7th Week of OT 2020 - Monday - Jealousy and Selfish Ambition

Last week, my morning homilies focused primarily on our readings from the letter of St. James.

James taught us to undergo our trials joyfully, to persevere amidst every temptation, to be doers of the word, not just hearers of the word, and that faith without works is dead. His instruction is certainly applicable for every Christian, for temptation and trial are inevitable for all of us, we must all be concerned that we don’t allow the Gospel to go in one ear and out the other, but to put the Gospel into practice in concrete works of charity.

Today’s reading may or may not be universally applicable. James seems to be addressing Christians with the unique role of teaching the faith. “Not everyone should become teachers of the faith” he says in the preceding passage, “for teachers will be judged more severely.” James is concerned that those who are teaching the faith aren’t living the faith, they are just giving the Gospel lip-service. They are falling into hypocrisy—saying one thing and doing another. And James is worried about the scandal this sort of hypocrisy causes. For if a teacher, a priest, a bishop can’t live the faith, how can anyone else be expected to do so.

In today’s passage, James seems to be still speaking to teachers and Christians with official roles in the community, and he gives a warning against jealousy and selfish ambition, and he says these motives are earthly, unspiritual, and demonic—and they cause disorder in a community and allow foul practices to occur.

In recent years, we certainly have been scandalized by many teachers, many clergy and religious, who have caused public scandal by failing to live up to the Gospel they have been charged to teach and preach. Jealousy and ambition continue to allow disorder and foul practices to fester in many areas of the Church.

So, James calls forth those with true wisdom and understanding to take up these public roles, but with great caution. They must ensure that their motives remain pure, that their actions are not for their own self-interest, but for the good of souls, that they cultivate not division but peace, but putting into practice, not the corrupt values of the world, but the authentic wisdom of the Gospel.

While James addresses those involved in official public roles in the church, every Christian in a sense is a public figure, and has a responsibility to set good example, to be full of mercy and good works.
May we be faithful to our calling, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

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That the Holy Spirit may direct the appointment of a new Bishop for the Church of Cleveland, that he may be a man of true wisdom and understanding and fidelity to the Gospel

That young people may seek Christ amidst all the filth and evils of the world, and for the protection of innocent human life from evil.

For healing for all those suffering disease, for those afflicted with the Coronavirus, and all who are oppressed by any kind of need, that the Lord may graciously grant them relief, and For the Holy Father’s prayer intentions for this month: that the needs of migrants and victims of human trafficking may be heard and acted upon.

For the dead, for all of the souls in purgatory, and for X, for whom this Holy mass is offered.

O God, our refuge and our strength, hear the prayers of your Church, for you are the source of all goodness, and grant, we pray, that what we ask in faith, we may truly obtain. Through Christ our Lord.

Holy Hour of Reparation - Healing from Scandal and Grief

In response to the sexual abuse crisis engulfing the Church, the Holy Father, Pope Francis has asked the faithful and the clergy, “the entire holy faithful People of God to a penitential exercise of prayer and fasting, following the Lord’s command.”

“This can awaken our conscience and arouse our solidarity and commitment to a culture of care that says ‘never again’ to every form of abuse,” he said. “Every one of the baptized should feel involved in the ecclesial and social change that we so greatly need.”

To be honest, my first emotions in response to the news of these recent revelations were those of anger and sadness. Anger and sadness over brother priests, consecrated to the Lord, who disgraced their sacred orders; anger at the injustice of bishops and cardinals covering-up the crimes of the abusers; sadness for the pain caused to the victims and the scandal caused to them, how their image of the priesthood and of the Church and perhaps of God has been damaged, how their trust in their priests has been undermined.

Emotions of anger and sadness must always be brought to the Lord to be healed, lest they fester and become poisonous. Likely, I am not alone, here tonight, in bringing my anger and my sorrow to the Lord to be healed.

I came across a quote, just yesterday, from a letter written by the irish playright Oscar Wilde. Wilde writes from prison, this letter which he titled “De Profundis”, out of the depths, the first words of Psalm 130. Wilde writes from the depths of prison, a place of helplessness, despair, anger and sadness. A short sentence near the letter’s beginning resonated with he. He wrote, “where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.” “where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.”

His words reminded me of the second beatitude, “Blessed are the sorrowful, for they shall be comforted.” A time of sorrow can become holy when that sorrow is brought to the Lord. Whether we are grieving the loss of a loved one, a broken relationship, the loss of property, or we are sorrowful for the sins of fellow Christians, like during this time of scandal, grieving can be a holy activity, when our grief is brought to God to be healed.

I think our grief is so great, because grief is a consequence of wounded love.

We grieve the sins of the clergy because we love the clergy, we love our bishops and priests, and it grieves us when they fail, when their sins are so great. We grieve the wounds of the victims, because we love them, especially our young people who put their trust in the Lord and those he has ordained to serve the Church. We grieve their sense of betrayal.

But I truly believe that in coming here is holy, acknowledging our anger and grief before our Eucharistic Lord. This is holy ground because we come to the Lord for healing, healing our wounds, and those of the Church.

We pray that the Lord will hear the prayers of the grieving and bring healing to all the victims of abuse, those who are scandalized by the sins of trusted clergy, and that the Lord will give us strength to continue to work for the spread of the Gospel, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

23rd Sunday in OT 2018 - Christ's Healing Activity Then and Now

As you may have seen in the bulletin, this month I’ll be hosting a bible study of the Gospel of Mark. Though we hear the Scriptures proclaimed at Holy Mass, to take them time to study them opens us to more deeply understand God’s Word. Like the deaf and the dumb man in the Gospel today, the Lord wishes to open our ears to understand the Word more deeply and loosen our tongues to proclaim the Word with greater courage, conviction, and faithfulness. So consider participating in our upcoming Scripture study on Monday nights in the chapel.

St. Mark’s Gospel is such an interesting Gospel to study. Compared to the Gospels of St. John, St. Luke, and St. Matthew, which relate to us many of the Lord’s sermons and longer teachings, St. Mark’s Gospel is very action-oriented. We see in Mark’s Gospel the Lord’s power, dominating the forces of evil and sickness, his strength of will in accomplishing the mission preordained by his Heavenly Father. St. Mark details how The Savior of the World working: healing the wounds of our sinfulness, casting out demons, opening eyes, ears, lips, minds, and hearts to God’s grace.

This weekend, our Gospel reading contains one of these wonderful detailed accounts from Mark’s Gospel of the Lord healing man who is deaf and dumb. To accomplish this miraculous healing the Lord could have simply willed the man to be healed, he could have snapped his finger or waved his hand and this man would be healed. But instead, we read of this multi-stepped ritual. The Lord first receives this man, then the Lord then takes him aside and he puts his fingers into the deaf man’s ears, and he spits and he rubs his spittle on the deaf man’s ears and tongue.   And then the Lord looks up to heaven, and he groans, and then he yells out, “Ephphatha, be opened.”  Why this ritual?  Why all these gestures, these signs, these actions? 

The Lord of course not only wanted to heal this man, but as usual, to teach us a lesson.  Namely, that he prefers to work through words, and gestures, and touch, and actions, and signs and intermediaries.  That’s how he healed so many during his earthly ministry, back then, and that’s how he wishes to bring healing to us, now, and all the ages of the Church.

This ritual healing, these gestures and signs in the Gospel today, teach us that the Lord heals through the gestures, signs, and rituals of his holy Church, primarily the Seven Sacraments. In washing our bodies in the waters of baptism, he brings cleansing of our sinful nature. In anointing our heads with chrism in the sacrament of confirmation, he brings strength for the work of the Gospel. In feeding us, under the appearance of bread and wine, in the Eucharist, he nourishes our deepest hunger for God, so that we turn less to be satiated by sin. Through the ritual words of absolution in the sacrament of confession, he brings the reconciliation with God that we cannot achieve on our own. In the exchange of vows in holy matrimony, he joins man and woman to become instruments of God’s fruitful love. Through the anointing of the Sick, the Lord gives powerful grace to endure bodily sickness and the final trial of physical death.

In recent years, there has been a real decline in the number of people coming to the Sacrament of Reconciliation for the forgiveness of their grave sins.  One of the reasons one often hears is that, “I don’t need to go to a priest, I just pray to God directly.”  But that’s not Christianity. The Lord works through his ministers, and through the words, gestures, and rituals of the Church. Offering our contrition to God in the privacy of our homes is good, for our sins truly offend God.  And we should offer our sorrow as soon as we recognize our sin.  BUT, God has made known exactly how He desires to forgive sins. We cannot insist that God forgive our sins on our own conditions.   That  forgiveness, that healing of sin, comes through the words and gestures of the sacrament—through the confession of our particular sins to a priest and the penitent’s expression of contrition, and the priest’s prayer of absolution.

The healing power of the Lord is not limited to the Sacraments, of course. He is present, when two or three are gathered in his name. The healing ritual in today’s gospel begins when the deaf man was brought to the Lord by other people. The Lord loves to work through other people, through parents and priests, neighbors and strangers, through support groups and best-friends-forever. He heals through doctors and medicine and nurses and caregivers, people who have dedicated their lives to healing. He helps those with emotional and psychological wounds through therapists and psychologists, by helping people confront wounds accumulated from childhood or trauma.  He teaches through catechists and clergy. Through Christians like you and me, the Lord desires to bring food to the hungry, clothing to the naked, consolation to the grieving, friendship to the lonely. He wants to use us, each and every one of us, to bring the healing the world so desperately needs.

What is the healing each of us needs? The Lord wishes to heal each one of us, to heal our wounded sense of right and wrong, our disordered attractions, to fix our broken moral compasses, to embolden our fear of speaking truth and being generous to the poor. Because of Original Sin we desire too much of what we don’t need and too little of what we do need. We desire too much social media, gossip, shopping, dessert, selfish exaltation, noise and entertainment, and too little prayer, study, charity, self-discipline, penance, fasting, mortification, silence and meditation. We do well to identify those parts of our lives which need healing, and bring them to the Lord.

That so many Catholics have fallen away from the Church in recent years is such a tragedy, because our brothers and sisters have fallen away from the ways that Jesus wants to work miracles in their lives, the ways the Lord wants to bring them healing and wholeness.

In the news these days, we’ve heard a lot about bishops and priests falling short of their sacred duties. It is a true scandal when ordained clerics undermine the spread of the Gospel through their grave sins. And yet, Christ has not abandoned us. He wants to bring healing to our Church now, and he will continue to do that through the Sacraments, through good holy priests and religious and lay faithful committed to the Gospel. Scandal, in a sense, is always a wake up call to the Church, the hierarchy and the lay faithful, and even to non-Catholics, that counterfeit and watered-down Christianity isn’t good for anybody. May we work and pray for the healing needed in the Church, our families, our community, by turning to the Lord in prayer and penance and the works of charity.

The Lord wishes to speak that powerful word, “Ephphatha” in each of our lives, that we might be ever-more open to his light and healing grace, by bringing our wounds to Him, by trusting in Him, by sharing our faith in Him for the glory of God and salvation of souls.