On Mission for the Blessed Trinity

 

Trinity Sunday

at St. Mary’s in Salem

29-30 May 2021

Dt 4:32-34, 39-40

Rom 8:14-17

Mt 28:16-20

 

Praised be Jesus Christ!

        “…the Lord is God in the heavens above and on earth below…”

        Our first reading for today’s Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, taken from the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy, does a great job of communicating the boundless sense of confidence in God’s power to save, and yes of the pride coming forth from the People of Israel reflecting upon how their God drew them out of slavery in Egypt and led them to freedom under the protection of His Almighty Hand.

        Trinity Sunday is a great time for us to talk about and maybe even brag about our God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. One God in Three Divine Persons, Trinity in Unity.

        Our second reading today from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans goes on to stagger that Old Testament experience by proclaiming that what Deuteronomy is describing was and is brought to completion in us through our Savior Jesus Christ. The coming among us, through His birth at Bethlehem, His saving death upon the Cross and His glorious Resurrection not only brought liberation from this world’s slavery but bestowed upon us the Spirit of adoption, which through Baptism makes us children of God. In Jesus Christ we were not only freed from the slavery to sin and death which bound us, but by His grace we have become heirs of heaven “…joint heirs with Christ, if only we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.”

        With the sending of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost and our full immersion into the mystery of the Most Blessed Trinity, we have been caught up into the very interior life of the one and only God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

        There was a time when more Catholics than not understood the implications of that truth. While disrespecting no one and loving non-Catholic family and friends no less, back then we understood better what it meant to profess the one true faith. Well, haven’t things changed in the age of ecumenism? No! All you have to do is open your ears to our liturgical prayers. The official prayer of the Church gives evidence that Catholic teaching has not changed. People who try to convince you that something is somehow different, claiming that we are somehow less because of the teaching that the one true Church subsists in the Catholic Church, have not understood, or do not wish to believe that the Church is still the Body of Christ. Through Him, with Him and in Him, we as Church are still caught up into the Mystery of the Godhead.

        We have as much reason as the great missionary saints, like St. Francis Xavier, talking about Spain, four hundred years ago, or like St. John Eudes, a couple generations later in France, to wish to run through the halls of universities or great centers of learning, shouting at young people to wake up and move out of the classrooms and libraries to the four corners of the earth, to win our world for Jesus Christ. This is our duty in Baptism, first and foremost at home, but yes even to the ends of the earth to proclaim the Good News.

        “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you.”            

This is Good News, the best news, of which there is none better. Trinity Sunday sometimes frightens preachers, who puzzle over how to explain the mystery of divine life. That is a challenge, but we must not forget unto what end having some understanding the inner workings of the Godhead should move us.

“Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you.”

        The other day I was listening to a podcast, by a truly righteous man, not Catholic and not even Christian. I think he is really worthy to be called a leader in American society. He has dedicated his whole life, from his student days on, to educating people in the values upon which America was founded and which are to be found in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Somehow, as I listened to him speak with great conviction, it became clear to me that if he were a convinced Catholic, he would be speaking somewhat differently and probably would have figured out why he is somewhat dissatisfied with his life’s work. He would understand why without a vibrant faith in the Holy Trinity all his efforts fall short of being truly Good News. Without Catholic faith, the man has not gotten a handle on what true greatness in us implies. The man has not and cannot grasp that our destiny goes beyond what the founders of the nation held dear, in that we are more, as by God’s grace and favor we are truly at the pinnacle of God’s creation. Moreover, we are more as we have been saved in Jesus Christ and through the grace of the sacraments are filled with His Holy Spirit.

        One of the sad facts about being a missionary today is that if you simply proclaim Catholic truth, without special effects like some tele-evangelist or pop star, you probably will not be a giant success. You will not be the one to take the world by storm. That is probably right and is as it should be, if you look to the example of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. There are great preacher saints, who by force of the holiness of their lives and their preaching converted countless souls. We can pray that the Church and our world would be blessed again in our time by such great messengers. Nevertheless, you will never convince me that the most important and fundamental work is done in the first cell of the Church, the family. People come to know, love, and serve God because of the witness of their parents and grandparents. The first and most fundamental experience of God for the vast majority of folks starts and continues our whole life long at home.

Personally, although great missionary saints are great and we could use some in our day, I would be much happier if more babies and small children learned the Sign of the Cross at home and came to believe, thanks to grown-ups, that they are truly loved by their Heavenly Father.

Lord, on this Trinity Sunday, bless us to the depths of our being with Good News. In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Praised be Jesus Christ!

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

Pentecost and the Ministry of the Confessional

 

Pentecost Sunday

at St. Mary’s in Salem

22-23 May 2021

Acts 2:1-11

Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth.

1 Cor 12:3b-7, 12-13

Veni, Sancte Spiritus

Jn 20:19-23

 

Praised be Jesus Christ!

        Some of the big feasts in the Church calendar, which fall on Sundays at this time of year, have a Sequence prayer or hymn before the Alleluia verse. In the old, old days, even if people did not know the Latin, they were familiar with two of them, the Sequence Victimae Paschali Laudes for Easter and for Pentecost Veni, Sancte Spiritus (Come, Holy Spirit). The melodies are lovely, and people could easily identify from the music the mystery being celebrated. Albeit with a different melody, one of the most popular refrains of the Taizé movement has those three words: Veni, Sancte Spiritus (Come, Holy Spirit).

        A central theme to the Pentecost Sequence is the forgiveness of sins by the power and grace of the Holy Spirit. At one point we sing:

        “Heal our wounds, our strength renew; On our dryness pour your dew; Wash the stains of guilt away, Bend the stubborn heart and will; Melt the frozen, warm the chill; Guide the steps that go astray.”

        This same theme is also prominent in the readings from Sacred Scripture for Pentecost Sunday. We see this especially in the choice of the passage from the Gospel of St. John which recounts the mission the Risen Lord Jesus entrusted to the Apostles:

        “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” Above all else, the Holy Spirit gives life to the Church through the forgiveness of sins.

        Let it be noted that after more than two generations of exposure to the Catholic Charismatic Renewal Movement, most people’s first thought associated with Pentecost and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit is probably related to praying in tongues and other kinds of emotional or ecstatic manifestations of the Spirit. For some Catholics this is fine, but others remain skeptical. If you read the account in the Acts of the Apostles attentively, however, it is unmistakable that people came running and remained to listen because Peter and the other Apostles were communicating clearly. “Are not all these people who are speaking Galileans? Then how does each of us hear them in his native language?” On this point, it is always best to stick to St. Paul, who taught that other gifts, like the gift of teaching or prophecy, were more important than that of speaking in tongues.

        So then, in the first place we should associate Pentecost with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles for the sake of the mission of proclaiming the Gospel: “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And secondly, and of no less importance, for the forgiveness of sins: And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” We tie the institution of the Eucharist and the priesthood to the Last Supper on Holy Thursday and the institution of the Sacrament of Penance, giving priests the power to bind and loose, to forgive sins in His Name, we tie to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles in that same Upper Room on Pentecost Sunday.

        I guess you could say that priests have much they can learn from the feast of Pentecost in terms of the importance of their ministry in the confessional. The Church which officially came into being on Pentecost has a twofold mission of preaching Jesus and forgiving sins in His Name. This mandate comes from Jesus, the Risen Lord, Himself. If a priest does not make himself available to his people for confession, then he is seriously falling down on the job. It is all about freeing people through forgiveness. Priests should know that because of the reticence of many people, their doubts and sometimes fears of confession, making Christ’s forgiveness accessible might demand of them to go out of their way, to bend over backward, in order to win God’s people over to Christ in His Church through repentance and the forgiveness of sin.

        The role of the faithful in this regard is no less important. You need to go to confession. The basic rule is that if you commit mortal sin, you need to get to confession as quickly as possible. Even if you are such a good person that you cannot accuse yourself of serious or grave sin, by Church precept you are required to go to confession at least once a year. Most people tie that yearly confession to preparing for their Easter Duty, which is to receive Holy Communion worthily during the Easter Season, which extends from Easter Sunday through Trinity Sunday, a week from now.

“Heal our wounds, our strength renew; On our dryness pour your dew; Wash the stains of guilt away, Bend the stubborn heart and will; Melt the frozen, warm the chill; Guide the steps that go astray.”

        That is what we are asking of the Holy Spirit and that is what we ask of confession. I do not think that the minimum of confession once a year is sufficient to show that we are truly honest about getting that accomplished. One of the reasons that already back in the first millennium penitential practice with the Irish monks became so popular, that is, private confession without public penance as had been the rule for six hundred years or more, is that it offered people guidance and direction on a regular basis, enabling them to make progress more easily in the spiritual life, not only for conquering mortal sin, but growing in grace and holiness.

        “Heal our wounds, our strength renew; On our dryness pour your dew; Wash the stains of guilt away, Bend the stubborn heart and will; Melt the frozen, warm the chill; Guide the steps that go astray.”

        I bet that not many of you would have guessed that I would use Pentecost to make a plug for regular confession even of your venial sins. Resolve to go to confession at least once in each of the four seasons of the year, and preferably once a month the way our parents and grandparents did. Why? Well, what else could be our intent in praying the Pentecost Sequence?

        “Wash the stains of guilt away, Bend the stubborn heart and will; Melt the frozen, warm the chill; Guide the steps that go astray.”

        Praised be Jesus Christ!

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

The Sacrament of Confirmation - Homily

 

Confirmation, 19 May 2021, Redfield

         You will have to forgive me if I seem a bit excited about conferring the Sacrament of Confirmation on you this evening. I am happy to fill in for Bishop DeGrood, who is in Duluth, Minnesota for the ordination of the new bishop for that diocese. Not just that, but several things come together to explain my joy or excitement, I guess. For one, it is the first time since I have retired and come home to South Dakota that I celebrate the Sacrament, or better, it is the first time ever that I have confirmed as a bishop here at home. Before Covid, I did quite a few confirmations in Switzerland, but this is my first in South Dakota. Then too, our celebration falls within the novena of preparation for Pentecost, which is next Sunday. On Pentecost, 50 days after Easter, we celebrate the coming down of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles in the company of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Upper Room. Pentecost is sometimes called the birthday of the Church.

        We tie Pentecost and the Sacrament of Confirmation to each other in our thinking and teaching. Both on that day in Jerusalem and for us here this evening in Redfield, the Holy Spirit fills and empowers us for mission …if we let Him. We are graced by the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity not only to better resist sin and more perfectly love God and our neighbor, but also like the apostles on that first Pentecost to be enabled to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ to all the world. Thanks to the Sacrament of Confirmation, God the Holy Spirit flanks us in our witness to the world on behalf of that Good News, that joy is ours for now and for all eternity as well in unbounded measure, when we bind our lives and destiny to that of Christ for the sake of the life of the world.

        Bishop DeGrood sent me the letters you wrote to explain why you were looking forward to being confirmed. Young people your age in Switzerland write similar letters to their bishops for Confirmation. It is good to remember that ours is a universal Church and even if we speak different languages, we have a lot in common, especially when it comes to our Catholic faith. The truth is that way. One of its characteristics is that it is universal: there is no such thing as your truth and my truth, but only the one truth about life which comes to us from God alone in Jesus Christ by way of the teaching office of His Holy Church.

        Confirmation is about strengthening us in our faith, strengthening us to fight against sin in our lives and against all that is wrong in our world. You can only be confirmed once. The Sacrament of Confirmation, like Baptism and Holy Orders, leaves an indelible mark on our souls. It is the custom in many places in the Church to plan Confirmation at some point in a young person’s high school years. It is important however to remember that Confirmation should always be seen as yoked or tied to Baptism. The two sacraments, Baptism and Confirmation, belong together. That helps explain why we do not administer the Anointing of the Sick to infants and children in danger of death, but rather we confirm them to complete their Christian initiation and thereby strengthen them for severe illness and possible death.

There is nothing magical about Confirmation. Although the grace and gifts of the Holy Spirit are always bestowed, it is important that we receive the sacrament well disposed. Making a good confession is part of that preparation, but I hope as well that all the confirmands, their parents and families, their sponsors, and the parish communities both here in Redfield and in Mellette have been praying for a worthy and a fruitful outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon you. Everything we do, we do in freedom. God the Holy Spirit does not take us over by force but responds to our invitation to Him to come into our hearts and lives and transform us by His grace.

        I mentioned at the beginning the Pentecost Novena in the midst of which we find ourselves. These are nine days during which the Church prays that the gift of the Holy Spirit would be renewed in each one of us. Thinking more generally about novenas and prayer in the life of a Catholic, young or old, we can understand that beyond our daily prayer, which besides Sunday Mass is our usual contact with the Lord Who accompanies us through life, we can dedicate special time, such as during a novena, to ask of the Lord some special favor for us and those we love. Besides the Pentecost novena for the grace of the Holy Spirit, “Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth”, I am reminded of the Divine Mercy novena, which starts on Holy Thursday and asks special favors of the Lord for us poor sinners.

        My message then to you and to all gathered here this evening? Rejoice in the grace of Confirmation! Know yourselves through this sacrament to be strengthened by the power of the Holy Spirit! Pray every day, morning, noon, and night, for the Lord to stand by you, and to protect you and all those whom you love! Be confident and brave in your personal struggle against Satan, the father of lies! Let Christ’s light shine in your heart and through you brighten the world, simply for the sake of joy and for our well-founded hope in the life of the world to come.

        The little old catechism I learned as a child, and with which I am sure that at least your grandparents are familiar, started off with the question: “Why did God make me?” The answer: “God made me to know, love and serve Him in this life, so as to be happy with Him forever in heaven.” It is as simple as that. Nothing else should complicate your life or make you swerve off course.

“Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth”!

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

The Ascension and the Church Militant

 

The Ascension of the Lord

at St. Mary’s in Salem

15-16 May 2021

 

Acts 1:1-11

Eph 1:17-23

Mk 16:15-20

 

Praised be Jesus Christ!

        The article of faith we celebrate on the Solemnity of the Ascension is that of Jesus being glorified at the right hand of God the Father. The return of Jesus to His heavenly Father begins the mission of the Church by Christ’s command, “Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature”, and marks our empowerment, yours and mine, called as we are to give witness in our lives to Christ’s victorious return to heaven. A key element of the message is that we are not sent out alone, without the assurance of succeeding. We are sent out empowered to proclaim the Gospel and win souls for Christ with the power of the Lord Jesus Himself. He is with us.

        “…they went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the word through accompanying signs.”

        One of the things which I have taken up since retirement is reading daily the martyrology, which is the list of saints for the day. Most days it is a small half page briefly recounting the lives of saints associated with that day in the calendar. It is aptly called a martyrology because the saints who were martyred for Christ form the backbone of each day’s reading. The lives of those saints mentioned who did not die for the faith are generally marked by miracles, by signs and wonders which accredited their witness for Christ. As we just read in the Gospel:

        “…they went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the word through accompanying signs.”

        The fundamental question for me is: how important to the mission of an apostle are those signs and wonders if you are not called to martyrdom? Just think of all the wonders recounted in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles! Can holiness of life be separated from miracles? If you are truly holy, should you not also be a miracle worker? Jesus, our Risen Lord commissioned His disciples on the Ascension Mount and their mission continues until today in the Church, “Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature.” And He guaranteed their word through accompanying signs, that is by miracles.

        It is at this point as perhaps nowhere else that our talk about Jesus, about His life and teaching, distinguishes itself from a history lesson. We move beyond history into something very much more. My Catholicism is much more than a family tradition. By the will of God, empowerment to witness to Christ is one of the consequences of Baptism and of professing faith in the Lord.

        “So then the Lord Jesus, after he spoke to them, was taken up into heaven and took his seat at the right hand of God.”

        Most common-sense Catholics know that our baptismal calling is not to stand on a soapbox at a busy corner to preach. We do not just pay lip service to Christ. In Him we are transformed not just for our own sake, but for the sake of the life of the world. Nothing is so important for the life of the Church and the spread of the Gospel is our good example, the witness of true belief which we give within the circle of our family and friends.

As a bishop, a successor of the apostles, I am called to go beyond that common witness which marks us in Baptism. My readiness to share my hope in Jesus Christ with family, friends and other people close at hand is just a start for how I fulfill my commitment to spread the Gospel. Because of my reception of the Sacrament of Holy Orders, I must not only give good example to others and speak about the reason for my hope in Christ, but I am also called to the ministry of the Word. For that reason, I need to examine my conscience concerning the fulfillment of my heavier duties. Do I preach and teach effectively? Is my challenge to others to faithfully live out the Gospel in their lives backed up by my own personal witness of virtue?

  God in the Old Testament placed before the Chosen People the choice between life and death, between being blessed by God for choosing Him and the fulness of life in Him, and being cursed by God for choosing death and ultimately damnation. Just the same, as people of the New Testament we are called to choose between life with God and death.

One of the most oddball things about so-called religious education, paid for by the state in public schools in many countries of Europe, is that faith plays no part in these religion classes. Whether in school or in the parish community, in the German language throughout central Europe, they talk about religious socialization of children as if it were the one necessary thing. If you try to use the hour of religious education in school to teach catechism or if you witness to Jesus as our Lord and Savior, well, you can kiss taxpayer funding goodbye and probably count on being fired. Nowadays they do not even teach the children Church history. Instead, they are treated to the green deal, taught to be politically correct, and never even say a prayer.

As I say, priests and bishops have been entrusted with a ministry of the Word, but the role of parents as disciples on mission could not be clearer. Dear parents and grandparents, I hope the reason you are here in church is because you believe and pray on your own and with conviction. If you fail to share with your children and grandchildren that gift of belief in Jesus Christ, a belief firmly grounded in a life of prayer, then do not expect St. Mary’s Grade School or a CCD teacher to do it. There is no middle ground and no excuse. Either you are an apostle, or you are lost. “Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature.”  That is what the Ascension is about.

Praised be Jesus Christ!   

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

Mary, Our Mother and Defense

 

6^th Sunday of Easter

at St. Mary’s in Salem

8-9 May 2021

Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48

1 Jn 4:7-10

Jn 15:9-17

 

Praised be Jesus Christ!

        For Matins of the Saturday Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary the Absolution reads as follows in English:

        “By the prayers and the merits of blessed Mary ever Virgin and of all the Saints, may the Lord lead us to the kingdom of heaven.”

        In this month of May, we should talk a bit about the Blessed Mother in the life of the Church, in your life and in mine. Mother’s Day lends itself quite well as a starting point to this reflection. The object of this reflection would be to better understand Mary’s role as our intercessor before her Son. Let’s start with Mother’s Day!

        Small children nowadays draw lots of pictures. I cannot remember doing that so much when I was little, except for Mother’s Day. Every year, we children at home would draw and color pictures of flowers for Mom. They were intended to represent our gift to her of the bedding plants which it was still too early to buy and plant for danger of frost up in Moorhead, MN, by Fargo. In my childhood, we were never wanting for anything important, but there was no such thing as a money allowance that we could save up to buy Mom something on her special day. Dad with Mom would go to the greenhouse to do the buying later once the danger of frost had passed, but for Mother’s Day we children did the drawing. The bedding plants we gave her every year were always the same: geraniums, petunias, marigolds, and alyssum. When I got too big for drawing pictures for Mom, I got to plant those flowers for her once she and Dad brought them home.

        Some half-grown-up people might not approve of this little Mother’s Day ritual, but for us and I think for my mother too it was an important ritual to demonstrate in a special way our love and appreciation for each other, children for mother and mother for children. I know Mother enjoyed the trip to the greenhouse, but she enjoyed our colored pictures no less. Mother’s Day was our time to express in a simple but more formal fashion the love and appreciation we had all year long for our mother. That is how love works, children do not initiate the process or exchange, but rather respond to the great and ongoing gift of our parents’ love and the sacrifices they make for us.

        One of the central teachings from Scripture for this Sunday is precisely that: love does not begin with me.

    “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.”

        “It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you. This I command you: love one another.”

Love as a gift and a relationship begins elsewhere, namely, in God. We call God the Creator of all things and that includes the virtue of love. It is our calling, our duty to respond to His great love. But because Almighty God the Father is unseen, I come to know of God’s love for me in the witness of the person and life of Jesus Christ. 2000 years have come and gone since Jesus stood in our midst, and so I rely on other witnesses to draw me into the great mystery of divine love. The school, even with its imperfections, for understanding all this is the human family. Children learn to love by being loved by adults, first and foremost by their parents at home. We know too, that people normally receive the gift of faith within the context of the family. To say that the family is the little Church, the place where faith is passed on, is common knowledge for us Catholics. To understand faith bound absolutely to hope and to love takes our reflection to a whole different level. The family is the primary school of divine love.

“In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.”

In much the same way, the saints and the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, play an essential part in God’s plan for showing us His love. Jesus, Son of God and Son of Mary, gave us His Mother as a help to understand this great mystery. From the Cross, Jesus gave His Mother to the beloved disciple, St. John, with the words to her “Behold your son” and to him “Behold your mother”. It was as if Jesus were speaking to us in that John stands there at the foot of the Cross on our behalf, accepting Mary and taking her home as his own mother.

It is not uncommon to run into non-Catholic Christians who have little or no veneration, no love and little respect for the Blessed Virgin. Their excuse for withholding from Mary that childlike love we should have for her in imitation of her Son Jesus is simply nonsense. They claim that venerating/honoring, not adoring or worshiping which we owe only to God, takes away from Jesus our only Savior. The constant teaching from the very first days of Christ’s Church is that Mary and the saints inspire us; they lead us to the Lord.

This teaching also spares us from any sort of determinism, which would exclude the possibility of coming to faith, hope and love in a dysfunctional family. We are not condemned, if our parents fail us. We are baptized into the Communion of Saints. They can pray for us to God and Mary can stand in for our earthly mother or stand by her to help us grow and inspire us to a holy life.

Today we pray thankfully for our mothers both living and dead. If we can, we find simple, but honest ways to thank them for love and life.

 It is May and that is Mary’s month. “By the prayers and the merits of blessed Mary ever Virgin and of all the Saints, may the Lord lead us to the kingdom of heaven.”

Praised be Jesus Christ!

 PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

Conforming My Will to That of Christ

 

5^th Sunday of Easter

at St. Mary’s in Salem

1-2 May 2021

Acts 9:26-31

1 Jn 3:18-24

Jn 15:1-8

Praised be Jesus Christ!

“I am the vine… If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask for whatever you want and it will be done for you.”

“Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence in God and receive from him whatever we ask, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.”

It is when you read or hear quotes like these that you understand just how unjustified the bad wrap is, given to Mother Church by people who either hate us without really knowing us or who may have been Catholic but cannot seem to manage turning their backs on us for whatever reason, without just one more parting shot. For their misery which they blame on Jesus, most anti- or former Catholics are in bad conscience. They are to blame; they are culpable and no one else, not their parents and not society or some mediocre or worse priest they might have known. They are wrong to try and blame the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, for all the injustice and cruelty they claim to have suffered.

Granted, it is truly unfortunate that the quotes we just read make no sense to them. But they are the ones who will not allow the Scriptures to apply to the Church as it carries out its mission in the name of Jesus. They reduce the Church acting in the name of Jesus to precious little or nothing beyond being a merely human institution at best, but probably corrupt at that. They refuse to see Jesus as God and accept the logical consequences of what that means in terms of His holy will for the life of the world as it is revealed to us in and through the Church which He established to carry on in His place, to guide and guard people until His Second Coming at the end of time.   

These two quotes from the readings for this 5^th Sunday of Easter are classic St. John the Evangelist and not the only such as we read from St. John in both his Gospel, quoting the Lord Jesus directly, and in his first Letter. Sadly because of all the Church’s critics and with the complicity of our neighbors who seem to be caught up in negativism, St. John’s words present a message to which we are not accustomed: “…ask for whatever you want and it will be done for you.”  Rarely do you hear that or get to hear the Church’s saintly confessors proclaiming this message, and working wonders at the same time, to demonstrate just how true it is.

Just think about how during the pandemic civil authorities in some states and in other countries around the world have been so restrictive on the Church, to the point of blocking access to churches for the Sunday Mass, the holy action which essentially defines us. We believe as Catholics that without the Mass we cannot properly survive in this world. Think of the added tragedy of the pandemic, which was and is people in the Church who restricted themselves and fellow Catholics even more than the civil authorities required! Some of these people have effectively placed themselves on the warpath against what the Second Vatican Council taught about the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Mass understood as Sunday Mass is the source and summit of Christian existence. People who claim to be Catholic, no matter if they are priests, deacons, or bishops, when they further this restrictive agenda of our enemies, are indulging in an exercise which is usually labeled “cutting off your nose to spite your face…” What to do?

I suppose the real question is another, and namely whether we are reading the Scriptures from this Sunday correctly. Do we understand that as adopted children of God we need to ask of the Heavenly Father in the same way and words that Jesus did, He being the only begotten Son? God the Father will answer us, His adopted children through Baptism, just as He did the Lord Jesus, revealed over and over in His public life as God’s beloved Son.

Just a couple chapters earlier than what we just heard from the Gospel of St. John we read the words of Jesus: “Now My soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save Me from this hour’? No, it is for this purpose that I have come to this hour. ‘Father, glorify Your name!’ Then a voice came from heaven: ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’” [Jn 12:27-28]

Do we understand that as an obedient son or daughter of God what we truly want and ask of God, just as Jesus did time and again, is that His will be done in us and in all things? That is what we want.

St. Matthew’s Gospel may be more familiar to us from his account of Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. “O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.” [Matt. 26:39]

Jesus sought the will of His heavenly Father even unto drinking the cup of terrible suffering unto death. This is what we seek to share.

And among Jesus’ last words from the Cross as recounted in St. Luke: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.” [Luke 23:34]

Not only does Jesus embrace the Father’s will for the salvation of the world through the death and suffering of His only Son, but He does this by forgiving those who did Him in and asks the Father to forgive them as well.

“…ask for whatever you want and it will be done for you.”  What all then did Jesus endure and what is He asking us His followers to suffer and endure united to Him, the vine? And how is that getting whatever we want? What do we stand to gain? Somebody might be thinking, hey, you are pretending to give with one hand while really taking with the other.

How do I live with such great words, such that I am not scandalized by Christ’s Church and turn away, as did many who heard Him talk about Himself as the true Bread come down from Heaven for the sake of the life of the world? Difficult as it can be, we need to claim the words of Simon Peter for ourselves, who answered Him when others walked away, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” [John 6:68]

I hope that Sunday, the Lord’s Day, gives you time to sort things out and understand it our goal to unite our will to that of Christ and therein find our consolation.

“Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence in God and receive from him whatever we ask, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.”

Praised be Jesus Christ!

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI