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.
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!
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