“In Harmony, on the Feast of Saint Ignatius of Antioch

Your Excellency, Father Abbot, Reverend Mother, holy priests and brothers, angelic choirs, brothers and sisters all.

A venerable tradition informs us that Ignatius was a disciple of the Apostle John and was consecrated as the Bishop of Antioch by Saint Peter himself. Nearly forty years later, during the reign of the Emperor Trajan, he was condemned to a martyr’s death because he refused to renounce his faith in Christ Jesus.

At which, he was taken in chains from Antioch to Rome, for his sentence to be carried out. Along the way, he wrote letters to the Christian communities he had come to know and love. And in one of those letters, addressed to the Christians at Ephesus, he seems to have had you in mind.

For he urges his priests to be like the strings of a lyre, and, in harmony with their Bishop, to sing Christ Jesus, by the “concord and harmony” of their love.1 Indeed, he calls all the faithful to become members of this choir (chorós), so that, being harmonious in concord and taking your note from God’s pitch pipe, you may sing with one voice through Jesus Christ to the Father, so that he may hear you and recognize from your good works that you are members of His Son.2

Now, listen closely to his words. The Bishop martyr does not tell the Ephesians that they should sing about Jesus. Nor does he tell them simply to sing beautifully. But they are to sing Christ Jesus to the Father, that he might recognize his beloved Son in the harmony of their lives.

And there is the secret of what it means to be the Church's choir.

Like every choir, it is made up of different voices. Some high, some low. Some strong, some weak. Some accomplished, and some struggling to find the next note.

But when they sing, they are like the strings of a lyre, or the pipes of the great Casavant. In the words of our beloved Pope Benedict, ‘the many pipes and voices becoming one.’3

But such harmony requires humility and sacrifice. The piccolo cannot be jealous of the mighty Contra Bombarde. Each must be content with its own part, and all must embrace what Pope Benedict called “a harmonization of differences.”4 

And as you have learned in these days, such harmonization does not come easy. It requires discipline, sacrifice, and the willingness of musicians to listen to one another rather than seek personal prominence.

So it is with the Church. If we are to sing in harmony with the angels, obedience must triumph over conceit, generosity over cynicism, and merciful love over all.’5

And if this harmony is essential for all liturgical music, it is all the more apparent in chant. Unlike much of the choral music we know, with its sopranos and altos and tenors and basses singing different parts, Gregorian chant is ordinarily sung in unison. Everyone sings the same melody.

But that doesn't mean everyone becomes the same person. Each singer brings a different voice, a different temperament, a different history. And each has to learn to listen to the others, to breathe with the others, to resist the temptation to rush ahead or drag behind the others.

And, perhaps hardest of all, each has to learn that his own voice is not the most important voice in the room. For the purpose of chant, like all liturgical music, is not to hear myself sing. It is to hear the Church sing.

And that brings us to what you have been doing last night and today, on this feast of Saint Ignatius of Antioch. You have been learning Gregorian chant and polyphony. Chant, which is, in a very particular way, the music of the Church. Not the only music of the Church, but, as the Second Vatican Council taught, a music which, all things being equal, holds “pride of place” in the Roman liturgy.

Not simply because it is old. There are lots of old things that are not particularly worth preserving. Not simply because it is beautiful. There is plenty of beautiful music that would be entirely inappropriate at Mass. But because Gregorian chant has grown out of the Church's prayer. It has been shaped by centuries of folks like you, seeking to give voice to the Word of God.

And because, unlike so much of the music that surrounds us, Gregorian chant is not primarily concerned with expressing the feelings of the singer. It is concerned with giving voice to the prayer of the Church.

As Pope Benedict reminded us, the liturgy is not something we invent for ourselves, but something we receive. We do not come to perform, or to impress our neighbors, but to surrender our voices to the voice of the Church.

And isn't that a wonderful image of what it means to be a loyal son or daughter of the Church? We are not all the same. We have different personalities, different gifts, different opinions, and sometimes very different ideas about how things ought to be done. But we are each called to profess the one, true faith, to gather around one altar, to offer one sacrifice, and to become one Body in Christ.

Saint Ignatius understood this profoundly. Writing to the Christians at Philadelphia, he urged them to be united around one Eucharist, for there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, one chalice, and one altar.

One Lord. One altar. One sacrifice. One song.

And here is where Saint Ignatius becomes particularly challenging. For the harmony he describes is not merely musical. It is the harmony of Christian love.

And there is a warning here, especially for those of us who love the beauty and solemnity of the Church's ancient liturgical traditions. It is possible to sing every note perfectly and still be terribly out of tune with the Gospel. It is possible to know every rubric, to pronounce every Latin syllable correctly, to execute every neume with exquisite precision, and still be impatient, uncharitable, proud, or contemptuous of our brothers and sisters.

And if that is the case, what have we accomplished?

We may have produced beautiful music. But have we sung Christ?

So as we leave this workshop, I hope we will take home more than a few new chants, or a better understanding of the modes, or a greater confidence in reading the ancient notation. I hope we will take home something of the wisdom of Saint Ignatius.

That the Church is called to be a choir; that the song she is called to sing is Christ, and that the most beautiful music we will ever make is the harmony of our lives surrendered to him.

Saint Ignatius, pray for us!

__________________

1  Ignatius of Antioch, Ephesians 4:1.

2  Cf. Ignatius of Antioch, Ephesians 4:1.

3 Pope Benedict XVI, September 13, 2006.

4 Pope Benedict XVI, July 11, 2012.

5 Pope Benedict XVI, September 12, 2008

AI and You: A Homiletic Reflection

 

Do you remember the old story in the Book of Genesis about the day when human beings discovered a new technology? They learned how to make bricks.

That might not sound very impressive to we who live in an age of artificial intelligence, when you can talk to your iPhone and AI reads X-rays, paints pictures, composes music and seems to know all about everything!

But once upon a time, making bricks was a technological revolution. Until then, if you wanted to build something, you had to find stones, and stones came in different shapes and sizes. They’re hard to pick up and even harder to fit together.

But now they had bricks. All the same size. All interchangeable. Stack one upon another and you could build higher and faster than ever before. And so they said to one another: “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky, and make a name for ourselves.” And so they built  the Tower of Babel.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the bricks, or with discovering a better way to build. The problem was what they began to believe about themselves. They began to believe that because they could make something extraordinary, they themselves had somehow become gods “Let us make a name for ourselves.”

And you know the rest of the story. They build their tower and they end up being scattered. They seek a single language, and they end up unable to understand one another. They reach toward heaven, and wind up farther apart than when they began.

It is an ancient story. But it is also a remarkably modern one, as we live through another technological revolution, perhaps one of the greatest in human history.

Artificial intelligence is changing the way we work and learn and communicate. It can already do things which, only a few years ago, would have seemed impossible. And what it will be able to do in five or ten years from now, none of us really knows.

And again, there is nothing wrong with the bricks, or with Artificial Intelligence, Pope Leo tells us in his first encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas. Technology is not the problem. We are.

For when they built the first brick or the first printing press or the first waterwheel or the first circuit board, there was always a temptation to think that we shall use it “to make a name for ourselves,” and to forget who God made us to be.

And that’s the problem. Because there is an enormous difference between the most sophisticated machine ever created and the smallest human child. We made the machine. God made the child.

We can make artificial intelligence in our image. But only God makes the human person in his image and likeness. And that means that no matter how intelligent the machine becomes, no matter how quickly it thinks, no matter how much information it possesses, no matter how convincingly it imitates us, it can never possess the dignity which God has given to you and to me.

You are not valuable because you are intelligent. You are not valuable because you are productive. You are not valuable because you can work or earn money or solve problems. You are valuable because God made you. Because God knows you. Because God loves you. Because from the first instant of your existence until your final breath, you bear within yourself the image and likeness of God.

And that is why every technology we might ever create must remain the servant of the human person and never become his master.

I may not be able to figure out how ChatGPT does what it does and I’m certainly not the one who understands the potential or the pitfalls of this rapidly growing technology. You need smarter people to figure that out.

But the one thing I do know is that no matter how smart or strong or devious this, or any other technology might become, it is nothing compared to the people who are sitting in front of me right now. People made in the image and likeness of God, for whom he sent his only Son to die on the Cross and who he will come to judge at the end of time.

For the value of any technology, from the brick to the wheel, to the printing press to the latest large language model…the only value it really has is to help us to be more human.

Because the purpose of human life is not to become more efficient. It is not to become more productive. It is not even to become more intelligent. The purpose of human life is communion with God and with each other. To know God. To love God, and in that love, to be made one in Christ,

The Transitus of Saint Francis - 800 Years Ago

800 years ago, Saint Francis of Assisi went home to God.

You may know him as the little fellow with the birds, as the little poor little one of Assisi, who radically renounced the riches of this world, that he might love Christ in the poorest of the poor.

In Italian, they call him the Poverello, the little poor one, and he has always been my good friend…whom I began to emulate and love as a child of the ’60s, when I saw in him a fellow religious hippie, like the Saint Francis portrayed in the movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon. A pure soul with long hair and a blessed rage against convention. Not unlike my young self: a revolutionary in search of a worthy cause.

And then, as the years went by, the little poor one fascinated me with his words…with prayers that by their simplicity drew me into the wonder of all that God had created for me and the love which was its beginning and its end. But most of all it was the stark simplicity of those words, calling me to be a fool for Christ, willing to let go of anything that did not lead me to the Cross, and there to allow God to embrace me with his infinite love.

And now, in these latter years, I find myself returning to my friend, on the eight-hundredth anniversary of his death, as I contemplate my own death, and strain to see in him a reflection of my own littleness and need, and beg him to lead me once again to the same Lord to whom he has been introducing me all these years.

And it is because I hope that St Francis will become your friend, as well, that I invite you to look on him as he is about to die, and to see in that scene three little moments and three great lessons about what this life is really all about: letting go, rejoicing and loving.

First, letting go. When he knew he was about to die, Saint Francis asked his brothers to take him to the Porziuncula, the little church where his ministry had begun. I have such an abiding love for that spot and have been blessed to pray and to cry there more times than I can count. It is a tiny little chapel, rebuilt by the young Saint Francis himself. Much smaller than our Chapel, its walls are stained with the smoke and tears of generations, and as you enter, you look down at the ground, and see a simple Latin inscription: Hic locus sanctus est. “This place is holy.”

And why is it holy? It is holy because it is here that Saint Francis lay upon the ground with nothing but a borrowed blanket to cover him. He lay on the ground naked and vulnerable, like the baby Jesus in the manger, possessing nothing, and clinging to nothing, like Jesus on the Cross, opening his arms and letting go of everything, that he might fall into the gentle embrace of the God who had created him for love.

The second lesson of Francis’ death is about rejoicing. It is the curious tale of the Lady Jacoba, whom Francis sent for just before he died. And he had a special request: he asked that she bring him the little almond-and-honey sweet cake that he loved so much, so that he might taste it one last time before he died.

For Francis understood that letting go of this world does not mean despising it. It means receiving everything as a gift. And just as he called us to let go of everything in love, so must we delight in all that God has created for us, for it is beautiful and holy—and sometimes even delicious!

And then there is the last, and perhaps most important lesson: loving. As he lay dying, Francis called for all his brothers, but especially for the two who had walked with him from the beginning, through the good times and the bad, through days of holy certainty and days of doubt.

They were the ones with whom he had learned to find Christ in the unlikeliest of places and to love others as Christ had loved him. They were the ones he had struggled to forgive and from whom he now asked mercy. They had strengthened him when he was weak, as he had encouraged them when they were uncertain. He blessed them and asked God to be good to them. And finally he asked them to pray for him and to forgive whatever ways he had sinned against them.

And, you know, I almost feel as though I was standing there with them beside the dying body of the little poor one. For hardly a week goes by that I am not called to stand by the bed of a man or woman about to die. Sometimes at the hospital, sometimes at home. Sometimes surrounded by those who love them, and sometimes all alone. Those moments are among the most beautiful of my life, although it is often a terrible beauty, in the middle of the night, when it is often very dark. 

And at such times, I often find myself looking down at the Poverello laying in the dirt, looking up at the stars 800 years ago, trying to let go of everything for love of God—even the beating of his heart, his breath, and life itself.

There he lies, looking up at the stars 800 years ago, trying to let go of everything And yet he is rejoicing. Rejoicing in all the delights God has given him. And he is loving—reaching out one last time to those God had given him to love: blessing them, seeking their forgiveness, and praying that God would give them the grace to keep loving until they might all see one another again in heaven.

For in the end, I guess we’re really not so different, you and I, from this saint who breathed his last some 800 years ago. 

We who seek to open our arms on the crosses Jesus gives us, rejoice  in all his wonderful gifts and love one another as he has first loved us.

Introduction to the Sacred Liturgy: Classes Three and Four

3: THE MIDDLE AGES

VIDEO OF 1540 MASS RECREATION

Introduction to the Sacred Liturgy: Class 2: The First Millennium

 To download the slides from today's class, just click this link:

LINK TO SLIDES FOR CLASS TWO

Introduction to the Liturgy: Class I: What is the Liturgy

 

Dear Brothers,

What a joy it was to be with you this afternoon for our first class.  To access the slides from out time today, just click the following link and download the PDF:

https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/018uO-L0SCen7KvGqVY8Qev-w

If you have any problems, just send me an e-mail or text me at the number contained in the Syllabus.

In the Lord,

Monsignor Moroney

Waiting for God...

There is something really uncomfortable about the Canaanite woman in today's Gospel. She comes to Jesus and begs him to help her daughter: “Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David!”

And at first, Jesus says nothing. Think about that for a moment. She prays—and she hears nothing. But she keeps after him, to the point that the disciples want Jesus to send her away. But even when Jesus finally speaks, his words seem anything but

encouraging.

But that doesn't stop her. She goes right up to him, falls to her knees and begs, “Lord, help me!” It is the cry of a desperate woman, convinced she has no place else to turn.

At which, Jesus looks into her tear-stained eyes and says, “O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.”

So, why did Jesus finally respond? Was it because she wore him down? But there is no wearing God down. We do not need to persuade him to keep loving us, he made us and he will never forget us any more than a mother can forget to love her child.

Remember Abraham bargaining with God over Sodom? “What if there are fifty innocent people there? Will you spare the city for fifty?” Yes. “Forty? Thirty? Twenty?” Yes. Yes. Yes.

Finally Abraham asks, almost apologetically, “What if there are only ten?” And God replies, “For the sake of those ten, I will not destroy it.” So patient is the love of God that he never stops listening, never stops caring, never stops loving us, no matter what we do or how we feel. As Pope Francis used to say, “God never tires of forgiving. We are the ones who get tired of asking for forgiveness.”

Yeah, we get tired—tired of asking, tired of waiting, tired of repenting, tired of beginning again.

But God does not gets tired of loving us. That's something Saint Teresa of Calcutta—Mother Teresa—understood better than we could have ever have imagined. For most of her life, the world saw Mother Teresa as the tough little nun, filled with sweetness, faith and joy: walking the streets of Calcutta and the world, picking up the dying, caring for abandoned children, feeding the hungry, praying before the Blessed Sacrament. We imagined that she must have felt close to God every step of the way.

But we were wrong. For after her death, her letters revealed something quite different. For long periods, she wrote, she struggled with an unrelenting spiritual darkness. She described

“this terrible sense of loss—this untold darkness—this loneliness—this continual longing for God.” Once she wrote simply: “I just long and long for God.” That may be one of the most beautiful things ever written by any saint.

Not: I feel God.

Not: God always answers my questions.

Not: Prayer fills me with peace.

Just: I long for him.

But, despite the suffering, she kept on going. Day after day. Year after year. She went to Mass. She received Holy Communion. She made her holy hour. She prayed her Rosary. She cared for

the dying and the abandoned—not because it made her feel good, but because she knew that God loved her, even when she could not feel his embrace.

Eventually she even came to understand that darkness as a participation in the suffering of Christ upon the Cross. She even came, she wrote, to “love the darkness,” because it united her

more closely to the suffering of Jesus.

So the next time you pray and feel nothing; the next time you wonder whether God is listening; the next time you fear that God has taken a vacation or is looking the other way—

remember that Canaanite woman and that little nun from Calcutta.

They never gave up on God. And neither should we.