Father George William Rutler Homilies

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**Father George William Rutler Homilies**

The homilies of Fr. George William Rutler, pastor of the Church of St. Michael the Archangel in New York City.

Latest Episodes:

2020-12-06 - Advent II Dec 06, 2020

6 December 2020

The Second Sunday of Advent

Mark 1:1-8 + Homily

15 Minutes 15 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/120620.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

Note: A substitute priest celebrated Mass and preached today. The attached homily is from 10 December 2017, Advent II, using the same readings as today.

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 6 December 2020:

(Adapted from December 6, 2015*)

During the 1976 Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia, a relatively unknown figure, the Archbishop of Krakow and future Pope John Paul II, said: “We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has ever gone through. I do not think that wide circles of the American society, or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-church, between the Gospel and the anti-gospel. This confrontation lies within the plans of Divine Providence; it is a trial which the whole Church . . . must take up, and face courageously.”

Those words in Philadelphia certainly were as prophetic as the voices in Judea thousands of years ago. In the subsequent generation, crammed with breathtaking events of universal and historic significance, heroic and tragic, we can count the manifold ways in which that future pope seemed to see the judgment of God at work.

The Second Sunday of Advent points attention to two kinds of judgment. First, and most immediate for the human condition, is the particular judgment each of us will experience at the moment of death, when our life passes before us. Christ as Judge makes no arbitrary decisions, but instead avails himself as the measure of our compatibility with his love. The other judgment is the social judgment of the whole world. This will happen at the end of time when all created things and time and space themselves will end. There was an intimation of this in the earthquake when Christ died on the cross, as prelude to his resurrection when he could “die no more” (Romans 6:9).

Confronting the Judge, we have the option of two kinds of fear. The first is the perplexity of the person who knows only self-love and has lived life as though the self were God. The second is the joyful awe sensed by the person who has loved God and neighbor as much as the self.

In the moral order, people have to make judgments for the sake of sanity, but those judgments must be based on standards outside one’s sentiments, similar to the way we measure objects according to the standards set by the Bureau of Weights and Measures. Jesus submitted to the judgment of Pontius Pilate, and by so doing, he took on the suffering of those who are wrongly judged.

Jesus did not deny Pilate’s right to pass judgment; rather, he reminded Pilate that he was answerable to a higher authority: “You would have no power over me were it not given to you from above” (John 19:11). The command not to judge others is about defining justice without accountability to God. “He who rejects me and does not receive my words, has one who judges him; the word that I have spoken will be his judge on the last day” (John 12:48).

*During this season we shall run columns from A Year with Father Rutler, published by Sophia Press

2020-11-29 - Advent I Nov 29, 2020

29 November 2020

The First Sunday of Advent

Mark 13:33-37 + Homily

13 Minutes 42 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/112920.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

Note: A substitute priest celebrated Mass and preached today. The attached homily is from 3 December 2017, Advent I, using the same readings as today.

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 29 November 2020:

(Adapted from November 29, 2009*)

The season of Advent is lyrically beautiful if one is willing to engage the realities it teaches: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. The alternative is to create a parallel universe, partying in a faux Christmas confection of jingle bells, dancing elves, self-conscious bonhomie, and ignoring the Incarnation of God. T.S. Eliot belabored the obvious in saying, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

Reality, nonetheless, has the last say. Advent focuses on the reality of life as a sacred gift from God, and not a morally indifferent biological accident to be manipulated by human will. Pope Paul VI was scorned for saying this in his prophetic encyclical Humanae Vitae, whose predictions have been realized with frightening rapidity. The first illusion it condemned was artificial contraception as morally good. Those cultures that ignored reality are entering what the European Union now admits is a demographic “catastrophe.” The dwindling population rate is leading to the collapse of social welfare benefits and the bankruptcy of Europe’s cradle-to-grave welfare state. The cradles are emptying as fast as the graves are filling.

A report presented to the European Parliament by the Institute for Family Policies says, “Europe is plunged in an unprecedented demographic winter and has become an elderly continent, with a large birth deficit, fewer marriages and more of them broken, homes emptying.” The report projects there will be 27 million fewer Europeans by 2050, with every third inhabitant over 65. Unspoken is the effect of Islamic immigration to fill the vacancies and replace European civilization. What is chillingly unreal about the report is its acceptance of those eugenic policies that brought on the catastrophe. Our own nation is on the edge of entering the same illusory world of a bright future that ignores the facts of life.

From a secular perspective, Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin has written about the harm done to children by the “Marriage-Go-Round” in the United States. Marriage has become a status symbol rather than an essential core of society. Marriages in our country are even more ephemeral than in Europe. After just five years of marriage, 23 percent of Americans had separated or divorced, compared with 12 percent in West Germany, 8 percent in Great Britain, and 3 percent in Italy. Dr. Cherlin’s approach is utilitarian and ultimately defeatist: “I think our best hope is to find better ways of coping with the culture we have.”

Christ does not call us to cope with the culture, but to transform it. Transformation happened in a decaying Roman Empire and it can happen in our quaking modern imperium, but only by facing reality. In their November 2009 annual conference, the US bishops issued a pastoral letter on marriage, which realistically spoke of good and evil. It is already being criticized by the sorts who mocked Humanae Vitae. But they are growing very grey.

*During this season we shall run columns from A Year with Father Rutler, published by Sophia Press

2020-11-22 - Christ the King Nov 22, 2020

22 November 2020

Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

Matthew 25:31-46 + Homily

17 Minutes 45 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/112220.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

Note: A substitute priest celebrated Mass and preached today. The attached homily is from 26 November 2017, the Solemnity of Christ the King, using the same readings as today.

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 22 November 2020:

These days I am frequently asked if we are living in the “End Times.” As the grace of Holy Orders does not make me a seer, I defer, as is prudent, to the King of Universe: “Watch therefore, for you do not know what hour your Lord is coming” (Matthew 24:42). So the answer simply is that we do not know, but as the Coast Guard’s “Semper Paratus” motto exhorts, we must constantly be prepared. That vigilance is contingent on everyone’s immediate obligation to be recollect for the end of one’s own life. For the Christian, this is a stimulus to faith rather than neurosis. “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God” (Philippians 4:6

The prophets were not like the boy who cried “Wolf!” They were inspired by God to tell what he wants his people to know about spiritual readiness, so that his kingly rule is that of a shepherd guiding his flock through the variables of human experience. In the film The Lion in Winter, Katharine Hepburn as Henry II’s queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, remarks with regal resignation about her dysfunctional family: “What family doesn’t have its ups and downs?” Christ’s family the Church has always had its ups and downs, often big time, and many times it has been the lamentable case that the Shepherd King is tasked with herding cats rather than sheep

The Church began with a crucifixion when no one expected a resurrection. That sequence of death and life is repeated time and again. There were the persecutions under so many Caesars, heresies with volatile schisms in consequence, sieges, desecrations, destructions, corruptions and civilly institutionalized blasphemies. But each of these crucifixions was followed by a resurrection. This is to be remembered when distress in the Church is accompanied by a confluence of unrest and fear in politics and pandemics. Through it all, the Carthusian motto grows ever more stolid and incontestable: “Stat Crux dum volvitur orbis”—the Cross stands steady while the world revolves. This is most vivid when the revolving world seems to be whirling out of control

On November 5, the ninety-year-old Cardinal Tumi of Cameroon was briefly kidnapped by separatists who demanded that he endorse their propaganda. He told his captors that he must preach only what is true: “Nobody has the right to tell me to preach the contrary because I was called by God.” In every cultural crisis, this is the kind of witness that transcends any attempt to speculate about the end of the world, for it takes its strength from the assurance that Christ Crucified in Jerusalem is also Christ the King of the Universe

His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not be taken away, his kingship shall not be destroyed. (Daniel 7:14)

2020-11-15 - 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time Nov 15, 2020

15 November 2020

33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 25:14-30 + Homily

21 Minutes 03 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/111520.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

Note: A substitute priest celebrated Mass and preached today. The attached homily is from 19 November 2017, the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, using the same readings as today.

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 15 November 2020:

Several of our Lord’s parables have to do with productivity in one form or another: The Sower, The Mustard Seed, The Tares, and then there is today’s, which is specifically about money (Matthew 25:14-30). In Greek currency, a talanton, as a measure of silver, was the equivalent of 6,000 Roman denarii. Establishing modern equivalences of money is notoriously difficult, but since a single denarius was worth a day’s wages, the value of a talent was great.

This parable is about more than wealth management. In English, the word “talent” is an insightful pun, because this is about investing whatever spiritual graces God gives “to each according to his ability.”

Thus, the expression “Keep the Faith” has its limits, because the same Faith that is to be kept and cherished in our hearts, can only flourish if it is spread to others. Even in mercantile economics, as St. John Paul II taught in the encyclical Centesimus Annus, wealth is not the product of static human resources, but of human creativity in their use. And the greatest resource is life itself.

Three men are given different talents, which the first two put to work and by their investments make a profit. The third, whose fear of his master is more on the order of servile fear, which causes timidity, rather than the holy fear that engenders courage, is overly cautious and can only excuse himself by telling his master, “I knew you to be a hard man.” He becomes the spokesman for timorous sorts who apply human psychology to Christ, whose judgments are just, as if that justice excluded productive mercy.

This is an illuminating wisdom in these dark days of our nation, when the temptation might be for Christ’s disciples to be discouraged and for the Church Militant to seek shelter from a tempestuous culture. By way of metaphor, one is reminded of the highly decorated British general, Leslie Rundle (GCB, GCMG, GCVO, DSO, etc.). This estimable man engaged combats from the Zulu War through the First World War. A man of caution and deliberation, he was careful to protect the lives of his soldiers, for which they were understandably grateful. He was a well-intentioned exemplar of the dictum of Shakespeare’s less exemplary Falstaff: “The better part of Valor is Discretion.” But that can be overdone. While Rundle took few risks, he may have occasionally lost the chance to charge forward into enemy ranks.

Then there was the dithering figure of General McClellan, who lost opportunities at Antietam. An exasperated Lincoln telegraphed him: “If General McClellan does not want to use the Army, I would like to borrow it for a time, provided I could see how it could be made to do something.” It would be terrible in our conflicted times, to hear our Lord say that to us.

2020-11-08 - 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Nov 08, 2020

8 November 2020

32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 25:1-13 + Homily

17 Minutes 13 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/110820.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

Note: A substitute priest celebrated Mass and preached today. The attached homily is from 12 November 2017, the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, using the same readings as today.

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 8 November 2020:

In the late nineteenth century, a New England college dean wrote: “The youth who loves his Alma Mater will always ask, not ‘What can she do for me?’ but ‘What can I do for her?’” One of his students, a clergyman named George St. John, paraphrased that as a locution to boys when he became headmaster of the Choate School in Connecticut: “Ask not what your school can do for you, but rather ask what you can do for your school.” One of the boys who heard that in the 1930s, John F. Kennedy, made the diction more resonant in his inaugural address of 1961: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” Although he had speechwriters of acumen, one will not gainsay naïve clients of Kennedy for pillaging what was not his own. As Anatole France said, “When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.” Today those lines could not be uttered approvingly by the political party to which Kennedy belonged. Because of the exigencies of copy editors, I am writing these lines before the national election, so I refrain from predicting the various state votes. But as a client of Saint Michael the Archangel, who is the patron of my parish, I am confident that this election, because the issues it is engaging are of the highest portent for our moral order, will have results that transcend the consequences of customary politics. This election will have exposed the corruption of the mainstream and social media, by their acquiescence to subjective journalism and the wanton censorship of reports of inconvenient scandals in high places. Holy Church has been under attack, as borne witness by the need for armed security guards in our sanctuaries. Our own church in Hell’s Kitchen has been assigned armed security guards. This is not just a political assault, for the brutal killing of Christians worshipping in France shows the hatred of Christ, who said in words as thrilling as they are ominous: “Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake” (Matthew 5:11). “…for My sake.” All that we do, in every aspect of life, and in every moment of the day, if done for His sake, will reap an unimaginable reward. If we want things only for ourselves, they will fester in the soul, confusing the intellect and weakening the will, but if we want the good of others that will redound to the good of Church and Nation. Abundant are the demagogues who would promise what the government will give man, but they offer it in return for our souls. For Christians, it is a choice between Mother Church and Nanny State. That could be a costly exchange.

2020-11-01 - All Saints Day Nov 01, 2020

1 November 2020

Solemnity of All Saints

Matthew 5:1-12A + Homily

19 Minutes 28 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/110120.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 1 November 2020:

The wife of a most distinguished oil painter who taught at the Art Students League for many decades, having started there as a boy with a scholarship given by Mayor LaGuardia, told me that he had “perfect pitch” when it came to mixing his palette. She also confided that he never painted autumnal scenes of leaves at full peak because the colors are so brilliant that on canvas they would seem artificial. In my brief tutelage under him, I found his happiness in his work contagious. But the most important thing I learned was that lesson about the natural outdoing artifice. And this can be taken a step further with reference to God’s grace which, as Aquinas said, does not destroy nature but perfects it, despite our limitations. In other words, if the best human talent cannot replicate the highest beauties of nature, we cannot expect to be more than heroic on our own. Saints are not superhuman. Sanctity is simply the state of the virtues lived to an intensity beyond unaided human effort. This gift is available to all who allow God to infuse their lives with the love that made them. “I no longer live, but the Messiah lives in me, and the life that I am now living in this body I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). Paul of Tarsus was not less who he was, but more than he had been, when that change happened. It is rather like Yehudi Menuhin’s violin; for when a lady said that his violin “made such a beautiful sound” he placed his ear to it and said that he heard nothing. Divine grace is to the human being what human talent is to the instrument of wood and strings. This explains why saints experience such transporting joy commingled with suffering: Living a life of grace makes the gracelessness of a fallen world more painful for them than it does for others who have passively adjusted to it. To continue the theme of aesthetics, I am reminded of how William F. Buckley, who could do many but not all things well, showed Chagall a picture he had painted, only to hear that master groan, “The poor paint!” Perhaps that gives a sense of the divine wrath caused by God’s contemplation of lives that have neglected to let him be in them. Think of what Attila the Hun or Mao Tse-tung might have accomplished had they accepted the Gospel. Conversely, one dreads to think what evil Aquinas might have caused if he had used his brilliance to tell lies, or what desolation Teresa of Calcutta might have spread by twisting her fame to propagate eugenics. The Feast of All Saints celebrates those who show us what we may or may not become by showing what we can be.

2020-10-25 - 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time Oct 25, 2020

25 October 2020

Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 22:34-40 + Homily

17 Minutes 14 Seconds

NOTE: Due to technical difficulties today’s homily is not available. The homily recorded here was given on 29 October 2017, the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time using the same readings as today.

Link to the Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/102520.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 25 October 2020:

In one survey of grammarians, two words deemed to be among the most beautiful sounding in the English language were Agape and Philadelphia. The problem is that these actually are Greek. There also are many aphorisms in the English language that have become so familiar that one may not realize that their sources are in antiquity. Take for instance “Who will watch the watchers?”—which originally was a phrase of the Roman poet Juvenal (b. 55 AD). He also coined the expression “a sound mind in a sound body,” and in college we were not allowed to forget its Latinity, for it was written on a wall of the gymnasium: “Mens sana in corpore sano.”

Juvenal had a talent for lapidary expressions, and I suppose his most common one is “bread and circuses” from his Satire X. Precisely because he was satirical, he was not popular among the more thin-skinned Romans. Juvenal was of the senatorial caste, and much of a snob, for he disdained what some of our contemporary politicians have called “a basket of deplorables.” But his point was well taken at least in the sense that the majority of the populace could be controlled by being offered things, like government subsidies and sports, in exchange for the freedom they had enjoyed in republican Rome before Augustus created the imperial “deep swamp” that eventually led to the moral decay of their civilization.

In our days of high political fever, one need not embellish the cultural parallels. A natural philosophical school of Stoics disdained vulgar seductions by the imperium, but they were of little threat, and when they became political obstacles, they could be eliminated the way Nero compelled Seneca to kill himself shortly before his elder brother Gallio did the same. It is not irrelevant to the story that Gallio was the proconsul of Achaia, and the just judge who dismissed the case against Saint Paul (Acts 18:12-17). It was the emergence of the strange new cult worshiping a “Christos,” whom his followers said had risen from the dead in the backwater of Judea, that began to threaten the Roman “deep state.”

Political discourse today has degenerated into riots because what is at stake is not a mere matter of government, but a crisis of humanity itself. There is a portion of the people that, as Juvenal satirized, “anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses,” but behind their superficial choice of living are sinister forces as from a swamp that would subvert by anarchy all that the Christian mind knows to be true.

About one-fifth of the citizens in the United States are Catholic, and how they vote will determine how many of them really are faithful to the “Christos” who asked, “For what does it profit a man, if he shall gain he whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Matthew 16:26)

2020-10-18 - 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time Oct 18, 2020

18 October 2020

Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 22:15-21 + Homily

16 Minutes 08 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/101820.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 18 October 2020:

Some of those dining before the gilded statue in Rockefeller Center in fair weather and skating there in the winter may not know that the glistening figure is Prometheus, one of the Titans who preceded the gods of Mount Olympus. He stole fire from Zeus, who then condemned Prometheus to everlasting torment by an eagle eating his liver, which was renewed each day. The liver was thought to be the seat of human emotion, and the agony expressed the consequences of overreaching in attempts at seizing power. Prometheus gave mankind gifts of the intellect, and so over the Rockefeller statue are words of Aeschylus, which perhaps do not command the attention of many diners and skaters: “Prometheus, teacher in every art, brought the fire that hath proved to mortals a means to mighty ends.”

While Greek mythology was sheer fantasy, it is psychologically insightful, as it symbolizes the complexities of reason and willpower. In this it is superior to the Norse mythology that gave Wagner his operatic bluster. Better Venus than Brunhilda. But what then of the true God who is revealed in Christ? He is not, like Zeus, infuriated at the theft of his power. It is true that he is “a consuming fire, a jealous God” (Deuteronomy 4:24), but that jealousy is the desire of divine love to be loved in return, for that love endows human creatures with the gift of knowledge, freely sending fire to human souls at Pentecost.

Humanity has a hard time understanding why the Divine Love is logical and manifests that love by subjecting itself to that logic. By not being able to do irrational things, God shows his power by subjecting himself to that inability. For instance, God cannot make himself cease to exist (2 Timothy 2:13), and he cannot sin (Hebrews 4:15), nor can he lie (Titus 1:2).

In his Regensburg lecture in 2006, Pope Benedict calmly explained the difference between the Divine Logic incarnate in Christ and the Islamic concept of a god who is pure will, even if that will is irrational. Some who misunderstood his academic analysis rioted and murdered, and by so doing, proved his point.

If the Creator is illogical, then creation is chaotic. The only morality, then, is the assertion of strength. Leni Riefenstahl’s cinematographic propaganda for Nazism was called “Triumph of the Will” and not “Triumph of the Reason.” While Hitler disdained religion, in 1941 he treated cordially the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, because they at least agreed on the primacy of willpower over moral reason.

The model who posed for the statue of Prometheus in New York, Leonardo Nole, became a postman in New Rochelle and died in a nursing home in Sacramento, California. The RMS Titanic was so named to invoke the power of the Greek Titans. And we know what happened to the Titanic.

2020-10-11 - 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time Oct 11, 2020

11 October 2020

Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 22:1-14 + Homily

19 Minutes 54 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/101120.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 11 October 2020:

Of the many scientific contributions made by priests, including Father Copernicus’s heliocentrism and Father Lemaître’s “Big Bang” theory, some would rank higher the invention of champagne by Dom Pérignon. Something close to it had already been invented by monks near Carcassonne in the Abbey of Saint Hilaire in 1531. They were Benedictines like Pérignon, but he replaced wooden stoppers with corks and developed thicker glass bottles that enabled the production, a century or so later, of what we now call champagne.

When Dom Pérignon first tasted what he had done to Pinot Noir in 1693, he shouted: “Come my brothers, I am tasting the stars!” Stretching that a bit, it is a good description of the Christian encountering Christ. It is more than Archimedes shouting “Eureka!” when he discovered a principle of hydraulics, because it is an embrace of eternity. So Saint Peter declares, in telling us to obey the prophecy of Scripture “like a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns, and the day star arises in your hearts” (2 Peter 1:19).

In Christ’s revelation of heavenly joy, he describes himself as the first of all stars: “I, Jesus, have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright morning star” (Revelation 22:16). He appears to us first like a distant light, like Venus rising as a portent of the sun about to appear. As the Morning star, Christ contradicts the Anti-Christ, Lucifer, who once was called a bearer of light and even the Morning Star, before his fall: “How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations!” (Isaiah 14:12)

We are living in a kind of chiaroscuro time in history, alternating light and dark, effervescence and despair, and in this the stars can be a reflection of the human condition. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writes in The Little Prince that “All men have stars, but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. ... But all these stars are silent.” His point is that star gazing can make one feel very much alone until there is a perception of the meaning of life, which requires a vision not by the eye but by the heart. Only when Saint Paul was blinded, could he truly see Christ, and it was like tasting stars. Or, as Shakespeare wrote in what can be transposed to a description of Christ the Morning Star: “His face will make the heavens so beautiful that the world will fall in love with the night and forget about the garish sun.”

2020-10-04 - St Michael Oct 04, 2020

4 October 2020

Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, Archangels

Patronal Feast (Transferred)

Matthew 21:33-43 + Homily

14 Minutes 54 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/092920.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 4 October 2020:

When explorers roamed what was to them a “New World,” they sent back to Europe descriptions of strange vegetation and wildlife, using familiar images to describe the unfamiliar. Spaniards in Peru reported that the llama was an animal with the body of a large sheep, the neck of a camel, and the head of a deer.

In retrospect these descriptions were pretty good, but only because all material creatures are analogous to each other one way or another. This is not so in the case of purely immaterial and perfectly intelligent beings. There are ranks of them, the most extraordinary of which are called Cherubim and Seraphim, and by the fact of their unlikeness to anything in time and space, some descriptions of them in the Bible can strike us as outrageous: giant wheels the size of the universe covered with unblinking eyes.

In their ranks, those who are called angels and archangels, meaning messengers of God, get involved in human events. They can show up in our daily commerce while we are unaware (Hebrews 13:2). Limited human art strains to portray their appearance when they choose to become visible. Fra Angelico did this sublimely. But then there was the school of the master stylist Bouguereau who made choirs of angels look like the Folies Bergère.

Although they have no need of them, angels are often depicted anthropomorphically with wings, because material creatures like us cannot fly without them. But this has its limits, like the mythological Icarus who failed in his flight from Crete because the wax that stuck the feathers to his arms melted. Powerful icons of ageless angels frequently suffered the indignity of being replaced by images of chubby Raphaelite infants. When angels have appeared in time and space, and most importantly to Our Lady, they have had to calm humans down. One cannot imagine a pink and white baby cherub in a state of neglected dress having to say, “Fear not.”

In 1857, our church was dedicated to the patronage of Saint Michael the Archangel, who was of supernal help during the Civil War draft riots and the burgeoning crime rate. Not for nothing was our neighborhood nicknamed “Hell’s Kitchen.” This year our streets have been under attack during the maliciously orchestrated and funded riots. The holy angels strengthen the classical virtue of “sophrosyne,” which is moral sanity based on reason and temperance, and is the opposite of riotous demagoguery.

We have the privilege of transferring the Feast of Saint Michael to this Sunday, lighting candles before his statue, whose recently gold-leafed sword, too heavy for chuckling cherubs to wield, points at Satan. That Prince of Pride, and ventriloquist of anarchists, boasted: “I will be like the Most High” (Isaiah 14:14). But Saint Michael declares “Quis ut Deus” which freely translated from the tongues of angels into the vernacular of men, means, “Sorry, Liar. You ain’t God.”

2020-09-27 - 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time Sep 27, 2020

27 September 2020

The Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 21:28-32 + Homily

16 Minutes 37 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/092720.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 27 September 2020:

“And now for something completely different,” as the entertainment industry is wont to say. Some aspects of liturgical worship are used for reasons that express the psychology of praise. For instance, there are vesture, candles, bells and, especially, holy water. The more that worship is confined to cerebral edification, the less attention is given to the offering of all human senses in the worship of God. After the Protestant schism, the pulpit replaced the altar, and churches became more like lecture halls with comfortable pews for listeners. So for something different, consider incense. Puritan influences abandoned what was redolent of sacrifice, and in particular the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which fulfills the symbolic sacrifices within the Temple in Jerusalem, with Christ himself becoming the perfect Sacrifice and the indestructible Temple. As an instance of “the old made new again,” the scent and smoke offered by the priests in Solomon’s courtyard (Psalm 141:2) are perfected in praise of Christ the High Priest. Egeria, the fourth-century indomitable lady pilgrim from Spain, or possibly France, mentioned the incense offered by Christians in Jerusalem at the holy sites. Even after the rejection of the Mass by order of the Tudors, the use of incense lingered in the cathedrals of Ely and York. Incense from the Sarum form of the Latin Rite, which was developed in the eleventh century in Salisbury, continued by force of custom well into the eighteenth century. A canon of the Salisbury cathedral chapter finally eliminated it because he said it affected his breathing, which many considered a poor excuse inasmuch as he took liberal doses of snuff while seated in choir. Ironically, considering the way flaccid celebrants used post-Vatican II liturgical changes as an excuse for neglecting incense, the Novus Ordo rubrics provide unlimited use of incense, while the Extraordinary Form limited it to solemn celebrations. The Magi gave the Holy Child presents of gold and myrrh and the essence of Boswellia serrata, which is the resin known as frankincense. The incense used in church may be pure frankincense or a combination of it with other aromatics, but its base comes from the sap of an arboreal bark, which recent science has discovered has properties that relieve anxiety and depression by activating ion channels in the brain. More importantly, one study at the Jena Friedrich Schiller University in Germany claims that frankincense contains anti-inflammatory substances produced by Boswellic acid, principally the enzyme 5-lipoxygenase, which can alleviate the symptoms of asthma and rheumatoid arthritis. Whether its anti-inflammatory properties can thwart the Covid-19 Wuhan Coronavirus is not yet established, mindful of the cautions of the Food and Drug Administration. But burning frankincense reduces airborne bacterial counts by 68%. More important is the office of incense as an earthly hint of worship in heaven, where there are “harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints” (Revelation 5:8).

2020-09-20 - 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time Sep 20, 2020

20 September 2020

The Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 20:1-16A + Homily

19 Minutes 49 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/092020.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 20 September 2020:

. In our days of widespread inarticulateness, the word “awesome” is so overused that it loses its power. It is rooted in the Old English “egefull,” which means causing profound reverence. So, to call a good dinner or a new dress “awesome” is overkill. Only in the nineteenth century did its equivalent, “awful,” come to mean something bad. It is said that when Queen Anne first saw the completed St. Paul’s Cathedral and told Sir Christopher Wren that it was awful, the architect was moved by the compliment.

After the patriarch Jacob saw in a dream that ladder reaching to heaven, he cried out, “How awful is this place!” and he called it Bethel, the House of God. He had seen angels ascending and descending on the ladder. It is fitting that the magnificent crucifix suspended from the ceiling in our church should hang over our altar, for in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the angels and saints unite heaven and earth in worship, and Christ makes the Cross a ladder of heavenly access. By it he is able to descend to the altar, True Body and Blood, without diminishing his eternal glory. “No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man” (John 3:13).

Having celebrated the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross this past week, the Church remembers that, as Cardinal Gibbons wrote, the veneration of the Cross “is referred to Him who died upon it.” In 787, the Second Council of Nicaea distinguished veneration of the Cross from the worship (“latria”) that belongs to the Divine nature alone. The Cross, as Saint Bonaventure hymned, is the Medicine of the World (“Crux est mundi medicina”) because of the healing power of the crucified Good Physician.

At a prize fight, when one of the boxers made the sign of the Cross upon entering the ring, a man seated next to me asked sardonically if that meant he was going to win. As a Doctor of Sacred Theology, I felt qualified to reply that it depended on how good a boxer he was. But the awful Crucifix does have power when human intellect and will are consecrated to the Crucified.

Around 325, Saint Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine (and, before her successful marriage, what we might call a “barista”) and Bishop Macarius, found what they believed to be the True Cross buried under the rubble of a Temple of Venus that had been built by the emperor Hadrian as a profanation of the Holy City. A generation later, Saint Cyril, second successor to Macarius, wrote: “Let us not be ashamed of the Cross of Christ. … Make this sign as you eat and drink, when you sit down, when you go to bed, when you get up again, while you are talking, while you are walking: in brief, at your every undertaking.”

2020-09-13 - 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time Sep 13, 2020

13 September 2020 The Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 18:21-35 + Homily

16 Minutes 32 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/091320.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 13 September 2020:

In our city accustomed to protest demonstrations of all sorts, a recent one was particularly dismaying and even frightening. The anarchistic chants were bad enough, but the frightfulness was in the glazed eyes of the expressionless marchers, like the “pod people” in the 1956 cult film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Carrying signs supplied for them, they chanted refrains called out by a leader as they moved through one of our pricier neighborhoods. As a boy, the black-and-white film was scary, though in later years it was amusing to watch again, but now it has taken on an unsettling reality in the living color of live people.

Mind control is a signature of corrupt politics, and George Orwell said that “Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” It is easy to appropriate the brains of people who are disturbed or idealistic or both. In the eighteenth century, the physicist and satirist George Lichtenberg volunteered that “The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.” That is the essential psychology of heresies in religion, and it is also true of platforms in politics. In any election season, when information is twisted by “disinformation,” one can learn with profit the experience of the Church as she has confronted distorters of the Gospel. A vital instance is the way Saint Paul detected the errors among the first Greek Christians on the island of Crete. Being a man of erudition, which his true humility allowed him to remark without affectation, Paul quotes a minor poet of about 600 BC, Epimenides: “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.”

Epimenides is the same sage that Paul cites when he speaks to the philosophers of the Areopagus in Athens. The verse sent to Titus is paraphrased by the Apostle in Acts 17, when he speaks of the One “in whom we live and move and have our being.” A discovery of the full text of Epimenides’s poem “Cretica” in the early 1900’s by the formidable English scholar J. Rendel Harris, makes clear that the lying was a specific lie—namely about a tomb built in contradiction to the supposed immortality of Zeus. This resolves what has been called the “Epimenides Paradox:” If Epimenides said that all Cretans are liars, how can we trust Epimenides who was himself a Cretan? But in fact, the deceitfulness of the Cretans was only about trying to entomb immortality. Saint Paul invoked the gift of “diakrisis,” which is the discernment of truth from falsehood (1 Corinthians 12:10). Never, and especially not in times of political propaganda, should lies intimidate, so long as one has that discerning gift to know the difference between what comes from Christ, the Head of the Church (Colossians 1:18), and the talking heads on television.

2020-09-06 - 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time Sep 06, 2020

6 September 2020

The Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 18:15-20 + Homily

16 Minutes 07 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/090620.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 6 September 2020:

The Prince of Lies cannot lie in the presence of Christ: “I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” (Luke 4:34). And Christ who is the Truth knows him, too: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18). Satan does not want anyone to know him, and yet in the present discontent that afflicts our culture, many anarchists and Marxists invoke him. The desecration of churches and statues of saints is spreading. Twice recently, our own church has been defaced with Satanic symbols: not just the customary obscenities, but invocations of the Prince of Lies. The mystics have known two characteristics of Satan. A Desert Father around 300 A.D., Abba Apollo, had a vision of him: “The devil has no knees. He cannot kneel; he cannot adore; he cannot pray; he can only look down his nose in contempt. Being unwilling to bend the knee at the name of Jesus is the essence of evil.” (cf. Isaiah 45:23, Romans 14:11) The other malignant quality of the Liar, as revealed to Saint Martin of Tours, is that he can look as attractive as Christ, but he has no wounds. Instead of taking our suffering upon himself, the Anti-Christ inflicts suffering. That is his infernal nourishment and macabre ecstasy. Playing the Devil’s game is dangerous. He has concealed weapons, and the chief of them is deceit. At one recent political convention, a Religious sister from a dying community, in secular dress, prayed not to the Lord, but to “O Divine Spirit” in a way that would have been unobjectionable to a Hindu or an Aztec. With concomitant vagueness, she said that an opinion on the killing of unborn life was above her “pay grade.” At the convention that followed, another Religious in full habit, who is a surgeon and former Army colonel, Sister Deirdre Byrne, made clear that naming the lies of Satan was not above her pay grade as she held her “weapon of choice: the rosary.” The rosary is the most effective private prayer in defying the Liar. The greatest public prayer is the Holy Eucharist. Four years ago in France, two Islamic terrorists sliced the throat of 85-year-old Father Jacques Hamel at the Altar of Sacrifice. His last words were: “Va-t’en, Satan!” (Be gone, Satan!) Christ had said the same in the wilderness and on the way to his crucifixion (Mark 8:33; Matthew 16:23). Unlike some Catholics, who shy away from mentioning the name of Christ at public gatherings lest they give offense, the evangelist Franklin Graham prayed “In the mighty name of your son, my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” Christ himself warned: “Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels” (Luke 9:26).

2020-08-30 - 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Aug 30, 2020

30 August 2020

The Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 16:21-27 + Homily

16 Minutes 51 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/083020.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 30 August 2020:

It is our custom not to have the "From the Pastor" column during the weeks of August. The parish website is still available with general news and information. It is a pleasure to have a community of friends beyond the regular number of our own parishioners. We are grateful for the support of all, especially during these months of “lockdown,” and the resulting financial challenges. In addition to individual gifts, the parish website explains how contributions can be made electronically, providing convenient records for donors. Until the Pastor's Column resumes in September, books by Father Rutler to benefit the parish are available in our church and through the publishers Ignatius Press and Sophia Institute as well as Amazon. In celebration of the August 4 Feast of Saint John Vianney, patron saint of parish priests, subscribers may want to read his biography by Father Rutler, The Curé d'Ars Today, published by Ignatius Press.

2020-08-23 - 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time Aug 23, 2020

23 August 2020

The Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 16:13-20 + Homily

18 Minutes 50 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/082320.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 23 August 2020:

2020-08-16 - 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time Aug 16, 2020

16 August 2020

The Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 15:21-28 + Homily

19 Minutes 39 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/081620.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 16 August 2020:

2020-08-09 - 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time Aug 09, 2020

9 August 2020

The Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 14:22-33 + Homily

19 Minutes 09 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/080920.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 9 August 2020:

2020-08-02 - 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time Aug 02, 2020

2 August 2020

The Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 14:13-21 + Homily

19 Minutes 02 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/080220.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 2 August 2020:

2020-07-26 - 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time Jul 26, 2020

26 July 2020

The Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 13:44-52 + Homily

16 Minutes 35 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/072620.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 26 July 2020:

As a psychosis, “self-mutilation syndrome” is rooted in self-loathing and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Whole cultures can be afflicted with a similar compulsion to injure themselves.

Nowadays it is called a “cancel culture.” To topple statues and burn churches is a metaphor for self-loathing rather than reason.

In their modern aesthetic recklessness, nations begin to disdain what Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said.” Even people who do not read much still can see much, and they can see that destruction of great buildings is the grammar of self-mutilation. There was a sigh of relief when the French government announced that the cathedral of Paris would be restored exactly as it had been. But you need only look at some recent architectural horrors, like the Centre Pompidou, to appreciate that the preservation of Notre Dame was a close call. Consider the 1925 Plan Voisin of Le Corbusier for replacing central Paris with buildings that looked like refrigerators, to see the fabric of a society without a soul.

The burning of the cathedral of Nantes was reported with practically no mention of the winter of 1793-1794, when over 14,000 Catholic counterrevolutionaries were slaughtered in that region. Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the sadistic officer of the Revolution, mocked his own name by drowning more than four thousand priests, nuns, mothers and infants in boats designed for what he called “Revolutionary Baptisms.” At the same time, another Jean-Baptiste, Gobel, was made Archbishop of Paris in place of Antoine de Juigné, provided he “take the knee” to the Revolution. All atheistic revolutionaries kill their fomenters: Just as the architect of the Terror, Robespierre, was guillotined by his Terror, so were Carrier and Gobel. In a kind of cultural doppelganger today, writers for our most “liberal” periodicals are being fired for not being pure enough for the anarchists who have made their moral impurity into a religion.

Since the late 1960s, disciples of Le Corbusier among the liturgical “wreckovaters” denuded churches as arrogantly as the cults of theanthropy in the French Revolution. Convents subscribing to ephemeral “renewal” have now become nursing homes for women who once thought that labyrinths could be stairways to Heaven.

We are now in a spiritual combat as monumental as World II. In 1944, when the Nazis demanded that the Americans surrender during the Battle of the Bulge, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe replied, “Nuts!” The vernacularism was unfamiliar to the Germans, and so another message was sent: "Du kannst zum Teufel gehen."—You can go to the Devil.

No victory is secured by kneeling to the Enemy. Those who do, will be the next in line for the guillotine. The Holy Church has the best translation for “Nuts” when proclaimed in defiance of the Anti-Christ: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty…”

2020-07-19 - 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time Jul 19, 2020

19 July 2020

The Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 13:24-43 + Homily

19 Minutes 59 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/071920.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 19 July 2020:

It may not be long before “Ladies and Gentlemen” ceases to start a speech, as the result of blurring the distinction between man and gentleman, and woman and lady. We may not hear at banquets, “Gentlemen, charge your glasses,” or understand the Victorian-era ballad: “My mother was a lady like yours, you will allow.”

Putting aside the grotesquerie of gender confusion, this is simply the consequence of losing the brilliant sense of chivalry, courtesy, and honor. Men and women are biological facts; gentlemen and ladies are crafted by long exposure to natural virtue. In times past this was foolishly ascribed to social privilege. In 1381 the slogan of the Peasants’ Revolt was: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” Sherlock Holmes detected that Baron Gruner was an imposter because in respectable society “you remove the band from a cigar before lighting it.” This distorted understanding of courtliness occasionally led to a reaction replacing “Ladies and Gentlemen” with the generic “Comrades,” which may be revived as a protocol by the likes of Antifa and the mayor of New York City.

Chivalry, courtesy and honor are as accessible as virtue itself, and are apart from wealth, social status, race and nationality. Their absence can degrade popes and paupers alike if they insult, humiliate and bully others. Charles II was a gentleman, not because he was a king but because he “put those around him at ease.” As wit is in the arsenal of the courtly man, Charles quipped that Presbyterianism was no religion for a gentleman and Anglicanism was no religion for a Christian. He became a Catholic on his deathbed, apologizing to his courtiers for taking so long to die. For Saint John Henry Newman, it is “almost a definition of a gentleman to say that he is one who never inflicts pain.” With intuitive elegance, a gentleman “makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring.”

I recently came across some accounts in Catholic journals that had lost the meaning of “gentleman” in describing what Sherlock Holmes would have called a “bounder.” One mentioned a “gentleman” intent on killing, and described a “gentleman” on a New York City sidewalk poking an elderly woman in the head. Last week, when a church in Florida was set afire, with worshipers barely escaping, the Diocese of Orlando offered piteous prayers for “the gentleman who caused this damage.” Thugs and arsonists are not gentlemen.

We can say without irreverence that the Divine Saviour is the Perfect Gentleman. He inflicted no pain, although he stimulated pain in the consciences of the guilty, and by a singular redeeming act, he took the pain of the whole world on himself. In this he also exemplified that other quality of Newman’s gentleman, by being “merciful to the absurd.”

2020-07-12 - 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time Jul 12, 2020

12 July 2020

The Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 13:1-23 + Homily

17 Minutes 29 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/071220.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 12 July 2020:

July waves Old Glory and Le Tricolore. Jacques-Louis David based the French flag on the cockade of the Marquis de Lafayette, who had been urged to help the American colonists by the Duke of Gloucester, in a funk because his brother, King George III, disapproved of his marriage. At least there was no Reign of Terror in Philadelphia.

Our unofficial “National Hymn” was written by a professor of English literature from Wellesley College after a trip in 1893 to Pike’s Peak, from whose twilight purple summit she could see grain fields hued in amber. An elderly parishioner of mine was a student of Professor Katharine Lee Bates and remembered her reciting the final 1913 draft of “America the Beautiful.” The melody, “Materna,” had been composed in 1882 by a church organist, Samuel Ward, on a ferry from Coney Island to Newark.

In the “political correctness” and “cancel culture” of recent days, there have been attempts to censor “America the Beautiful” on the grounds that it is unfeeling to make reference to “alabaster cities [that] gleam undimmed by human tears.” En route to Colorado, Bates had visited the World’s Columbian Exposition where crowds were stunned by Nikola Tesla’s incandescent light bulbs. The illuminated “White City” was plaster and not alabaster, but it envisioned a culture enlightened by the Heavenly Jerusalem, just as another lady of letters, Julia Ward Howe, in the Civil War had seen earthly struggle from a divine perspective: “Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel.” No naïf, Professor Bates knew all about the human tears in Chicago slums and had worked with Jane Addams and her Hull House. But souls today, bereft of critical judgment, would decry mention of a “White City” and an exposition honoring Columbus.

There are also demands to eliminate our National Anthem because the author owned slaves. In fact, Francis Scott Key freed his slaves and pleaded before the Supreme Court for the liberation of 300 African slaves captured off the ship “Antelope” along the Florida coast. He also worked with John Quincy Adams in the “Amistad” case to free 53 slaves.

Key’s anthem was based on verses he composed in 1805 to celebrate the victory over the Muslim slave-trading pirates on the Barbary coast: “And pale beam’d the Crescent, its splendor obscured / By the light of the star-spangled flag of our nation. …” Although the founder of Islam was a slave trader, the bigoted zeal of contemporary rioters hesitates to menace mosques.

Some of these petulant Jacobins demand to replace our National Anthem with the pretentious doggerel of the song “Imagine” by John Lennon: “Imagine there's no heaven / It's easy if you try / No hell below us / Above us only sky.”

That is not quite Francis Scott Key, Julia Ward Howe, or Katharine Lee Bates. When the opioid bubble bursts, heaven and hell remain. Take your choice.

2020-07-05 - 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time Jul 05, 2020

5 July 2020

The Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 11:25-30 + Homily

14 Minutes 16 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/070520.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 5 July 2020:

Christians would be slaughtered.

There are magnificent witnesses in China today, among whose champions is Cardinal Zen, indomitable at the age of eighty-eight. The insouciance with which some timorous Western ecclesiastics have cast a blind eye to the persecution of the Catholics in China, will be remembered as a dark blot on the history of our time.

Mao killed at least 40 million. His “Cultural Revolution,” which executed upwards of 3 million, excited mobs of youths as agents of government repression. Monuments of ancient culture were destroyed. These included nearly 7,000 priceless works of art in the Temple of Confucius alone as part of the frenzied attack on the Four Olds: Old Customs, Old Habits, Old Culture, and Old Ideas.

In our own country, the debutantish radicalism of hysterical youths whose misguided idealism makes a venomous brew when mixed with poor education, is exploited by more sinister strategists. James Madison described such mobs as: “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

Young people eager to condemn the immorality of forebears, while exulting in their own undisciplined lives, recently pulled down a statue of Saint Junípero Serra. It evoked the attack on the Franciscan mission in Alta California on November 4, 1775, when 600 native warriors pierced the friar Father Luis Jayme with eighteen arrows as he called to them: “Love God, my children!”

Staff Sergeant David Bellavia, the one Iraqi combatant to receive the Medal of Honor, has said that our universities are turning out “Peter Pan” adolescents who would profit better if they joined the Army where they would be taught how to be men and women.

After the destruction of the statue of Saint Junípero Serra, the wise Archbishop of San Francisco did not engage in polemics. He simply went to the site of the vandalism and said the exorcism prayer of Saint Michael. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12).

2020-06-28 - 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time Jun 28, 2020

28 June 2020

Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 10:37-42 + Homily

15 Minutes 59 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/062820.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 28 June 2020:

As the local churches gradually open again, one is reminded of the persistence of Benjamin Stoddert Ewell, president of the College of William and Mary, ringing the school bell during seven years of closure after the Civil War. It is yet to be seen how many return to our churches after the quarantine, but the churches will be strengthened by the perdurance of the truly faithful, and I have been edified by their patience.

Nor have I been scandalized by those who call worship of God non-essential. No surprise here. I write this on the feast of Saint John Fisher and Saint Thomas More, the only bishop and the one high-level magistrate who placed Christ before the Crown. “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help” (Psalm 146:3).

Perhaps not by coincidence have social riots accompanied the health crisis. The anarchists, whose numbers include ignorant pawns, are the latest effervescence of the ancient Gnostic heresy which in modern times has assumed the fatal dialectic of Marxism.

The supine “virtue signaling” of failed leaders bending their knees to barbarians makes them poster children for what Lenin called his “useful idiots.” Civilization stands on the precipice of what already seemed chaotic as William Butler Yeats perceived over one hundred years ago. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

Demagogues who lack all conviction ignored one of the most important civil acts of recent times: our President’s “Executive Order on Advancing International Religious Freedom.” On June 2 he dared to proclaim that “Religious freedom, America’s first freedom, is a moral and national security imperative.” The First Amendment is not “non-essential” because, among other instances, thousands of Christians have been slaughtered in Nigeria, in attacks ignored by Westerners who claim to be champions of black lives, and in China churches are being destroyed by a government with which ecclesiastical bureaucrats have tried naively to cut deals.

In the present cultural war, parishes are on the front line. We have our obligations to the needs of the larger church, but we exercise the “principle of subsidiarity” by assuring our people that any donations specified for the support of our local church will be honored as such. After months of closure, our parish, perhaps like most, is in financial peril. But the greater peril is surrender to vandals who would smash the very fundaments of our civilization. If “the centre cannot hold,” such is only the case with the material order. Christ is the true and unfailing nucleus of all life: “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).

2020-06-21 - The Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time Jun 21, 2020

21 June 2020

Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time

NOTE that public Masses in Manhattan will resume on Monday, 22 June 2020. There are various health precautions. For details, please see the homepage of the parish website: https://www.stmichaelnyc.org.

Next Sunday, 28 June 2020, St Michael’s parish will resume its regular Mass Schedule: 10:00, 11:15 (Spanish), and 12:15.

Since no public Masses were permitted today due to the Covid19 / Coronavirus Emergency the homily attached hereto was the homily given on 25 June 2017, the Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time, using the same Readings as for today, 21 June 2020.

Matthew 10:26-33 + Homily

13 Minutes 33 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/062120.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 21 June 2020:

After the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD, the Jews relied on literacy to preserve their culture, with the Mishna as the written record of what until then had been an oral tradition of rabbinic commentaries. While functional illiteracy seems to have been common, our Lord asked his listeners at least four times: “Have you not read . . . ?” (Matthew 12:3, 12:5, 19:4 and Mark 12:26). On the very day of the Resurrection, he explained the prophetic writings to the two men on the Emmaus road, just as Philip later would baptize the obviously well lettered official of the Ethiopian royal household.

Romans often had Greek slaves as teachers, because they were better educated than themselves. King Malcolm of Scotland did not bother to learn how to read, but was charmed by the way his wife, Saint Margaret, could read to him, and the subjects she chose gave her much influence.

The first part of the Eucharistic Liturgy is the “synagogue part” because it teaches from the Sacred Books. “For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures . . .” (1 Corinthians 15:3). Since the transmission of knowledge and its ancillary wisdom is fragile and dependent upon faithful stewards, civilizations require civilized people.

Many were surprised in 1953 when President Eisenhower warned in a commencement speech at Dartmouth, without notes or teleprompter: “Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as any document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.” Having considerable experience of war, he had seen the consequences of thought control.

Back in 1821 Heinrich Heine wrote: “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn people too.” The destruction of the libraries of Alexandria by Muslims in 640 and Cluny by Huguenots in 1562 had irreparable consequences. This also applies to the mutilation of art in all its forms. This is not a question of taste or optional aesthetic judgment. It is simply the fact that to rewrite history is eventually to resent history altogether, to live in the present without past or future.

The cruelest illiteracy consists in a pantomime education that commands what to think rather than how to think, and that erases from a culture any memory of its tested and vindicated truths. In George Orwell’s “1984” dystopia: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

2020-06-14 - Corpus Christi Jun 14, 2020

14 June 2020

The Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ

NOTE: Due to the Covid19 / Coronavirus Emergency the Archdiocese of New York has cancelled all public Masses for an indefinite period. The homily attached hereto was given on 18 June 2017, Corpus Christi, using the same Readings as for today, 14 June 2020.

Note also that 18 June 2017 was Father’s Day in the United States. In 2020, Father’s Day in the United States is next Sunday 21 June 2020.

John 6:51-58 + Homily

14 Minutes 28 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/061420.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 14 June 2020:

Robert Gould Shaw was born into an abolitionist Unitarian family in Boston in 1837. When he was ten, they settled on Staten Island. An uncle who became a Catholic priest paid for his tuition at what is now the Fordham Preparatory School. As a somewhat distracted student, he never completed his studies (who does?) but he was tutored in Italy and Germany and studied at Harvard. During the Civil War he was eventually promoted to Colonel and, following the Emancipation Proclamation, he led New England’s first all-black military unit, the 54th Regiment. Shaw insisted on equal pay and opposed any form of discrimination. Two of his soldiers were sons of Frederick Douglas.

In 1863, storming Fort Wagner in South Carolina, Colonel Shaw led his regiment, which suffered heavy losses while he died from several wounds defending the nation and racial justice. Saint-Gaudens sculpted a bronze relief of Shaw and his troops, which was dedicated across from the Massachusetts State House 123 years ago on May 31. Just weeks ago, three million dollars were designated to restore it, but ironically on May 31, a mob claiming to be defenders of human dignity, defaced with obscenities this tribute to valiant African-Americans.

Rioters also gathered in our nation’s capital in Logan Circle, by another irony named for a Civil War general, John A. Logan, who said: “Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time, testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten, as a people, the cost of a free and undivided republic.” But many in our latest generation have not merely forgotten that cost, they were never taught it in the first place.

The valor of the 54th Regiment was depicted in the 1989 film “Glory.” Yet recent mobs have behaved more like the brawlers in old Western movies, for whom one man attacking another becomes a cue for everyone to rise and wreck the whole saloon. Riots broke out in other cities and spread abroad. Perceived manipulation of the ignorant by sinister plotters whose Orwellian strategy is to call their fascism anti-fascist, is no excuse for their obliviousness to the consequences of moral confusion.

In 452, Pope Leo the Great saved Rome from Attila the Hun and, in a double whammy three years later, he confronted Genseric the Vandal. He faced both with the serenity of virtue and the bravery of charity, bending his knee before neither because he knelt only to God.

Pope Leo preached: “Christian, remember your dignity, and now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return by sin to your former base condition. Bear in mind who is your head and of whose body you are a member. Do not forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of God’s kingdom.”

2020-06-07 - Trinity Sunday Jun 07, 2020

7 June 2020

The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

NOTE: Due to the Covid19 / Coronavirus Emergency the Archdiocese of New York has cancelled all public Masses for an indefinite period. The homily attached hereto was given on 11 June 2017, Trinity Sunday, using the same Readings as for today, 7 June 2020.

John 3:16-18 + Homily

16 Minutes 21 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/060720.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 7 June 2020:

Celebration of the Most Holy Trinity follows Pentecost, because it is through the Holy Spirit that the sublime truth of God as Three in One expands the limits of human intelligence. The perfect harmony of the Triune God is like music whose sound frequency cannot be registered by unaided hearing, but it reverberates in the systematic order of nature, evident in those things we take for granted: health, happiness, and peace.

The peace that Christ proposes is not a human fabrication (John 14:27). But as the Creator has entrusted the care of His creation to humans as His most complex creatures, we are responsible for promoting what Saint Augustine called the tranquillitas ordinis—the tranquility of order.

When the human mind works in harmony with the indications of the Holy Trinity, great things can be accomplished. For example, last week two astronauts on the SpaceX craft perfectly docked in outer space. In a devilish irony, this was accompanied by simultaneous rioting in our streets, nihilistic in its destructiveness. As many of the bomb throwers and arsonists were middle-class suburbanites turned terrorists, this was a commentary on the collapse of family life and the abandonment of classical education. And the desecration of our cathedral was the screech of young people who, for various reasons and from various sources, had come to think that the Divine Word of Life is an incomprehensible whimper.

The contrast between astronauts and anarchists is a model of the blessings and dangers of free will. “For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want” (Galatians 5:17). This boils down to the choice between Christ and chaos, challenging the human mind to be rational or irrational. The human will is not bound to some arbitrary fate, but as John Milton put it: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

It has been said one way or another that the gates of Hell are locked on the inside. By choosing misrule, distorted reason prefers Hell to Heaven. The gates of Heaven are opened by choosing the tranquility of divine logic. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will enter his house and dine with him, and he with me” (Revelation 3:20).

The destiny of souls depends on what people do with the “if” of their moral freedom. Thus, Rudyard Kipling wrote: “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, . . .”

2020-05-31 - Pentecost May 31, 2020

31 May 2020

Pentecost

NOTE: Due to the Covid19 / Coronavirus Emergency the Archdiocese of New York has cancelled all public Masses for an indefinite period. The homily attached hereto was given on 4 June 2017, Pentecost, using the same Readings as for today, 31 May 2020.

John 20:19-23 + Homily

17 Minutes 24 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://cms.usccb.org/bible/readings/053120-day.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 31 May 2020:

In a letter Sigmund Freud wrote to his friend Edoardo Weiss on April 12, 1933, he reminisced about a visit to the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli: “Every day for three lonely weeks of September 1913, I stood in church in front of the statue, studying it, measuring it and drawing it until there dawned on me that understanding which I expressed in my essay.” His obsession with the statue of Moses reflected the anxiety it had caused its sculptor, for—according to tradition—when it was completed Michelangelo struck the statue with his chisel: “Say something!” Genius could not give it the life of which God alone is the author. In a form more accessible to children, Michelangelo was Geppetto wanting his wooden doll to become a real boy. And in more exalted cadences, this was Ezekiel asking, “Can these bones live?”

“In him was life . . .” (John 1:4). At the Last Supper, the youngest apostle had pressed his head against Christ and could hear the beating of the Sacred Heart that had animated all creation. Only God can create life, but he has given his creatures the ability to “procreate.” This seems to have been the ultimate secret that he kept until he left this world in glory, promising to send to his believers his Holy Spirit, the bond of fecund love between him and his Divine Father. In the fourth century, Saint Gregory of Nyssa wrote “. . . he gave this glory to his disciples when he said to them: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’ (John 20:22). Although he had always possessed it, even before the world existed, he himself received this glory when he put on human nature. Then, when his human nature had been glorified by the Spirit, the glory of the Spirit was passed on to all his kin, beginning with his disciples.”

When people ask if Christ had a sense of humor, remember this: a sense of humor is basically a balanced mind’s perception of imbalance. Unbalanced people laugh at what is not funny. Fanatics, by definition, are a little off kilter, and so they have no sense of humor. As the Perfect Man, Christ had a perfect sense of humor and must have smiled most broadly when he spoke to his gathered followers, the nucleus of his Holy Church, in anticipation of the new Pentecost that completed the symmetry of fifty days after the Resurrection. He told them: “All this I have spoken while still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid” (John 14:25-27).

2020-05-24 - Seventh Sunday of Easter May 24, 2020

24 May 2020

The Seventh Sunday of Easter

NOTE: Due to the Covid19 / Coronavirus Emergency the Archdiocese of New York has cancelled all public Masses for an indefinite period. The homily attachewwwd hereto was given on 28 May 2017, the Seventh Sunday of Easter, using the same Readings as for today, 24 May 2020.

John 17:1-11A + Homily

16 Minutes 17 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://cms.usccb.org/bible/readings/052420-day.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 24 May 2020:

In these days of closures, which must soon end, I am able to offer Mass quietly for the intentions of parishioners and others, and I often take the opportunity to use the Extraordinary Form, whose beautiful cadences end with the “Last Gospel.” This Johannine Prologue in hymnodic verse concluded the Liturgy from the earliest days of the Faith, as a reminder that “the Word was made flesh” and, by being received into the flesh of communicants, makes them living tabernacles commissioned to take Christ into the world. He is the Light that shines in the darkness, and “the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).

The present pandemic has spread a cultural darkness that contrasts with the growing brightness of late spring days. Any amateur artist, if untutored, must learn by experiment that the brightest colors in his paint box are brilliant on canvass not by themselves but by contrast with dark tones. There is remnant evidence that this application in art goes back about 2,500 years to the Athenian muralist Apollodorus. It may seem obvious, but it was not so until it was tried, and in fact it was gradually forgotten until rediscovered in the Renaissance. The contrast of light and dark, chiaroscuro, was mastered by the likes of Leonardo, Caravaggio and then Rembrandt and Vermeer. It conveys brooding as well as rejoicing, and “film noir” of modern cinematography made as much use of darkness as earlier art made of light.

It remains to be seen if what we call normalcy will be restored. It is certain that “things will never be the same” because things present by definition can never be what they used to be. Whether this be good or bad depends on what is learned from having passed from darkness into light (cf. Isaiah 9:2). This is the Gospel essence that the first Christians gave to a world that had accustomed itself to a life of shadows. “For at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light” (Ephesians 5:8).

During these long weeks, the absence of votive lights in a darkened church has contrasted with the candles that used to burn here, and I hope that soon there will be even more lit than before. But all this time, a lamp has burned before the Blessed Sacrament.

One recalls that passage from Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited describing the sanctuary lamp in a desolate chapel during the darkness of a World War: “. . . the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.”

2020-05-17 - Sixth Sunday of Easter May 17, 2020

17 May 2020

The Sixth Sunday of Easter

NOTE: Due to the Covid19 / Coronavirus Emergency the Archdiocese of New York has cancelled all public Masses for an indefinite period. The homily attached hereto was given on 25 May 2014, the Sixth Sunday of Easter, using the same Readings as for today, 17 May 2020.

John 14:15-21 + Homily

17 Minutes 43 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/051720.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 17 May 2020:

The French theoretical physicist Pierre Duhem (1861-1916) was amazingly prolific and contributed much to hydrodynamics and thermodynamics, but his most important influence may be his philosophy and history of science. He refuted the superficial analysis of the relationship between physical science and religion as distorted by rationalists since the eighteenth century. Drawing on the qualifications of reason as given by Saint Thomas Aquinas, Duhem explored the foundations of scientific analysis in the Middle Ages in the experimental constructs of men like Buridan, Oresme and Bacon.

The doctrine of divine providence and the systematic order of the material universe, as systematized by the Catholic scholastics, gave the logic for scientific analysis. In short, it is only because there is a benign order to the universe that there can be material science, and this is true even among those who ignore that fact.

Such symmetry in the universe is replicated in history. This is why numerical systems are significant in the Bible. For instance, the Ascension of Christ happened forty days after the Resurrection. There is nothing “magical” about numbers themselves, but the fact that the number forty occurs 146 times in the Bible should strike any reasonable person as an indication that God choreographs events to accomplish his purposes.

Christ spent forty days in the wilderness and predicted that Jerusalem would fall forty years after his death and resurrection. Not by chance did he spend forty days between his resurrection and entrance into glory, preparing his followers for the rest of history. He would not let Mary Magdalene “cling” to him because he had to instruct others. He tutored those two men on the Emmaus road in the meaning of what the Scriptures had predicted. He went back to the rented Upper Room to show that he was not an illusion. He then spent time instructing crowds on occasion and evidently devoted more time to preparing the apostles for their missionary work. He was making clear that the Church is not a vestigial apparatus, but is the embodiment of his logic that created the universal order.

The strange cloud that surrounded him as he seemed to vanish in his return to eternity was, like the Transfiguration, a glimpse into a dimension for which human optics lack a capacity fully to perceive. But it can be interpreted by the fact that the benign order of the created world is the result of a power for which mortal language has the term “love.” Inadequate as it may be, it definitely makes demands on those who want to participate in the divine glory that is so extravagant that it can be intimidating in what it requires. Having spent four years at hard labor in Siberia as a penalty for love of truth, Dostoyevsky wrote: “. . . active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with the love in dreams.”

2020-05-10 - Fifth Sunday of Easter May 10, 2020

10 May 2020

The Fifth Sunday of Easter

NOTE: Due to the Covid19 / Coronavirus Emergency the Archdiocese of New York has cancelled all public Masses for an indefinite period. The homily attached hereto was given on 14 May 2017, the Fifth Sunday of Easter, using the same Readings as for today, 10 May 2020.

John 14:1-12 + Homily

21 Minutes 17 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/051020.cfm

10 (New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 10 May 2020:

“As I was saying…” That, more or less, is how Saint Athanasius began his homily each time he returned from exile. Over seventeen years, he was banished five times by four Roman emperors for reasons political and theological, but he persisted in defying the heresy of the powerful Arians who had a flawed idea of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. The persistence of Athanasius in the face of discouragement is honored by his inclusion along with Ambrose, Augustine and John Chrysostom in Bernini’s Altar of the Chair in Saint Peter’s Basilica.

Persistence against the odds shows the strength of humility, whereas its opposite, vainglory, is easily discouraged in difficult times. Athanasius, whose feast was recently celebrated, comes to mind in preparation for the feast this coming Thursday of the persistent Matthias. He is sometimes confused with Matthew the tax collector, one of the original twelve apostles. But Matthias was very much his own man, and even though he gets no mention in the Gospel texts, the book of the Acts of the Apostles records that he was one of the seventy disciples appointed by Christ, and was a witness to the Resurrection.

After the Ascension but before Pentecost, Peter summoned his fellow apostles to choose a man to fill the moral cavity left by the suicide of Judas. There was no precedent for this, so Matthias was nominated along with another early companion of Christ, Joseph Barsabbas, a reliable man, and in fact he was called Justus for that reason. As the soldiers had cast lots to see who would own Christ’s tunic, that disgrace was atoned for by the apostles casting lots, the equivalent of shooting dice, to choose one of the two. Matthias was the winner, if you consider a virtual assurance of martyrdom something devoutly to be wished. According to one tradition, Barsabbas became the holy bishop of Eleutheropolis, near modern Hebron. Matthias went on to preach the Gospel in Judea, and probably Turkey, and Ethiopia as well, finally shedding his blood for the Savior, perhaps in Jerusalem.

Matthias left no extant writings, but his humble persistence is testimony to John Bunyan’s hymn:

There’s no discouragement

Shall make him once relent

His first avowed intent

To be a pilgrim.

Although there is no evidence that Matthias was an addict of any sort, because of his persistence he is the patron saint of alcoholics and others contending against various sorts of compulsive behavior. Early in the eighteenth century, the essayist Joseph Addison wrote: “If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.”

That is sound domestic advice, and can invoke the examples of the virtuous of any age. The saints like Matthias and Athanasius take it to heights heroic with the results promised by the Risen Christ.

2020-05-03 - The Fourth Sunday of Easter May 03, 2020

3 May 2020

The Fourth Sunday of Easter

NOTE: Due to the Covid19 / Coronavirus Emergency the Archdiocese of New York has cancelled all public Masses for an indefinite period. The homily attached hereto was given on 7 May 2017, the Fourth Sunday of Easter, using the same Readings as for today, 3 May 2020.

John 10:1-10 + Homily

20 Minutes 19 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/050320.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 3 May 2020:

Eyebrows were raised when Queen Victoria commented that of all her predecessors, she would most enjoy a conversation with King Charles II. In the arrangements of their domestic lives they could hardly have been more unlike, but Charles was a man of attractive wit, and that was her point. In most ways, Voltaire was the perfect opposite of Pope Benedict XIV, but he admired the pope’s gifts as an astonishing polymath and even dedicated a stage play to him.

The scientific and literary pursuits of Benedict did not concentrate his mind to the neglect of the ministry of the Church. He revived devotion to the Blessed Virgin as “Mother of the Church” in 1748, in the tradition of Saint Ambrose of Milan, who first used the title in the fourth century. As the Church is the body of Christ born of Mary, Pope Paul VI, previously an archbishop in the Ambrosian succession, formally proclaimed the title at the close of the Second Vatican Council. In 2018, our present Pontiff decreed that the Monday after Pentecost be a Memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church. This year on May 1, the bishops of North America put their churches under the protection of Mary, the Mother of the Church.

Pope Benedict XVI wrote: “The Church . . . carries the burdens of history. She suffers, and she is assumed into heaven. Slowly she learns that Mary is her mirror, that she is a person in Mary. Mary, on the other hand, is not an isolated individual. . . . She is carrying the mystery of the Church.”

In the Clementine Hall of the Vatican is an allegorical painting of a woman nursing symbols of the Four Evangelists. Christians who call themselves Evangelicals might find the depiction startling, but it is a reminder that one cannot be fully a “Bible-believing Christian” without the Church that nurtured the canonical formulation of the Holy Scriptures.

Deprived of the Church’s sacraments during the pandemic, the faithful can find resonance in the old spiritual: “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” The experience is not unique to the present time. In various plagues, churches have had to close. Christians, including missionaries, have also been denied sacramental access due to geographical isolation.

Sometimes the Church herself has imposed “interdicts” banning public worship for disciplinary reasons: Pope Adrian IV briefly placed Rome itself under interdict; by decree of John XXII, churches were shut in Scotland for eleven years; and Innocent III censured France for nearly a year, Norway for four years, and England for six. The circumstances were complicated and regrettable, but the results overcame previous lassitude and bonded the faithful to the Easter joy of the Blessed Mother.

Queen of Heaven, rejoice, alleluia. For He whom you did merit to bear, alleluia. Has risen, as He said, alleluia. Pray for us to God, alleluia.

2020-04-26 - The Third Sunday of Easter Apr 26, 2020

26 April 2020

The Third Sunday of Easter

NOTE: Due to the Covid19 / Coronavirus Emergency the Archdiocese of New York has cancelled all public Masses for an indefinite period. The homily attached hereto was given on 30 April 2017, the Third Sunday of Easter, using the same Readings as for today, 26 April 2020.

Luke 24:13-35 + Homily

19 Minutes 06 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/042620.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 26 April 2020:

Among logical fallacies, the argument from authority, “argumentum ad verecundiam,” means accepting a proposition because its source is authoritative, even though the matter is outside that source’s competence. Such a fallacy, for instance, might approve Einstein’s view on politics or religion because he was such an important physicist. However, precisely because of his inventiveness, it is not fallacious to accept as valid his assertion that the monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulate the creative mind.

Einstein was a remote disciple of the quirkily brilliant early nineteenth-century philosopher Schopenhauer: “A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.”

There is some consolation in that at present, when “cabin fever” is an ancillary affliction of the coronavirus. One does not have to be a physicist or philosopher to know that while “it is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18), there is a difference between cursed loneliness and benevolent solitude. The integrity of one’s spiritual life can be measured by understanding the difference. So Pascal, who was a Christian mystic and a mathematical scientist, famously said: “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a room alone.”

The Nazis locked the Dominican nun, Blessed Julia Rodzinska, in a cement closet for a year, and witnesses remarked on the radiance of her face. The Venerable Cardinal Nguyen van Thuan spent thirteen years in a Vietnamese prison, nine of them in isolation. I can attest to the serenity of three men I met who never were lonely in solitude. One was Bishop Dominic Tang of Canton, who spent seven of his twenty-two years in prison in solitary confinement. Cardinal Kung Pin-Mei of Shanghai was thirty years in prison, much of that time in solitary confinement. Father Walter Ciszek died in New York after five years in isolation in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison and fifteen years in the Gulag.

These names came to mind when I read of a CNN commentator, who has shown condescension for the Church and promoted an article calling for the abolition of the Catholic priesthood. He tweeted that, after some weeks in lockdown, during which he kept his lucrative job, he “crawled in bed and cried.”

Saints in solitude often did not have a bed to crawl into, but they were with God, and would have been embarrassed for the Governor of New York, who said of the pandemic: “The number is down because we brought the number down. God did not do that. Faith did not do that.”

Another governor, the fifth of the Roman province of Judaea, was told: “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above” (John 19:11). We know who said that.

2020-04-19 - Second Sunday of Easter Apr 19, 2020

19 April 2020

Second Sunday of Easter / Divine Mercy Sunday

NOTE: Due to the Covid19 / Coronavirus Emergency the Archdiocese of New York has cancelled all public Masses for an indefinite period. The homily attached hereto was given on 23 April 2017, the Second Sunday of Easter, using the same Readings as for today, 19 April 2020.

John 20:19-31 + Homily

19 Minutes 03 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/041920.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 19 April 2020:

Clichés should not be ignored just because they are clichés. Facile repetition of what is true does not make it false. Of course, it can be annoying to hear a phrase repeated often without giving it much thought. Some expressions are not false simply because they lack originality. There are many invented lies, but there is no truth that has not always been true.

Only a dull mind would be annoyed by the truism that “Life is full of surprises.” Our first surprise happened when we were born and realized that there is a world outside the womb. The most stunning surprise in history, literally earth-shaking, was the Resurrection of Christ. No one expected it, and those few who recalled Christ’s prediction, denied it: “Now, on the next day, which is the one after the preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered together with Pilate and said, ‘Sir, we remember that when he was still alive that deceiver said, “After three days I will rise again.” ’ ” (Matthew 27:62 ff). Not to risk the chance of a hoax, they arranged for the tomb to be guarded.

The closest disciples did not understand that Jesus really meant what he said, beyond metaphor. Even in the afterglow of the Transfiguration, three of the apostles seem to have dismissed his prediction of death and resurrection as a pious cliché. There was even a subtle humor in the way the Lord surprised them: the way the Magdalen at first thought the distant figure was a gardener, and the way young John dropped for a moment his self-effacing humility by mentioning that he outran Peter to the tomb, and Jesus’ conversation with the two men on the Emmaus road almost like an elegant tease at first, and the food he ate in the Upper Room to prove he was not a ghost, and his commanding serenity when he showed Thomas the wounds.

The element of surprise affirms the integrity of an event. The Risen Lord said to Cleopas and his companion: "How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken!” (Luke 24:25). That is the one instance when he called anyone a fool. At first it would seem to contradict his command not to insult people by calling them “raqa” which means empty-headed. But here, in the glory of the Resurrection, there is no malice attached to what he says. There is only what some have called a gracious mirth.

If life is so full of surprises that we are no longer surprised by them, the solution is to recall that for forty days after the Lord rose from the dead, “Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through this belief you may have life in his name” (John 20:30-31).

2020-04-12 - Easter Day Apr 12, 2020

12 April 2020

Easter Day

NOTE: Due to the Covid19 / Coronavirus Emergency the Archdiocese of New York has cancelled all public Masses for an indefinite period. The homily attached hereto was given on 16 April 2017, Easter, using the same Readings as for today, 12 April 2020.

John 20:1-9 + Brief Homily

15 Minutes 59 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/041220.cfm (New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday 12 April 2020:

Normally each Easter, the Resurrection Sermon of Saint John Chrysostom replaces our regular column, with his paraphrase of Saint Paul’s “Death, where is thy sting? Grave where is thy victory?” (Corinthians 15:55). But these are not normal times. Their abnormality includes my own difficulty in not preaching the Three Hours on Good Friday for the first time in fifty years. But this sudden breakdown of the life we were accustomed to living has a power of its own, like the tension of Holy Saturday between Friday and Sunday.

This jolt is a reminder that the Resurrection of Christ was the most unusual thing that ever happened. Perhaps it takes a cancellation of Easter-egg hunts and an absence of chocolate bunnies, to renew the shock of an end to sorrow. The Magdalene recognized Jesus only after she wept: “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” It must have been very quiet in the garden by the empty tomb, when the Voice called to her by name. The whole world has now become silent enough for us to hear that Voice. And when the Master told the Magdalene not to touch him, he was not setting an example for “social distancing.” He was telling her not to cling to him, because he had more to do over forty days, before he entered eternity, making himself available everywhere, cancelling all emptiness.

In 590, Rome was reeling from what evidently was Bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis, which pandemic over several decades had killed an estimated one hundred million people in a population much smaller than now. Pope Pelagius II was one of its victims. His successor, Pope Gregory I, had been Pelaguis’ ambassador or “apocrisiarius” to Constantinople where he learned the custom of their penitential processions. On April 25, he organized a procession of seven groups representing the different regions of Rome, and prayed the prototype of our prayer, the “Regina Coeli”: “Queen of Heaven, rejoice, alleluia: For he whom thou hast deserved to bear, alleluia, Hath risen, as he promised, alleluia.” He said he heard it from angels. Then he had a vision of Saint Michael the Archangel sheathing his sword, and the pestilence ended.

Divine Providence arranged long ago that our church’s patron should be Saint Michael the Archangel. Our parish has the honor of pastoral responsibility for the emergency hospital with a capacity for over three thousand patients at the Javits Center. In every country people are responding in different ways to the specter of desolation that has haunted each generation in various ways.

On Palm Sunday, Queen Elizabeth spoke words as maternal as they were monarchical: “We will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again.” Those with memories long enough will recognize that the Queen was evoking the World War II song: “We’ll meet again. Don't know where, don’t know when. But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day.” Her words were broadcast from the same castle where, nearly eighty years before, as a girl herself, she sent her first radio message to all the children who had been sent away from vulnerable cities and towns to a variety of locations in England and other countries to escape the bombings: “We know, everyone of us, that in the end all will be well; for God will care for us and give us victory and peace. And when peace comes, remember it will be for us, the children of today, to make the world of tomorrow a better and happier place.”

There are wars made by men, but there are also wars of pestilence that are not invented, but are even deadlier for having been inflicted. Yet there never is a day without the supernatural combat that engages each soul: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12). In that battle, the Risen Lord clothes us with the mantle of victory, if we are willing to bear the weight of its glory. That is why Pope Gregory, after the people had prayed the “Queen of Heaven” prayer in that procession, chanted a new line as Saint Michael appeared: “Pray for us to God. Alleluia.”

In hard times people have consoled each other with the promise: “We’ll meet again.” Because of the cruelties of circumstance, not all did meet again, not in this world. But the joy of Easter is this: Just as the disciples met again the Lord they thought they had lost, so may we meet Him on what our limited language calls “some sunny day.” He is the Living Word who made all things, so he says in speech not limited by mortal intelligence: “A little while, and you will no longer behold me; and again a little while, and you will see me” (John 16:16).

2020-04-05 - Palm Sunday Apr 05, 2020

5 April 2020

Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion

NOTE: Due to the Covid19 / Coronavirus Emergency the Archdiocese of New York has cancelled all public Masses for an indefinite period. The homily attached hereto was given on 9 April 2017, Palm Sunday, Year A, using the same Readings as for today, 5 April 2020.

Passion According to Matthew 26:14 – 27:66 + Brief Homily

35 Minutes 0 Seconds

(Homily begins around 29:37)

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/040520.cfm

(http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/032920.cfm (New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday, 5 April 2020:

The term “parochial” is frequently used in a condescending sense, but no one today can get away with thinking that to be parochial is to be isolated from reality. As I write, the Navy hospital ship “Comfort,” last seen here on the Hudson River after the World Trade Center horror, is passing by our rectory windows. The convention center nearby, usually home to flower and boat shows, is being converted into a huge emergency hospital.

This is how we approach the start of the Holy Week in which the faithful observe the most important thing that ever happened since the world was created. With powerful shock this Lent, mortifications have been imposed by circumstances beyond human control and not chosen by the exercise of free will. Now the Passion will be more powerful, because the Gates of the Temple are closed. The holy apostles thought themselves bereft of the One they hoped might be the Messiah. On the Mount of Olives, three of them slept a depressed sleep, haunted by anxious confusion. Varying circumstances in every generation have given the impression of being abandoned by the One who had promised to be with us always. Blaise Pascal wrote: "Jesus sera en agonie jusqu'à la fin du monde: il ne faut pas dormir pendant ce temps-là." (Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world. We should not sleep during this entire time.) The solemnity of those words was the freight of the confidence that tethers agony to victory.

In a book I wrote years ago, I remarked that modern communications have made popes more visible than ever, but a dangerous result is the impression that their significance issues from celebrity. Last Friday, Pope Francis stood alone in the dark and rain of a totally empty Saint Peter’s Square, and then blessed the whole world with the Blessed Sacrament. Because it was in what is now called “real time,” it was a stunning evocation of the final scene in Robert Hugh Benson’s dystopian novel, Lord of the World. The Anti-Christ would try to destroy the Church, attacking the lone figure of the Pope exiled in Nazareth, as he holds the Blessed Sacrament. The future Pope Benedict XVI spoke of that book in 1992, and Pope Francis mentioned it in 2013 and 2015.

Bulwer-Lytton wrote many fine things and is mocked only because one line has become a cliché. “It was a dark and stormy night.” That dark and stormy night when the Pope stood alone before the Basilica of Saint Peter was the harbinger of victory and not the whimper of defeat.

Now there is even concern that palm branches might be infected. No matter. This will be a great Holy Week, because “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out” (Luke 19:40).

2020-03-29 - Fifth Sunday of Lent Mar 29, 2020

29 March 2020

The Fifth Sunday of Lent

NOTE: Due to the Covid19 / Coronavirus Emergency the Archdiocese of New York has cancelled all public Masses for an indefinite period. The homily attached hereto was given on 2 April 2017, the Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year A, using the same Readings as for today, 29 March 2020.

John 9:1-45 + Homily

19 Minutes 49 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/032920.cfm

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/032920.cfm (New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday, 29 March 2020:

I have a rule never to begin a paragraph with a first-person pronoun. I do this not because it would be inappropriate to use the monarchical “We,” as in “We have a rule,” or the princely “One,” as in “One has a rule,” but because self-reference confines the argument to personal experience. That is somewhat like the danger of using exclamation points—a clear sign of rhetorical failure, like shouting when your argument is unclear.

I have broken my own rule today because it is my birthday. The demands of publishing require that this be written several days before it appears in print. I have achieved three-quarters of a century, which is child’s play compared with Methuselah, but I can say at least that I have lived a share of two very interesting centuries. I was entertained once by a lady who had lived in three centuries, having been born in the last year of the nineteenth century, and who died in the second year of the twenty-first century. That is almost as interesting as the fact that she was Queen of the United Kingdom and the Dominions and Empress of India.

On the day of my birth, the Indian 20th Infantry launched the conquest of Burma, British troops crossed the Rhine, and American forces began the battle of Okinawa—the harshest conflict in the Pacific theatre. I have no memory of that since I was in a diaper and not a uniform, but the truth is that I was born during a war. That makes me no different from any other life born into this world, since everyone is engaged in a war. Life itself, whether politically peaceful or belligerent, is an engagement “against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against the spirits of wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12).

That moral combat takes different forms, and it was not hyperbolic for our Chief Executive to call himself a “wartime president.” A struggle against disease, whose present virulence still remains uncertain, can be as violent as any combat zone. All struggles are rooted in the war that broke out in heaven when “Michael and his angels fought against the dragon” (Revelation 12:7). The happy fact is that the dragon, which is Satan, “who leads the whole world astray,” was defeated. The sobering fact is that we have a free will to choose in whose service to enlist.

That account in the Book of Revelation is a mere myth only if soldiers dying on battlefields, or the sick suffering on hospital beds are figments of human imagination. But when Satan fell, he took highly intelligent powers with him, and in every generation they “wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls.” Their strategy is intimidation, and they cannot resist the Faith that casts out fear.

2020-03-22 - Fourth Sunday of Lent Mar 22, 2020

22 March 2020

The Fourth Sunday of Lent

NOTE: Due to the Covid19 / Coronavirus Emergency the Archdiocese of New York has cancelled all public Masses for an indefinite period. The homily attached hereto was given on 26 March 2017, the Fourth Sunday of Lent, Year A, using the same Readings as for today, 22 March 2020.

John 9:1-41 + Homily

20 Minutes 38 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/032220.cfm.

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of Sunday, 22 March 2020:

Geniuses often are thought to be absent-minded. Archimedes was so preoccupied with a mathematical diagram he was constructing during the invasion of Syracuse in Sicily in 212 BC, that he told a Roman soldier about to slay him: “Let me finish my numbers.” He was not professorially absent-minded, but present-minded. His obligation to truth took precedence over life itself.

In our exceptional times, the President has declared a national emergency. This is not unprecedented, and I have an oral tradition of my own family witnessing to the influenza epidemic of 1918, when my grandparents’ venerable parish rector survived the infection while ministering to the ill, but whose two daughters died. The causalities were much higher than now, with a much smaller global population.

We pray for our leaders, and the scientists enlisted to mitigate the spread of infection. We also deplore those who would exploit this crisis for political gain. Our Lord had the greatest contempt for demagogues. It is thankworthy that months ago, our government prudently imposed barriers on immigration from China, in spite of criticism from politicians who faulted that policy for what they called “xenophobia.”

In any generation, crises provoke a reaction to the fact of human mortality. In their anxiety, those unwilling to acknowledge that tend to decry catastrophes as if they were intrusions into the obvious circumstance that life is a fragile gift. So they become paranoid about disease, demographics, climate change and other metaphors for the simple reality of impermanence.

Death is nothing new. Until now, everyone has done it. Our Lord would speak of it with a strange mixture of gravity and nonchalance. It is prelude to a permanent realm of which every anatomical breath is an intimation by virtue of its impermanence. Anxiety ignores the promise that accompanies the warning: “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”

Saint Charles Borromeo led a procession in prayer to mitigate the plague in Milan in 1576, caring for upwards of seventy thousand dying and starving people. Death meant nothing to him, save an opening to Paradise. For all his mystical intuitions, he also enjoyed playing billiards, and when asked what he would do if he had only fifteen minutes more to live, he responded, “Keep playing billiards.”

One of the Church’s youngest saints, Dominic Savio, told Saint John Bosco that if the Holy Angel blew his trumpet for the end of all things while he was on the playground, he would just keep on playing. That is how we should want to play each day of our lives, in a friendship with God that will not find Heaven unfamiliar. In 1857, fourteen-year-old Dominic’s last earthly words were: “Oh, what wonderful things I see!”

A saint is one who can stand at the eternal gates and say, “Hello. I am home.”

2020-03-15 - Third Sunday in Lent Mar 15, 2020

15 March 2020

Third Sunday in Lent

NOTE: Due to the Covid19 / Coronavirus Emergency the Archdiocese of New York has cancelled all public Masses for an indefinite period. The homily attached hereto was given on 19 March 2017, the Third Sunday of Lent, Year A, using the same Readings as for today, 15 March 2020.

John 4:5-42 + Homily

23 Minutes 22 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/031520.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin of 15 March 2020:

On September 10, 1919, General Pershing led his returning troops up Fifth Avenue before crowds numbering two million. In front of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, he dismounted from his rambunctious white horse “Captain” to greet Cardinal Mercier, who had arrived in New York by ship the night before. The General made a point of expressing his esteem for the Belgian prelate. Perhaps the name Mercier means little to many today, but over the course of several weeks, he received an unprecedented series of welcomes in the United States, excelling even the welcome tour of Lafayette in 1824-1825.

Cardinal Mercier had become a hero to the world for his defense of Belgium during its sufferings after the German invasion. It is edifying to read on the Internet the account of the celebrations in America recorded by Father Thomas C. Brennan. In it, he describes the prelate addressing Protestant leaders in English, rabbis in Hebrew, and academics in a Latin more fluent than their own, as they bestowed honorary laurels upon him.

This archbishop led a revival in studies of Thomas Aquinas, but more than that, he was an image of moral integrity, a cardinal honored more for himself than for his title. The response to the Donatist heresy established with certainty, through the articulation of such as Saint Augustine, that the personal attributes of a cleric do not affect the legitimacy of his priestly acts: the sacraments of a weak bishop can confer the same grace as those of a saint. But the moral integrity of a cleric empowers his encouragement of souls. Weak leaders and their bromide-churning bureaucracies have scant moral influence.

Cardinal Mercier had a zeal that issued from a love of doctrinal truth. In the wartime chaos of 1917, he told his priests not to tell their people to love if they could not explain the theology that justifies love. He gave a practical formula for happiness:

“Every day for five minutes control your imagination and close your eyes to the things of sense and your ears to all the noises of the world, in order to enter into yourself. Then, in the sanctity of your baptized soul (which is the temple of the Holy Spirit), speak to that Divine Spirit, saying to Him:

O Holy Spirit, beloved of my soul, I adore You. Enlighten me, guide me, strengthen me, console me. Tell me what I should do. Give me your orders. I promise to submit myself to all that You desire of me and accept all that You permit to happen to me. Let me only know Your Will.

If you do this, your life will flow along happily, serenely, and full of consolation, even in the midst of trials. Grace will be proportioned to the trial, giving you strength to carry it, and you will arrive at the Gate of Paradise laden with merit.”

2020-03-08 - Second Sunday of Lent Mar 08, 2020

8 March 2020

Second Sunday of Lent

Matthew 17:1-9 + Homily

19 Minutes 12 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/030820.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

Materialism, fantasy and false worship were the temptations Satan thrust at Christ, and he is tempting our nation the same way. These seductions are a formula for Socialism, which Winston Churchill in 1948 defined as “The philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.”

A poorly educated generation succumbs to adolescent idealism, bereft of history, unaware that a cult of the state has been a consistent failure, costing countless millions of lives in modern times.

State worship was resisted by the earliest Christians, who refused to offer incense to Caesar. Socialism is simply Communism not yet in power, and its smiling face in the guise of “Democratic Socialism” quickly scowls once it has control. As the economist Ludwig von Mises showed in various ways, the essence of Socialism is coercion and manipulation. Pope John XXIII, quoting Pope Pius XI, taught in 1961: “No Catholic could subscribe even to moderate Socialism.”

Socialism in the guise of benevolence exploits the naïve. As a corollary, Yeats said: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Lack of conviction moved appeasers to sign the Munich Agreement, and in present times it has ceded the Church’s integrity to the Chinese government. Naïve people were scandalized by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but Stalin and Hitler were simply Socialists in different uniforms. Just as the National Socialist manifesto of 1920 tried to replace the Church with a pastiche of “Positive Christianity,” which was Christianity without Christ, so has the Chinese government ordered that images of Christ be replaced with images of Party leader Xi Jinping.

In 1931, Pope Pius XI denounced the exaltation of the state as “Idolatry.” He insisted that “Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.” From a conviction born of suffering under National Socialism and Soviet Socialism, Pope John Paul II maintained that “the fundamental error of Socialism is anthropological . . . [because it] considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism… .”

As the Catholic Church is the largest charitable organization in the world, Catholics should note what a present candidate for his party’s presidential nomination, who calls himself a Democratic Socialist, said years ago: “I don’t believe in charities . . .government, rather than charity organizations, should take over responsibility for social programs.” But Pope Benedict VI has said: “We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces . . .”

The prophet Samuel warned the Israelites who wanted a king in charge of everything: “He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves” (1 Samuel 8:17). That voice is louder now.

2020-03-01 - First Sunday in Lent Mar 01, 2020

1 March 2020

First Sunday in Lent

Matthew 4:1-11 + Homily

18 Minutes 4 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/030120.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

Earnest preachers use their personalities to lead people to Jesus without obstructing him with themselves. They may honestly boast that they have been given the best information to convey, and we have it in the form of what we call the Bible—that is, the Biblia, or Books.

At the start of Lent, our Lord makes us privy to the forty days he spent confronting the Anti-Christ. The only reason he made this public is that he, “who knew all men” (John 2:24), conquered with a blithe insouciance the same three temptations that we mere mortals, whom he loves, confront every day.

The temptation to turn stone to bread is the seductive power of disordered passions: trying to gratify the wants of the flesh with gossamer seductions that never satisfy for very long. Besides uncontrolled sexuality, this includes gossip, anger and abuse, such as that of drugs and drink, and creates an illusion of pleasure that God alone can give without end. The temptation to defy gravity afflicts human souls by wallowing in fantasy every day, ogling at what others have. The temptation to rule kingdoms is the seduction of the ego to measure ourselves by the prestige others accord us.

That temptation to rule kingdoms is the most vicious temptation because it elicits and animates the original sin of pride. Not everyone has political power, but each human being is tempted to make a kingdom of his own imagining. Every generation is witness to the futility of that vanity, such as befell the King of Babylon who said in his delusion, like Lucifer: “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God” (Isaiah 14:13).

Catholicism is practical, which is why its supernatural power may appear among what is deceptively ordinary. Even superstitions, kitsch art, and scandalous behavior by some who identify as Catholics, witness to the fact that the supernatural character of the Church does not depend on human virtue. In some respects, heretical partisans are more virtuous and sober than Catholics, but that is because they depend on themselves, with the result that their populations become monochrome and have no tolerance for exceptions.

G.K. Chesterton said that if he were stranded on a desert island and could have only one book, if he wanted impress people he would ask for something by Plato or Aristotle, and if he expected to remain stranded a long while, he would want Dickens’ novel Pickwick Papers. But if he wanted to get off quickly, he would want Thomas’ “Guide to Practical Shipbuilding.” The Church is the Barque of Peter and, as such, has the most practical information for those who are stranded in a fallen world and want to get off quickly into the vibrant and colorful civilization of the saints. To begin Lent, the Church provides the guide.

2020-02-23 - 7th Sunday in Ordinary Time Feb 23, 2020

23 February 2020

7th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 5:38-48 + Homily

17 Minutes 54 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/022320.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

I used to dread Ash Wednesday because of the endless lines of people coming for ashes. By the end of the day, priests look like coal miners.

Sociologists may condescendingly consider the phenomenon of crowds coming for ashes, when they do not enter a church at other times of the year, a habit of tribal identity. If the mystery of the Holy Trinity, or Christ dying and rising from the dead, confounds limited human intelligence, there is still a spark of the sense that biological life has an end as real as its beginning. For skeptics, the Easter proclamation “Christ is Risen” may seem like an indulgence of romance or wishful thinking, but no one drawing breath can deny that “Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return.”

God gives life and does not intend to take it away. He resents mortality, and when he came into the world that he had made good, he wept to see how it had gone wrong. “Jesus wept” (John 11:35), and those tears were not because he was poor or hungry or insulted, or because of bad harvests or unpredictable climate or corrupt governments. He wept because someone had died. “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).

Even if some think that is too good to be true, every day radio and television advertisements promise that you will feel better if you take their multiple vitamins or subscribe to their weight-loss programs. This is what philosophers call the “élan vital,” or the will to live. The forty days of Lent, which go faster than health regimens, offer a promise of life beyond death more audacious than any promise of improved nutrition or medical cures.

In 1970 the film “Love Story” was a real tear-jerker, breaking records for its profits at the box office. Its closing line was “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” It was an altruistic sentiment, but God is love and not sentiment. Divine love is so powerful that, as Dante wrote, it “moves the sun and the other stars.” That power is offered to the human soul, which is in the image of God. “Know you not that the saints shall judge this world? And if the world shall be judged by you, are you unworthy to judge the smallest matters?” (1 Corinthians 6:2).

Powerful love, sanctifying grace, is available through the absolution of sin. “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). We shortchange ourselves of splendor if we do not tell God we are sorry, as “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). Lent is not an unwelcome burden, for it is the gateway to glory greater than the sun and the other stars.

2020-02-16 - 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time Feb 16, 2020

16 February 2020

6th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 5:17-37 + Homily

17 Minutes 59 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/021620.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

The names of the Franciscan friars Berard of Carbio, Otho, Peter, Accursius and Adjutus, are not as familiar as that of Francis of Assisi, who said that they had become the prototypes of what he called the Friars Minor. After his own failed mission to convert the Muslims of Egypt during the Fifth Crusade in 1219, he sent them on a similar mission to Morocco where they were tortured and killed in 1220. That was exactly eight hundred years ago. Clearly, Saint Francis did not spend his days talking to birds. Nor did he and his friars risk their lives to engage in meandering “inter-religious dialogue.”

This column is being published on the fifth anniversary of the beheading of 21 Coptic Christians. All martyrs believe, as did Saint Peter when filled with the Holy Spirit: “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). This perplexes flaccid minds and scandalizes the morally compromised, but it is the engine of heroic virtue. Dietrich von Hildebrand wrote in 1967: “Enamored of our present epoch, blind to all its characteristic dangers, intoxicated with everything modern, there are many Catholics who no longer ask whether something is true, or whether it is good and beautiful, or whether it has intrinsic value: they ask only whether it is up-to-date, suitable to ‘modern man’ and the technological age, whether it is challenging, dynamic, audacious, progressive.”

About a century earlier, in his Grammar of Assent, Saint John Henry Newman had already explained: “Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.” Saint Paul disdained rhetoric and mere speculation “so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom but on the power of God” (1 Corinthians 2:5).

By one estimation, and it is by necessity approximate, over the centuries there have been about seventy million Christian martyrs and, astonishingly, half of them have been in roughly the last century. It is also a fact that in our present culture, one in six 18- to 64-year-olds, and one in five aged 65 and over, depend on antidepressants. The example of the martyrs is better than any chemical cure for sadness, for they testify that Christ has made life so worth living, that living and dying for him makes sense. When the ransomed bodies of those five Franciscan martyrs were brought from Morocco to Portugal, a young priest in Coimbra was so moved by their mute witness that he consecrated his life to proclaiming the Gospel as far and wide as he could. We know him as Saint Anthony of Padua.

2020-02-09 - 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time Feb 09, 2020

9 February 2020

The Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 5:13-16 + Homily

14 Minutes 11 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/020920.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

Luke the Evangelist is the patron saint of artists because he paints pictures with words. In describing the scene of old Simeon in the Temple encountering Jesus, Luke wrote that he “took him up in his arms” (Luke 2:28).

That word picture of an old man holding a forty-day-old baby, reminds one of the 1490 painting by the master Domenico Ghirlandaio, of a grandfather and his grandson embracing. The old man is anything but beautiful, save for his smile as he gazes at the angelic boy. The grandfather’s problematic nose is “warts and all,” as the bleak Oliver Cromwell instructed his own portraitist, Samuel Cooper. For noses, it competes with that of the vaudevillian Jimmy Durante who, incidentally, was married in 1921 in our sister parish of Holy Innocents.

That juxtaposition of old age and youth bonded by love is the “leitmotif” of the encounter in the Temple. But by what power of perception did Simeon recognize the infant Messiah? You might ask the same of the seventeen-year-old Saint Joan of Arc when she entered the Chateau of Chinon in 1429 and recognized the disguised future King Charles VII.

Good teachers discern potential in the classroom, like Saint Albert the Great seeing in his student Thomas Aquinas, mocked as a “Dumb Ox,” a future Doctor of the Church. But to discern the Messiah in diapers requires heavenly help, since prodigy is not greater than divinity.

God comes to us often in obscurity, through unexpected events and persons, rather than through celebrities. Famous people come and go, often through the passing of fashion. In the second century, Plutarch compared the celebrities of his Roman days with the heroes of classical Greece; but who today remembers Cleomenes, whom he matched with Camillus, or Philopoemen compared with Poplicola?

There are natural intuitions, such as Saint Albert recognizing in the clumsy young Thomas Aquinas the future Doctor of the Church. But Simeon and his accompanying prophetess Anna, like Joan of Arc, had their eyes opened by the Holy Spirit.

Albert Schweitzer was a hero of my youth and one of the most revered figures of the day. Now he is as remote in present consciousness as Jimmy Durante. He left us an image of the Messiah that Simeon would have understood: “He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same words: ‘Follow thou me!’ and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.”

2020-02-02 - Presentation of the Lord Feb 02, 2020

2 February 2020

Feast of the Presentation of the Lord

Luke 2:22-40 + Homily

16 Minutes 48 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/020220.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

The Feast of the Presentation recalls the old man Simeon chanting thanks for having lived to see the Messiah. His “Nunc Dimittis”—“Let thy servant depart in peace”—is part of the Church’s evening prayers. In 542 in Constantinople, the Emperor Justinian placed it into the Eastern Liturgy.

This year the Feast falls on Super Bowl Sunday. Human nature instinctively finds entertainment more compelling than edification, but like all things ephemeral, games pass away while the songs of saints will endure until the end of time. Few today remember the Isthmian games of the Greeks, or the cheers in the Roman circus. But those games also warn thinking people of the dangers in giving sports a cultic status. When the amateur is overwhelmed by professionals who are paid mind-boggling salaries, inflating the cost of tickets, and whose lives and deaths distract from the great events of the day, a culture’s perspective becomes irrational.

Add to this the “ad verecundium fallacy” by which people accept the unqualified opinions of individuals simply because of their celebrity. This applies to sports figures and Hollywood starlets who turn entertainment into political theatre.

The aforementioned Justinian had to deal with this problem. He and his empress Theodora were not the only couple who have rooted for opposite teams; however, their situation was serious, since the teams represented political and religious factions. Theodora was a fan of the Greens, who were Monophysite heretics, and the emperor supported the Blues, who were orthodox Chalcedonians. No one who collects abstruse sports statistics should object that these theological issues are too obscure. Feelings were so intense in 532 that the “Nika Riots” (Nika being the term for “Victory,” now adapted for Nike sneakers, made mostly in third-world countries under disputed labor conditions) led to the deaths of 30,000 rioters and the destruction of much of the city.

Super Bowl half-time extravaganzas surpass in their vulgarity only the Field of the Cloth of Gold games in France in 1520 when Henry VIII, twenty-nine years old and an impressive 6’1” wrestled Francis I, twenty-three years old and over 6’5”. Thousands of tents were erected for the crowds, and for refreshments there were 3,000 sheep, 800 calves, 300 oxen, and fountains flowing with wine. Even the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I donated for entertainment dancing monkeys painted gold.

During the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175-164 B.C.) the Greeks built a gymnasium at the base of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Even some Jewish priests of the Herodian temple succumbed to the sports mania. Should any pulpit orator try to beguile his congregation on the Feast of the Presentation with banter about the Super Bowl, let him be reminded: “Disdaining the temple and neglecting the sacrifices, [the priests] hastened, at the signal for the discus-throwing, to take part in the unlawful exercises on the athletic field” (2 Maccabees 4:14).

2020-01-26 - 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time Jan 26, 2020

26 January 2020

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Matthew 4:12-23 + Homily

19 Minutes 56 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/012620.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

Precisely one year ago in the Italian town of Cremona, there was an imposed silence by order of the local government for eight hours a day, six days of the week for five straight weeks. The purpose was to allow the pristine recording by highly technical equipment of sounds played on the 1700 Antonio Stradivari “Stauffer” cello, the 1727 Antonio Stradivari “Vesuvius” violin, a 1615 “Stauffer” viola by Girolamo Amati, and the 1734 “Prince Doria” violin by Guarneri del Gesù. Cremona’s most famous luthier, of course, was Stradivari, and no one knows how many centuries from now such instruments as the Stradivarius violins can survive.

It is harder to make silence than noise. Because of modern cacophony, especially in what passes for music in the form of amplified “rock” sounds, young people are growing increasingly deaf. In urban areas, silence is so uncommon that one becomes suspicious of silence, rather like the dog that did not bark in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Silver Blaze” detective story. Sherlock Holmes said that it was Dr. Watson’s “great gift for silence” that made him so useful.

Satan and his evil spirits are noisy. Jesus told an evil spirit to be silent (Mark 1:25). The Greek Φιμώθητι (Phimōthēti) simply means “Shut up!” Our Lord always was precise. So should we be, in order to hear God. “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).

The surrealist poet Dame Edith Sitwell said, “My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.” She might have benefitted arts and letters had she been silent more often. But, after all, she eventually made her Profession of Faith at the Farm Street Church in London with Evelyn Waugh as her sponsor. Neither was famous for reticence, but they did profit from moments of quietude. Those who do not think deeply will not understand how painful it is to those who have powers of concentration, to be interrupted by frivolous chatter.

Saint Anthony helped to change the world by isolating himself in a desert. This is why retreats in one form or another are crucial, for a retreat is actually a frontal attack on the noisy Anti-Christ. The pope himself recently said that folks should put down their iPhones and listen to silence, which has a sound of its own. When Barnabas and Paul spoke at the Council in Jerusalem, “All the people kept silent . . .” (Acts 15:12). We can be thankful that they did not have cell phones.

God will not have to shout at us if we do not “harden our hearts” (Hebrews 3:15). Instead, as with Elijah, “. . . the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still, small voice” (1 Kings 19:11-13).

2020-01-19 - 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Jan 19, 2020

19 January 2020

The Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

John 1:29-34 + Homily

14 Minutes 13 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/011920.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

I knew an elderly Scotswoman who read the Bible each night by the light of a candle. It had become a kind of ritual, for everyone needs a rite, including those reared in the stark Calvinist kind of worship of her homeland Kirk. While she did all of her other reading by electric light, the lamp was turned off and the candle lit for the Bible. It was by that burning taper that she could read, as all of us can, the wonderful and mysterious words: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).

That contrast of light and dark is powerfully depicted in the Isenheim Altarpiece now in Colmar, France. It was produced between 1512 and 1516 by the sculptor Nikolaus of Haguenau and painter Matthias Grünewald for a hospital that treated people suffering from skin diseases, and such affliction is depicted on the flesh of the Crucified Christ in what has been called “The most beautiful painting of ugliness in the history of art.” The darkness of the Passion is darker for being next to the incandescent light of the Risen Christ. At the foot of the Cross, in deliberate contempt for chronology, is John the Baptist, still alive and attended by a lamb, for John had called his cousin “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). The Lamb, a symbol of Christ sacrificed on the cross, is also the Light that pre-existed all created light as we know it. “And the city has no need for sun or moon to shine on it, because the glory of God illuminates the city, and the Lamb is its lamp” (Revelation 21:23).

That illuminating “glory of God” briefly broke through created light as we know it in the Transfiguration. If it is to be understood to some small degree, that will be by acknowledging the “pre-existence” of Christ: “He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:2-3).

Even in speech, the mystery of Christ’s pre-existence declares itself: “. . . before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). For any human confined to chronology, saying that would be using bad grammar. One might say “I was” (Simple Past), “I was existing” (Past Continuous), “I had existed” (Past Perfect), or “I had been existing” (Past Perfect Continuous), but only Christ can defy grammar by saying that before Abraham was, “I am.”

John—standing at the Jordan river, poorly dressed and even more poorly fed—employed the only grammar available to him, to declare of his younger cousin: “This is he, of whom I said: After me there comes a man who is preferred before me, because he was before me” (John 1:30).

2020-01-12 - Baptism of the Lord Jan 12, 2020

12 January 2020

The Feast of the Baptism of the Lord

Matthew 3:13-17 + Homily

16 Minutes 0 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/011220.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

Prophets proclaim the truth, and they predict the future only in a derivative sense of cautioning about the consequences of denying the truth. Thus, the Church distinguishes between holy prophesying and sinful fortune-telling. There is a “psychic” near our rectory, who will tell your future for $10, but you have to ring the bell first, and I should think that if she had the powers she claims, she would not require a doorbell.

The less the Wisdom of God is heeded, the more people rely on fallible human calculations. Inevitably, the list of mistaken predictions keeps growing. We may remember being told in the 1960s that within twenty years, overpopulation would cause universal starvation. Instead, we now have crises of empty cradles and obesity: birth dearth and increased girth. As the new year begins, we can reflect on a prediction of the president of Exxon U.S.A. in 1989 that by 2020 our national oil reserves would be practically nil, while the solid fact is that those reserves are far higher than even back then.

In 1990, The Washington Post was confident that carbon dioxide emissions would have increased our planet’s average temperature about three degrees (and six degrees in the United States) by 2020. The increase has been only about one degree. If we trusted some experts, by now one billion people would be starving in the Third World due to climate toxicity, but instead the World Bank tells us that there has been a significant alleviation of dire poverty, with the assistance of developed countries and access to investment capital and prudent production.

There still are glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro, despite a warning of the United Nations Environment Programme in 2003 that by now they would have melted. In 1997, the Reuters newswire announced that by 2020 some eight million people would have died because of global warming catastrophes, while such deaths actually have reached historic lows. Taking up that theme, a New York congresswoman and former bartender predicts that the world could end in twelve years.

While to err is human and to forgive is divine, as the Catholic sensibility of Alexander Pope opined, forgiveness requires apologizing. Wrong predictions in recent decades are conspicuous for their authors’ lack of contrition. It is as if they had absorbed the bromide uttered at the end of the sentimental film “Love Story” in 1970: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” If that were so, there would be no Act of Contrition in the Holy Mass, which is the world’s most sublime manifestation of love. But we are talking here about simple humility in anticipating the future.

Without accountability to God for the right use of reason, ideology mimics theology, disagreement is treated as heresy, neurosis fabricates its own apocalypse, and mistakes claim infallibility, with no need to say “I was wrong.”

2020-01-05 - Epiphany Jan 05, 2020

5 January 2020

The Epiphany of the Lord

Matthew 2:1-12 + Homily

17 Minutes 25 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/010520.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

Who the “Wise Men” were is a recurring question for inventive debate, but the point is that these sophisticated scholars were from “a foreign country.”

Here in Manhattan, tourists can be annoying when they stop suddenly to look at a novel sight. But they also do us the favor of noticing what we take for granted. Those Magi from a foreign land pointed out that the locals had missed the greatest event in history. They also wisely distrusted King Herod (his heir Archelaus was even worse, as Saint Joseph knew), and so they ignored him. When Herod found out that a child had come into the world who threatened his complacency, he set out to destroy him, killing many innocents in the attempt.

Christians must always be tourists in this earthly realm, pointing out the wonders that others take for granted. That can be threatening to many. True Christians disturb the settled ways of a culture. People who succumb to the insanity of sin will accuse Christians of madness. That is how we get martyrs, as happened a couple of weeks ago in Nigeria when Muslims killed eleven Christians. Such hostility was an expression of the killers’ conviction that Jesus Christ brought madness into the world.

In a 1959 ”Twilight Zone” television episode called “Eye of the Beholder,” some exceedingly ugly people unsuccessfully perform plastic surgery on a beautiful woman, thinking that she is the one who is ugly. In our decaying culture, there are those who think that history’s Perfect Man was ugly and that those who are like him should be crucified one way or another, usually by ridicule and censorship. The media and demagogic politicians do this as a habit.

In recent days, a woman in Britain gave birth, although she was bearded after hormonal treatments that made her appear as the man she had “transitioned” to be twelve years before. Her partner is “non-binary”—which means neither male nor female, and the “sperm donor” was a man who thinks he is a woman, while the obstetrician, according to vague reports, was either a man who claims to be a woman or a woman who claims to be a man.

Thus, our rattled culture poses a dilemma: either these people are mentally ill, or Christians are. And this is not confined to the esoteric. An Ivy League institution has just mailed forms to alumni, asking them to choose the descriptive pronoun they prefer. This gives new meaning to “institution.” And this is why sane voices increasingly are banned from speaking in such places, because the function of prophets is to point out that inmates are running the asylum.

Observant souls never take for granted the sanity Christ brought into the world. Salvation means sanity. “For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints” (1 Corinthians 14:33).

2020-01-01 - Mary, Mother of God Jan 01, 2020

1 January 2020

The Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God

Luke 2:16-21 + Homily

9 Minutes 54 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/010120.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

2019-12-29 - Holy Family Dec 29, 2019

29 December 2019

The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph

Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23 + Homily

16 Minutes 45 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/122919.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

An architect knows where all the doors in a house will lead because he designed it. That is why man-made religions can seem plausible, being the product of human imagination. That is also why the fact that Christ is a divine reality, or “Person,” while having two natures, challenges human understanding, because it is not a human invention. In these days of Christmas, a good way to avoid reducing the Incarnation’s mysterious meaning to simple expressions of goodwill and Dickensian jollity, is to read the Athanasian Creed, focusing on the lines: “Although He is God and man, He is not two, but one Christ. And He is one, not because His divinity was changed into flesh, but because His humanity was assumed unto God. He is one, not by a mingling of substances, but by unity of person.”

A sure way to get the Incarnation wrong is to try to use mere human imagery to explain it. One recent attempt, with the best of intentions, was to make an analogy between the two natures of Christ and the mixed races of “mestizos” who are part European and part American Indian. This echoes the mistake of the monk Eutyches (d. 454), who imagined the divinity and humanity of Christ as fused into a sort of homogenized third reality, half God and half Man. Not to make light of such a serious mistake, but it reminds one of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta “Iolanthe,” named for a woodland fairy who bears a son, Strephon, fathered by a mortal man. Strephon’s problem is that he is half sprite and halfhuman, so when he tries to fly through a keyhole, his human legs get stuck.

There were even bishops who did not want to think more deeply than Eutyches, although he had been condemned as a heretic in 448, and they rehabilitated him at a bogus “Robber” council of Ephesus in Turkey. Pope Leo (known to history as “the Great”) appealed from Rome to the venerable lady Pulcheria, empress in the Byzantine half of the Roman Empire, who at the time was regent during the minority of her brother Theodosius II, asking her to summon another council. During the third session of that assembly in Chalcedon, a letter from the Pope was read, defining the true mystery of the Son of God, and the bishops cried out in chorus: “This is the faith of the Fathers, this is the faith of the Apostles. We all believe, the orthodox believe thus. Those who do not believe thus are excommunicated. Peter has spoken through the mouth of Leo.”

At Christmas we remember the words Peter heard from the Master, who was once cradled in Bethlehem: “. . . flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven”(Matthew 16:17).

2019-12-24 - Christmas Dec 24, 2019

24 December 2019

The Nativity of Our Lord (Christmas):

Mass During the Night

Luke 2:1-14 + Homily

16 Minutes 2 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/122519-the-nativity-of-the-lord-night.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

2019-12-22 - Advent IV Dec 22, 2019

22 December 2019

The Fourth Sunday of Advent

Matthew 1:18-24 + Homily

14 Minutes 59 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/122219.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

I have long been of the opinion that preachers should avoid allusions to the painting “The Light of the World” by William Holman Hunt. This is not because it is inferior in any way. It is a tour de force of an artist’s craft and a prime example of the Pre-Raphaelite school that he began around 1848 with John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, trying to revive the mystical aura they thought had become somewhat lost in the cold rationalism of the Renaissance. They were a lively and amusing coterie. Father Neville of the Oratory was offended when Millais smoked a pipe in the presence of John Henry Newman as he painted his great portrait of the saint. But His Eminence did not mind at all and was eminently amused.

My hesitation about Hunt’s painting of Christ knocking on a door is that it has become a cliché. It has been copied countless times, and like Leonardo’s Last Supper, it is seen so much that it is robbed of its force and even suffers the degradation of reproduction on coffee mugs and tea towels. Hunt’s painting has further been badly caricatured, as in the modern version by Warner Sallman, in a descent from cliché to kitsch. But clichés become clichés because of their innate truth, even if they are responsible for dreary platitudes from the pulpit.

Hence, the Advent days make reference to Hunt’s painting unavoidable, for its symbolism puts on the painter’s canvas, with color and linseed oil, what the scribe’s ink wrote on parchment: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and dine with him, and he with me” (Revelation 3:20).

At the risk of being tiresome, it needs to be pointed out that there is no exterior handle on the door, for it is the door of the human soul, which has to be opened from the inside. The door is covered with the thistles of sin. This is the moment when free will decides to open or shut. Free imagination assumes that the light Christ carries is seeping through cracks in the door’s rough wood, just as prophetic voices in Advent hint at a great Light about to shine on the world.

Over three centuries before the Incarnation, the Cynic philosopher Diogenes supposedly carried a lamp through the streets, “looking for an honest man.” Since Christ is Wisdom itself, the lamp he carries in portraiture is not a searchlight. It is a reflection of the light of divinity that surrounds his divine head, for he is “the radiance of God’s glory” (Hebrews 1:3).

On Christmas, the Church chants the words first uttered at Nicaea in Turkey by bishops who in many instances had been battered by darkened intellects: “Light from Light.” That is not a cliché.

2019-12-15 - Advent III Dec 15, 2019

15 December 2019

The Third Sunday of Advent: Gaudete Sunday

Matthew 11:2-11 + Homily

16 Minutes 27 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/121519.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

Gaudete!—Rejoice!—is the name for the Third Sunday of Advent. The rubrics say the Advent penances and discipline are somewhat mitigated on this day. Gaudete Sunday is a respite, rather like one of those “film trailers” that give a tantalizing glimpse of what is to come. Even so, the sonorous hymns and rose colors of Gaudete Sunday are awkward vaudeville rather than true drama, if there is no penance to lighten and no discipline to lessen. “But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently” (Romans 8:24-25).

Saint Thomas Aquinas spent a lot of ink describing joy, just as Bach set “the joy of man’s desiring” to music. Joy is a fact that only the true God can give, and so it is more than a transient feeling of happiness. At the heart of human nature is the longing for joy, and this is the case even with miscreants who are deluded in thinking that sensuality, sloth, and even suicide will bestow a fugitive kind of happiness.

Advent is the guide to true joy, and it has become a Lost Season, just as Confession has become a Lost Sacrament, because our culture is impatient for joy and tries to be satisfied with tinsel happiness. Dr. Seuss’s “Grinch that stole Christmas” has a twin in the Grinch that stole Advent. This means that the beautiful hymnody and literature of Advent is swept away. Even organizations that claim to be Christian have Christmas parties in Advent. Excuses for “rushing” Christmas would be amusing were they not so pathetic. That sober modern prophet, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the twentieth century.” That disease has become epidemic in our new century.

Patience is one of the seven fruits of the Holy Spirit. It should strengthen the soul that is tempted to celebrate Christmas before Christmas. The excuse for doing that—“But everybody expects it”—merely means that the “Long expected Jesus” is not really expected. In contrast, persecuted Christians in diverse lands keep a more profound Advent, learning and living “all endurance and patience with joy” (Colossians 1:11). This has significant results. While persecution has driven Christianity in Iraq almost to extinction, the Chaldean Archbishop Najib Mikhael Moussa, has said that his people “lost everything except our faith in Jesus Christ” and are stronger for it. Moreover, he said, “many thousands of Muslims discovered the Person of Jesus Christ” after seeing the patient endurance of Christians.

In Advent, has your example brought anyone closer to the deep joy of Christ? "Therefore you too have grief now; but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you” (John 16:22).

2019-12-09 - Immaculate Conception Dec 09, 2019

9 December 2019

Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception

Luke 1:26-38 + Homily

17 Minutes 38 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/120919.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

2019-12-08 - Advent II Dec 08, 2019

8 December 2019

The Second Sunday of Advent

Matthew 3:1-12 + Homily

20 Minutes 22 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/120819.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

Of the “Four Last Things,” the Second Sunday of Advent treats Judgment. While it is superficially pious to ask, “Who am I to judge?” this has nothing to do with our Lord’s admonition: “Judge not, that you be not judged” (Matthew 7:1). Christians are obliged to judge (1 Corinthians 5:11-13). Judgment is the ability to make a right discernment, and the chronic inability to do that is the definition of insanity. God is the ultimate judge, and all human judgment must conform to his justice. Otherwise, judgment is defective, based on “outward appearance” (John 7:24).

The spiritual director of Blessed Charles de Foucauld, Abbé Henri Huvelin, told a woman who accused herself of pride for thinking that she was one of the greatest beauties in Paris: “Madame, that is not a sin. It is merely a mistaken judgment.”

In the second century, Justin Martyr told the Roman consul Quintus Junius Rusticus: “We hope to suffer torment for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ, and so be saved. For this will bring us salvation and confidence as we stand before the more terrible and universal judgment-seat of our Lord and Saviour.”

Great leaders like King Louis IX were just judges. As he was dying on the Eighth Crusade, he left a testament to his son and heir: "In order to do justice and right to thy subjects, be upright and firm, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left, but always to what is just; and do thou maintain the cause of the poor until such a time as the truth is made clear.”

The virtue of justice is twin to prudence. Naiveté is eviscerated prudence. So for example, the recent capitulation of some Vatican diplomats to the Chinese government was intended to secure justice for Chinese Catholics, but it only issued in their further oppression. Now, the Communists have ordered that if any church is not to be destroyed, it must replace images of Jesus with that of Xi Jinping. The lack of right discernment leads to untold suffering.

The Feast of the Immaculate Conception is transferred this Advent to Monday. A depiction of Our Lady as the New Eve portrays her trampling on the head of Satan, shown as a serpent. This fulfills the prophecy of Genesis 3:15. It is the ultimate act of justice, which Mary, along with all Christians, can do by the power of the Just Judge, “born of a woman” (Galatians 4:4), who is the ultimate crusher of the Prince of Lies.

By no means a Catholic mystic, some inspiration moved Julia Ward Howe to awaken before dawn in the Willard Hotel in 1861 and write with a stub of pencil, the “Battle Hymn” which includes the often-neglected lines: “Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel, / Since God is marching on.”

2019-12-01 - Advent I Dec 01, 2019

1 December 2019

First Sunday of Advent

Matthew 24:37-44 + Homily

18 Minutes 11 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/120119.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

Given the many theatres that are or have been within walking distance of our church on 34th Street, it is not possible to count the number of times stage curtains have come down on a final act. One block away from us is the theatre built by Oscar Hammerstein, to compete with the old Metropolitan Opera House up on Broadway at 39th. Here on 34th Street, in what is now called the Manhattan Center, the Vitaphone sound system was used in 1926 to record the first soundtrack for a moving picture,Don Juan. Before the old Met’s gold damask curtain came down for the last time at 39th and Broadway in 1966, the greatest Madama Butterfly, Licia Albanese, who once sang in my former church, rendered her last “Un bel dì” and then kissed with her hand the floorboards of the stage as the curtain came down before a weeping audience.

In another venue, my grandmother had a vivid recollection of the consternation at the old Hippodrome up on 43rd Street in the late 1920’s when the curtain collapsed on the child star Baby Rose Marie. That forerunner to Shirley Temple survived and lived to be 94. Albanese was still singing when she died in 2014 at the age of 105.

So curtains fall sooner or later, and we have Advent to remind us of that. The superficiality of a life may be measured by how seriously one takes Advent’s four themes of Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. Advent proclaims that a curtain is falling, even if a premature Christmas celebration with bells and elves, beginning with the Macy’s parade (two blocks east of our church), fabricates a distraction from that.

If thought is not deep, there will be no real joy when the mysteries of God are disclosed. The bane of our times, and possibly of all times, is superficiality. This was illustrated at a synod of bishops in Rome in 2015, when papers of a politically correct nature were read, one after another repeating clichés to address the world’s problems. One consultant broke through the soporific jargon. Dr. Anca Maria Cernea, a prominent Romanian physician, whose father had been imprisoned by Communists for seventeen years, said:

“The Church’s mission is to save souls. Evil, in this world, comes from sin. Not from income disparity or “climate change.” The solution is: Evangelization. Conversion. Not an ever-increasing government control. Not a world government. These are nowadays the main agents imposing cultural Marxism on our nations, under the form of population control, reproductive health, gay rights, gender education, and so on. What the world needs nowadays is not limitation of freedom, but real freedom, liberation from sin. Salvation.”

In the darkening days of Advent, the curtain falls on the old man, in sure and certain hope that it will rise for those who believe that there is born in Bethlehem the Savior, who will die in order to rise.

2019-11-24 - Christ the King Nov 24, 2019

24 November 2019

Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

Luke 23:35-43 + Homily

18 Minutes 22 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/112419.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

If from time to time you have a sense that all things held dear in both Church and State seem to be collapsing, you might find a comrade in the Irish poet William Butler Yeats:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats wrote that in 1919, and we are now in 2019. Actually, things have been falling apart since the Fall of Man. Each age has to contend with that collapse, and each has had recourse to Christ as the solution. In 1925, Pope Pius XI proclaimed the Feast of Christ the King. Not King of various nations cobbled together, but King of the Universe. “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. . . . He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:15, 17).

Jesus Christ is the Word that brought into existence all that was in the mind of his divine Father. His kingship consists in the power of his Logos, which orders all things and is energized by the love between him and the Father, which pours forth as the Holy Spirit. “In the beginning was the Word [‘Logos’] . . .” (John 1:1).

In the logic of the Logos then, all things fall apart without Christ. Physically, all things hold together (sunestēken) in their elemental atomic structures. The compactness of matter requires gravity, electricity, strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force. The strong force keeps the nucleus together; otherwise it would come apart by the electrostatic repulsion between the positive protons. Christ the Logos prevents all things from collapsing, not only physically but morally and culturally. There will be a time when that happens, with a “loud noise” (rhoizedon), when all the elements, or atoms (stoicheia), dissolve (2 Peter 3:10).

This dissolution happens as well in the human soul when the intellect and will tear themselves from the truth and will of God. This rupture is what is called sin. It affects cultures, too. So the philosopher Giambattista Vico described the transition of cultures from barbarity to civilization, and from civilization to hyper-civilization, and from that to post-civilization. The fourth stage lives off the detritus of civilization. Whether we are in the fourth stage—post-civilization—is disputed, but if and when it irrationally abandons Christ the King, whose power is not political but logical, it will be worse than the first barbarism because its disintegration is accelerated by the tools of its former civilization’s science.

Every Christian is baptized to proclaim the Kingship of Christ, not just for personal salvation, but as a means of saving a culture in which “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

2019-11-17 - 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time Nov 17, 2019

17 November 2019

33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 21:5-19 + Homily

18 Minutes 56 Seconds

NOTE: Fr. Rutler was out of town today. The homily attached is from the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time in 2016 using the same readings as today.

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/111719.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

Most of our Founding Fathers were not deeply informed about Catholicism, but they appreciated moral integrity when they saw it. When Albert Dubois, eventually the first resident Bishop of New York, fled the French Revolution, he lived for a while in the home of James Monroe. Patrick Henry taught him English, and Thomas Jefferson arranged for him to say Mass in the courtroom of the newly built State House of Virginia.

On July 13, 1804, Jefferson wrote to the Superior and Sisters of the Ursuline order in New Orleans: “I have received, holy sisters, the letter you have written me wherein you express anxiety for the property vested in your institution by the former governments of Louisiana; the principles of the constitution and government of the United States are a sure guarantee to you that it will be preserved to you sacred and inviolate, and that your institution will be permitted to govern itself according to its own voluntary rules, without interference from the civil authority.”

Happily, at the end of October, the present Administration redressed restrictions on freedom of religion imposed in prior years. Previously, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had refused federal aid to the foster-care and adoption agencies of Catholic and evangelical Protestant foundations that oppose abortion and the redefinition of marriage. Moreover, the government will no longer enforce a provision in federal law that bars religious organizations from providing federally funded educational services to private schools. Ironically, some of our church leaders, to maintain government funding for pre-kindergarten programs and the like, already agreed to remove crucifixes and religious symbols from parochial school classrooms.

George Washington, who made a significant donation to the Augustinian order, took John Adams to a Catholic Mass in Philadelphia. For Adams, who lapsed into Unitarianism, the chapel might have seemed at first like a Hindu temple, but he found everything so awe-inspiring that he wrote to Abigail: “I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.” What most impressed him was the straightforward “moral” preaching of the priest.

When Adams was only 21, he wrote: "… This World was not designed for a lasting and a happy State, but rather for a State of moral Discipline, that we might have a fair Opportunity and continual Excitement to labour after a cheerful Resignation to all the Events of Providence, after Habits of Virtue, Self Government, and Piety. And this Temper of mind is in our Power to acquire, and this alone can secure us against all the Adversities of Fortune, against all the Malice of men, against all the Operations of Nature.”

Perhaps Providence has saved our nation from the downward spiral of hostility to God. Whatever the future holds, Catholics should pray that their ecclesiastical leaders—and they themselves—will match the fortitude of strong voices now heard in the civic order with boldness for holy religion.

2019-11-10 - 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Nov 10, 2019

10 November 2019

32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 20:7-38 + Homily

18 Minutes 49 Seconds

Note: Due to technical difficulties today's homily was not recorded. This homily is from 2016 using the same text for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time.

Link to today's Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/111019.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

Life in New York City can be hard for anyone who has difficulty accommodating paradoxes. For instance, the same City Council that has just banned the sale of foie gras on the grounds that it involves cruelty to force-fed geese, previously made New York the first city to pay mothers from other states to come here for abortions. With all due respect to Mother Goose, it seems hyperbolic to treat the over-feeding of ducks and geese as more inhumane than the destruction of the most helpless humans. Babies are human, yet there are those who do not see anything inhumane about killing a human child right up to birth.

Another curiosity that becomes “curiouser and curiouser,” as Alice described Wonderland, was the recent decision of our mayor’s wife to include among proposed statues honoring women, two men who attained fame by pretending to be women. By sane logic, that would be like honoring the women of the Revolution with a statue of Benjamin Franklin dressed as Martha Washington.

Another proposed statue celebrates a woman notorious for her promotion of infanticide, the majority of infants killed being female. In a poll to decide who should deserve a statue, Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini won first place by a landslide. But in her 67 years of humanitarian work, she established 67 institutions, all of which promoted the dignity of life from womb to grave, with no aborting of babies or giving poison pills to the sick and elderly. The saint’s broken English would have been at a loss to describe men with husbands or women with wives.

Mother Cabrini’s labors were too exhausting for her to worry about foie gras, which she probably could not afford anyway. Yet the mayor’s wife defied voters and eliminated the saintly woman from the list of honorees. That is no problem, though, because the same Catholic Church that “social progressives” slander as sexist, has more statues of women than the profligate City Council—with its hundreds of millions of dollars of unaccounted funds—could ever hope to match, and they include countless images of Mother Cabrini.

Saints are the greatest people who ever lived, but to acknowledge their existence means that you have to acknowledge God, who alone is the source of heroic grace that raises human nobility to the level of sanctity. This is why the saints are nervously ignored by cynics who hold holy innocence in contempt.

The newly canonized John Henry Newman preached: “What if wicked men took and crucified a young child? What if they deliberately seized its poor little frame, and stretched out its arms, nailed them to a cross bar of wood, drove a stake through its two feet, and fastened them to a beam, and so left it to die?”

Perhaps our mayor’s wife might explain why Christ, more innocent even than an infant, was crucified, or how his suffering for our sins compares with foie gras.

2019-11-03 - 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time Nov 03, 2019

3 November 2019

31st Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 19:1-10 + Homily

17 Minutes 45 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/110319.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

A 1973 film directed by Orson Welles was about forgers, and it turned out to be something of a forgery itself. Some of the information in “F for Fake” was itself faked. Later on, Welles claimed that this was deliberately done as a kind of joke, and he took to calling it an “essay” and “docudrama” rather than an authentic documentary. In art circles, some forgers have become celebrities, both for their skill and for their criminal cleverness.

In the last century the Hungarian forger Elmyr de Hory duped over one thousand collectors with his copies of masterpieces. John Myatt swindled Sotheby’s and Christie’s with his. Robert Driessen made a fortune from his slick forgeries of Giacometti. More impressive was Han van Meegeren, who became a folk hero in Holland for the way he could forge works by Vermeer. In 1911, when the Mona Lisa was temporarily stolen, Yves Chaudron was reputed to have sold six copies to unsuspecting wealthy Americans. It is surprising that Michelangelo carved what he claimed was an ancient Roman sculpture of “Eros Sleeping,” which he aged by rubbing it with acidic soil. He did this when he was 21, possibly as a joke, around the same time that he made the Pietà, so he certainly was not lacking talent.

A friend asked me why forgeries are less valuable than originals, if it is hard to tell them apart. The question can be annoying, but it has a certain logic. The answer, of course, is that the value of a work consists not only in its artistry, but in its originality. In that sense, what we call creativity is a gift of God who alone is the Source of all things, including life itself. Only God is the primary Creator, and humans are his pro-creators. We cannot produce something out of nothing.

The more individuals allow God, by a right exercise of the free will, to shape their souls according to his likeness, the more their individuality becomes pronounced. This is the work of “sanctifying grace” by which God “perfects human nature,” as Saint Thomas described the process (Summa Theol. 1, 1, 8 ad. 2). The Anti-Christ cannot create, and so he tries to make human forgeries, by sin. The more people block the will of God, the more they become uninspired copies of each other. This is why sinners are predictable, while saints are always surprising. No two saints are alike.

A figure of speech, synecdoche, uses one word, as part of something, to represent the whole. Forgers are synecdoches of all sinners who pretend to be creative instead of letting God work through them. The month of November focuses on the saints, who are not cleverly crafted imitations, but who are authentic images of God who "alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen nor can see" (1 Timothy 6:16).

2019-11-01 - All Saints Nov 01, 2019

1 November 2019

All Saints Day

Matthew 5:1-12A + Homily

16 Minutes 43 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/110119.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

2019-10-27 - 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time Oct 27, 2019

27 October 2019

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 18:9-14 + Homily

16 Minutes 56 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/102719.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

If “religio” is translated as being bound to a particular outlook on life, then everyone is religious. The saints simply have bound themselves to true religion. Today that is a socially unacceptable assertion, but “political correctness” is itself a form of religion. Early Christians were condemned as atheists because they refused to worship the gods approved by the government. The term “agnostic,” presumably coined by T.H. Huxley in 1869, is just a lazy form of atheism. But institutionalized atheism, which the Soviets called “gosateizm,” has caused the deaths of hundreds of millions. In our own country, it has created a hollowness of spirit and consequent despair. It is not irrelevant to this case that the most impressionable age group in our society, adolescents, have had a 56% rise in suicides in the last ten years.

Saint Polycarp could have been spared death by burning had he renounced “Atheism,” which meant Christianity, but he shocked the pagans in the stadium by shouting that they were the real atheists. Around 110 AD, Pliny the Younger, governor in northern Asia Minor, would exonerate Christians if they would worship the emperor Trajan as a god, along with the statues in the state pantheon, “which it is said bona fide Christians cannot be induced to do.” Thus there were even then what we now call “CINOs”—Catholics in Name Only, not “bona fide,” who claim to be Catholic only when politically convenient, or in order to get married in a pretty church.

“Secularism” is a religion with a non-creedal creed censuring those who do not believe in unbelief. Young people in the United States who claim to have “No Religion”—called “Nones”—now outnumber Catholics, and they have their own prophets, redefining morality and predicting apocalypse by carbon emissions. “Politically incorrect” thinkers are banned from universities as heretics. Attorney General William Barr recently exposed this in an address at the law school of Notre Dame University: The secular project “is taking on all the trappings of religion, including inquisitions and excommunication. Those who defy the creed risk a figurative burning at the stake—social, educational and professional ostracism and exclusion waged through lawsuits and savage social media campaigns.”

Some church leaders have tried to cajole secularists by avoiding mention of true religion. By contrast, Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan, whose family suffered under Stalin’s pogroms, has said that a dispirited Catholicism is “an extremely cunning method of Satan to take away the successors of the Apostles and priests from prayer and evangelization—under the pretext of a so-called ‘synodality.’”

The Founder of what politically correct idolaters in every age have considered heretical atheism warned: “For he that shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of him the Son of man shall be ashamed, when he shall come in his majesty, and that of his Father, and of the holy angels” (Luke 9:26).

Faithfully yours in Christ, Father George W. Rutler

2019-10-20 - 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time Oct 20, 2019

20 October 2019

29th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 18:1-8 + Homily

16 Minutes 35 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/102019.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

Last week’s canonization of Saint John Henry Newman will have universal influences that I trust will include our own parish. It should be remembered that his achievements, for the most part, hardly seemed successful at the time. He might even be called a patron saint of the disappointed.

Newman was so nervous in his university examinations that he got a “Lower Second Class” degree. He played the violin to relax, but the chords of his mind were taut, and he later suffered a nervous breakdown. He failed to attain a professorship of Moral Philosophy. Many Oxford dons derided his views, and eventually he resigned.

When Newman became a Catholic, former friends thought he had wasted his talents, and some Catholics questioned his free spirit and innovative genius. Not least among these were bishops. In Ireland, Archbishop Cullen impeded his foundation of a Catholic University there and opposed making Newman a bishop. In England, Cardinal Manning, a great man in some ways but not innocent of envy, regularly thwarted numerous projects. The English-language secretary of Pope Pius IX prejudiced the pope’s opinion of Newman, and with no little subtlety, Manning tried to prevent the new Pope Leo XIII from vindicating him with a Cardinal’s red hat.

Newman left a legacy of 32 volumes of letters, and in some of them he confided his frustrations. But his amiability and patience won over many. In old age, Newman’s Oxford college made him an honorary Fellow, and at Newman’s death Manning himself said, “The history of our land will hereafter record the name of John Henry Newman among the greatest of our people, as a confessor for the faith, a great teacher of men, a preacher of justice, of piety, and of compassion.”

Neman kept his balance by a steady faith in the uncompromising truth of Christ. This boldly defied the pastiche of true Christianity that was spreading in his time and which he prophesied would become endemic in our own age:

"What is the world's religion now? It has taken the brighter side of the gospel, its tidings of comfort, its precepts of love; all darker, deeper views of man's condition and prospects being comparatively forgotten. This is the religion natural to a civilized age and well has Satan dressed and completed it into an idol of the Truth. . . . Our manners are courteous; we avoid giving pain or offence . . . religion is pleasant and easy; benevolence is the chief virtue; intolerance, bigotry, excess of zeal are the first of sins. . . . [I]t includes no true fear of God, no fervent zeal for His honour, no deep hatred of sin, no horror at the sight of sinners, no indignation and compassion at the blasphemy of heretics, no jealous adherence to doctrinal truth . . .—and therefore is neither hot nor cold, but (in Scripture language) lukewarm.” (Sermon 24. Religion of the Day)

That sort of “Catholic-Lite” does not make saints, and Newman proved that.

Faithfully yours in Christ,

Father George W. Rutler

2019-10-13 - 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time Oct 13, 2019

13 October 2019

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Canonization of Saint John Henry Newman

Luke 17:11-19 + Homily

18 Minutes 58 Seconds

Link to the Readings

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/101319.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

Over forty years ago, I told a wise Protestant theologian that I had been reading the Apologia pro Vita Sua of John Henry Newman (1801-1890). He warned me that it is “a dangerous book.” That was just the sort of advice that makes a young thinker all the more eager to read it. And so I did, and so did countless others whose lives were changed by this book, whose passages are some of the most beautiful in the English language, and whose author’s the thoughts considering the psychology of the soul are undying.

Newman wrote that book in four weeks, standing at his upright desk in Birmingham, England, in response to a personal attack on his integrity: “I have been in perfect peace and contentment; I never have had one doubt. I was not conscious to myself, on my conversion, of any change, intellectual or moral, wrought in my mind . . . but it was like coming into port after a rough sea; and my happiness on that score remains to this day without interruption.”

Today Newman is to be canonized in Rome, a tribute to his unsurpassed gifts of grace as theologian, historian, writer, poet, preacher and, most of all, a pastor of souls. While preaching and writing immortal words, he also was meticulous in running the Oratory school he founded, even making costumes for school plays, paying coal bills, and playing his fiddle in the school orchestra.

In his honor and in thanksgiving for the Church’s recognition of his holiness, of which the angels never were in doubt, we shall dedicate today a shrine for him in our church. As with all that we try to do in our church, this sculpture is the work of one of our own parishioners. Newman foresaw with uncanny prescience the various challenges of our own day, and this monument should be a reminder to pray for his intercession on behalf of our local church and the Church Universal in a time of spiritual combat, which is a lot like what he faced in his own age.

To Newman’s great surprise, and even “shock,” the newly elected Pope Leo XIII in 1879 created him a cardinal. He had been so attacked and calumniated for his religious views over many years, that he was satisfied that the “cloud” had finally been lifted. In his acceptance speech he said that his entire life had been consecrated to refuting the doctrine of relativism which held that “Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy.”

Today we sing Cardinal Newman’s hymn, “Lead, Kindly Light,” which his own life embodied and faith made bold: “I do not ask to see the distant scene, one step enough for me.”

Faithfully yours in Christ,

Father George W. Rutler

2019-10-06 - 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time Oct 06, 2019

6 October 2019

27th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 17:5-10 + Homily

16 Minutes 28 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/100619.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

At the start of October, life in Manhattan recovers from those late September weeks when the opening of the United Nations General Assembly ties up traffic, even blocking many streets, and takes over many hotels and clubs for expensive receptions—some of the costliest, it seems, being those of some of the poorest countries. With so many heads of state in town, battalions of Secret Service agents and bodyguards eye everyone with suspicion.

This year there was one bright spot, although largely ignored by much of the media. Representing the United States, our President gave what was perhaps the most forceful address that any of our Chief Executives have spoken there. Denouncing the United Nations’ scheme to promote abortion, first drafted in 1994 at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the President said that “Americans will also never tire of defending innocent life. We are aware that many United Nations projects have attempted to assert a global right to taxpayer-funded abortion on demand, right up until the moment of delivery. Global bureaucrats have absolutely no business attacking the sovereignty of nations that wish to protect innocent life.”

Such boldness must have shocked many diplomats present, like those in the 1942 film “I Married an Angel” who were aghast when Jeanette MacDonald, as a blessed angel, tells them the truth, upsetting their cocktail party. Our nation has never had an angel for president, and its Constitution in fact prevents that. But Abraham Lincoln invoked “the better angels of our nature” and confounded those who had dismissed him as an untutored vulgarian with ambiguous views on abolition. The first Christians in Jerusalem were suspicious of Paul’s conversion, and theologians like Tertullian and Justin, some years before Constantine, thought it impossible that any emperor would ever defend Christianity.

Ironically, there are highly placed prelates who have shied away from mentioning these matters in secular forums, hoping that subtlety might be more persuasive. Such naiveté, as in the instance of the Holy See’s diplomats cajoling Communist China by compromise, accomplishes little. In his United Nations speech, the President said: “The world fully expects that the Chinese government will honor its binding treaty, made with the British and registered with the United Nations, in which China commits to protect Hong Kong’s freedom, legal system, and democratic ways of life.” The Holy See has not commented on the popular demonstrations in Hong Kong, which may explain why the youths there struggling for freedom, and inspired by the heroic Cardinal Zen, are waving the Stars and Stripes and not the Vatican flag.

“For he that shall be ashamed of me, and of my words, in this adulterous and sinful generation: the Son of man also will be ashamed of him, when he shall come in the glory of his Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38; Luke 9:26).

2019-09-29 - Feast of St. Michael Sep 29, 2019

29 September 2019

Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, Archangels

John 1:47-51 + Homily

18 Minutes 37 Seconds

From the parish bulletin:

In thinking of angels, you need humility, for a couple of reasons. First of all, a cynical culture mocks anyone who believes that angels exist in any way that is real rather than sentimental. Secondly, since angels, who were created before humans, are intelligent beyond any material measurement, that means they are smarter than any human. And so, by comparison we must seem very stupid.

But angels are humble too, although for a different reason. They can actually see God, so they are perpetually aware of their inferiority. In their perfect humility, they rejoice in that fact, and their subservience to their Creator makes them shine in glory. Chesterton rallied symbolic language to say that angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

At each Mass, angels gather at the altar. This Sunday in our church there will be a special kind of holy commotion because it is our parish’s patronal feast, with our patron never failing to be present. Saint Michael, as an archangel along with Gabriel and Raphael, has a symbolic name. (Michael means “Who is like God?”.) Surely it was by some inspiration, when the parish was established in 1857 with boundaries originally from 28th to 38th Streets and from 6th Avenue to the banks of the Hudson River, that Saint Michael, who casts “into hell Satan and all the other evil spirits who prowl through the world,” was made protector of what the police would come to call “Hell’s Kitchen.”

While crime and dereliction are still around (after a recent Vigil Mass there was a brawl in front of the church, but a dozen policemen quickly came to help us), our streets are much different now. There are new hotels, fine restaurants and elegant shops. We are at the center of the biggest real estate development in the history of the United States. A few years ago, the future of our church building itself was at risk. While maintenance costs continue at a level that could seem daunting, the burden does not weigh heavily considering what can be accomplished. In that sense, we can reach new heights if, like the angels, we take ourselves lightly.

Now the challenge is to bring those who are out on the street into God’s House. There is a daily stream of tourists stopping in to visit. The silent witness of our own people at prayer throughout the day can be, and in many instances already has been, an effective work of evangelism, turning picture-taking into worship.

To have such potential is a big responsibility. “From everyone to whom much is given, much will be required” (Luke 12:48). The hulking skyscrapers rising all around here may seem intimidating, but through the intercession of Saint Michael the Archangel, they can also be like Jacob’s ladder, on which the angels move up and down, connecting our temporal lives with life eternal.

2019-09-22 - 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time Sep 22, 2019

22 September 2019

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 8:16-18 + Homily

19 Minutes 40 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/092319.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

As with quotations that are variously attributed, journalists including Charles Anderson Dana of the “New York Tribune” and John B. Bogart of the “New York Sun” are said to have coined the aphorism: “‘Dog bites man’ does not make the news, but ‘Man bites dog’ does.” Human nature is fascinated by what is exceptional and scandalous. But “skandalon” really means more than that. It is a “stumbling block” that trips up the way mere mortals think things are supposed to be.

Theologically, there is the “Scandal of Particularity.” It has two aspects. First is the doctrine that the Creator of the universe has solicitude for every minute detail of it, even every sparrow and each hair on your head (cf. Matt. 10:29). This has ramifications even in mathematics where the “Chaos Theory” proposes a “Butterfly Effect,” meaning that something as slight as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in New Delhi might cause a hurricane in New York. So too it is with people.

Every human action can have consequences beyond fathoming. There is the prime example of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, that started a domino effect leading to the First World War. His chauffeur spoke only Czech and did not understand the orders of German security officers to follow a route safe from assassins. So he drove according to the original plan and came within feet of a radical Bosnian who had not expected such luck. It might be said that 17 million people eventually died because one man took a wrong turn.

The second part of the Scandal of Particularity is the acknowledgement that Christ, whose divine nature has no beginning or end, came to our small planet with a human nature as the unique savior from sin and death. “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1-2a). His divine nature enables him to see “the big picture” while his human nature involves him in the minutest details of ordinary life. If this is scandalous, it is because presently we are limited to categories of time and space, and we find it hard to think of importance without being overwhelmed by size and power.

In another quotation variously attributed, Stalin is said to have remarked: “The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million men is a statistic.” The same dictator mockingly asked, “How many divisions does the Pope have?” He knows now – though a bit too late. But the biggest scandal of all to the limited mind, and so bold that it is refreshing when it expands the mind, is the Lord’s declaration: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father apart from me” (John 14:6).

2019-09-15 - 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time Sep 15, 2019

15 September 2019

24th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 15:1-32 + Homily

18 Minutes 44 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/091519.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

From time to time someone will remark that our national flag hanging from the choir loft appears to be faded. It is actually in good condition, but the white stripes are printed with the names of those who were killed in the attack on our nation on September 11, 2001. Hardly anyone in our parish was not affected by that, one way or another. When offering Mass this past week for the dead, I remembered how, as people panicked in a stalled subway from Brooklyn when the electricity failed and smoke filled the passageways, a blind man guided them to the exit. During his life he had learned to manage without the light of day.

Christ is the original Light of the world, uncreated, and from whom all earthly light proceeds. Without Christ, the intellect darkens, and this moral myopia is the affliction of our present time. Celebrities illuminated by stage lights can utter some of the darkest blasphemies against human dignity. Professors who think of themselves as “bright” can obscure the logic of their students. When the lights of truth go out, and the corridors of civilization fill with the smoke of Satan, the only sure guides are the prophets and saints.

In saying that the blind will lead the blind into a ditch (Luke 6:39), Christ was referring to the morally blind, and not the physically blind, as depicted poignantly in that painting by Pieter Bruegel. The contemporary term “Fake News” does indeed expose the tendency of prejudiced opinion to conceal the Light of Truth.

This week the Church celebrates the life of Saint Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621), a man of superior intellect, though his mental brightness was not flawless. Most conspicuously, he made the mistake of rejecting the heliocentric theory of the priest Copernicus and his friend Galileo. The philosopher of science, Karl Popper, and Pierre Duhem before him, cut him some slack by arguing that the saint objected to presenting a hypothesis as an irrefutable conclusion.

But Bellarmine’s real business was to lead people out of temporal darkness into eternal light. This he did by his theological learning and commentary on culture, including his exposure of the fallacy of the divine right of kings (or what we might call government absolutism), but above all by his dictum: “Charity is that with which no man is lost, and without which no man is saved.”

In garishly bright city streets filled with people in danger of moral meanderings, each church is meant to be a beacon that saves people from falling into the ditch. The Vigil Lamp before the parish altar may seem frail, and its flame small, but it is a flickering reminder that “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning” (James 1:17).

2019-09-08 - 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time Sep 08, 2019

8 September 2019

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 14:25-33 + Homily

14 Minutes 53 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/090819.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

It is gratifying each week to hear from many friends of the parish across our country and abroad, bringing to mind the words of John Wesley: “The whole world is my parish.” That can be said ever more fervently by any pastor, for each parish is a microcosm of the ecclesiastical presence of the Body of Christ on every continent, as it bears witness to the Universal Faith that makes the Church “katholikos.”

So distant readers will indulge some reflections on our local parish scene, as the summer draws to a close. These past months were something of a surprise in that there seemed to be no significant slowdown in parish life. While many of our own people did travel outside the city, which is no little adventure for Manhattanites, we had many national and international visitors. Because the social media have made our world a “global village,” it seemed that most visitors were not strangers, and many were already familiar with life here. We have an increasing number of tourists stopping in at the church—almost constantly—and this may in part be due to the renovations and installations of art completed during the summer. We must make an effort to welcome our visitors and help them to learn more about the parish.

Our church already has one foot in the Heavenly City, where there are no seasons, at least in the sense that we have no air conditioning. (Our heating system is not always reliable either, and I have occasionally warmed my hands over the thurible on winter days when there was no heat at all.) This summer we had some brutal hot spells, and one Sunday the city issued a health advisory cautioning the frail and elderly against going outdoors. That was the first time in memory that we eliminated the homily at the Masses, and I had the impression that no one objected. But I was impressed as well at the numbers of people who came stoically on humid days and indeed in good spirits—just as in past winters there was patience when heavy clothing was needed. Here in “Hell’s Kitchen” we are a durable people.

This Sunday, September 8, is the 38th anniversary of my priestly ordination. It was a simple ceremony in the cathedral’s Lady Chapel. The three prelates who were at the altar with me on that day, including Cardinal Cooke, are no longer in this world, but they are invoked at each Mass, along with all those who since the middle of the nineteenth century have been part of this parish, which now enters challenging and promising times. “Memento, Domine, famulorum, famularumque tuarum et omnium circumstantium, quorum tibi fides cognita est et nota devotio . . . Remember, O Lord, Thy servants and handmaids and all here present, whose faith and devotion are known to Thee.”

2019-09-01 - 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Sep 01, 2019

1 September 2019

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 14:1, 7-14 + Homily

16 Minutes 40 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/090119.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

The weekly column “From the Pastor” continues on hiatus and will return after Labor Day. Meanwhile, we thank the fellowship of friends of the parish for the interest and support shown for our parish in challenging times.

This week’s suggested reading: Father Rutler’s most recently published essay may be of interest to readers. The article is available on the Crisis Magazine website: Nothing New under the Sun: St. Bernard’s Advice to a Pope

2019-08-25 - 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time Aug 25, 2019

25 August 2019

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 13:22-30 + Homily

16 Minutes 2 Seconds

Link to the Readings

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/082519.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

The weekly column “From the Pastor” continues on hiatus for the remainder of the month of August while regular activities continue as usual, enlivened by the welcome visits of increasing numbers of tourists. Since there is a gratifyingly large number of readers who follow the weekly columns, forming an extended fellowship of friends of the parish far and wide, each week during the summer hiatus we will use this opportunity to post brief news items and links to other sources and to express our thanks for the interest and support shown for our parish in challenging times.

This week’s suggested reading: Father Rutler recommends an article by Professor Anthony Esolen: “What Can Unite Us Catholics?”—published by The Catholic Thing.

2019-08-18 - 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time Aug 18, 2019

18 August 2019

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 12:49-53 + Homily

16 Minutes 29 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/081819.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

It is customary in our parish that the weekly column “From the Pastor” be suspended during the weeks of August, while the regular schedule of activities continues as usual. Summer also occasions the welcome visits of an increasing number of tourists. Since there is a gratifyingly large number of readers who follow these columns, forming an extended fellowship of friends of the parish far and wide, each week there will still be an opportunity to post brief news items and links to other sources.

Meanwhile, we take this opportunity to express our thanks for the interest and support shown for our parish in challenging times. Father Rutler’s most recently published essay may be of interest to readers. It is available on the Crisis Magazine website: Fr. Rutler’s Guide to Virtue-Signalling.

2019-08-15 - Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Aug 15, 2019

15 August 2019

Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Luke 1:39-56 + Homily

16 Minutes 54 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/081519-day.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

2019-08-11 - 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time Aug 11, 2019

11 August 2019

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 12:32-48 + Homily

18 Minutes 07 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/081119.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

It is the custom in our parish that the “From the Pastor” column be suspended during the weeks of August, while the regular schedule of activities continues as usual. Summer also occasions the welcome visits of an increasing number of tourists. Since there is a gratifyingly large number of readers who follow these columns, forming an extended fellowship of friends of the parish far and wide, each week there will still be an opportunity to post brief news items and links to other sources, such as the “Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis to Priests on the 160th Anniversary of the Death of the Cure of Ars, St. John Vianney”—covered by various outlets including the Catholic News Agency (CNA) and the National Catholic Register.

Meanwhile, this is an opportunity to express thanks for the interest and support shown for our parish in challenging times. Father Rutler’s most recently published essay, which may be of interest to readers, is available online at the Crisis Magazine website: Fr. Rutler’s Guide to Virtue-Signalling.

2019-08-04 - 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time Aug 04, 2019

4 August 2019

18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 12:13-21 + Homily

15 Minutes 38 Seconds

NOTE: There was a missionary priest as guest preacher today. His homily was short and focused on his work in Niger in Africa. The homily linked to this entry is from 31 July 2016 when Father Rutler preached on the same texts appointed for today.

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/080419.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

It is the custom in our parish that the “From the Pastor” column be suspended during the weeks of August, while the regular schedule of activities continues as usual. Summer also occasions the welcome visits of an increasing number of tourists. Since there is a gratifyingly large number who follow these columns, forming an extended fellowship of friends of the parish far and wide, each week there will still be an opportunity to post brief news items and links to other sources. Meanwhile, this is an opportunity to express thanks for the interest and support shown for our parish in challenging times. The Pastor’s most recently published essay, which may be of interest to readers, is available online at the Crisis Magazine website: An Immodest Proposal.

2019-07-28 - 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time Jul 28, 2019

28 July 2019

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 11:1-13 + Homily

17 Minutes 5 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/072819.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

Toddlers try to get their way by throwing tantrums, but they are not the only ones. In “An Open Letter on Translating,” an heresiarch in 1530 justified altering the Letter of Saint James: “Dr. Martin Luther will have it so . . . Sic volo, sic jubeo.” (I want it; I command.)

This solipsism was updated in a 1966 book turned into a 1972 film about a twenty-year-old named Roy who demonstrated his desire to be his sister Wendy by dressing in her clothes. The title was: “I Want What I Want.”

What one wants may not be obtainable. For the adult still psychologically in diapers, the only recourse is to become flushed and scream at anyone who sticks to reality. That was the response of some when the Holy See’s Congregation for Catholic Education published on June 10 a document that said the denial of the natural duality of the sexes creates the idea of the human person as an abstraction “who chooses for himself what his nature is to be.” This is what Pope Francis, who has stressed the need to be charitable to people misled by such mental disorders, in 2016 called a “utopia of the neutral.” A utopia is nowhere. In the same year, the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly explained, “The claim that it is possible to change one’s sex, or that sexual identity is fluid, contradicts scientific evidence, reason, the nature of the human person, and key tenets of the Catholic faith.” It is Gnostic dualism.

The term “gender” has commonly come to classify sex. So now we have an innovative vocabulary: transgendered, gender dysphoric, non-binary, and so forth. But neologisms fly in the face of the conclusion of Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the Johns Hopkins Hospital psychiatrist, that “gender reassignment” is “biologically impossible.” In 1975 the American Psychological Association, acting politically with no justifying science, declared that certain aberrancies are not pathological. Start with a lie and you can logically conclude with a lie. The APA’s “Non-Monogamy Task Force” now has endorsed polygamy and promiscuity, called “relationship anarchy.” Only about 6/10 of one percent of humans consider themselves “transgendered,” although about 3% of malleable adolescents now identify as such, as the result of pedagogical propaganda. This is a sophisticated form of child abuse. Among all those who have had “reassignment surgery,” the suicide rate is twenty times higher than average.

Schoolchildren once knew the rhyme about the grand old Duke of York’s ten thousand men: “He marched them up to the top of the hill, /And he marched them down again. / When they were up, they were up, /And when they were down, they were down, /And when they were only halfway up, /They were neither up nor down.” That is not how armies should work, and that is not how male and female created in God’s image can ever work.

2019-07-21 - 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time Jul 21, 2019

21 July 2019

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 10:38-42 + Brief Remarks

6 Minutes 40 Seconds

Link to the Readings

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/072119.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

If there is no objective truth, there are no heresies. For the lazy thinker, the mellow refrain suffices: “It’s all good.” The etymology of “heresy” is complicated, but it has come to mean a wrong choice. Yet, if the mere act of choosing justifies itself (as when people declare themselves “Pro-Choice”), then no choice is wrong. But we live in a real world, and so everything cannot be right. Thus, we have a new religion called political correctness, and anyone who is politically incorrect is accused of being “phobic” one way or another. Suddenly what claims to be liberal is decidedly illiberal, and what is called “free speech” is anything but free.

This confusion is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of creation itself. The world follows an order; otherwise all would be chaos. As God has revealed himself as its Creator, there are truths about the world that cannot be denied without illogical anarchy. Every heresy is an exaggeration of a truth. For instance, Arianism teaches the humanity of Christ to the neglect of his divinity, and Apollinarianism does the opposite. The long list of heresies with complicated names illustrates how many deep thinkers made mistakes by relying only on their own limited powers of deduction. The two most destructive heresies were Gnosticism and Calvinism, which totally misunderstood creation and the human condition. Thus, we have the romantic fantasizing of Teilhard de Chardin and the sociopathic astringency of John Calvin.

In the first chapter of his letter to the Colossians, Saint Paul sets the orthodox template by raising his glorious theology to an effervescent canticle praising the mystery of Christ “who is the image of the unseen God and the first born of all creation.” This hymnody animates the Office of Vespers in the weeks of each month: “. . . for in him were created all things in heaven and on earth . . .”

By natural intelligence, we would know God as the Designer of the universal order (Romans 1:19-20), but only by God’s revelation can we know the existence of Christ transcending time and space. By Christ’s enfleshment and the shedding of his blood on the Cross, as Saint John Paul II said, quoting Colossians, “the face of the Father, Creator of the universe becomes accessible in Christ, author of created reality: ‘all things were created through him . . . in him all things hold together.'” So Christ cannot be understood as just another wise man in the mold of Confucius or Solomon. As Saint Cyril of Alexandria proclaimed: “We do not say that a simple man, full of honors, I know not how, by his union with Him was sacrificed for us, but it is the very Lord of glory who was crucified.”

Without recrimination or censoriousness, but just looking around at the disastrous state of contemporary culture, logic can conclude that, if all things hold together in Christ, without Christ all things fall apart.

2019-07-14 - 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time Jul 14, 2019

14 July 2019

15th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 10:25-37 + Homily

19 Minutes 30 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/071419.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

Centenarians are not as rare as they used to be, and one can profit from their memories. In California I spoke with a woman who had traveled there from Missouri in a covered wagon. I visited another woman in a retirement home who was among the first to hear her English professor at Wellesley College, Katharine Lee Bates, read a poem she had written on her vacation in Colorado: “America the Beautiful.”

While the adage obtains, that those who do not know their history are condemned to repeat it, there also is evidence that those who do not know their history can be fooled. “Bastille Day” is the celebration of a myth. Propagandists, and later romanticizers like Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens, made the storming of the prison the first thrust of liberators. The Bastille was far from a fetid torture chamber, and its inmates numbered only seven on July 14, 1789. The Marquis de Sade had been transferred to a lunatic asylum ten days earlier, but while in the Bastille, his rooms were elegantly furnished. The other inmates, including four forgers and two more mental patients, one of whom had a personal chef, were reluctant to be set free. Yet the myth perdures, and the key to the Bastille now hangs in Mount Vernon, the proud gift of the Marquis de Lafayette.

It takes a skilled propagandist to airbrush the Reign of Terror, but it has been done many times, not least of all by our own Thomas Jefferson. When the Cathedral of Notre Dame burned this year, there was much misinformation about its history. In the Revolution it was ransacked, most of its treasures looted, 28 statues of the Kings of Judah decapitated, the whole building desecrated as a Temple of Reason with a woman of ill repute dancing as a goddess on its high altar, and images of saints replaced by busts of such luminaries as Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. Part of the lead roof was melted to make bullets, and only a gothic revival movement, animated by Victor Hugo’s story of Quasimodo, prevented the ravaged shrine from being totally demolished. It was astonishing, then, to read an essay by the estimable philosopher, Sir Roger Scruton, at the time of the recent fire in which he said of the revolutionaries: “Nobody at the time could bring himself to lay desecrating hands on the cathedral, apart from a few ruffians who beheaded a saint or two, thinking them to be kings.” As Horace said, even Homer nods; but such insouciance about such a clash of cultures, especially among those who are considered spokesmen for classical verities, is worse than nodding and is more like a coma.

The Gospel is Good News and not Fake News, because it is real and not malleable putty in the hands of theorists. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have touched, concerning the word of life. . .” (1 John 1:1).

2019-07-07 - 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time Jul 07, 2019

7 July 2019

14th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 10:1-12, 17-20 + Homily

16 Minutes 14 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/070719.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

There is dark humor in counting the number of “motivational speakers” who flood public television stations, and go as quickly as they come, just like the profitable “self-help” books of the type that counsel: “God wants you to be happy.” In some churches, there is a tendency to replicate this kind of “snowflake” Gospel that shortchanges people out of the truth.

Our opioid generation, whether drugged chemically or culturally, has had more suicides than in any decade since the Second World War. It does not understand Socrates’ statement: “An unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates was not “self-motivated” but was moved by the one True God for whom he searched as best he could long before Pentecost. Unlike modern motivational speakers who retire to Malibu or Hawaii to count their royalties, Socrates drank hemlock as a primitive, albeit heroic, sacrifice for objective truth.

There are those who would reduce Christ to a glorified motivational speaker. Thomas Jefferson edited the New Testament so that the Resurrection and Pentecost were irrelevant, making the Sermon on the Mount the pinnacle of Christ’s teaching. But this reduced the Messiah to an aphorist. Even had that been the case, there were others more verbose than any “Sage of Galilee.”

In the eighteenth century, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield wrote his son four hundred letters on how to live as a gentleman, oblivious to the fact that the youth had been born out of wedlock to a housemaid left to live in penury. A wiser author of epigrams was the last of the “Five Good Emperors,” Marcus Aurelius, who was a Stoic in the second century—and if you have to be a pagan, Stoicism is as good a way as any, if not as much fun as Epicureanism.

Both of those men warned against procrastination. Lord Chesterfield coined the phrase: “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.” This was wisdom, albeit snobbish, and not unlike Benjamin Franklin’s homely advice on how to make a man “healthy, wealthy and wise.” Marcus Aurelius was almost prophetic, and remarkably so since he left words he did not expect to be recorded but which ring true to Christ, when he wrote: “Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage.”

The Gospel is not a compendium of maxims, nor is Christ an amiable motivational speaker expecting to retire in Galilee and count his royalties. When he tells the scribe to follow immediately and not bury his father, and forbids another would-be follower to tarry to say farewell to his family, he is speaking of procrastination that defers the primacy of God to tomorrow. But Christ can only be a soul’s Saviour if he saves today: “Today if you should hear his voice, harden not your hearts . . .” (Hebrews 3:15).

2019-06-30 - 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time Jun 30, 2019

30 June 2019

13th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 9:51-62 + Homily

14 Minutes 44 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/063019.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

Among rare neurological disorders, the “pseudobulbar affect” is manifested by uncontrolled laughter or crying. It can be treated effectively in many cases with a combination of the drugs dextromethorphan and quinidine. But there is another malady for which the Food and Drug Administration has no cure, and that is the habit of affecting emotions insincerely in order to manipulate others. There is the habitual backslapper who uses laughter to avoid serious conversation, often out of insecurity. There is also the weeper whose tears flow to elicit sympathy.

A remarkable quality usually taken for granted, is that humans can laugh and cry unlike other creatures. “Risibility,” the ability to laugh or smile, is a defining trait of humanity. The moral challenge is to identify the right causes of happiness and sadness.

All sane, moral behavior has the pursuit of happiness as the goal of life. Sadness is the recognition of what impedes that goal. As long as we are in a broken world, happiness will be elusive to a degree, and at best will be “felicitas,” which means real but impermanent happiness.

Ancient Greeks, unlike their modern descendants who are largely occupied these days with fixing their economy, spent time studying human dispositions. They were good psychologists. Their gods and goddesses were essentially symbols of human characteristics. There were many deities who represented varying attempts at happiness, although some of their philosophers, like the Cynics and Stoics, did not think there was much of a chance at felicity. There were, for instance: Bacchus – drinking; Hypnos – drugs; Hermes – sports; Dionysius – partying; Aphrodite – sex; Tyche – good luck; Hygieia – health; Thalia – comedy; Momus – silliness and gossip; and Nemesis – revenge on enemies.

Saint Paul was familiar with that ghostly pantheon and politely confronted their clients in Athens. He did not mock or insult them. But he did declare to them that he knew the one true God who is the source of all true joy and for which those idols were lame substitutes:

Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man. Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead. (Acts 17:29-31)

Most of the philosophers were unmoved because they liked hearing themselves and none other. But one of them, Dionysius, and a woman named Damaris, and “a number of others” accepted Christ. Their stories are unrecorded, but as Christ never lied, we know that they inherited a happiness higher than felicitas, and that is beatitudo—the endless joy of God’s presence.

2019-06-23 - Corpus Christi Jun 23, 2019

23 June 2019

The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ

Luke 11B-17 + Homily

15 Minutes 32 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/062319.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

Jacques Pantaléon was an unlikely candidate for the papacy, being neither a cardinal nor Italian, since he was the son of a French cobbler. Nonetheless he became Pope Urban IV after having acquitted himself well as Patriarch of Jerusalem. His attentions also involved him in concerns from Constantinople to Germany and Denmark.

Two months before his death in 1264, he commissioned Saint Thomas Aquinas to write hymns for a new feast honoring the Eucharistic Presence of Christ. There used to be many hymnodic “Sequences,” but over the years they were trimmed down to Easter and Pentecost and, later, Corpus Christi. Although Aquinas had written so sublimely about the Real Presence, Urban wanted song more than prose. Thus we have Pange Lingua, Tantum Ergo, Panis Angelicus, and O Salutaris Hostia. As they have endured nearly nine centuries so far, they are likely to outlast the musical kitsch that guitar-strumming grey heads of a dying Woodstock generation persist in thinking are the heraldic sounds of a New Age. Unlike the works of those more recent composers, whose absent Latin and poor English only serve to express a low Eucharistic theology, the classical hymnody of Aquinas can best be sung in the original and, if sung in translation, needs translators who are accomplished Latinists and masters of English. Two Anglican converts of the nineteenth century, Edward Caswall and Gerard Manley Hopkins, qualified for that.

The ineffable mystery of the Blessed Sacrament will always be prey to minds smaller than the Doctors of the Church, as they try to reduce mystery to mere human puzzle whose pieces can be arranged according to limited human intelligence. Even in Pope Urban’s age, which by many standards of architecture and scholarship was golden, confusion about the Real Presence in the Mass was spreading. One priest, Father Peter of Prague, while en route to Rome was granted what the Church considers a miracle: blood emanating from the Host. Pope Urban was in nearby Orvieto and sent delegates to inspect the phenomenon. The Feast of Corpus Christi soon followed.

At the last Supper, our Lord did not subject his apostles to a lecture on how he could give them his Body to eat and Blood to drink. He simply commanded, “Do this.” This is not to deny the vocation of theologians ever since to describe the Heavenly Banquet, but the best of them have known the difference between apprehending and comprehending. “Faith for all defects supplying, Where the feeble senses fail.”

A Baptist hymn writer in the nineteenth century, Robert Lowry, would certainly have been a bit uncomfortable in the presence of the Dominican master Thomas Aquinas, but one suspects that the Angelic Doctor would have fully empathized with the confidence of Lowry’s hymn:

The peace of Christ makes fresh my heart,

A fountain ever springing;

All things are mine since I am his—

How can I keep from singing?

2019-06-16 -Trinity Sunday Jun 16, 2019

16 June 2019

The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

John 16:12-15 + Homily

16 Minutes 30 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/061619.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

An epitaph on the tomb of Bishop Miler Magrath of Cashel in Ireland (d. 1622) reads: “Here where I am placed I am not. I am not where I am not. Nor am I in both places, but I am in each.” His problem was that he had called himself a Catholic bishop as well as a Protestant bishop. Bishop Magrath’s ingenuity for rationalizing brings to mind his contemporary in England, Simon Aleyn, who was unable to maintain the duplicity of practicing two religions at the same time. To retain his position as vicar of an affluent parish in Berkshire, whatever might be the religion of the reigning monarch, he declared himself consecutively Protestant, Catholic, Protestant, and Catholic again, inspiring a caustic ballad:

And this is law, I will maintain

Unto my Dying Day, Sir.

That whatsoever King may reign,

I will be the Vicar of Bray, Sir!

There is a political parallel to this malleability in a former Vice President who has decided to run for the actual Presidency as a Catholic independent of the strictures of Catholicism. As Vice President, he officiated at the civil “marriage” of two men in 2016, although he had voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. In 2006 he threatened that if anyone said he was not Catholic, “I’m gonna shove my rosary beads down their throat.” The Bishop of Cashel and the Vicar of Bray could not have said it more eloquently.

Recently, this candidate reversed overnight his longstanding support of the Hyde Amendment, which blocks federal subsidies for abortions. We remember the United States senator who said in 2004 that he voted for a bill before he voted against it, and the Australian senator who explained her position on a tax-cut proposal in 2018: “I said no originally, then I said yes. Then I have said no, and I've stuck to it."

For Bismarck, “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best.” I was fortunate to know Congressman Henry Hyde, who counted his amendment his greatest achievement, and I also knew Judge Robert Bork who was slandered by the rancorous attacks of the aforementioned vice president. Both were aware that no one can survive in public life if he naively denies that situations can require compromise and even reversals. But they also knew that when the flip-flop is a matter of life or death, accommodation takes on an ominous character.

The Bourbon King Henry IV, baptized Catholic but reared Protestant and the champion of a Protestant army, became king of France by cutting a deal: he would declare himself Catholic. “Paris vaut bien une messe.” He decided that Paris was well worth a Mass, but the Church does not consider him worthy of sainthood. Less saintly is anyone who calculates that Washington, D.C. is worth more than a Mass.

NOTE:

A fuller version of this topic may be found by clicking the attached link to Crisis Magazine: https://www.crisismagazine.com/2019/the-strange-case-of-dr-biden-and-mr-hyde

2019-06-09 - Pentecost Jun 09, 2019

9 June 2019

The Day of Pentecost

John 20:19-23 + Homily

17 Minutes 14 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/060919-day.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

While experience cautions theologians against the quicksand of politics, politicians not infrequently rush in to theological matters where angels fear to tread. So it was on May 29 when our junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, announced on National Public Radio that the Church is wrong about abortion, homosexuality, and the male priesthood. This puts her at odds with all the saints and doctors of the Church, and with Jesus Christ. The latter sent his Holy Spirit on Pentecost to lead the Church into all truth, and it is hard to believe that he has reversed himself in our Republic’s recent years. Since it is “impossible for God to lie” (Hebrews 6:18), he would be at a disadvantage were he to run for the Senate from New York. This would be a trifling matter were it not for the fact that Senator Gillibrand tells Catholics that she is a Catholic.

On various issues, Gillibrand has boasted about her “flexibility.” This was evident when, as a Congresswoman representing a district populated by hunters, she enjoyed a 100% approval rating from the National Rifle Association, but when she became a senator, she got an “F” rating from that same NRA, which she has since theatrically described as “the worst organization in this country.” Such flexibility reminds one of Ramsay MacDonald, whom Churchill likened to the Boneless Wonder of Barnum’s circus, a spectacle that his parents judged “would be too revolting and demoralising for my youthful eyes.”

This mendacity became more egregious in a Fox News town hall televised on June 2 when she said that “infanticide doesn’t exist.” The senator’s comments, aired by numerous media outlets across the political spectrum, ignored the “late-term” abortion bill signed by Governor Cuomo on January 22, as he sat next to Sarah Weddington, the attorney who lied before the Supreme Court during the Roe v Wade case. Gillibrand then defended the “right to make a life and death decision.” But if there is no infanticide, there is no death. This is not a mistake the Holy Spirit would have made, but it does reek of the Father of Lies. The senator’s rant was the rhetorical equivalent of a clumsy saboteur, like Claudius in Hamlet, fatally “hoist with his own petard.”

Last Sunday in Romania, Pope Francis beatified seven bishops who were martyred after unspeakable tortures during the Communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu. They died in defense of the same Faith that Senator Gillibrand has said is flawed. During the beatification ceremony, the Pope warned against “new ideologies” that threaten to uproot people from their “richest cultural and religious traditions.” He said that there are “forms of ideological colonization that devalue the person, life, marriage and the family” and the faithful must “resist these new ideologies now springing up.” Because of their obedience to the Spirit of Truth, those beatified martyrs will never be known in history as Boneless Wonders.

2019-06-02 - Seventh Sunday of Easter Jun 02, 2019

2 June 2019

Seventh Sunday of Easter

John 17:20-26 + Homily

17 Minutes 11 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/060219-7thday.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

To have known Father Stanley Jaki for more than twenty years was a privilege and a challenge. The privilege was to count as friend and mentor this Benedictine cited by many as one of the five priests whose science has most shaped our understanding of the world. The others are Copernicus in astronomy, Mendel in genetics, Mercalli in seismology, and Lemaitre in physics. The challenge was in being corrected often by this fiery Hungarian whose zeal in debate took no prisoners.

In my book Cloud of Witnesses, I mentioned how Jaki cautioned me against making the Big Bang theory into a theological statement. That was similar to the polite correction Georges Lemaitre made, on a higher plane, in 1951when Pope Pius XII had implied that Lemaitre’s Big Bang proposition proved a Creator as well as Creation.

Einstein admired Lemaitre, and you might say that he was agnostic about agnosticism, observing cryptically: “If God created the world, his primary concern was certainly not to make its understanding easy for us.” Einstein could be impatient with outright atheists: “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.” He could not say more without compromising the limits of his own science. Saint Augustine wrote: “We do not read in the Gospel that the Lord said, ‘I will send the Paraclete to teach you the course of the sun and the moon;’ in fact, He wanted to create Christians, not mathematicians.” Later, Cardinal Baronio, a spiritual disciple of Saint Philip Neri, epigrammed: “The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”

This applies to the enigmatic Shekhinah, or Glory of God, in the form of a cloud that accompanied the wandering Jews (Exodus 13:21) and appeared on Sinai (Exodus 24:16) and on Tabor (Matthew 17:5). Finally, it was seen at the Ascension. While this cloud could be perceived by human senses, it was beyond physical analysis. Here meteorology yields to another dimension for which there is no human definition other than acknowledgement of its existence. The Christian response moves beyond analysis to rejoicing. When Saint Paul spoke of a man who had experienced a “Third Heaven” (2 Corinthians 12:2) he could say no more than that.

I knew a woman who, Christmas caroling as a child, sang “Silent Night” outside Einstein’s house at 112 Mercer Street in Princeton. The Professor appeared on the porch with his violin and, while not singing the words, played the music.

In a sermon of 388, Gregory of Nyssa mentioned a special Feast of the Ascension to celebrate the Phos tou kosmou, the Light of the World. At the Ascension, the angel told the people not to gaze into the heavens, but to pray. Saint Paul would say: “When the Lord comes again, the living and the dead will be gathered in the clouds” (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17).

2019-05-30 - The Ascension of the Lord May 31, 2019

30 May 2019

The Ascension of the Lord

Luke 24:46-53 + Homily

14 Minutes 45 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/053019-ascension.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

2019-05-06 - Sixth Sunday of Easter May 26, 2019

26 May 2016

Sixth Sunday of Easter

John 14:23-29 + Homily

18 Minutes 5 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/052619.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

A chronic temptation of the historian is to play the “Monday morning quarterback” who assumes that he would have made a correct decision in a past crisis. But the players at the time could only postulate consequences. The appeasers who signed the Munich Agreement in 1938 do not enjoy a happy legacy, but then the thought of repeating the carnage of the Great War was unspeakable. In his first use of the term, back in 1911, Churchill described “une politique d’apaisement” as a wise strategy.

A magnanimous Churchill wept at the coffin of Neville Chamberlain and eulogized: “The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions.” But if blundering by innocence is forgivable, not learning from mistakes is unconscionable. That distinguishes innocence from naiveté. Experience has crafted the adage: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

Some future historian may impute a lack of probity to the Vatican agreement with Beijing in 2018, which conceded civil interference in the appointment of bishops. Though difficult to assess since the full text has not been published, this clearly contravenes the canonical stricture that “In the future, no rights and privileges of election, nomination, presentation, or designation of bishops are granted to civil authorities.” (Code of Canon Law c. 377.5)

After Pope Pius XI realized that the Reichskonkordat of 1933 had been abused by Nazi Germany, he issued the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge—“with burning indignation.”Damage had been done, just as the Yalta Agreement of 1945 put Poland on the chopping block, a betrayal never forgotten by a Polish pope (Centesimus Annus, n. 24). He denounced the fallacy of communism in Warsaw in 1979, and Reagan did the same in his Westminster speech in 1982. The New York Times displayed its propensity to be fooled more than twice, by editorializing that John Paul II “does not threaten the political order of the nation or of Eastern Europe” and that Reagan was “bordering on delusional.”

While the Holy See invokes two thousand years of diplomatic experience, China beats that by more than twice, and has treated the 2018 agreement as tissue, tearing down churches and persecuting faithful Catholics, not to mention banishing over a million Uighur Muslims and Falun Gong cultists to concentration camps. The issue is not theology but control. The Vatican Secretary of State said that “an act of faith is needed” for the agreement to work, but the heroic Cardinal Zen replied that a “miracle” is needed, and miracles are rare in Rome and Beijing.

Diplomacy is a delicate art, and there have been saints among Catholic emissaries, though few remember Eusebius of Murano, Conrad of Ascoli, Anastasius Apocrisarius, and Fulrad of Saint Denis. There remains the haunting specter of the only diplomat among the Twelve Apostles, “who by transgression fell, that he might go to his own place” (Acts 1:25).

2019-05-19 - Fifth Sunday of Easter May 19, 2019

19 May 2019

Fifth Sunday of Easter

John 13:31-33A, 34-35 + Homily

15 Minutes 30 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/051919.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

In recent weeks, long lines streamed into the Morgan Library to see a display of J.R.R. Tolkien’s memorabilia and his art, mostly drawings and watercolors. Other authors like William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor sketched as an avocation, but these pictures were very much an integral part of Tolkien’s symbolic world in The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion.

Here on display was an example of the words inscribed as John Henry Newman’s epitaph: “Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem” – “Into the truth through shadows and images.” When Tolkien’s widowed mother converted to Catholicism in 1900, she was disinherited by her Baptist family. She died at the age of 34, before the invention of insulin, when Tolkien was twelve and his brother ten. He would write that his mother “killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.” The devout Oratorian priest to whom Mabel entrusted her boys, Father Francis Xavier Morgan, had been a schoolboy under the tutelage of Newman, soon to be canonized.

To his dying day, Tolkien was a daily communicant and venerated the memory of Father Morgan (no relation to J.P.), whom he had served as an altar boy, leading many others to the Faith, and he married only after persuading his future wife to convert. His grandson Simon has recalled that during the liturgical changes following Vatican II, his grandfather “didn't agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but my grandfather was oblivious. He simply had to do what he believed to be right.”

A new “biopic” about Tolkien’s early years features Father Morgan at the start, near the middle, and at the end, but practically omits any other mention of the Catholicism that was at the heart of the author’s life as an Oxford don and writer. The film originally had a scene showing Tolkien receiving Communion in the trenches during the First World War, but it was cut because “people felt it was boring.”

Last year’s film of the children’s book A Wrinkle in Time, produced with Disney Corporation money (like Tolkien, which was made through the Disney-owned Fox Searchlight), eliminated the Christian imagery of its author, Madeleine L’Engle. Perhaps if it had been faithful to the text, it would not have lost nearly one hundred million dollars.

Madeleine was a good friend, and I knew to a lesser degree Tolkien’s eldest son John, who was a priest. Both would have found the film producers’ airbrushing of religion utterly incomprehensible. Tolkien wrote to the daughter of his publisher: “. . . the chief purpose of life, for any one of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks."

2019-05-12 - Fourth Sunday of Easter May 12, 2019

12 May 2019

Fourth Sunday of Easter

John 10:27-30 + Homily

16 Minutes 17 Seconds

Link to the Readings

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/051219.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

The English priest John Colet was influenced by his friends Erasmus and Saint Thomas More. As Dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, he founded Saint Paul’s School for boys in 1509 on humanist principles. Graduates have included John Milton, Samuel Pepys, John Churchill, G.K. Chesterton, three recipients of the Victoria Cross and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who planned the D-Day invasion in one of its classrooms. Colet provided that the school have 153 young scholars, in recollection of the 153 fish that the disciples hauled ashore the third time the Risen Lord appeared to them.

There is endless speculation about what 153 means, but saints including Jerome and Louis de Montfort have been transfixed in observing that the Tetragrammaton, the unutterable name of God, appears 153 times in the first book of the Bible.

It would be a mistake to suppose that the apostles went back to fishing in disobedience to the Master’s command years before that they drop their nets and follow him. Christ is the Alpha and Omega, meaning that He is able to know everything from start to finish at the same time. So He was able to “set up” His men, ordering them to go to the Sea of Tiberius, knowing their thoughts in order to instruct them.

In His humanity He did a human thing in cooking breakfast. In His divinity He predicted what the apostles would become. By an intricate symmetry, He prepared a charcoal fire on the shore and asked Peter three times if he loved Him. Peter got the message, and he wept because he had denied knowing Christ three times sitting by another charcoal fire. Whatever else may been encoded in the number 153, the point is that this event happened, a detail never to be forgotten.

Contemplation of the unity of the True God and True Man encounters layers of reality beyond the limitations of human intelligence. Nonetheless, we can perceive the existence of those dimensions. A “Participatory Anthropic Principle” among some quantum physicists suggests that the universe is structured with a set of physical constants without which there would be no intelligent life on Earth, and that it is only by participating in that structure by observation that humans can sense this. So there may be in those 153 fish the Voice saying: “I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (John 16:12).

But one thing we know, and it is what prevents miniaturizing Christ as the best of men, but nothing but a man: “For in Him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions, or rulers or authorities. All things were created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16-17).

2019-05-05 - Third Sunday of Easter May 05, 2019

5 May 2019

Third Sunday of Easter

John 21:1-19 + Homily

19 Minutes 12 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/050519.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

Every writer is familiar with the word “obelism,” which refers to an editor’s abbreviations in the margins indicating corrections to be made. An author in a passive-aggressive mood may counter by writing the Latin “stet,” which means to let the text remain as is. When the Temple authorities were scandalized that Pontius Pilate had ordered a placard for the Cross to read “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” they asked him to edit it to read that Jesus only claimed to be King of the Jews. As his own stet, the governor said “Quod scripsi, scripsi—What I have written, I have written.”

Who knows if he was being cruelly sarcastic, or perhaps was haunted, as was his wife? Either way, he showed some courage, albeit with the might of Rome behind him and an army around him, because his job was to keep order among a volatile demographic.

On page proofs of one of my books, an editor marked in red ink, “Do you really mean this?” What surprised me was that he thought it was possible that I had written something I did not really mean—not as a grammatical error but as ill-advised audacity. Prudence is a virtue to be used in expressing thoughts, but it is overused as timidity when it thwarts courage.

Courage, or fortitude, is one of the four cardinal virtues. Citing the Aristotelian philosophers, Cicero wrote: "Each man should so conduct himself that fortitude appear in labors and dangers: temperance in foregoing pleasures: prudence in the choice between good and evil: justice in giving every man his due.” Cicero quite literally was a man of his word, and was dismembered for speaking out against Mark Antony. When his head and hands were displayed in the Roman Forum, Anthony’s wife Fulvia tried to take revenge on Cicero’s eloquent outspokenness by piercing his tongue with a hairpin. But today, that unlovely couple are historical curiosities, while Cicero’s speeches still animate civilized consciences.

After the Resurrection, the Holy Spirit filled the Apostles with heroic courage. This was a marked change from when they fled from the sight of the Cross, proving the adage ascribed to the Duke of Wellington: “All soldiers run away. The good ones come back.” Hauled before the High Priest and Sanhedrin, and at risk to their own lives, Peter and the apostles said: “‘Obedience to God comes before obedience to men; it was the God of our ancestors who raised up Jesus, but it was you who had Him executed by hanging on a tree. By His own right hand God has now raised Him up to be leader and saviour, to give repentance and forgiveness of sins through Him to Israel. We are witnesses to all this, we and the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey Him.” STET.

2019-04-28 - Second Sunday of Easter Apr 28, 2019

28 April 2019

Second Sunday of Easter

John 20:19-31 + Homily

15 Minutes 22 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/042819.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

In the radiance of the Resurrection, the Church relates to the emotions of the first witnesses: grief, fear, bewilderment, and then exultation. In each generation, believers experience all of these in various ways. On Good Friday our local custom is to meditate on the Seven Last Words, using meditations written by Blessed John Henry Newman. Because the reflections he wrote in the nineteenth century are so apposite to the history of the Church’s trials and triumphs, listeners often think they were written just yesterday. The same is true of the Paschal Sequence: “Death and Life have contended / In that combat stupendous.”

On Good Friday a faithful young priest I knew when he was a boy, died after a long illness, and at the same time, a girl was born to one of our families. Early on Easter morning one of our Sri Lankan worshipers told me of the massacre in Colombo. It is estimated that around our world a Christian is martyred every five minutes “in odium fidei” by those who hate Christ. During the cathedral fire in Paris, the rescue of the Blessed Sacrament (which the frail ecclesiology of The New York Times called “a statue of Jesus”) was a triumph of life over death.

Over many years I have had recourse to an epitaph in an English church inscribed during the dark Puritan days of Cromwell’s Protectorate: “In the year 1653 when all thinges Sacred were throughout ye nation Either demolisht or profaned, Sir Robert Shirley, Baronet, Founded this church; Whose singular praise it is to have done the best things in ye worst times, and hoped them in the most callamitous.”

On Easter Day in that spirit, and at a time of no little tribulation in the Church and culture in general, we dedicated a new baldacchino to enhance our central altar. This was part of an ongoing project to furnish our church with art and craftsmanship representative of the unsurpassed aesthetic patrimony of Catholicism. Our funds are limited, so this was a work of devotion by the carpenters who attended the dedication, and our own parishioners, including the architect and sculptor. If friends of the parish continue to be generous, we can put our local talent to further use.

The High Priests and Pharisees told the Roman governor Pontius Pilate that Jesus had said that He would rise from the dead. They certainly did not believe that, but it made them edgy enough that they asked permission to seal the Tomb. The Living Word, however, always has the last word. Recall the admonition of one of Hannibal’s soldiers after his victory at the battle of Cannae, when he hesitated to march on to Rome: “Vincere scis, victoria uti nescis.” —"You know how to win but you do not know what to do with the victory.” May the Victorious Christ never have to say that about us.

2019-04-21 - Easter Sunday Apr 21, 2019

21 April 2019

Easter Sunday: The Resurrection of the Lord

John 20:1-9 + Homily

19 Minutes 42 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/042119.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

From the parish bulletin:

THE EASTER SERMON OF JOHN CHRYSOSTOM

Bishop of Constantinople (c. A.D. 400)

Is there anyone who is a devout lover of God? Let them enjoy this beautiful bright festival! Is there anyone who is a grateful servant? Let them rejoice and enter into the joy of their Lord!

Are there any weary with fasting? Let them now receive their wages! If any have toiled from the first hour, let them receive their due reward; if any have come after the third hour, let him with gratitude join in the Feast! And he that arrived after the sixth hour, let him not doubt; for he too shall sustain no loss. And if any delayed until the ninth hour, let him not hesitate; but let him come too. And he who arrived only at the eleventh hour, let him not be afraid by reason of his delay.

For the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first. He gives rest to him that comes at the eleventh hour, as well as to him that toiled from the first. To this one He gives, and upon another He bestows. He accepts the works as He greets the endeavor. The deed He honors and the intention He commends.

Let us all enter into the joy of the Lord! First and last alike receive your reward; rich and poor, rejoice together! Sober and slothful, celebrate the day!

You that have kept the fast, and you that have not, rejoice today for the Table is richly laden! Feast royally on it, the calf is a fatted one. Let no one go away hungry. Partake, all, of the cup of faith. Enjoy all the riches of His goodness!

Let no one grieve at his poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed. Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again; for forgiveness has risen from the grave. Let no one fear death, for the Death of Our Saviour has set us free. He has destroyed it by enduring it.

He destroyed Hades when He descended into it. He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh. Isaiah foretold this when he said, “You, O Hell, have been troubled by encountering Him below.”

Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with. It was in an uproar because it is mocked. It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed. It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated. It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive. Hell took a body, and discovered God. It took earth, and encountered Heaven. It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.

O death, where is thy sting? O Hades, where is thy victory?

Christ is Risen, and you, O death, are annihilated! Christ is Risen, and the evil ones are cast down! Christ is Risen, and the angels rejoice! Christ is Risen, and life is liberated! Christ is Risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead; for Christ having risen from the dead, is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

To Him be Glory and Power forever and ever. Amen!

2019-04-19 - Good Friday - Seventh Word from the Cross Apr 19, 2019

19 April 2019

Good Friday

Seventh Word from the Cross

"Father, into your hands I commend My Spirit."

11 Minutes 32 Seconds

2019-04-19 - Good Friday - Sixth Word from the Cross Apr 19, 2019

19 April 2019

Good Friday

Sixth Word from the Cross

"It is finished."

16 Minutes 32 Seconds

2019-04-19 - Good Friday - Fifth Word from the Cross Apr 19, 2019

19 April 2019

Good Friday

Fifth Word from the Cross

"I thirst."

20 Minutes 16 Seconds

2019-04-19 - Good Friday - Fourth Word from the Cross Apr 19, 2019

19 April 2019

Good Friday

Fourth Word from the Cross

"My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

17 Minutes 9 Seconds

2019-04-19 - Good Friday - Third Word from the Cross Apr 19, 2019

19 April 2019

Good Friday

Third Word from the Cross

"Woman, behold thy son; son, behold thy Mother."

16 Minutes 47 Seconds

2019-04-19 - Good Friday - Second Word from the Cross Apr 19, 2019

19 April 2019

Good Friday

Second Word from the Cross

"Today thou shalt be with me in paradise."

21 Minutes 9 Seconds

2019-04-19 - Good Friday - First Word from the Cross Apr 19, 2019

19 April 2019

Good Friday

First Word from the Cross

"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

18 Minutes 52 Seconds

2019-04-18 - Holy Thursday Apr 18, 2019

18 April 2019

Holy Thursday:

Evening Mass of the Lord's Supper

John 13:1-15 + Homily

15 Minutes 14 Seconds

Link to the Readings:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/041819-evening.cfm

(New American Bible, Revised Edition)

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