, on SB 1950 Assisted Suicide Bill.” Accessed 30 May 2025. Available at https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1AsuXutzGY/

[6] House Amendment 2, Section 5(a)(2). Accessed 30 May 2025. Available at https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=10400SB1950ham002&GA=104&SessionId=114&DocTypeId=SB&LegID=161335&DocNum=1950&GAID=18&SpecSess=&Session=

[7] Frank J. Sheed, Christ in Eclipse: A Clinical Study of the Good Christian (San Francisco: Ignatius Press), 25.

[8] Pope Benedict XVI, Homily, 24 April 2025.

Homily - 27 September 2020 - The Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

The Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)

 Dear brothers and sisters,

Saint Paul addresses us today, saying, “If there is any encouragement in Christ, any solace in love, any participation in the Spirit, and compassion and mercy…” (Philippians 2:1). He does not use these phrases in a hypothetical or theoretical manner because he knows that there is encouragement in Christ; the knows there is solace in love; he knows there is participation in the Spirit; he knows the compassion and mercy of the Lord Jesus. On the road to Damascus and in the many persecutions he endured for Christ, he has experienced all of this because he had in himself “the same attitude that is also in Christ Jesus” who became “obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:5, 8). Have we experienced what he did? Do we know what he knew?

Regrettably, a great many people – both in our nation and throughout the world – have not experienced encouragement in Christ or solace in love, nor have they participated in the Spirit and found compassion and mercy. Because they think they “see the end beyond all doubt,” they fall into despair.[1] This is why there is an ever-greater push for so-called euthanasia and physician assisted suicide. Too many people have lost hope and turn inward on themselves. Instead of giving in to despair when life becomes difficult, we must remember that “pain and death do not constitute the ultimate measures of the human dignity that is proper to every person by the very fact that they are ‘human beings.’”[2]

To be sure, “it is hard to recognize the profound value of human life when we see it in its weakness and fragility.”[3] Even so, the value of human life is perhaps evident to us when we are at our weakest and most fragile because it is precisely in these moments when most seriously ponder the meaning and purpose of it all. In these moments, we see that

Each person’s vulnerability is encoded in our nature as a unity of body and soul: we are materially and temporally finite, and yet we have a longing for the infinite and a destiny that is eternal. As creatures who are by nature finite, yet nonetheless destined for eternity, we depend on material goods and on the mutual support of other person, and also on our original, deep connection with God. Our vulnerability forms the basis for an ethics of care, especially in the medical field, which is expressed in concern, dedication, shared participation and responsibility towards the women and men entrusted to us for material and spiritual assistance in their hour of need.[4]

 We might say that at weak in our moments of vulnerability is

a contemplative gaze that beholds in one’s own existence and that of others a unique and unrepeatable wonder, received and welcomed as a gift. This is the gaze of the one who does not pretend to take possession of the reality of life but welcomes it as it is, with its difficulties and sufferings, and, guided by faith, finds in illness the readiness to abandon oneself to the Lord of life who is manifest therein.[5]

“The Church affirms that the positive meaning of human life is something already knowable by right reason, and in the light of faith is confirmed and understood in its inalienable dignity.”[6] Living as we do in a society that only seems to look for the bad and the negative, too many have lost sight of the goodness of life itself. “Life is the first good because it is the basis for the enjoyment of every other good including the transcendent vocation to share the trinitarian love of the living God to which every human being is called.”[7] If we are help those who suffer find encouragement in Christ, solace in love, and to participate in the Spirit so as to receive compassion and mercy, then we must look with them to the Cross of Christ.

Too often those who are ill “often seem as a burden to society; their questions are not answered; [and] they often undergo forms of affective desertion and the loss of connection with others,” which is especially heightened during these days of COVID.[8] “Add to this is the suffering caused when society equates their value as persons to their quality of life and makes them feel like a burden to others.”[9] We must help them to recognize that they are each a unique and unrepeated wonder and never a burden, but how can we do this? By helping them understand that “Christ’s experience resonates with the sick.”[10]

Whenever we feel abandoned or as a burden to others, whenever life becomes painful and difficult, it is important and necessary

to turn one’s gaze to Christ … to him who experienced in his flesh the pain of the lashes and nails, the derision of those who scourged him, and the abandonment and betrayal of those closest to him. In the face of the challenge of illness and the emotional and spiritual difficulties associated with pain, one must necessarily know how to speak a word of comfort drawn from the compassion of Jesus on the Cross…

 

In the Cross of Christ are concentrated and recapitulated all the sickness and suffering of the world: all the physical suffering, of which the Cross, that instrument of an infamous and shameful death, is the symbol; all the psychological suffering, expressed in the death of Jesus in the darkest of solitude, abandonment, and betrayal; all the moral suffering, manifested in the condemnation to death of one who is innocent; all the spiritual suffering, displayed in a desolation that seems like the very silence of God.[11] 

It is precisely in his Cross that we find encouragement in Christ and solace in love; it is precisely in the Cross that we can participate in the Spirit and receive compassion and mercy.

What is more, it is in the Cross that we see that “the end of life is a time of relationships, a time when loneliness and abandonment must be defeated in the obedient offering of one’s life to God.”[12] “In a time when autonomy and individualism are acclaimed, it must be remembered that, while it is true that everyone lives their own suffering, their own pain and their own death, these experiences always transpire in the presence of others and under their gaze.”[13] Just as the Blessed Mother and Saint John both remained at the foot of the Cross, near to Jesus during his deepest suffering, we, too, must remain near those who are sick and who are in pain because the “Love of God always makes itself known in the history of men and women, thanks to the love of the one who never deserts us, who ‘remains,’ despite everything, at our side.”[14] 

In this manner, although marked by a painful passing, death can become the occasion of a greater hope that, thanks to faith, makes us participants in the redeeming work of Christ. Pain is existentially bearable only where there is hope. The hope that Christ communicates to the sick and the suffering is that of his presence, of his true nearness. Hope is not only the expectation of a greater good, but is a gaze on the present full of significance. In the Christian faith, the event of the Resurrection not only reveals eternal life, but it makes manifest that in history the last word never belongs to death, pain, betrayal, and suffering. Christ rises in history, and in the mystery of the Resurrection the abiding love of the Father is confirmed.

 

To contemplate the living experience of Christ’s suffering is to proclaim to men and women of today a hope that imparts meaning to the time of sickness and death. From this hope springs the love that overcomes the temptation to despair.[15] 

We must help to instill within those who suffer so greatly this hope borne from love, to find encouragement in Christ, solace in love, participation in the Spirit, and compassion and mercy. 

All of this forms the backdrop behind the Church’s continued denunciation of the horrors of abortion and euthanasia and physician assisted suicide, each of which the Holy See said this past week “poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are a supreme dishonor to the Creator.”[16] If you heard anything about this recent statement in the document Samaritanus Bonus, what you likely heard was that Church again said no to euthanasia and physician assisted suicide. This is true – and no surprise – but when the Church says no to the purposeful killing of an innocent human life, she does so because she says yes to every human life; she reaffirms time and again that every human person is a unique and unrepeatable wonder made by and for Love. May each of us remain with those who suffer; may we help them the understand the beauty of God’s love shown for us on the Cross; may we help them realize they are not a burden, but a unique and unrepeatable wonder. Amen.

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[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of the Lord of the Rings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994), 262.

[2] Samaritanus Bonus, Introduction.

[3] Ibid., I.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., III.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., II.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid., III.