O Sacrament Most Holy!

 

The Solemnity of

THE MOST HOLY BODY AND BLOOD OF CHRIST

(Corpus Christi) 18 June 2022, St. Lambert

Gn 14:18-20

1 Cor 11:23-26

Lk 9:11b-17

Praised be Jesus Christ!

        Corpus Christi: The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ.

        This week, in the runup to our celebration of Corpus Christi, I have had to take another look at what has been described as a crisis of faith among Catholics in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. I am doing so in the light of statements I have come across made by relatively younger men (young for me would be not yet 50 years of age). I have been confronted by statements by various younger men, all of them seemingly faithful Catholics, who express their understanding for the results of that recent Pew Research survey and other surveys which peg faith among Catholics in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist at 27% or less. It would seem that over 70% of Catholics polled in these surveys, do not believe that the Blessed Sacrament is really and truly Christ; they refer to the symbolic value of the consecrated bread and wine, but no more, and some even less.

I was sort of taken aback to discover that this story of the last year, which has a lot of people expressing their shock over the lack of faith in one of the central teachings of the Church doesn’t seem to shock these younger men. They are not happy about it, but they claim they can understand it, where it is coming from and how something as tragic as this could happen. For two generations now children have not been taught the faith either at home or in their Catholic schools; they have no idea what the Church believes and teaches. Let me give you two examples of such men and their observations which recently came to my attention!

In the one case, I just listened to a podcast by Fr. Mike Schmitz (a priest of the diocese of Duluth and quite popular on Catholic media). Fr. Mike comes from a good Catholic family but does not seem to have avoided in his own life as a child a major crisis of faith, and this already in elementary school. In the video in point, he recounts his own personal conversion at age 15, his conversion to faith in Jesus Christ really and truly present in the Eucharist. The other man, an Irishman who discerned out of a religious community in favor of marriage and family, expresses himself in his video as quite convinced that practically no one in Ireland born after Vatican II has actually been formed in Catholic faith. For him it is obvious that people without any formation in the faith cannot be expected to believe in Christ present in the Sacrament. Remember, this man says this of himself, having been a professed religious, who should have been better formed in the faith.

        Until I took time for these men’s opinions, I was shocked by the lack of faith pointed out by the surveys and which I had encountered in the lives of Catholics, let us say, around the world. I had my own theories about remedies for the situation, but which I fear fell short of the real problem of the countless number of people in the Catholic Church who simply do not know Who Jesus is.

Let me say that this is not a new crisis in the history of the Church and that in some ways it takes us back to the origins of the Feast of Corpus Christi, which was historically intended to reaffirm the faith in the transubstantiation, in Christ really and truly present, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, under the forms of Bread and Wine in the Eucharist. The beautiful office composed for this feast by St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us what we must needs believe, what the Lord Jesus Himself taught and which we find recorded in the Bread of Life Discourse in Chapter 6 of the Gospel of St. John (cf. vv. 47-51). “Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

        There are people who claim that the Feast of Corpus Christi is no more than a duplicate of Holy Thursday. Some approved authors argue in favor of this duplication simply for the fact that as Holy Thursday is situated right in the middle of our reflection on the Lord’s Passion that it is good to have another feast so that we can focus on all that is contained in this great mystery. Which mystery? That of the real Presence in the Eucharist of Jesus Christ, True God and True Man! With all of its beautiful old hymns and customs, Corpus Christ is intended as an aid to our faith, to help us embrace the great truth that Our Savior has not abandoned us, but at Holy Mass in the memorial of His Passion, He comes to us really and fully in His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. In the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar the Son of God feeds us with His very Self and strengthens us with heavenly nourishment for life’s journey to the Kingdom.

        Our first reading this year is taken from Genesis and speaks about Melchizedek, the priest of God Most High, bringing out bread and wine to Abraham, a foreshadowing of the Eucharist. From this Old Testament passage Abraham’s reverence for the priest-king Melchizedek and for the sacred gifts he bears is all too evident. And to think that the Eucharist is so very much more!

        In today’s Gospel passage from St. Luke, we read about the miraculous multiplication of the loaves and the fishes, Jesus feeding over five thousand, feeding their bodies and by His teaching feeding their souls as well. “They all ate and were satisfied.” … “Jesus spoke to the crowds about the kingdom of God.”

        Traditionally, a big part of Corpus Christi were always the beautiful outdoor processions with the Blessed Sacrament, Christ carried out of church and through the streets to encounter and bless His people. One of the most hopeful signs in the Church of our times has been the rise in the practice of Perpetual Adoration. Here at St. Lambert’s, we have public adoration of the Blessed Sacrament here in church from after Thursday morning Mass nonstop for just short of 24 hours until just before Friday morning Mass. Other places, like the Adoration Sisters chapel across from the Cathedral are open for prayer before the Blessed Sacrament all day, every day, with one of the sisters in turn keeping watch and praying the whole time.

        Some of the youth retreat movements and other Church events and celebrations incorporate times of adoration before the Blessed Sacrament and we have lots of testimony to vocations inspired or confirmed in the hearts of young people who spend time with Christ adoring Him in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar.

        My duty today is obviously to confirm you in your practice of coming to adore Christ here exposed on the Altar at special times, or at any time here reserved in the Tabernacle. If you are not in the habit of taking even a little bit of time on a regular basis to keep our Eucharistic Lord company, then I am here to challenge you as well to come and give Him His due. Christ must rule in our hearts and moving our bodies to come and kneel before Him is the best evidence that we are doing our part to seek His Holy Face. “Jesus spoke to the crowds about the kingdom of God.” … “They all ate and were satisfied.”

        O Sacrament Most Holy, O Sacrament Divine, all praise and all thanksgiving be every moment Thine!

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

Rejoice with Me! Up Close and Personal

The Solemnity of

 THE MOST HOLY TRINITY

Saturday, 11 June 2022, St. Lambert

 

Prv 8:22-31

Rom 5:1-5

Jn 16:12-15

Praised be Jesus Christ!

On today’s solemn feast it is proper to make some mention at least of the Doctrine of the Most Holy Trinity: One God in Three Divine Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! There is no other day in the year quite like Trinity Sunday, prone to lead us into theological and even philosophical discourse. It would be the appropriate day to offer outside of Mass some kind of educational, catechetical content on the nature of God. I say outside of Mass, because homilies were never intended for lectures, but they should kind of point us toward where we ought to be going. Study, reflection, meditation should be an integral part of our Christian life, for both priests and religious, but no less for all the lay faithful, for all the baptized. Repurpose some of your Sunday, if you will, for the things of God! Make it truly the Lord’s day!

So not having a Sunday afternoon lecture on the calendar, if I can leave you with nothing else, it would be that we are duty bound to be aware, to reflect on the place of God in our lives. Not God in any generic sense of the term but as God the Most Holy Trinity: One God in Three Divine Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit!

        Personally, I am a firm believer that even as we grow older, we never stop learning. For instance: one of the things I have learned in the last year is that among the general non-churched population, especially in the world of scientific research, you don’t have to be an atheist anymore. Believing in God is back in fashion among scientists and mathematicians. I would say it this way: Atheism is no longer a viable or reasonable option for serious, grownup people. Granted, there are people who may not be all that sure about God. They may have doubts, but they do not deny His existence, that is, if they have anything intelligent or intellectual going on in their lives, they admit God even if they fail to name Him.

Atheism has become what it always was: it is or was either an attitude held by angry people, or it is or was a political stance. The tenets of atheism cannot be held in good faith by people of good will. At some point in recent history, the questions which thinking people tend to ask on an ultimate level have changed. “Does God exist?” “Is there a Creator, Who brought all things into being and holds them in existence?” These are not the big questions anymore. Serious science seems to be aware of its limits in describing reality. People have moved beyond much of the pretense of the 19^th and early 20^th Century. In the face of its own discoveries and a clearer understanding of the limits its methods impose upon it, science seems to have become more respectful especially when it comes to speaking about matters of faith.

        The question of the day seems rather to be: “Who is God?” And we respond, God is Trinity in Unity. We can know God clearly in the Person of Jesus Christ. The Lord Jesus has shown us the Father and sent the Holy Spirit forth into our midst.

I was watching a year-old video the other day. It was a discussion between the very popular Jordan Peterson and Bishop Robert Barron. Jordan though a clinical psychologist is not an atheist. Nonetheless he has not yet succeeded in making a faith commitment in life, at least not one which goes beyond generic Christianity. Most people who know and admire Peterson expect that at some point he will take that final step and will probably convert to the Catholic faith. For now, he speaks about Catholic faith with respect, but also as a friendly critic, as an outsider who wishes us well. In the video he makes a general statement noting all the people, especially young people, who are walking away from the Church, who are abandoning the Catholic faith. They are the same people whom Bishop Robert Barron and many others refer to as “nones” (people who on a questionnaire when asked about their religious affiliation say they have “none”). Peterson places the blame for this exodus or abandonment by the young of Catholicism in our day on the leadership of the Church, on the hierarchy. His thesis would be that the Church has failed the young in particular for not really demanding enough of them, for not espousing high enough ideals. He thinks being a Christian and fulfilling the demands of the Church has become too easy.

        Peterson makes that accusation despite a deep respect for the things of God and of His Church. I suppose it could be true, that the Church is not demanding enough. Personally though, I think young people falling away from the Church has more to do with their failure to grasp the uniqueness of our faith. I doubt if Peterson would disagree with me, but I would challenge his analysis from outside of the Church which complains that faith practice today is not demanding enough. Granted: the goal of getting everyone in and out of church on Sunday in less than an hour is slack; it does not inspire. Doing away with abstinence from meat on Fridays except in Lent is slack; it is not serious. I won’t deny the relevance of Peterson’s observations. He has something to say, but I think more central to the abandonment of church life is the failure to grapple with the question of God’s personhood, that He can be named. We are not just talking about God in any generic sense of the term but of God as the Most Holy Trinity: One God in Three Divine Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit!

Sadly, most folks’ commitment to the Church is not one which goes beyond generic Christianity. I remember back in high school already learning about the teaching of the II Vatican Council, which warned against the temptation to a false irenicism in areas of interreligious dialogue or even ecumenism. For all the warnings, that seems to be the trap we have fallen into. Our respect for others who do not share our faith ends up in promoting religious indifference: one church, temple or house of prayer ends up mistakenly being considered equal to another. The notion of the fulness of truth in Jesus Christ in His One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church gets emptied of its meaning. The gift of the Holy Spirit no longer seems to be grounded in such an urgent call to Baptism in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Our first reading today was from Proverbs in the Old Testament. It starts out: “Thus says the wisdom of God.” Not only is there a God, Who brought into being all that is and holds it in being, but He saved us from everlasting death in and through His Son. God showed us His Face. Our faith is in Jesus Christ alone. As St.  Paul says in his letter to the Romans: “…we boast in hope of the glory of God.” We usually use Luke’s Gospel Chapter 15 to illustrate the Church’s teaching on penance and reconciliation. On Trinity Sunday we could apply it as well to God’s love for us and His eagerness to bring us to share in His joy: rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep… rejoice with me because I have found the coin I lost… but, son, we had to rejoice because the brother of yours who was lost, who was dead, has been found and has come back to life within the circle of the family.

If our notion of God is not shot through with our awareness of the Almighty as Person, who created and saved us out of love, then we might as well check the box which puts us in the “none” category. Glory then be to the Father, God, to the Son, God, and to the Holy Spirit, God, one in Being and threefold in Person. To Him be glory now and for ages unending. Amen. 

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

In Thy Sevenfold Gift Descend!

 

Pentecost Sunday

4-5 June 2022, St. Lambert

Acts 2:1-11

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

Jn 14:15-16, 23b-26

        Praised be Jesus Christ!

Come, Holy Spirit!

        “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit … As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ. For in one spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons, and we were all given to drink of one Spirit.”

        Even before I started to prepare my homily for Pentecost, for some reason (call it inspiration?) the Genesis reading about the Tower of Babel was roaming around in my head. The thought which accompanied this little distraction was about how in Sacred Scripture Old and New Testament, that is to say in God’s inspired word, confused speech, speech with no commonly held point of reference, was and is considered a curse: Babel (the word says it all).

When in 2001 I moved from Bonn, Germany (at the heart of the very culturally Catholic Rhine Valley) to Berlin (bottom land, marsh land, sort of Protestant, but mostly just secularized and without any particular geographic points of reference) I learned that one of the things Berliners were quite proud of was referring to themselves as “multiculti”, multicultural. As many of these same people in that big city were often prejudiced against foreigners, that multiculturalism usually boiled down to a rejection of what were for their parents commonly held pre-WWII German values, usually Christian values about matters of faith and home life. With this multiculti business, it was as if they were celebrating the chaos in the Book of Genesis which came as a result of the confusion of speech which put an end to the project of building a tower to heaven (Babel!). They were effectively not embracing foreigners and diversity of culture so much as they were rejecting hearth and home as they relate to traditional Christian values and customs. In other words, many of the rather outspoken people living in Germany’s capital city when I was there 20 years ago were being doubly foolish. Not only did they refuse to place themselves under God or to espouse the traditional values of their ancestors, but they basically refused any kind of common social project for the present or for the future. They were being multiculti, or so they said!

My simple message to you is that “multiculti” (you can supply the word “woke-ism” if you like) is not the miracle of Pentecost. The tongues of fire and the multiple languages with which the Apostles taught on that day were far better, because they effectively communicated. They did not divide but actually taught people, offering singleness of purpose. God is not about division and confusion but rather about unity, experienced as favor and grace. If we are going to build up our world, this world, then we will do so on Christ and no one else. We will do so by the grace of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost was and is the showering of His gifts upon the faithful. We know who is faithful and truly favored by God by the fruits of their lives, the fruits of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in our hearts, in our Church.

“Come, Thou Holy Spirit, come!”  

        “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always.”

        I don’t mean to pick on the Berliners, but back then they were for me a perfectly illustrated example of unfounded pride which had lost its way. Life is about virtue, and it is God-centered, or it is not truly life at all. Before we moved to the old/new capital of reunified Germany, my boss had sent me ahead to Berlin to interview candidates for the position of chauffeur for the Nunciature. The idea was to recruit a man from Berlin to come to Bonn to work for the last couple months before our move, so that then back in Berlin he would be at home with his family. After interviewing 11 candidates, I settled on the guy who seemed the cleverest and most engaging. Reporting back with my recommendation to my boss, with my top three picks, he reacted by telling me I was mistaken to favor as number one a guy without church affiliation rather than to pick the less flashy but much more solid Catholic man, my number two among those I interviewed. As it turned out, he was right. Flashy quit almost immediately (no real strength of character). He did not even make it through the couple months left in Bonn before the move. The Catholic guy, in the meantime, had been hired by the Cardinal of Berlin and served faithfully and well for many years. He was steady and his life was marked, yes, by virtue.

        Life in the Holy Spirit is virtuous living. Virtue is a habitual and firm disposition to do good. The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us that the human virtues are stable dispositions of the intellect and the will that govern our acts, order our passions, and guide our conduct in accordance with reason and faith. There are moral virtues and there are theological virtues. The moral virtues grow through education, deliberate acts, and perseverance in struggle. They can be grouped around the four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Divine grace purifies and elevates them. The theological virtues dispose Christians to live in a relationship with the Holy Trinity. They have God for their origin, their motive, and their object— God known by faith, God hoped in and loved for his own sake. There are three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity. They inform all the moral virtues and give life to them.

        Many of the more charismatically inclined members of the Church seem to be drawn by the flashy. They seem to ignore basic Catholic teaching about what the true gifts, the higher qualities in life are. The moral life of Christians is sustained by the gifts of the Holy Spirit. These are permanent dispositions which make man docile in following the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Already from the Old Testament Prophet Isaiah we class these gifts as numbering seven. The seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord. They complete and perfect the virtues of those who receive them.

        Several of the communities of nuns I have worked with over the years had the custom of preparing holy cards with the name of each of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit on them and then each one drawing a card out on Pentecost at breakfast. The card you drew was the gift you were to work on and pray for, for yourself, during the Pentecost Octave especially.

There are also the fruits of the Spirit. They are perfections that the Holy Spirit forms in us as the first fruits of eternal glory. The tradition of the Church lists twelve of them: “charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, chastity.”

[cf. Church, U.S. Catholic. Catechism of the Catholic Church: Second Edition (pp. 502-504). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.]

        On this Sunday or during the Pentecost Octave, look in the mirror at your own life to see what kind of perfections the Holy Spirit is working in you. “Charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, chastity”, not much of what you would call “flashy” there and not particularly marked by multi-anything either. There is steadiness, however, something wholesome that you can build on for your own sake and for the sake of the life of the world.

Praised be Jesus Christ!

Come, Holy Spirit!

 PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI