Monday, December 6, 2021

In the Arms of a Nurturing Mother

 


40 Hours Devotions, Talk #3

Monday, Dec 6th, 7:30pm, St. Michael

Mary the Mother of the Eucharist: Nurturing the Life of Grace

 

Praised be Jesus Christ!

Holy Mary, Mother of the Word Incarnate, pray for us!

St. Nicholas, pray for us!

        As Catholics, we firmly believe that nurturing the life of grace works best in conjunction with Mary, the Mother of God and our Mother. If you have problems or hesitancy in believing in the Son, ask the Mother for her aid! That advice holds especially when it comes to professing faith in the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Sacrament of the Altar. We need to leave no stone unturned in our quest to grow in faith. We need to have confidence that the gift of faith is not one of which we should despair, certainly not given that our Mother Mary is around and wants us to know her Son. Good mothers, true mothers are the first and best at nurturing the lives of their children. Mary can nurture the life of grace within us. Just know that she is the one in your life, in every aspect of your life, to whom you need to turn things over. Why did Pope Saint John Paul II take as his motto Totus Tuus (which could well be translated, “I am all yours”)? Because he was confident that Mary, for the love of her only begotten Son, Jesus, would carry her son, Karol Wojtyla as well.

The motto Totus Tuus was JPII’s way of expressing his understanding and acceptance of the total consecration to Jesus through Mary, taught by St. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort. The saint lived in France from Jan 31, 1673 - Apr 28, 1716. He was only 43 when he died but left behind several religious orders he had founded and his writings on true devotion to Mary and total consecration to her Son through her. His description of true devotion to Mary is not the easiest reading and so I won’t go into it today. If you are interested, there are not only English translations of the saint’s writings out there, but also other authors who have written to popularize the teaching of St. Louis-Marie.

Instead, we will take it a little bit simpler and so to start our talk, let’s go to Calvary for the definitive statement from the Lord Himself, Who made such a consecration through Mary possible and explained where it and we belong in the life of the Church with Mary. There upon the Cross the Lord Jesus entrusted to us the Blessed Virgin Mary, His Immaculate Mother, and entrusted us to her care! There is no doubt that Jesus, dying on the Cross is asking a full mother-son, son-mother commitment from both Mary and John, the Evangelist. We read about it briefly from John’s Gospel 19:25-27:

“Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.” [Harper Bibles. NRSV Catholic Edition Bible (p. 1012). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.]

My message to you and to all Catholics of good will is simply this: “Take Mary into your own home!” If you have not so far in life and you do, then your life will change. Through intimacy with Mary you will come alive in Christ; you will come to know God and rejoice exceedingly in Him.

At the foot of the Cross, John, the beloved disciple, stood in for all of us as he was entrusted by the dying Christ with care for His Mother. The Church teaches us that. At the same time, there at the foot of the Cross, Jesus gives John and us into Mary’s arms. The meaning of the passage was clear for John, as he took her into his own home. The Church teaches that its meaning is clear for all of us as well. Since that moment on the Cross, Mary is Mother for us all and we are her children in Christ. The Catholic faith is a Marian faith. To truly believe, to be Christian and therefore Catholic we must hold to Mary. Entrusting ourselves to the Blessed Virgin is neither an option nor a frill when it comes to living the true faith. Relying on Mary to intercede for us with her Son does not diminish Christ’s role in our lives. The Church’s teaching on the communion of saints is all gain. It takes nothing away from Christ’s Lordship or His power to save.

Speaking of the title given to our talk today, the idea of naming Mary the Mother of the Eucharist is nonetheless sort of puzzling. What is the sense of that particular title for the Blessed Virgin, for Mary the Mother of God? Why do I ask? Partly because I should, as the title and its traditional explanation may seem somewhat convoluted to older people who have lived more in the 20th century than they have in the 21st. I say that full well knowing that this title is a beautiful expression of the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. What ultimately is the sense of talking about Mary as the Mother of the Eucharist? She has so many other titles. What does this one add? We know her as the Mother of Christ, and we firmly believe that her Son, true God and true Man, is present Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in the Eucharist. Logically, just as Jesus says, “This is My Body”, so Mary can say of the consecrated Host “This is My Son”. Even getting that far would be a great enrichment to our understanding of her title, Mother of the Eucharist, and a genuine aid toward growing our faith in Jesus present and active in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, enduringly present in the Holy Sacrament of the Altar.

Mary’s other titles of Motherhood are perhaps more evident and direct. Mother of God is clear. Mother of the Word Incarnate is also profound and immediate in its sense. It fits especially well with Christmas: and the Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us. Other titles? Mother of Jesus, even Mother of the Church, we can understand all these titles if we but approach them with simplicity and openness. But why call Mary the Mother of the Eucharist? I suppose in a sense because in our day the title is helpfully subversive. It does an end run (football language) around all the opposition and lack of love shown to Mary over the last century and puts her back at the center of the Eucharistic action and the great Mystery of Faith. Mary is as inseparably bound up with the Eucharist as she is with Calvary. Stupid and sometimes wicked people have either ignored Mary over the last century or they have actually plotted to deprive her of her central role in the plan of salvation. Fatima was especially important to disarming the enemies of Mary and of our Church. Even so, it has been a long uphill struggle to win over hearts. This tragic prejudice, especially since the late 1960’s, has already denied generations of children of a healthy and uncomplicated love for Mary, thus hindering them on the path to Christ in the fullness of the mystery of His Being.

“When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.”

* * *

Nurturing the Life of Grace!

To go back to my talk from Sunday evening, the miserable results announced by the Pew Research Survey concerning the faith of Catholics today in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is compounded by the all too real erosion of people’s understanding of our obligation under pain of mortal sin to assist at Holy Mass on all Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation. Since time immemorial, law has been used to teach Catholics what St. Justin Martyr proclaimed before his judge in that first age of persecution of the Church, namely, that as Christians we cannot live without Sunday, meaning without the Holy Eucharist. But for Sundays in our time, even though the law is still on the books, I guess now especially since COVID, we are talking about 20% attendance at Sunday Mass by people who profess themselves Catholic, even here in God’s Country, in South Dakota. Holy Day attendance, other than for Christmas Day, has so eroded that if we take the case of the Feast of the Ascension, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, presumably to sort of save face for the failing numbers, took a vote and half the dioceses in the country transferred the Ascension from the Thursday to the nearest Sunday. They capitulated!

People no longer take Holy Days seriously, unfortunately. When I was a child, the US had 6 Holy Days of Obligation and both England and Italy had even more (8, I think). The observance of Holy Days in our time gets even more difficult because of the invention of vigil or prefestive Masses: Saturday night for Sunday or the eve for the Holy Day. Just to give you an alert, this Wednesday, December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception is not only a Holy Day of Obligation, but it is the patronal feast of the United States. How many people will remember and fulfil their obligation? I won’t ask for a show of hands from those who have the Holy Day Mass on their family calendar for this week, even though I surely hope that everyone does. Let me say it differently! I am always pleasantly surprised by people who have the Holy Days of Obligation down on their family or personal calendar. Enough said!

At the beginning of my first talk, I said my goal for these days would be “…to restore, revive, expand belief in and devotion to the Eucharist according to the mind of the Church”. At some point or another I also said that our faith is of a piece; it is integral. If my Catholic identity is not founded on faithfulness (treated as necessity) to attendance at Sunday Mass, how do I ground my faith in the Real Presence? If I am not a person of prayer, making my morning offering first thing when I get up, blessing my meals, examining my conscience at night before bed, cultivating my faith in the Incarnation by praying the Angelus and staying close to Mary by praying at least some part of her rosary each day, then how can I be able or ready to encounter Jesus present in the Holy Eucharist? It is truly a matter of sensitizing ourselves straight across the board to the things of God.

Our Lady of Fatima, explaining the First Saturday Devotion to Lucia, described one of the requirements very simply as keeping Mary company for 15 minutes on that day. Earlier we described prayer as lifting our hearts and minds to God. That simple definition helps us understand just how constant prayer, prayer without ceasing, is indeed possible. Failing faith in the True Presence has not little to do with failing to be mindful of the Lord as otherwise and always part of our lives. Personal prayer grounds and nurtures faith in the Lord Who gives Himself to eat in the Eucharist.

During my whole life as a priest, since 1976, I have tried myself, and I have been edified by the example of many good priests, old and young, who have tried their best to win people back to the sacrament of Penance. Up until the Council most good Catholics, let’s say average Catholics, went to Confession once a month. I had a great uncle who went to confession every week or two weeks and he was not alone in the 1950’s. Sadly, back after the Council it was not uncommon for priests to discourage people from Confession and lots of parishes went to systems of confession by appointment only, which meant never. We need to get back to Confession not only for serious sin, but as a form of spiritual direction aimed at our growth in holiness.

Why the low percentage of faith in the Real Presence? Belief in the Real Presence presumes the clear understanding that we cannot presume to receive the Lord in Holy Communion in the state of mortal sin. Moreover, we should be using regular confession to fight habitual venial sin in our lives and thereby to grow in holiness, that is, to grow closer in love and devotion to our great God in Jesus Christ.

St. José Maria Escriva de Balaguer, the founder of Opus Dei, taught especially the men of his group to get back to the old-fashioned ways in the Spain of his childhood of preparation for receiving Holy Communion. Since before the Council most people were hesitant to approach the Lord in Holy Communion without first going to confession, he reminded the men to go all the way and prepare like the fathers and grandfathers had done: confession on Saturday and then take a bath. Sunday morning shave and clean up, put on your Sunday best and maybe even a bit of cologne. No doubt the results for a Pew Research Survey back then would have been quite different than now when people tend to dress down to come to church.

Et Verbum Caro Factum Est! The Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us! One of the mindless consequences of COVID has been to further erode the faith in the necessity of our Sunday encounter with Jesus really and truly present in the Eucharist. Not only were our churches closed at some point, but all kinds of scare tactics with disinfectant protocols were imposed. My sister who lives in Switzerland told me that in her parish, she tried to take on as a greeter at Sunday Mass the duties that were imposed upon them by the state with the complicity of their bishop, taking down contact information, checking for a mask, and squirting disinfectant on people’s hands at the door. She gave up, however, when she found one lady in her group who stationed herself with her spray bottle at the head of the Communion line and insisted on spraying people’s hands again just before they received.

Father Morgan at the Cathedral did tell me of one good thing that came out of the COVID distancing. At our Cathedral people were asked to come up and stand to one side of the center aisle, with the Communion rail between them and the priest or deacon. Almost naturally then, some of the people knelt down and received Communion on the tongue. They continue to do so now even after the restrictions have been lifted. In Bern I had a goodly amount of contact with former Swiss Guards of all ages and came to understand how these men, especially the younger ones, wanted to express their faith in Jesus really and truly present, not only by bowing before coming up to Communion, but by going down on their knees before the priest and receiving their Lord on the tongue. To my way of thinking, it is a free world and people should always feel free to express their devotion by receiving Communion in the traditional manner. Priests or deacons who discourage such signs of devotion are only undermining the faith in Christ really and truly present in the Sacred Host. Let’s title this section especially for the priests and deacons as: Don’t Stifle the Spirit!

At this point, I am kind of asking myself how I have done in terms of my goal, “…to restore, revive, expand belief in and devotion to the Eucharist according to the mind of the Church”. I hope I have not been too blah, blah, but have given you something to ponder over. In terms of the other request from the pastoral team that these 40 Hours Devotions help prepare the parish for Christmas, I think that is part of the whole. The more prayerful I am, the more attentive I am, and hence the more fully I enter into the mystery. I hope I was somewhat encouraging to get you to confession to prepare your heart to receive the Savior King at Christmas.

No need to tell you that preparing for Christmas cannot simply be equated with getting into the Christmas spirit. Even so, we know that people who are overcome by the hectic of the season cannot really enjoy Christmas. That is one of the reasons I have given up on writing Christmas cards. They get on my nerves for various reasons and doing a clever mail merge to send them out by email leaves me even colder. In the Nunciature, I had my secretary to prepare the obligatory cards and envelopes for the bishops of the country and for the mother superiors who would write, plus to prepare the thank you’s for things like the gingerbread shingle from the company that had our roof maintenance contract. No, what I mean by preparing for Christmas is allowing your prayer to engulf you. During Advent it means to really let those O Come O Come Emmanuel’s resonate in your heart.

This is the first year I think in my life that I have had to set up my own Advent Wreath at home. Up until now someone has always done it for me. By chance, just a couple days before the First Sunday of Advent, I got a little holy card in the mail. It has a picture of Mary walking with a staff in hand and is entitled “The Evening Before the Birth of Christ”. On the flip side are four little prayers for lighting the Advent Wreath, one for each week. “” Now if you pray that and your grace before meals you are set. Without effort you have a good thought and maybe even a bit of focus for your meal.  

  Let me thank you for your attentiveness and assure you of my prayers for you especially in this beautiful Advent Season. Let Mary come and place the Christ Child right in your lap.

Praised be Jesus Christ!

Holy Mary, Mother of the Word Incarnate, pray for us!

St. Nicholas, pray for us!

 

Age Appropriate Adoration

 


40 Hours Devotions, Talk #2

Monday, Dec 6th, 9:30am, St. Michael

He grew in Wisdom, Grace, and Stature: Aging and adoring the Eucharistic Lord. (Talk geared towards our seniors)

Praised be Jesus Christ!

St. Michael the Archangel, pray for us!

St. Nicholas, pray for us!

I thought we should begin with the passage from the Gospel of Luke 2:41-52, which (I presume) inspired your pastoral team’s choice of titles for this talk {He grew in Wisdom, Grace, and Stature}.

“Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day’s journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them, and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him, they were astonished; and his mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he said to them. Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.” [Harper Bibles. NRSV Catholic Edition Bible. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.]

        If you were ever looking for proof that there is something over the course of the centuries and millennia in the life of the world which we can call a human constant, at least in terms of developmental psychology, this passage we just read has pride of place in pointing one out and deserves to be quoted. Here in this passage, we meet Jesus the perfect 12-year-old. There is not a well-adjusted 12-year-old in the world today who would be surprised by the behavior of the young God-Man. “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” Jesus is not behaving like an adult in this passage, but rather like a 12-year-old, who wouldn’t think to talk through with His parents His decision to remain in the Temple. One of the struggles parents have with a younger, not yet technically a teenage son is to bring him to understand that being grown-up implies talking through lots of things for which we really don’t need permission.

So! How is this talk supposed to go today? Granted, there could be value in sorting through the Fifth Joyful Mystery of the Rosary, Jesus found amongst the elders in the Temple, but for us here in church today given that the rest of the title for this talk reads: Aging and adoring the Eucharistic Lord, maybe we should leave adolescent developmental psychology aside. The bigger question to address would seem to be what does this passage have to do with senior citizens?

We’ll come back to it again at the end, but my encouragement to you would be to render the Lord age-appropriate worship. Our call is to give witness to Jesus really and truly present here in the tabernacle in a way that is different from that of a twelve or even of a twenty-year-old (I could even say a 40-year-old). Aging and adoring the Eucharistic Lord!

        Every year around Thanksgiving one of my classmates from the North American College in Rome, class of 1976 (He is a priest of the Archdiocese of Dubuque), puts together and sends out our class newsletter, which offers us updates on all those who choose to stay in touch by writing in to him. I say that, because very few of us write every year and some never contribute to the newsletter. This year for the first time, Father also attached an updated necrology to the newsletter. More than a quarter of my classmates have passed on.

I am basically happy to get the letter each year, whether the individual letters from classmates are interesting or maybe not so much. It has been 49 years since we first met each other in Rome. Some of us have become lifelong friends and some not. Some of the entries are no less annoying coming from men over 70 years of age than the men themselves were back in seminary in their early to mid-20’s. Even so, I look forward to each edition as the better part of the letters are really a joy and, friends or not, these men have been an important part of my life.

One of the men, a good friend of mine back then, (I think he is suffering from Parkinson’s) lives most of the year with his brother and sister-in-law up in North Carolina and occasionally drives down to his diocese in Florida for meetings, doctoring and what not. He’s a very colorful figure and always was. In the seminary he used to tease me a lot, but I really enjoyed his attention. This year he waxed eloquent about the significance of finding ourselves in the autumn of our lives as a metaphor for facing our common health challenges and especially for him facing his own which are tougher than most. With his disability I am sure he is more pensive than I would be about the inevitability of physical and mental decline, and yes, of death. As he tells it, he was driving back to North Carolina just as the fall colors were in all their glory. His reflection was on the particular beauty of the autumn of our lives, comparable let us say to the beautiful fall colors of North Carolina. All the aches and pains of age aside, he wanted us all to take courage from the powerful imagery he penned into his letter to the class.

        He grew in Wisdom, Grace, and Stature: Aging and adoring the Eucharistic Lord.

        To be good at Eucharistic adoration, to do it right takes effort, just like a good marriage does. Eucharistic adoration is prayer at the highest level. Just like when you pray to the unseen God, so especially when you worship Him present before you under the forms of bread and wine, you need to invest without expecting return for your efforts. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, much like Christ’s sacrifice once and for all on Calvary, His Crucifixion and Death, costs us more personally than it builds us up. Just look at Mary, John and Mary Magdalen there at the foot of the Cross! Assisting at Mass, we are drawn into Christ’s action. If, outside of Mass, we give ourselves over to adoring God in Christ Jesus present in the Sacred Host, we are pondering His Sacrificial Love which saves us, brings us life in fullness.

First and foremost, in order to give glory to God and enter into the mystery of our salvation in Christ, other than being a person honestly striving for holiness, you have to be a person who prays. I won’t say that you have to be certified as a blackbelt when it comes to praying, because there is no jury or manual of certification for prayer. Besides, eager and good pray-ers are never content with their own performance. They are always critical of themselves, just like the good husband never judges himself worthy of his beloved wife, the mother of his children. As with so many things in life, so also with prayer, it is not finesse or my personal prowess in prayer that counts. Achievement and success are categories appropriate to competitive sports but not necessarily relevant to happiness in life. Let me repeat the statement again! To be good at Eucharistic adoration you have to be a person who prays and who prays without ceasing. When I left Kyiv, Ukraine for Bern, Switzerland, because of a customs ruling, I had to leave behind my favorite icon, the first one I received as a gift there. Even though there was not an ounce of gold on it and the holy image was not done by some great artist, just because it was over 80 years old, I could only have taken it out of Ukraine with a license from its owner. As the priest who gave it to me had recovered it from the trash, there was no way possible. I have my memories! What I loved about it was that it was an image of Christ the King, seated on His Throne. On the open book in His Hand, you could read the admonition “Pray without ceasing” written in everyday Ukrainian (…). Never cease praying or pray constantly. That is our task in life entrusted to us by Christ Himself. Always have your heart and mind fixed on the Lord.

Let me insist on that point, that we must be people of prayer, for reasons which are intimately bound up with advancing or advanced age! Prayer, among other things, is basically about lifting your mind and heart to God, and adoration declares God to be Who He is, our Creator, Redeemer, and Friend. At some point, I am sure no later than high school I learned that adoration means giving God His due. Already years ago, since forever really, we as Catholics have been clear that giving God His due means adoring Him and He only as God is deserving of our adoration. The more English and less Latinate word for adoration is worship, which as every Catholic knows does not apply to the saints, not even to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Our honor for the saints and for the Mother of God is called not worship but veneration. We do not worship, but rather we venerate Mary and the saints. We express our love for the saints, our brothers and sisters in Christ, who have fought the good fight and won the race. We pray to them yes, but in a different way than we pray to God. The saints are now in glory with God and can intercede for us before the Heavenly Throne. Mary, in a special way as our mother from the foot of the Cross, can intercede with her Son for us.

        I want to insist on the central importance of prayer, of living consciously in the presence of God and making the Lord the focus of our lives: heart, soul, mind, and strength. Apart from the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as important as it is, being the source and summit of Christian existence, Perpetual Adoration can help us in our prayer, can help us draw close to God. Different from the Mass, Eucharistic Adoration with ongoing Exposition in the monstrance is more of a big city, downtown kind of thing. It usually means or takes on the form it has at the monastery of our Adoration Sisters here in Sioux Falls up by the Cathedral. After early morning Mass each day, the priest exposes the Blessed Sacrament to the view of the people in the monstrance set on high above the tabernacle; the sisters take turns keeping silent watch before our Eucharistic Lord all day long and the chapel is open all day for people who want to drop in and pray.

I know parishes or cities around the world without a community of religious who guarantee that watch before the Lord. The lay people themselves are the ones who organize a schedule of people to be in church for the hours of exposition. In Switzerland, I was invited for anniversary celebrations by groups of Perpetual Adoration at the city level in both Freiburg and Sion. To be able to do that, you have to be able to guarantee that people will be there to watch and pray before the Lord. Perpetual Adoration is a value in itself, but in recent years it has also been the source of countless vocations to priesthood and the religious life. Lots of younger priests will tell you they found their vocation in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament.

Holy Cross Parish in Hutchinson, Kansas, where my mother lived, had a very successful program of Perpetual Adoration. The people of the parish had their adoration chapel open all day and all night throughout the whole year. The people themselves organized it, and over the years the parish priests were firm supporters of the effort. The older priest, who was there when they began, was very soft-spoken but fervent in faith. He believed that Perpetual Adoration was one of the reasons Holy Cross had been spared from storms, especially tornadoes, over the years. The good priests, who came after him, were just as supportive of this effort which the people of the parish themselves carried. My Mom’s hairdresser and her husband, a carpet layer, were not even registered in the parish but faithfully kept their hour, one day a week, and they did it at like three in the morning. For most of the hours of adoration the organizers had two people signed up. Mom volunteered for an hour each Sunday afternoon, which was actually the hardest time to find people to cover. Quite often she would be there alone. Occasionally, something would happen that the person or persons for the next hour, or maybe their substitute, would not show up. Mom would just stay on then for another hour until someone came. Everyone knew that you could not leave Jesus alone, outside the tabernacle on the altar, unwatched and unguarded.

        Here in our part of the world where the Church is predominantly rural and farming used to completely absorb people’s lives, we have more common and older traditions for adoring Our Eucharistic Lord. Men used to tip their hats, and everyone would make the Sign of the Cross when they passed by a Catholic Church on the street. When churches were generally open all day, before vandalism and crazies became so common, believing people would often stop into church to make a visit to Our Lord in the tabernacle. During my years as nuncio in Ukraine, riding in the car with bishops or priests in various parts of the country, none of them would ever miss making the Sign of the Cross when they drove past a church.

        Not too long ago, I was visiting with an older woman, who had moved to South Dakota to be close to her son and grandchildren. They live in a small town outside of Sioux Falls. She was distressed because here, different from where she had been living in another state near a community of retired priests with Mass every day, here she no longer had daily Mass and Communion. Her priest had another parish to care for as well, so each parish got daily Mass two days per week. The woman drives, so I asked her why she didn’t drive to another town on the off days for Mass. Sadly, her fixed income would not allow the extra gas money, and truth to be told, at her age and health, I don’t think her son wants her driving on the highway. Doing her own time in the parish church before the tabernacle, keeping Christ company, probably best fits her bill. Aging and adoring the Eucharistic Lord.

        What is age-appropriate adoration? Remember the perfect 12-year-old! One of my brothers-in-law, when he was traveling on the road selling, used to work it out where he could stop each day, when not for Mass, then to spend his hour before the Blessed Sacrament. I know people still on the job who make a point of leaving early for the office so they can stop for a brief visit to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament or who make a brief detour on the way home from work. I know others who could not stay for weekday Mass, but could come to confession, which Father offered daily before morning Mass. Thoughtfulness and creativity find ways to draw near to the Lord, when not in an Adoration chapel, then in a parish church, which (please God!) is open and accessible for folks to make visits to the Lord.

        Retired and you still have your vehicle? Make an appointment with our Eucharistic Lord just like you would to meet a friend for coffee or for lunch! Make a stop at church on your way to pick up groceries! Don’t give Father the silent treatment! If something is not right, let’s say the church entry is too dark or there’s a mat there or missing which puts you at risk of stumbling, then speak up! When Jesus cleansed the Temple, people noted His action and quoted Scripture to say, “Zeal for Your House consumes me”. 12-year-olds have theirs and we as senior citizens have ours!

        If you are homebound, then pray! Turn off all the noise, maybe withdraw to your room away from other people in the house to spend time with the Lord of your life! That fits in with my statement about prayer as the gateway or presupposition for Eucharistic Adoration! To be good at Eucharistic adoration you have to be a person who prays.

Praised be Jesus Christ!

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle! Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the Devil! May God rebuke him we humbly pray and do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God thrust into Hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls! Amen!

Sunday, December 5, 2021

40 Hours Homily - Renewing Faith in the Real Presence

 


 SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT

St. Michael Parish – 40 Hours Devotion

Saturday, Dec. 4th, 4:00pm Mass - Sunday, Dec 5th, 9:30am Mass

Bar 5:1-9

Phil 1:4-6, 8-11

Lk 3:1-6

Praised be Jesus Christ!

        The Alleluia verse proposed for the Second Sunday of Advent reads: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths: all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”  

That is basically Advent in a nutshell and with very little need for unpacking. “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths: all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” (Before going on with my homily, I better add a little parenthesis.)

        [I am really quite pleased to accept the invitation of your pastor and pastoral team to lead 40 Hour Devotions here at St. Michael this weekend. I do so, as they have suggested to me, with two intentions in mind: 1) To prepare you all for Christmas, our annual celebration of the great feast of the Lord’s Incarnation, and 2) by way of the classic 40 Hours focus on Eucharistic Adoration, to seek to stir up in your hearts that faith which is ours as Catholics in the Real Presence of Jesus, truly God and truly Man, in the Eucharist, the Sacrament of the Altar, He the Lord being present here Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity.

        Regardless of how much time you are able to dedicate to 40 Hours this weekend, I would ask you to pray intensely for the success of our parish devotions. With what intention? That hearts may be changed! That sinners may repent! May everyone at St. Michael’s come to deeper faith in the Lord Jesus born for us and for us given! May Christ reign in our hearts and in our homes this Advent and for Christmas!]

        “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths: all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

        Advent and this Sunday’s readings bring an insistent question to my mind. Over the course of history, I wonder who has had a tougher time believing in the victory of our God over human events: Was it Jerusalem? The chosen people to whom the Prophet Baruch addressed his book in the Old Testament, they, a city under siege, a people carried off into exile, but nonetheless promised the impossible: “… for God is leading Israel in joy by the light of his glory, with his mercy and justice for company”? Remember! In the Book of the Prophet Baruch, we are talking about God’s People at an all-time low in their history and yet they are told by the prophet that God is coming to save them. The Prophet Baruch talks about glory, mercy, and justice for them from God, Who is leading Israel in joy…

Advent and again our question! Was it tougher to imagine: hope and excitement for Jerusalem back in the Old Testament because of God’s promised victory for them or hope and excitement for Catholics today, despite the fact that many are filled with anxiety and maybe have serious doubts as to whether they should be confident in St. Paul’s promise to the Philippians: “I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus”? We are faced with the challenge of believing and hoping in the power of God to save, to reign victoriously not only in a spiritual sense, but truly over our lives and our world. Baruch told Jerusalem they would recover from the present devastation and be back on top again. Paul described an ongoing work in the lives of his listeners which would reach completion in the day of Christ Jesus.

To complicate matters even further, let us turn to the passage just proclaimed from Luke’s Gospel for today! Just what is it that would accredit the message of John the Baptist, spoken in the desert, by this ragged, emaciated figure, dressed in a camel’s hide and physically barely surviving, living off of locusts and wild honey? Just how are we to believe John’s claim that … “all flesh shall see the salvation of God”? Who was John the Baptist to make such promises in God’s Name?

        There is no doubt about it: the readings assigned for this Second Sunday of Advent are upbeat and full of anticipation. But how do we get past that which is seen and suffered, day in and day out, to the truth that it is God Who does the good work in us. The Lord Jesus brings all to fulfillment, to fruition.

        Part of the reason that I am sort of fixated on this idea that the primary action is God’s, that He brings the captives back from exile (thank you, Baruch), that He brings the work He has begun in you to fulfillment (yes, St. Paul), that John the Baptist was indeed the last and greatest prophet preparing the Lord’s victorious way, is that not few sensible Catholics are skeptical about that being the case. To say it another way: Just as in other times in the history of God’s People, so today we find ourselves in a spiritual wasteland, an arid place where people do not seem to pray much at all and as such show very little evidence of true, deep, and lifegiving faith.

        While I was working on this homily, I happened to listen to one of my favorite podcasts, by a younger husband and father, whose point was that as lay Catholics you don’t have time to waste. You are putting your children at risk, if you are investing time and effort in a parish, which may be a toxic environment at worse or at best a dud without heart or soul. My man urged his listeners to shake the dust off their feet, leave a lukewarm parish behind, and move in search of a true faith community. How does this square with St. Paul? “I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus.”

        I understand my man’s point of view, but disagree that that requires that we must, necessarily and in the first place, pronounce judgment on others.

        One of the very powerful scenes in the Book of Daniel shows the prophet quietly defying the king’s orders not to pray to anyone but the king for a given period of time. Daniel, despite those orders, continues to go home, close his door, open a window toward Jerusalem, and pray in private to the Lord for the deliverance from captivity of his people and the restoration of Jerusalem. The rest of the story we know. Daniel’s enemies denounce him to the king, who throws him into the lion’s den, but God delivers Daniel from the jaws of the lions when the king could not, the king feeds all of Daniel’s enemies to the lions and confesses the supremacy of Daniel’s God to his whole kingdom.

        Moral of the story and the message for this Sunday? In good times and in bad, but especially in adversity, we need to trust absolutely in God’s power to save. Our steadfast prayer amidst suffering and persecution has not to do with resignation but with hope. We cannot be slack; it is no solution. Our prayer, our engagement is what places us on God’s side; it is our choice, not so much to empower God as to open our hearts and lives to His victorious reign.

“Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths: all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” Or to use the words of St. Paul? “I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus.”

Praised be Jesus Christ!

Saturday, December 4, 2021

The Force (ouch!) of Law

 


I read an Italian commentary (here) on a ONEPETERFIVE article puzzling over a seeming auto-cancelation in the motu proprio TC by the reigning pontiff of his own provisions for the development of the Roman Rite through the principle of mutual enrichment of its two forms by offering some additional prefaces for inclusion in the 1962 Missal, as well as the option to celebrate some of the new and popular saints canonized since 1962.

As horrible as it may sound, the noted inconsistency, along with the benevolence which Pope Francis has shown to the FSSPX, granting faculties for the Sacrament of Penance and encouraging bishops to provide the necessary jurisdiction for priests of the Society to officiate at Catholic Weddings, hardly seems consonant with some of the brutish restrictions a few bishops seem to be reading into the motu proprio.

These mixed signals give me hope that some of the dire prophecies about persecution of traditional monastic and contemplative orders and the repression of the Church's Ecclesia Dei Institutes are no more than sabre rattling by the minions and do not reflect the mind of the Holy Father.

May the Holy Father turn again to a more nurturing position in law!

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI


Talk #1 - Our Dignity and Empowerment

 


40 Hours Devotions, Talk #1

Sunday, Dec 5th, 7:30pm, St. Michael

The Incarnation and the Real Presence:

The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

Praised be Jesus Christ!

St. Michael the Archangel! Pray for us!

        Let us start off with a very brief quote from the Gospel of St. Matthew 5:14-16! This is Jesus speaking to His disciples and potentially to us as His faithful followers today:

“You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” [Harper Bibles. NRSV Catholic Edition Bible. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.]

        Those words of Our Lord and Savior are intended to remind you and me of our dignity and empowerment in Him. Not only are none of us nobodies but rather somebodies, but in Jesus we are all light and life for the world. Amen! Let’s just stop there while we are ahead and ponder that particular marvel! … On second thought, maybe I should say a little something else lest anyone feel cheated. So here goes!

        One of the greatest challenges of retirement is time management, setting priorities for your days and weeks. I won’t go there and make a judgmental statement about me and other retirees, saying that we need to struggle to avoid wasting time, but the statement is not exactly untrue. I do not have a TV, partly because I didn’t have one for my last two assignments in Europe and so I guess you could say I don’t really know what I am missing. Sadly however, not having TV does not keep me from wasting time online, supposedly in my search for daily news. TV or Internet, it is all about the same. Long ago, I remember coming home to Sioux Falls from college seminary at IHM in Winona, Minnesota (late 60’s and early 70’s), for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter and sitting down each time with Mom for her afternoon soap operas on TV and realizing that I had not missed a thing in the intervening months since I had last been home. I never said a thing to her, but later when I came home for the first time in the summer after 2 years in theology in Rome and still had no problem catching up on the various story lines of Mom’s soaps, I guess I figured it out. Mom did too and soon swore off soap operas, explaining that they made her nervous. I will leave you to draw your own conclusions concerning possible parallels to time spent on the internet as it impacts our lives, spiritual development, sanctity, and mental health.

        For all the good things I have learned online, I must admit honestly that for me spending time on the internet is basically a waste of time. Reading books would be a better use of my time. I should really do without virtual living, Facebook, and all. That being said, the other day I did come up with something pretty good, an exercise proposed by a priest blogger in the lead up to the November meeting of the US Bishops’ Conference. He asked the followers of his blog to leave comments concerning this question: “How might the bishops, as a body and as individuals, work in concrete ways to restore, revive, expand belief in and devotion to the Eucharist according to the mind of the Church”? (Fr. Z) It is a pretty thoughtful question and I guess that is sort of my task during these 40 Hours: Just so you know: My goal for these days would be “…to restore, revive, expand belief in and devotion to the Eucharist according to the mind of the Church”. Wish me luck!

        As you may well know, in the Church today, addressing this particular faith topic has undoubtedly become a priority almost everywhere. Why? I suppose because of a Pew Research study, which got a lot of publicity and provided shocking results concerning what Catholics, even practicing Catholics, believe or don’t believe about the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, under the forms of Bread and Wine in the Eucharist. According to this and subsequent studies (the most recent one published just a couple weeks back by The Pillar), some 40% of Catholics (maybe 30%) do not seem to know what is going on at Sunday Mass. If you can trust these surveys, at least a generous third of all Catholics do not seem to believe that Jesus Christ, truly God and truly Man, is here present and active. I guess we should be asking why or striving to understand what is going on in the Church today. Why is there such a lack of true faith among Catholics? Concretely, as the topic applies to St. Michael Parish, maybe we should ask if your pastoral team had a good reason to assign this topic to me for our 40 Hours Devotions. What do they know or what do they fear about this parish? Do you suppose I could quiz them on it? No, I won’t! Anyway, we are not celebrating 40 Hours just to point a finger at St. Michael’s.

        I am not going to attribute anything specific, particular, or out of the ordinary to the concerns behind the parish team’s choice of topics for me. They know, as I do, that your parish is not the only one facing this question here in Sioux Falls. Even rural parishes here in South Dakota cannot be exempted from the accusation that almost half the people who call themselves Catholic do not seem to hold to what the Church of all times has believed and taught and what it still believes and teaches today. Talking with the DRE (Director of Religious Education) of a small-town parish here in the diocese back just before the end of school last spring, I learned that half of the Catholic children, K though 12, in that town have no regular contact with their parish, not with youth groups, not with religious education. They and their parents, though professing to be Catholic, or at least recorded as having been baptized in the parish church rarely or never attended Sunday Mass. My guess is that few if any of the children know their basic prayers and probably cannot even make the Sign of the Cross. If you added them all in, you would probably only have a tiny minority who even know what we mean when we say that Jesus the Son of God is really and truly present in the Eucharist.

Be it noted that the problem is not specifically American. You can find instances of it most everywhere in the Western World. It was very much an issue in Switzerland, where I spent the last five years before my retirement almost a year ago. Catholic Switzerland cannot even come close to the 20% Sunday Mass attendance we claim in the USA. The other day I read an interview online in German from the Swiss Catholic News Agency there. The author put the question about Mass attendance to the priest who is the spokesman for Upper Wallis in the diocese of Sion. Upper Wallis is German speaking and Lower Wallis or Valais speaks French. I know Father Martone the spokesman well, because he worked for me part time in the Nunciature in Bern. In the interview he states that the Canton Wallis, the bigger part of his diocese, is the most Catholic part of Switzerland. He comments that already before COVID the number of people coming to Sunday Mass was in serious decline in the German speaking part of the diocese. Father basically understates the problem, saying that with the lockdowns people had gotten out of the habit of going to Mass and no longer felt obliged to come to church.

        Father Paolo is a very good communicator, primarily because he knows how to avoid the red flags which provoke people and thus without putting them on the defensive, he can engage his listeners and readers in an honest examination of the problem. That is good Swiss psychology, which works well in our part of the world too. Just the other day I listened to a podcast on the same topic of faith in the Eucharist, by a man from Cincinnati, Ohio. His approach would not go over well either in Switzerland or here in South Dakota, because it is so brutally honest. My man from Ohio, whose podcast generally I kind of like, proceeded in his commentary with no holds barred (as people from Ohio tend to do) to state that the Catholic Church in America today is in a very bad way. He cited pre-Covid statistics to show that Sunday Mass attendance and infant baptisms were already tanking before the lockdowns. I don’t know about Ohio, but at least in Switzerland and maybe also here in South Dakota, people would probably push back and insist that my guy was an alarmist.

But what does Sunday Mass attendance have to do with faith in the Real Presence? Everything! If people truly believed that God in Christ comes down upon our altars in the Eucharist, they would not be missing Sunday Mass except out of necessity. Watching Mass on TV or streamed on the internet cannot substitute for being in God’s Presence here in church. Moreover, dare I say that people who truly believe would be finding the lockdowns and prohibitions of in-person Mass attendance to be insufferable.

When talking about belief in the Real Presence, that is an obvious takeaway. It goes especially for the clergy, who lead us in the worship of the Living God. There are many more points as well, concerning the issue of reverence, of how people behave or how they dress for church, concerning their posture, and the respectful silence which we all should be keeping in the presence of the King of kings and Lord of lords (Real Presence!). People my age or older may remember as children when the priest admonished not only the children but also the adults in church to sit up straight and kneel up straight (no three-point landings, as they were called back then), with the reminder that you were in God’s Presence.

No doubt it would be helpful or constructive to invite people to an examination of conscience on these various points. It is not really the very best approach however to challenge people to give evidence of their faith by how they stand, sit, or kneel here in the presence of the living God. The point is obvious, and you cannot deny the importance to true faith of reverent comportment in church, but people nowadays tend to get sort of touchy when a priest gets that direct. So, let’s take another approach, at least for now! Let’s go back to the Pew Research survey results or maybe look at our own annual head count in the parishes of the Sioux Falls diocese! What do the results from the annual parish census taken here in the diocese each March have to say?

        Granted, the results of the weekend counts on subsequent weekends in March each year are hard to interpret. Given people’s mobility, individual parish statistics cannot assure that folks are not going to Mass elsewhere. People should be registered in their territorial parish and attend there, but they do not always. No small number of Catholics in our day do not register in their parish out of ignorance and just sort of fall through the cracks; others remain anonymous by choice. One could also claim that the headcount taken in some parishes by the ushers is quite approximate. We know that Saturday evenings often find parishioners out and about or, because of children’s sports schedules, in the neighborhood of a more convenient Saturday evening Mass in another parish. That is especially true of all the small towns around Sioux Falls, where people come here to town for shopping, activities, restaurants and so on, stopping for Saturday evening Mass here in town while they are at it. Even admitting that there may be less sense to territorial parishes here in town and that for more than a generation already people have been going to the church of their choice here in town anyway, there is still something to the studies based on the annual census concerning parish planning for the city done some years back right here in Sioux Falls. As I recall, they indicated clearly that overall Mass attendance in the metropolitan area was not keeping pace with the growth of the city and of Minnehaha and Lincoln counties. For some time, maybe decades here in Sioux Falls, we have been carrying more people to the grave than we have to the Baptismal font.

        It is hard to escape the conclusion that, yes even here in River City we are suffering from a crisis of faith in Christ present and active in His Church. What to say? What to do?

        Let’s address the topic as assigned for this talk!

The Incarnation and the Real Presence:

The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

        When I was a child in school when we prayed the Angelus together, we genuflected at the third verse, The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. This followed the same pattern as at Sunday Mass where we genuflected every Sunday and not just at Christmas and the Annunciation at the same words during the Nicene Creed and again at those words from the last Gospel at Mass taken from the prologue to St. John’s Gospel: Et Verbum Caro Factum Est, The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. What was the sense of those genuflections? They physically underlined the earth-shaking significance and importance for our life of faith of the great and central truth that our salvation was wrought by the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity. I can remember as a child in parochial school Sister teaching us that the reason for Hell and the fallen angels, Lucifer and all the evil spirits prowling about the world seeking the ruin of souls, was their jealousy over God choosing not to become an angel but to become a man, the Incarnation. Jesus born of the Virgin Mary!

        What am I trying to get at? For one thing, that our faith, the true faith is integral. It is all one piece. Jesus changed bread and wine into His own Body and Blood, that through the mystery of the Incarnation God took on the fullness of our humanity so as to save us, to free us from the consequences of original sin, which we inherited from our first parents. What I am trying to say is that there is no such thing as optional about Sunday which proclaims, yes, the mystery of faith, but maybe the word proclaim is saying too little. Sunday rather bodies forth in us the great mystery of our salvation, of our hope in the life of the world which is to come.

        What I am trying to say is that there is nothing casual or nonchalant about Sunday Mass. The central mystery of our faith should bring us to our knees and fill us with awe in the sight of the angels who not only serve the Divine Majesty before His heavenly throne but sang and served the Infant King, as He lay in a feed trough on a cold winter’s night, in the midst of livestock and ragamuffin shepherds.

        To say that the true faith is integral, that it is all one piece, is to say that Holy Mass is the source and summit of Christian existence. The Catholic life lived is all about professing belief in thought, word, and deed. All that we say and are leads to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass to find its fullest and most perfect expression. Catholic life flows from the Mass. It is the fullest possible life imaginable, truly happy and upright.

        Let us go back to the beginning of my talk this evening to my stated goal: “…to restore, revive, expand belief in and devotion to the Eucharist according to the mind of the Church”. I cannot do this task justice in one evening and so I promise to return to it again Monday morning with my talk for seniors and again in the evening here in church. We’ll try too, to do something special with the school children on Tuesday morning before our closing Mass.

        Obviously, celebrating the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is central to our devotion. In our celebration of 40 Hours for this Advent, we are including Exposition, Adoration and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament to enhance your possibilities for prayer here in church before Jesus truly present. During these days or hours seek out a time alone here before the Blessed Sacrament for your own quiet prayer. Shut out all the noise and distraction and focus on the Lord! You won’t regret any time you might spend alone with Him.

Because we are talking about an integral life, a life lived day in and day out, I would like to recommend that you take advantage of the opportunities for the Sacrament of Reconciliation during these 40 hours. I make a special plea to those who have not gone to confession in a long time and to those living under the burden of mortal sin. One of the neatest things about the way we have practiced the Sacrament of Penance everywhere in the Church now for over a millennium is that it is confidential. The priest is there in Christ’s stead to open your way to grace. The best thing about Confession is that it is for everyone and maybe especially for those without big sins, who on a regular basis (maybe once a month and certainly at least 4 times a year) need a simpler consolation or who seek direction in living a holy life according to the Commandments and the Precepts of the Church. People usually tie confession to their Easter duty, but Confession any time can help you to open your heart to the Lord and to His transforming and saving grace. It is by confessing our sins and receiving penance and absolution from the priest that we do the necessary interior work by God’s grace to allow the Lord Who comes down upon our altar to find a place in our hearts and work wonders there for our sake and for the sake of those whom we love: for the sake of the life of the world.

        A good 40 Hours can be freeing and encouraging. That is what I wish and pray, for St. Michael Parish, for each of you, and for our Catholic Church which at the moment is maybe not shining enough like that city on the hill talked about in the Gospel.

Praised be Jesus Christ!

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle! Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the Devil! May God rebuke him we humbly pray and do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God thrust into Hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls! Amen!