Christianity is not for sissies...

There is a view of religion, and of Christianity in particular, that it is about the avoidance of conflict and smoothing over hurt feelings.

And while it is true that love is patient, gentle and self-sacrificing, love does not (contrary to that old movie) mean never having to say you are sorry.

Rather, to paraphrase Betty Davis, ‘Christianity is not for sissies.’  It begins in the poverty of the manger and reaches its climax nailed to the wood of the Cross.  It is the very definition of conflict: a blazing fire at the intersection between good and bad, light and darkness, virtue and evil.

This blazing fire immolates deceit, hatred and selfishness. It spontaneously combusts where the weak are exploited, the innocent are convicted and the hungry are ignored.

And it will end in the blazing fires of Hell, which will consume all who turn from love and truth in Christ.

So the world would do well not to mistake the gentleness and self-sacrifice of the followers of Jesus for a capitulation to darkness. Rather, it is but an imitation of our Savior, who gave his life in meekness: the perfect sign of self-giving love; but who will also come with justice, to judge the living and the dead.

The Catacombs

Tonight we started our new class, entitled Introduction to Liturgical Art.  The first session was on the catacombs.

Pope Saint Callistus

There are times, I am afraid, when we think that our modern age is the first to encounter controversy and colorful characters.  But even in the pre-internet age, even in the first centuries of the life of the Church, life was messy and complex, as was the case with Saint Callistus, the sixteenth Pope.  I guess it goes to show you that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The life of the sixteenth Pope is clouded by history, but one account tells us he was born a slave of Carpophorus, a Roman banker, who did a lot of business with the somewhat unpopular Christians of the early third century. There is some indication that Callistus became a Christian, as Carpophorus put him in charge of the monies which Christians had collected for the care of widows and orphans.

But then the young Callistus made a terrible mistake.  He lost the Christians’s money.  And we don’t know how.  Perhaps he just misplaced it, perhaps he mis-spent it or maybe the bank went bankrupt.  But, in any case, he lost the money and decided to run away to escape facing a charge of larceny.

He only got as far as the port of Ostia, not far from the Rome airport of today, where be was arrested and thrown into jail.  The merciful Christians, however, convinced the judge that Callistus was good for the money and should be released and given the chance to recover their funds.  No sooner was he released, however, at least according to one account, than he was rearrested at the Jewish synagogue where he tried somewhat too forcefully to either borrow money or collect debts from some of his friends.

So, he’s now in his 30’s and once back in prison, where he was denounced as being a Christian, which under the Emperor at the time got him sentenced to hard labor in the salt mines of Sardinia. Within a few years he was a broken man, but then, by the grace of God, he was finally released with some other Christians at the request of a priest who was close to the favorite mistress of the Emperor Commodus.  Go figure.

Two successive popes, then recognized his piety and scholarship, and so he was ordained a Deacon at the age of 39 and placed in charge of the first piece of real estate owned by the Church, a cemetery on the Appian way called to this day, the Catacombe di San Callisto.

Nine popes were buried there and there is an indication that Callistus became an able administrator and valued advisor.  

So, in 217, when Callistus was about 57, he was elected Bishop of Rome.  But the controversies of his life were to continue.  

Callistus, perhaps because of the three times he got out of jail, had a keen appreciation for mercy.  And up until then, those who committed adultery and murder were thrown out of the Church for good. No change of forgiveness for adultery and murder. But Callistus decided to admit them to the Order of Penitents and eventually reconcile them.  He faced a lot of push back for this controversial stance, including the election of a less merciful rival as the first anti-pope, who claimed an equal claim to the Papacy until well after Callistus’ death.  

Callistus was to remain pope for only five or six years in all, at which point an anti-Christian mob threw him into a well, where he died.  Ironically they had to pull the body of he who had been the manager of the first Christian cemetery out of a well in the middle of the night in order to give it a proper burial.

So, since the days when Paul would describe himself as a slave, called to be an Apostle of the Gospel of Christ Jesus, through the extraordinary struggles of the first martyr Popes and even to our own day, the Christian life is a messy business.  But a messy business in which good and holy men, imperfect but holy men, sought to give their lives to the one who died to save them on Calvary hill.

Saint Callistus, pray for us!

Religion, Politics and Archbishop Romero

Religion and politics.  What’s a Catholic citizen to do?

From the days when Father Power preached from this pulpit to today it is a thorny and a challenging problem, ever calling us back to the pure proclamation of the Gospel in a world beset by really confusing political, social and economic realities.  It can be a mess.

One thing is certain, we can never stop proclaiming the Gospel, in season and out. Whether it be the right to Life, the dignity of the poor and the immigrant, Religious Liberty or the integrity of the Seal of Confession, the Church has a right and responsibility to preach the Gospel.

But none of this is politics.  It is proclaiming the Gospel, in every political and economic setting. I’m a priest.  Party, politics and economic systems are not my bailiwick.  I preach Christ Jesus and him crucified and risen, and it is his Gospel and his Church for which I would lay down my life.

So why talk about this now? Because Bishop McManus has invited Cardinal Chavez to celebrate the noontime Mass tomorrow.  His Eminence is an old friend and collaborator of Saint Oscar Romero, who was killed by government agents for defending the rights of the Church and her poor in El Salvador.

In Latin America of the 1960’s, not a few sons and daughters of he Church argued that the ordained and religious should preach an overthrow of unjust structures and organize political resistance to unjust political structures. For some, this meant working for the election of this group or that, while for many others, it meant preaching very particular socio-economic gospels, most of them based on Marxist political theory.

Such was the state of affairs in El Salvador, a country governed by terror and oppression, Archbishop Oscar Romero was appointed Archbishop of San Salvador. A deeply spiritual priest of Opus Dei, he was not known for his political views. And so many of the more radicalized priests feared Romero’s more traditional style would compromise their advocacy for the poor and the oppressed.

It’s a long story from there, but they were very wrong.  Indeed, Archbishop Romero’s radio homilies on Sunday nights were listened to by three quarters of the citizens of El Salvador, as he spoke against injustice, defended the poor and the oppressed and insisted on respect for the rights of the Church.

Notice he never advocated a particular political ideology and never associated himself with a particular party. Such a path would, in the words of our beloved Pope emeritus, lead only to “rebellion, division, dissent, offence and anarchy.”  Romero chose to preach Christ crucified more than Marx redefined, seeking not the victory of political ideologies, but the saving of souls.

Indeed, while no one was more relentless in fighting against the oppression of the poor and the persecution of the Church, no one was ever as clear that he was seeking neither temporal or political victory.  For the Church, Romero insisted, is not about the reform of governmental structures, but the conversion of human hearts.

Archbishop Romero was killed for preaching that Gospel.  Literally shot to death while saying Mass in a hospital for the terminally ill.  He finished his sermon, stepped away from the lectern, and took a few steps to the altar as a man with a gun emerged from a car in front of the chapel. He shot him in the heart.

As many as fifty people were shot to death outside the Cathedral the day Saint Oscar Romero was buried and the civil war in El Salvador was to drag on for years to come.

So what are we to we do in the face of immoral government leaders, who ignore the rule of law and persecute the poor?  Each and every citizen has the right and the responsibility to take a full and active role in political life and to seek to apply the moral mandates of the Gospel to our civic structures, preserving the rights of every citizen to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But the Church does not accomplish this task by our advocacy of political parties or movements or by redacting or inventing new political ideologies.

I’m a priest, not a politician.  And I am called, like Saint Romero, to preach the Gospel, which includes a defense of the poor, the unborn, the old, the stranger and the orphan.  But, like Saint Oscar and Saint Paul, sitting in prison, chained like a criminal, I preach no earthly doctrine, but “Jesus Christ, raised from the dead,” and him alone. 

And while the forces of this world may sometimes put us in chains, Saint Paul reminds us, “the word of God is never chained.” And we are called to “bear with everything” that we might lead every man or woman we ever meet to that salvation which is Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Saint Oscar Romero, pray for us.

Some simple thoughts on peace...for the Feast of Saint Francis

Did you ever hear about the time Saint Francis walked from Assisi to Egypt? It was 994 years ago at the very moment that the Sultan of Egypt was engaged in mortal combat with the Fifth Christian Crusade.

Now it probably took about a year to walk that distance into a war zone so fierce that the Sultan had decreed that anyone who brought him the detached head of a Christian would be rewarded with a single golden coin.

St. Bonaventure, in his Major Life of St. Francis, tells us how the Saint and his companion just walked right into the enemy camp, where they were predictably placed in chains, beaten and dragged before the Sultan.

And then it began.  Like Pilate before the Lord, the great Sultan had no idea who was before him.

Who sent you?  the Sultan asked.

God. Francis replied.

And why did he send you? the Sultan asked.

To save you and to teach you the truth, he answered.

“When the Sultan saw his enthusiasm and courage,” Bonaventure tells us, “he listened to him willingly and pressed him to stay with him.”

Here you have this medieval Goliath of a Sultan with an army so powerful he and his brother had conquered the whole Middle East, but he was conquered by the simplicity of the poverello.

It was an unfair imbalance for a diplomatic negotiation. But Francis did not arrive as a diplomat, but as someone who loved that Sultan and wanted to obtain his soul for God.

In other words, Francis saw Peace not as the prize at the conclusion of an effective political negotiation, but as the opportunity to love the one who had been cast as his enemy, to humanize him and recognize him as his brother.

Which is why his example is so good for me.  I am no diplomat.  My entire knowledge of international diplomacy comes from observing Jed Bartlett and Leo Magarry in the Situation room of the West Wing.  I, frankly, have no idea how to solve geopolitical conflicts.

I am not a diplomat.  I am a Priest.  But as a Priest I know the road to true peace is to love and to pray.  

Peace, as Saint Francis teaches us, begins and ends with dying to all my self-serving power grabs, and loving the one who is right in front of me, who has been cast as my enemy.

But its so much easier to hold dearly to a grudge and to speculate on my next act of revenge than to forgive my brother for whom I hold a grudge.  My grandmother used to speak of Irish Alzheimer's: where you forget everything except the grudges.

Or, as Dorothy Day used to say, “My prayer from day to day is that God will so enlarge my heart that I will see you all, and love with you all, in God’s love.”  

Now that’s a prayer for peace.

Homilies on the Death of Gervais LaRochelle

Homily at the Wake               

We never know.  We never know God’s good time.

You suspected it three years ago when Jarvis first got cancer.  But then he got better.  And then it came back.  And then he got better.

And then they thought it might make it to next year.  And then it was thanksgiving.  And then it was just a few days.  You never know.

So, Jesus tells us, not knowing the day nor the hour, we must be ready at any time for the Lord to call us home.  Maybe tonight?  Maybe next year?  Maybe in twenty years?  Who knows.

Jarvis knew that he did not know when he would die, but he also knew what he knew.  He knew that God loved him.  He knew that God made him to give what he knew, to give the strong faith he had received, to spread it to his children.  That’s why he married Virginia.  Because she deeply believed that what life is all about is believing and loving and striving for holiness.  Of course, it helped that she was beautiful and bright and so easy to get along with.  But at the root of it all was the hunger for holiness which joined them together, the hunger for God.

A hunger so deep that it was fruitful, and planted the faith so deeply in their hearts of their children and grandchildren and everyone whom they met, that it shone forth like a lamp, enlightening the lives of everyone whom it touched and bringing them joy.

Joy as at a wedding, when the bridegroom arrives and knocks.  The bridegroom came knocking at 6 Cotuit Street the other day at just about five O’Clock.  And how blessed was that servant whom the master found vigilant at his arrival.  That servant who had received the Apostolic Pardon and absolution and the consolation of the Sacraments.  That servant who knew the Cross as well as the glory, and whom you sang into the arms of his beloved Lord.

May that Lord judge him with mercy, as we now pray the last prayer he heard upon this earth.  So may our voices be joined with the angels in heaven.

Homily at the Funeral

Sixty-three years ago, Camillien and Cecile brought their little baby to the Church of Sainte-Aurélie, named after an Ursuline nun of the 19th century, in the town of the same name. It was a small and faithful town, bordering on the U.S....today the census lists 901 souls living there. But on that morning, the priest looked down at the child of Camillien and Cecile and gently poured water from a small golden shell. And as the water ran over the baby’s forehead he said: Ego te baptizo, in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sanctus: “I baptize you, Gervais, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

Thus began a great journey, as Gervais was joined to the death and rising of Christ Jesus.

Day by day and year by year, he came to know Christ Jesus. He learned to love and to forgive and to live in the model of his Lord and Savior. When they crossed the border they came to live in Holyoke and even after the tragic death of his father, Gervais continued to grow in the deep faith to which Cecile and the family clung with all their might. I’m sure Lucie, Sylvie, Serge, Marguerite Boudreau and Jean Pierre could tell many stories if the faith of their mom and how it sustains them, even to this day.
And then he met Ginny. And Ginny and Jarvis stood before the altar at Sacred Heart in Weymouth and promised to remain faithful to one another and to God: a promise they lived for forty years. And from that faithfulness, God brought forth John and Jo, Tony, Pauline, Joel, Robert, David and Grace as concrete signs of the willingness of Jarvis and Ginny to cling to faithful love in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, until death.

In fact, on the day, after they were married, Jarvis and Ginny knelt before that altar in Weymouth as the priest, extending his hands over them, blessed them with a quotation from Psalm 128: videas filios filiorum tuorum: May you live to see your children’s children. And so faithful was God’s love for them that they lived to know and to love twelve grandchildren, with two more on the way.
And so we gather here to pray for Gervais, a man who loved to pray. A man who knew right from wrong, and would not hesitate to remind you, if you needed reminding. But a man who came to grow in his appreciation for God’s infinite mercy. “If you want to get to heaven,” he used to say “work on getting someone else to heaven.” And so he spent his life trying to get you all to heaven.

He was even willing to take the road of suffering and sorrows if that’s what it took. He picked the harder way, he prayed for the harder way because, like his beloved Lord, he knew it was God’s will that he might pick up his Cross and carry it with obedient love.
So, don’t let your hearts be troubled, for there is a secret we heard in the Gospel here today. A secret which Jarvis knew and lived and carried with him all the way to death. He learned it from another son of a carpenter, who told him there were many rooms in his Father’s house.

And just as Jarvis sided more homes than he could count in one lifetime, he has now gone to prepare a place for you in heaven. He and Jesus are working on a place for you to live with him in heaven. A place where Randall, Katie, Mary, Ian, Evelyn, Catherine, Elysse, Robbie, Lily, Joey, Hanna, and Claire and each one of us can be with him in the presence of Jesus with all the angels and saints, singing God’s praise forever in a place we can’t see yet. Because he’s still getting it ready for us.

But as the Liturgy tells us, some day we will see Jarvis again and he will run out to meet us and he will lead us to Jesus, who is the way to heaven, the truth about everything and the hope of eternal life.

So join with the whole Church in praying for Gervais, this good man, that Christ might judge him with mercy, lead him gently home to his side and prepare for all the just a place to rest with him in glory forever.

Mary, Mother of the World, Novena to Our Lady of LaSalette

It was 1846 as Maximin and Melanie were tending the cows when they saw the Lady weeping. She told them of a great famine which would come upon the world and that the only salvation from it was honoring God’s Name, going to Church on Sundays and prayer. Soon thereafter the great potato famine struck France and then most of Western Europe, killing more than a million people in Ireland and forcing more than twice that number to flee their homes.

Thus Mary is pictured seated upon a globe, for her message of prayer to avoid a horrible punishment was not just for a small village in Southeastern France, but for the rest of the world, as well.

135 years later, in 1981, the Blessed Virgin appeared in a small town in the south of Rwanda, named Kibeho. There she identified herself as Mother of the World and, while weeping, warned three small children that unless the world turned to repentance and prayer a great suffering would come upon the land. Thirteen years later, the Rwandan Genocide broke out in that country in which a million members of the Tutsi, Twa and Hutu tribes were slaughtered. One of the worst massacres took place in the school room where the Blessed Virgin had appeared to the children.

What do these apparitions in mid-nineteenth century France and late twentieth century Africa tell us about the Blessed Virgin Mary? Three things:

First, that the Blessed Virgin Weeps;

Second, hat she prays for us;

and third, that she is Mother of the World.

First, we learn that Mary weeps when she sees the evil men do. She who was conceived without sin also stood on Calvary Hill and witnessed the evil which nailed her Son to the Cross. We can also imagine her weeping as she fled into Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath, as she stood in the Temple unable to find her child, cradled his dead body in her arms and placed his body in the tomb.

Each night every priest or religious and perhaps many of you, pray Night Prayer, including the Gospel Canticle of Simeon, who with his weary arms holds the baby Jesus in his arms and whispers to God: “Now Lord, you can let your servant go in peace, for my own eyes have the seen the salvation you have prepared, the light to the nations and the glory of your people Israel.”

And after that joyous canticle, he turned to Mary and told her this baby would be the rise and fall of many, concluding with the words: “and your own heart will be pierced with a sword.”

At that moment, Saint Alphonsus Liguori tells us, “the joy which had filled Mary’s heart must have been turned to sorrow, a sorrow which would perdure and a foreshadowing of the Cross on which her Son would offer the perfect sacrifice.”

For her suffering was a participation in the Cross of her son, just as each of the Crosses God sends to us is a way of participating in the Cross of Jesus. “Whenever you suffer,” Mother Theresa once told an old woman, “it is really just Jesus loving you so much that he is holding you closer to his Cross.”  “But could I ask him,” the woman responded, “not to hold me quite so close!?”

For from suffering we learn what it means to love others, as compassion grows from witnessing pain. “In [Mary’s] tears,” Pope Francis once said, “we find the strength to console those experiencing pain.”¹

How many people we meet in pain every day. This morning I sat with a longtime parishioner of the Cathedral who has been undergoing chemo therapy for brain cancer for almost a year now. Her house was filled with all kinds of folks from hospice, helping her to prepare for her final days. But when I came in she sent them all into the other room. “He helps me more than all those pills” she told them firmly, “For when I receive Holy Communion, I receive Jesus, and he stays with me when it gets tough in the middle of the night.”

She knows the sorrow of the Blessed Virgin whose heart was pierced with a sword, and the Virgin Mary knows her sorrows, too. Now, and at the hour of her death.

Second, we learn from LaSalette and Kibeho that Mary prays for us, that we might be delivered from the hands of evil men, and even worse, that we might not be evil men ourselves.

That’s why we ask for Mary’s intercession through all our lives, we “poor banished children of Eve, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” 

“By the tears which flowed from your eyes,” the Novena to our Lady of Sorrows begins, “obtain for us, O Mother of Mercy, true contrition for our sins, persevering fervor in the divine service, and the particular favors we ask in this Novena.”

That is why you bring the sorrows and the fears of your lives to this Miraculous Medal Novena, just as I remember doing every Wednesday night when I was growing up. I remember, as a freshman in High School, coming out with old Father McCarron (to be honest, he was probably younger than I am now) and kneeling on the bottom step of the altar (yup, he was definitely younger than I am now) and praying to Mary for all the world-shattering needs I carried in my adolescent heart. And you know what? She heard my prayers.

As I know she will, all the way to the hour of my death, for that is what the Mother of God does for a living. She intercedes with her Son on our behalf. And what Son can resist his mother’s intercession, “now and at the hour of our death.”

My favorite place to pray in Washington, D.C., where I lived for many years, is the Irish Chapel in the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. There’s no fancy sanctuary or big mosaic...there’s not even an altar in this chapel. Just a statue of the Blessed Virgin with the Christ child playing on her lap in the middle of a gurgling fountain. 

But on the wall, not far away, is a 1200 year old Celtic Prayer that boldly states: There is no hound as fleet of foot, nor young soul so quick to win the race, nor horse to finish the course, as the Mother of God to the death bed of one who needs her intercession. It’s like the line in the Memorare: Never was it known that anyone who fled to Thy protection, implored Thy help or sought Thy intercession was left unaided. 

For Mary, in the words of our beloved Pope Emeritus, watches “over us, her children: the children who turn to her in prayer, to thank her or to ask her for her motherly protection and her heavenly help, perhaps after having lost our way, or when we are oppressed by suffering or anguish because of the sorrowful and harrowing vicissitudes of life. In serenity or in life’s darkness let us address Mary, entrusting ourselves to her continuous intercession so that she may obtain for us from the Son every grace and mercy we need for our pilgrimage on the highways of the world.”²

For Finally, Mary is the Mother of the World, in LaSalette, Rwanda or Worcester she is the Mother of Mercy. A late medieval and early Renaissance devotion to the Blessed Virgin depicts her with an enormous cloak, under which she gathers all those who are in need. As a mother cradles a crying child in her arms, so Mary gathers each of us to herself with the compassion and hungering love which she learned from her divine Son.

Her Divine Son, who, in the words of our beloved Pope Emeritus, “Looking down from the Cross, from the throne of grace and salvation…gave us his mother Mary to be our mother. [For] yes indeed, in life we pass through high-points and low-points, but Mary intercedes for us with her Son and helps us to discover the power of his divine love, and to open ourselves to that love.”³

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

Pray for us sinners,

now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

__________

1 - Pope Francis, 8 October 2016.

2 - Pope Benedict XVI. 22 August 2012.

3 - Pope Benedict XVI, Vespers of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 23 September 2011.