Father Robert T. Cooper

May 31, 2020

           May 31^st is traditionally the Feast Day of the Visitation of the Lord in which, among other things, we ponder the in-utero interaction between Jesus and John the Baptist. Mary, a few days pregnant with her Creator, visits her elderly cousin Elizabeth, six-months pregnant with the forerunner of the One through whom all things were made. John, before his vocal cords had developed to be the voice crying in the wilderness, testified to Jesus by making his mom’s womb a peritoneal trampoline, leaping with joy. Jesus, before his human fingers and hand had even formed, nevertheless blessed His cousin, sanctifying him for his mission of preparing Jesus’ way. It is an extraordinary mystery, one that is particularly significant for those in pro-life work. The Sisters of Life name all their outreach centers helping pregnant women choose life—in New York, Toronto, and Philadelphia—“Visitation” Missions. They seek to live, and show the Church how to live, both sides of this Visitation mystery.

          Jesus taught clearly that everyone who received a child in His name, receives Him, and that whatever we do to the least He takes personally (Mt 18:5; 25:40), and so the first side of the mystery is to help women come to embrace the fruit of their womb as a blessing, as Mary received Jesus in the world’s most famous (humanly) unplanned pregnancy. The other side of the mystery is that they, like Mary, go out to care for modern Elizabeths, pregnant women in need, helping them in so many practical ways during pregnancy and beyond so that the women may eventually feel their children kicking and leaping within—and one day jumping into their arms with joy. Like the Annunciation, the Visitation is a feast on which we can and should ponder the deeper meaning of human life in the womb. It is also an opportunity for us to see in greater relief what happens when that renascent life encounters violence rather than love.

           In May of 2019, Pope Francis gave us another extraordinary discourse on abortion when greeting participants in a Vatican Conference dedicated to the theme, “Yes to Life! Care for the Precious Gift of Life in Fragile Situations.” Bringing together 400 experts from 70 countries, it was sponsored by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, the Knights of Columbus and the Italian foundation Heart in a Drop, which was formed in 2015 to promote scientific research and the growth of a culture that protects the life of mother and child before conception, during pregnancy and after birth. Pope Francis spoke plainly about the “throwaway culture” that considers children diagnosed with various malformations and pathologies “incompatible with life,” and that often leaves them, in places with ready access to abortion, “condemned to death.” Francis emphasized, however, that “no human being can ever be incompatible with life, not due to his age, his health conditions, or the quality of his existence. Every child that enters a woman’s womb is a gift, which changes the history of a family, of a father and a mother, of grandparents and siblings. And this baby is in need of being received, loved and taken care of.”

           He stated that every time a woman discovers that she is pregnant, she becomes aware of a mystery within, of a “presence, growing within her, pervading her whole being, making her not only a woman but a mother.” He marveled at the “intense, crisscrossing dialogue” established between mother and child from conception that fosters a “mutual adaptation, as the little one grows and develops.” That crosstalk, however, can change, he said, when the child is diagnosed with a serious condition that endangers his or her life, robbing the mother and father of serenity and feeling powerless.

           At the same time, he stressed that children in the womb with such conditions are “little patients who not rarely can be cured with pharmacologic, surgical and extraordinary care interventions” and, when they cannot, can be placed in perinatal hospices that “provide essential support to families that accept the birth of a sick child.” Pope Francis summoned doctors and nurses to give “competent accompaniment” that affirms the “sacred value of human life” and takes responsibility for those little patients and their family members. In the very trying situation of children who are destined to die immediately or soon after birth, whose care “might seem a useless commitment of resources and further suffering for the parents,” Pope Francis said it is rather an opportunity to bring familial love to fulfillment. “To take care of these children helps parents, in fact, to work through their mourning and think of it not only as a loss but as a stage on a path followed together. That child will remain in their life forever. And they will have been able to love him. Often those few hours in which a mother can cradle her child leave a trace in the woman’s heart, which she never forgets.”

          This approach is in stark contrast, he said, to the culture of waste that justifies abortion for such children in fragile circumstances under the euphemism of “prevention.” It is really, he stated, part of an “inhuman eugenic mentality” toward children with disabilities. Opposition to abortion, in these circumstances and in every situation, he underlined, is not principally a thing of faith, but “pre-religious” and simply “human.” He said two questions that clarify the issues at state are: “Is it licit to eliminate a human life to solve a problem?” and “Is it licit to hire a hitman to solve a problem.” He answered by saying that it is never permitted to “do away with a human life or hire a hitman to resolve a problem.” Everyone sees these truths clearly with regard to those who have been born. He wants us to see it just as clearly with regard to those who will grow into kids and adults if they are not assassinated.

            He then gave a powerful example from his time as Archbishop of Buenos Aires of how “abortion is never the answer that women and families seek.” “There was a 15-year old girl with Down Syndrome who became pregnant, and her parents went to the judge to ask permission for her to abort. The judge, an upright and serious man, studied the matter and said: ‘I want to question the girl.’ ‘But she has Down Syndrome, she doesn’t understand,’ [the parents replied]. “No, no, have her come,’” the judge responded. “The 15-year old girl went, sat down, and began to talk with the judge and he said to her: ‘Do you know what is happening to you?’ ‘Yes, I’m sick. … They told me that I have an animal inside that is eating my stomach so I must have surgery,’” the girl said. “No, you don’t have a parasite that is eating your stomach,’ [the judge retorted]. ‘Do you know what you have there? A child!’ And the Down’s girl said: ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ … With this, the judge didn’t authorize the abortion. The [girl’s] mother wanted it.” The Pope went on to give the rest of the story. “A girl was born. The years passed. She studied, grew up and became a lawyer. From the moment this girl became aware of her history, she called the judge on her birthday to thank him for the gift of her birth. … The judge died and now [the daughter of the girl with Down Syndrome] has become a prosecutor.”

             “Abortion,” the Pope reiterated based on the story, “is never the answer that women and families seek,” and he thanked those families, those moms and dads, who have “accepted fragile life” and who support others in such situations, saying their “witness of love is a gift for the world.” In contrast to the throwaway, eugenic inhumanity that undergirds the abortion of handicapped children and others, this warm, welcoming culture of parents and medical professionals to kids in fragile situations manifests a culture of love. It is the only adequate answer to another human being, however young, however disabled. It is the culture that Christians find in the mystery of the Visitation.

May 24, 2020

           One of the great paradoxes in the Gospel is about peace. On the one hand, Jesus says during the Last Supper, “Peace I leave you. My peace I give you” (Jn 14:27); on the other, when He sends out His 72 disciples, He says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword” and describes that because of Him, even families will be divided. Has He come to bring peace or division, to unite or scatter?

          He has clearly come as the “Prince of Peace” (Is 9:5) in order to fulfill what the angels sang the morning He was born, “Peace on earth to people of good will” (Lk 2:14). He took on our nature to ratify in His own flesh the definitive peace treaty between God and the human race. He has come to “guide our feet into the path of peace” (Lk 1:79). But He has left each person free. Not everyone will choose to follow Him on the way of peace. Not everyone will believe in or adopt what He describes as peace’s essential conditions. Many will choose, in fact, to do the opposite of what Jesus says—and how much division flows from such a path. What I would like to do in this article is explore five things Jesus reveals about the path to peace. Jesus said, “Not as the world gives do I give [peace] to you” (Jn 14:27), and so these elements are different than what we would learn in foreign service training. But just as He turned worldly logic right-side-up with regard to happiness in the beatitudes, so Jesus also does so regarding His peace plan for a world rife with conflict.

          The first is to prioritize God. After Jesus describes that He has come “to bring not peace but the sword,” He specifies, “I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s enemies will be those of his household.” This is not because Jesus came to divide: He came to gather and to save. But not everyone will accept His offer. We see the division He foretold in families, for example, in the envy that husbands feel when their wives start spending more time with Jesus in prayer, or the brutal ribbing teenagers will take when they announce to their peers that they think God may be calling them to the priesthood or consecrated life. Those who don’t put God first often won’t like the new priorities. It’s an indirect challenge to them, and often they’ll respond the way most kindergarteners respond to the teachers’ pets, simply because the other is good. Those who do not want to prioritize God are often intolerant of those who do.

           At a macroscopic level, we see how much lack of peace has come from those who do not want to give God his due. Historians tell us that the twentieth century was quantitatively by far the most violent century in the history of humanity, with more people executed than in all previous centuries combined. We know that that abhorrent bloodbath was not unleashed in the name of religion, but under the banner of various secularist, anti-religious, or explicitly atheistic regimes like we have seen under Stalin, Hitler, Ataturk, Pol Pot, and others. If the perversion of religion has occasionally led to violence, the prevention and persecution of religion has empirically been worse. While religion has not been successful in restraining every believer’s propensity for violence, the absence of religion—living practically as if God does not exist—has been much less successful. To prioritize God means not just to acknowledge His existence but to pray. In 2011, on the vigil before the 25^thanniversary of John Paul II’s famous interreligious Prayer for Peace in Assisi, Pope Benedict said, “The most precious contribution we can make to the cause of peace is that of prayer.” Prayer helps us to become more like the God whom we address. It makes us far more capable of seeing those with whom we might have a conflict not as enemies but as fellow human beings created and loved by God, so that we will treat them not like Cain behaved toward Abel but as Joseph acted toward his brothers in Egypt.

           The second thing Jesus reveals is the connection between peace and following His commands. Right before Jesus said, “Peace I leave you. My peace I give you,” He spoke of keeping His word and commandments, before adding, “If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love” (Jn 14:21; Jn 15:10). We will never have peace without love, and Jesus stated that all the commandments hang on the two-fold commandment of love of God and neighbor (Mt 22:40). We see this connection very readily in practice. How much more peace there would be if people minimally just kept the Decalogue: there would be no murder, hatred, broken or wounded families, stealing, lying, or envy. There would be intergenerational respect. People would make time to put God first in their lives, and to praise and worship Him. These are basic principles for obtaining that peace that the world cannot give or rob.

           The third practice is to wish peace. When Jesus sent out the 12 apostles and later the 72 disciples, He told them upon entering a house to wish it peace, promising that if a peaceful person lives there, the peace would remain (Mt 10:13; Lk 10:5). Notice that Jesus did not say, “Investigate as to whether peaceful people are there first.” He wanted us to wish peace to everyone, to have a positive prejudice about the people we would meet. This is the exact opposite of the suspicion that often reigns between people who do not know each other, or those from different places, ethnicities, races, cultures, or religions. While Jesus sent out His disciples as “lambs in the midst of wolves,” He sent us with no paranoia about everyone’s being wolves. He wanted us to presume the best, that the person could receive peace. He wanted us to be instruments of peace, sowing it so as to reap it.

           But He wants us to be far more than “peace wishers.” He calls us to be “peacemakers” (Mt 5:9), saying that peacemakers will be called true children of God. God is a peacemaker and we are called to be chips off the old divine block. This is the fourth practice. What does it mean to make peace? Jesus describes various conditions. It means loving our enemies, praying for our persecutors, doing good to those who do evil. It means responding with the weapons of love, mercy and forgiveness rather than the sword. It means learning from and imitating Jesus, who established peace ultimately through dying for those who were waging war against Him, God and others through sin. To be a peacemaker, we must stop the downward spiral of vengeful retaliation. We must never forget the dignity of each person as loved by God, even when the other forgets. We must transcend selfishness, envy, pride, anger, and greed and work patiently to build a culture of encounter, solidarity and brotherhood, even when others resist. We must model ourselves on the Lord’s enduring mercy, seeking to reconcile as we have been reconciled seventy times seven times.

           This is obviously hard. Some would even say it is impossible for human beings. That brings us to the last practice: Cooperation with the Holy Spirit. On the night Jesus rose from the dead, He entered through the closed doors of the Upper Room and twice wished the frightened apostles “Shalom,” or “Peace be with you.” Then He sought to make them peacemakers. He breathed on them the Holy Spirit and said, “Just as the Father sent me, so I send you.” (Jn 20:19-23). Jesus was sending them out with God’s own power to create peace through forgiveness and reconciliation. Pope Francis said in a homily a few years ago that the peace Jesus leaves, gives, and breathes is fundamentally the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit abides in us, He helps us to experience what St. Paul lists as the “fruit of the Spirit”: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal 5:22). That fruit is not merely subjective, suffusing us with those qualities. It impacts our relations with others and makes it possible for us to prioritize God, keep His commands, wish peace to all, and make peace perseveringly.

          In the midst of so much conflict, when the sword of division cuts deep into individuals, families, societies, and the world, Jesus’ perennial peace plan is needed now more than ever. Now is the time to follow Him on the path of peace He has revealed and to draw others with us onto that way. The peace of the Lord be with you always!

May 17, 2020

         Early in the book of Job, the blameless and upright man is besieged with a series of catastrophes: Sabeans steal his oxen and murder his herdsmen, lightening wipes out his sheep and shepherds, Chaldeans seize his camels and slay those tending them, winds collapse the house where his seven sons and three daughters are feasting and finally he himself is struck with severe boils from his feet to his head. The suffering compounded and came from all sides.

            Those who love God and the Church might be excused for feeling similarly overrun lately by news of rampant sexual infidelity among the clergy. Last year there was a summit at the Vatican on the sexual abuse of minors across the globe. Throughout the last several months, there has been growing attention to the sexual abuse of women, including religious women, by priests and bishops, which Pope Francis acknowledged in an airborne press conference returning from the United Arab Emirates. And there has been a feature story in the New York Times on sexually active gay priests and a salacious 576-page book released in 2019 entitled, In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy.

            Clerical sexual abuse of minors. Clerical sexual abuse of women. Clerical sexual abuse of men. The deluge of stories of sexual unchastity among clergy, including in the Vatican, might lead one who does not know many priests to question whether clergy cheating on their vocations and promises of chaste celibacy are the rule rather than an aberration. There is also a second level of corruption, which involves the failure of those in positions of authority to address and attempt to eradicate sexual infidelity when they become aware of it. Such failures have gotten much attention regarding the abuse of minors, with some now being held accountable. But it still has not been substantially addressed with regard to clergy who are unfaithful with women or men.

           The practical toleration in many places of clerical unchastity with adults has helped foment a culture of hypocrisy, secrecy, and cover-up that has enfeebled the Church’s response to the abuse of minors: when those in authority get accustomed to looking the other way with regard to sexual sins with adults, it facilitates similar omissions with respect to the molestation of minors. There is an important lesson here that this flood of stories is making increasingly clearer: We cannot eradicate the cancer of the clerical sexual abuse of minors while allowing the tumors of clerical infidelity with adults to grow unaddressed.

              If we are going to permit priests to abuse nuns, do we really think that we are going to stop their abusing innocent children? If in the Vatican, or in dioceses or religious orders, there is widespread, tolerated homosexuality activity, do we really anticipate that we are going to get true reform?

           There are three ways to respond to this problem. The first is to try to pretend that it does not exist. There are many who choose this path. Some do not want to know the extent of the degeneracy because when they turn over the rugs, they will have to face the reality of cleaning the dirt they discover. They do not think they have the strength nor the stomach for it. Others just do not want to admit to a culture of sin because they prefer to keep a culture of happy appearances in which sin and redemption are not urgently necessary. Others try to say a few prayers, passing the responsibility to God to fix the problem by miraculous means. These responses are all immature, unhelpful, and abet the problem.

             The second response is to try to baptize the sins. If there is a problem with priests’ living chastely, then the problem must be with chastity rather than with the priests. There are many who think this way. Chaste celibacy, some imply, makes moral monsters. The solution, therefore, to the same-sex molestation of teenage boys—which accounts for four of five abuse cases—is somehow to allow potential molesters to marry women. Others, like Frédéric Martel, author of In the Closet of the Vatican, or Andrew Sullivan, author of the New York Times feature, advocate to have same sex attracted priests leave the closet and not feel ashamed for acting on their attractions, Christian sexual ethics notwithstanding. Others recognize that the chaste celibacy of priests and religious is the last barricade against the triumph of the sexual revolution. If the Church admits defeat, and either overturns celibacy or acknowledges that chastity is impossible for even the so-called spiritual elite, then everyone who has violated Church teaching against the sixth commandment will somehow be exonerated and be able to share in the spoils. But none of this, of course, will solve the problem of sexual abuse. It will exacerbate it. The sexual revolution does not protect victims of abuse, but ultimately gives those who would be prone to take advantage of others for sexual gratification the green light.

               The third response is to acknowledge and attack the problem. This demands eliminating a culture of unchastity in the clergy by communicating quite clearly that sins against chastity will not be tolerated. This means reaffirming the basic standards of insisting clergy be faithful their promises, and if they refuse, or discover they cannot, to remove them from a situation in which they can take advantage of their office to engage in spiritually incestuous relations with the sheep and lambs Christ has entrusted to their care. But it also requires providing much greater continual formation in celibate chastity throughout the life of the priest. In general, good, solid formation is provided in most seminaries, but insofar as temptations do not stop at ordination, neither should formation. Much of the ongoing training in celibate chastity for priests is negative, focused on not violating boundaries, etc. It must be complemented by greater formation in the virtues of chaste celibacy, temperance, love, purity, and piety.

             Many of the falls would be eliminated if bishops and clergy directors held priests accountable for the ordinary means of priestly spiritual growth, like spiritual direction, regular confession, and retreats, where priests can develop an intimate and ever-deepening friendship with Christ and learn to imitate His philia (loving friendship), agape (sacrificial love) and chaste celibacy. The story of Job, as we know, ends well. For the Church’s reform to have a similar outcome, we must approach the problem with the same faith as Job and be aware of “friends” with false solutions.

May 10, 2020

           Because of the times we are living in, Pope Francis has spoken out repeatedly about the dangers of “gender ideology,” a modern form of gnosticism that not only undermines our basic understanding of anthropology but also of reality. He has made a distinction between the welcome, support, accompaniment, and loving pastoral care that we must offer to those who say they are transgender—whose sexual self-understanding does not align with their biological sex—and pretending and teaching others that there really are men trapped in women’s bodies and women in men’s. While we must affirm the dignity of those who believe themselves to be transgender and defend their fundamental human rights to be free of violence and unjust discrimination, he says, we must also be clear about the danger that the ideology of gender poses to individuals and to society.

           “We must protect our humanity,” Pope Francis stated in his exhortation on the family, “and this means, in the first place, accepting it and respecting it as it was created.” It is “one thing to be understanding of human weakness and the complexities of life and another to accept ideologies that attempt to sunder what are inseparable aspects of reality” (Amoris Laetitia 56). Our sex is a basic part of human nature, just like our genes, race, age, and species. It is an objective fact, not a subjective choice, mental state, or feeling. To deny that is to deny our humanity. Gender ideology, he said in a 2015 General Audience, is therefore a “step backwards. The removal of [sexual] difference in fact creates a problem, not a solution,” a problem not just for those with gender dysphoria but for everyone. And yet our culture is recklessly sprinting backwards.

          Last year, the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives gave first hearing to the Equality Act of 2019, which aims to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which banned discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin”—by changing its definition of “sex” to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” the latter defined as “gender-related identity, appearance, mannerisms, or characteristics, regardless of the individual’s designated sex at birth.” Similarly, during the United Nation’s Commission on the Status of Women in New York, there was a push by the LGBTI Core Group—representing 28 countries, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the NGOs Human Rights Watch and Outright Action International—to change the meaning of “woman” to include those who claim to be women, “no matter their sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics.”

          Whereas everyone once knew what “woman” meant based on her bodily nature—her two X chromosomes, capacity for motherhood, female hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, secondary sex characteristics—proponents of gender ideology are asserting that bodily nature has nothing intrinsically to do with womanhood beyond how sex is “assigned” at birth. Womanhood, rather, is the way one thinks about oneself, or expresses oneself, based on sexual stereotypes like the clothes and shoes one wears, the hobbies or sports one enjoys, the make-up one dons, etc. Manhood is similarly a state of mind rather than a biological and bodily reality. The person is reduced to spirit and will and the human being almost becomes a disincarnate abstraction until one discerns what nature and gender one is or wants to be.

           Gender ideology, however, does not stop at profound anthropological confusion. As we are witnessing in Washington, the UN, and various state and national capitals, those promoting it are trying to reorder society according to that confusion, with profound consequences not just in terms of law, education, economy, health, safety, sports, language, and culture, but also in terms of human rights, marriage and family, motherhood and fatherhood, and the cause of women, men, and especially children.

           Let’s focus on the harm to four groups. First, to women. Changing the definition of woman to include biological men who identify as women means, de facto, that what women have fought so hard to achieve over recent decades in terms of jobs, education, and sports—and what is necessary for their safety in terms of shelter, bathrooms, and locker rooms—will no longer be protected. Any biological man saying he is a woman would now be entitled to whatever a biological woman is. Employers who want to save on parental leave but still claim gender balance can employ biological men who believe they are women instead of biological women. Boys claiming to be girls—with their physical advantages in terms of muscle mass and type, bone density, heart, lungs and natural performance enhancing hormones—can compete against girls and take their championships (and no doubt soon scholarships), and in violent contact sports also put them at greater risk for serious injury. Women who have suffered violence from men will have to endure biological men entering battered women’s shelters, bathrooms and locker rooms, no matter the trauma to their sense of safety. And the opportunity for those who want to exploit such facile, subjective redefinitions of personal identity are already sadly in evidence: rapists who self-identify as women to enter women’s prisons to rape again; peeping toms or exhibitionists who identify as women or girls to enter women’s bathrooms and locker rooms at their will and pleasure; careerists who want to improve their chances for jobs identifying as women to take advantage of gender parity policies.

            Second, to children. Pope Francis is particularly concerned about gender ideology being taught to kids, so that boys and girls are encouraged to question, at their earliest ages, whether they are a boy or a girl and are taught, at a time when gender non-conformity is higher, that they can choose their gender. Rather than solid anthropology, indoctrinating them in categories like those found in the “gender unicorn” is a form of intellectual child abuse. Worse, however, is what is happening medically with children who experience gender dysphoria. Rather than treating the underlying issues of gender non-conformity, children are being encouraged to transition socially at a very young age and adopt opposite-sex name, habits and expressions. As pre-pubescents, they are then being given puberty blockers—which are not even FDA approved for this purpose—despite the fact that they arrest bone growth, decrease bone density, stop the formation of sex cells, and leave them physically behind their maturing peers. When they reach the general age of puberty, they’re being given cross sex hormones in very high doses, despite foreseeable side effects in terms of bone mineral density, lipid profile, cardiovascular problems and cancer. And finally, as early as 13 in some places, they are being helped to have sex reassignment surgery, surgically removing their external sex organs and replacing them with a simulation of opposite sex organs. All of this is happening despite the fact that longitudinal studies have shown that 85 percent of children with gender identity disorder do not persist in dysphoria in adolescence. Once, however, children begin the four-step pathway of social transition, puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, and reassignment surgery, it is rare that they revert. Parents who seek to prevent this pattern are treated as facilitators of their children’s future suicide, or uncaring bigots, and in some countries have even begun to lose their children.

               Third, to those with gender dysphoria. Studies in Sweden have shown, for example, that despite a culture strongly supportive of those who say they are transgender, the suicide rate 10-15 years after sex reassignment surgery is 19 times that of comparable peers, including groups who also experience some form of social stigma. How come? Because you cannot fool nature. All non-ideological, commonsensical thinkers recognize that there is something awry when someone thinks he is a man trapped in a woman’s body, or vice versa, in a similar way to those who think they are transspecies or transracial. Such dysphoria is not remedied by everyone else’s feigning the emperor is an empress. But there is a vast cultural conspiracy pretending that those with gender dysphoria are psychologically healthy and normal, and that their only issues concern integration within the larger culture. It is medical, psychological, cultural, and ethical malpractice of the highest measure.

              The last group is everyone in society, as gender ideology seeks to compel us to suppress our common sense and knowledge of elementary biology and play along with the fiction. All of us will have to change our pronouns, or pay fines, or lose jobs. Individuals and institutions that fail to abide by the zeitgeist will suffer severe consequences for civil rights violations. Medical professionals, despite their oath first to do no harm, will have to prescribe puberty blockers and opposite sex hormones and to perform surgeries. Women and girls will have to live with the new situation that treats trans-women and biological women as legally identical. Families that try to give their children adequate psychological care to treat underlying issues may be found guilty of civil rights abuses and lose their children. All of this will likely continue until children who have suffered all the consequences of puberty blockers, cross sex hormones and amputations as minors grow up and begin to sue the medical establishment for the irreversible damage done to them. These radical changes, however, are not inevitable. But if they are going to be halted, those who see clearly, truthfully and charitably need to act now to protect our humanity and defend and help those who are vulnerable.

May 3, 2020

          Last February, Pope Francis welcomed to the Vatican leaders of the Italian pro-life movement the day before Italy’s annual pro-life day, held since 1978 on the first Sunday of February. He spoke powerfully about how “the defense of life is not carried out in only one way, or with one gesture, but it’s done in a multiplicity of actions, attentions, and initiatives; nor does it concern some persons or certain professional realms, but it involves every citizen and the complex web of social relations.” Catholics in a particular way, he added, are called to “be leaven to spread a style and practices of reception and respect for life in the whole ‘dough’ of society, [which] must always be a jealous and firm custodian of life.”

            While stating that “to take care of life exacts doing so during the whole of life, and up to the end … [and giving] attention to the conditions of life: health, education, work opportunities, and so on,” he nevertheless underlined that “the defense of life has its fulcrum in the reception of the one generated and who is still protected in the maternal womb, enveloped in the mother’s womb as in one loving embrace that unites them.” Therefore, we cannot promote and protect life, he said, without first defending the life of the unborn. There’s no seamless garment if there is no child to be covered by that garment as the child grows from conception to natural death.

            Pope Francis continued, “To extinguish life voluntarily in its budding is … a betrayal of … the pact that binds the generations among themselves, a pact that enables us to look ahead with hope. If life itself, however, is violated in its beginning, what remains is no longer the grateful and amazed reception of the gift, but rather a cold calculation of how much we have and what we can get rid of. Then life is also reduced to a good of consumption, to be used for ourselves and for others or discarded. How tragic this vision is, unfortunately, widespread and rooted, and how much suffering it causes the weakest of our brothers and sisters!” He then turned to the political dimension of the pro-life movement. He thanked those present for their “attachment to the Catholic faith and to the Church, which renders you explicit and courageous witnesses of the Lord Jesus.” But he added, “At the same time, I appreciate the secular nature with which you present yourselves and operate, a secular nature founded on the truth of the good of life, which is a human and civil value and, as such, calls to be recognized by all persons of good will, of whatever religion or creed they belong.”

             Pro-life convictions, though strengthened by faith, are not in the least sectarian, he stressed. They flow also from reason about the nature of the child in the womb—at the same age and with the same humanity every one of us once was—and the basic principle of ethics that the intentional slaughter of innocent human beings is always wrong. Pope Francis added that the children whose lives are threatened by abortion are not the property of the mother, but are “are children of the whole society, and their killing at such an enormous rate, with the endorsement of the States, is a grave problem that undermines the foundations of justice and compromises the right solution to any other human and social question.” He finished by making a special appeal to those in public office, “so that, regardless of each one’s faith convictions, they will place as the cornerstone of the common good the defense of the life of those that are about to be born and make their entrance in society.” He prayed that they will not “let themselves be conditioned by a logic that looks only to personal success or immediate or partisan interests, but always looks beyond, and looks to all with the heart.”

              His reflections provide a Catholic lens with which to look at the very disturbing events that have occurred in New York and seem to be on the way in other states. On January 22, 2019, the 46th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, as faithful Catholics in the United States were observing a day of prayer and penance in reparation for the nearly 60,000,000 children who have legally been killed in the womb since that judicial travesty, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York was holding a celebration in Albany. Cuomo, baptized Catholic soon after he left the womb in 1957 and recipient of sixteen years of Catholic education at St. Gerard Majella Elementary School and Archbishop Malloy High School in Queens and Fordham University in the Bronx, hosted a jovial ceremony at the State House in which he signed the Reproductive Health Act. His signature made abortion legal up to the moment of birth for any reason, eliminated the conscience rights of health care professionals not to participate in abortions, made it possible for abortions to be performed by those who are not doctors, and permitted that babies who survive abortion and are born alive to be left to die without any medical assistance.

             Cuomo ebulliently began the signing ceremony observing, “It is a good evening this evening! Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations!” He gave shout outs to the legislators who supported the Act and a special welcome to Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who argued Roe v. Wade before the Supreme Court. He dubbed the night “bittersweet,” sweet “because we won … after a long, long, long fight” to “ensure a woman’s right to … access an abortion,” and bitter for two reasons: because “we shouldn’t be here” trying to defend abortion against pro-lifers who are trying to take society back fifty years to before Roe; and because, as he said he told his daughter—whom he thankfully chose not to abort—the Reproductive Health Act should have gone into law eight years ago. But Cuomo was not done celebrating. He signed an executive order requiring that the One World Trade Center’s 408 foot spire, the bridge named after his father Mario (the former Tappan Zee spanning the Hudson), the Kosciuszko Bridge between Brooklyn and Queens and the Alfred Smith State Office Building in Albany be lit in pink that night. Cuomo turned a monument rising up from the ashes of the deaths of 2,831 at the World Trade Center—including 11 children who were victims of the terrorists while still in their mother’s wombs—into a festive symbol for a practice that since Roe has taken the lives of an average of 3,574 innocent children a day in their mother’s wombs. And he said he believes that “we have to go even a step further and do a constitutional amendment so no governor, no legislator, no political swing, can ever jeopardize a woman’s right to control her own body in this state.”

             This is something quite far from what Pope Francis was saying those in public office should do: placing the defense of life of those about to be born at the cornerstone of the common good. This is essentially putting the destruction of life of those about to enter society as the foundation of one’s political platform. Cuomo likes to quote Pope Francis when it serves his purposes, especially when he thinks he is joining Pope Francis in criticizing the Church and her leaders for opposing Cuomo’s own priorities. But in this case, we cannot but help quote Pope Francis, who very bluntly likened abortion to “hiring a contract killer” to “take out a human life to solve a problem.” In this papal simile, Cuomo is a don in such a mafia culture.

             The logic of abortion is that those who are bigger, stronger, older, more politically connected should have the right to end the life of those who are smaller, more vulnerable, younger and without a voice. When we accept that, then why not infanticide for unwanted children? Why not let the “hired killers” have a bigger and easier target? To oppose infanticide, however, should logically require opposing abortion. Pretending that abortion is the equivalent of sloughing off a wart or ending the life of some insignificant non-human species, is no longer possible. Abortion is plainly about the willful killing of another human being.

                Some, like Cuomo, think that such intentional killing of little children is something to be proud of, that the whole world should be lit in pink while the crimson blood of babies stains latex gloves and forceps. No longer is there the political need, they think, to say that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” Now it should be celebrated as a great human rights advance and women should unabashedly brag about their abortions. The more, the merrier. What should happen to them? Many are calling for Cuomo and the other Catholics who supported the Reproductive Health Act to be excommunicated. Even if the bishops with the responsibility to make that call do so, however, it would not be enough. What is really needed is for voters politically to excommunicate them from public office.

          The question is: What is it going to take for voters, especially Catholic voters, to conclude that those who celebrate the destruction of human life in the womb as if it is the Fourth of July, who desecrate monuments and landmarks to gloat about it, who think that babies who survive abortions should be allowed to die without medical assistance, do not represent their values? And when will they resolve to do something about it?

April 26, 2020

           The first time a believer receives the flesh and blood of the eternal Son of God in Holy Communion ought to be one of the greatest occasions in that person's life. The amount of preparation, waiting, and longing that normally accompanies one's first Communion only makes the reception even more special. But what makes one's first Communion a truly blessed event is not the adjective but the substantive: not the "first" but the "communion." Because of Whom we receive, our second, third, next, and last Communion should always be as special.

          The Church teaches that the communion we enter into with the Lord Jesus is not meant to last only as long as it takes our body to digest the sacred host; rather, our communion is supposed to continue in all our actions throughout the day. In short, the reception of the Lord Jesus in the Eucharist is meant to lead to a truly Eucharistic Life, one in which Jesus in the Eucharist becomes the source, summit, root and center of a person's existence. This reality, which the Church puts before all believers, is modeled in a particular way for young first Communicants by some great young saints in Church history. Today we briefly look at four of them and propose them as exemplars to our children preparing to receive Him for the first-time very soon.

Blessed Imelda Lambertini (1322-1333)

           There's a prayer that has been made popular among Catholics in which they ask the Lord for the grace to receive Him in Holy Communion that day with the same love with which they received Him in their first Communion, with the same love with which they hope to receive Him at their last communion, and with which they would want to receive Him if that were the only communion of their life. The three parts of this beautiful prayer all came together on May 12, 1333, for an 11-year-old girl in Bologna, Italy called Imelda Lambertini.

            When Imelda turned nine, she begged her parents to allow her to go to the school at the Dominican convent in her city. She fervently desired to be able to receive Jesus in Holy Communion like the sisters and several of the older students, but this was six centuries prior to St. Pius X's lowering the first Communion age to the "age of reason," or about the age of 8. Prior to that 20th century change, many young people received the Lord for the first time during their teenage years. In place of being able to receive Jesus in Holy Communion, Imelda used to go to the chapel to adore Him. She used to pepper the Sisters with the question, "Tell me, can anyone receive Jesus in his heart and not die?" That question would turn prophetic.

            On the vigil of the Ascension, she was praying in Church after Mass. The sisters were preparing to leave the church when some of them were startled to see a strange light, what appeared to be a small sacred host, hovering in the air above her head as she was kneeling before the tabernacle. They ran to get the parish priest. Knowing of her burning desire to receive Holy Communion and taking this theophany as a sign from heaven that she was ready, the priest gave her Jesus in Holy Communion. To her enormous joy, she devoutly received her long-awaited for the first time. And the last and only time.

           Soon after receiving Holy Communion she fell first into what seemed like an ecstasy of love. She had a most serene and angelic smile on her face. While all the sisters were praying with her in thanksgiving, they watched her slowly sink to the floor. They thought that she had simply fainted and felt her arm. But she had died out of love for Christ in the Eucharist, with her face transfixed by a smile that has never worn off. With the Lord within the temple of her body, her soul ascended out of her body with the Lord into heaven. Her body remains incorrupt seven centuries later and lies in a Church in Bologna. In 1826, Pope Leo XII declared her blessed and proclaimed her to be the patroness of first communicants.

St Gemma Galgani (1878-1903)

          Gemma was born in Camigliano, Italy in 1878, the fourth of eight children. Her mother used to take her as a young girl to daily Mass and passed on to her a great love for Jesus in Holy Communion. Around the time of her mother's death when she was seven, Gemma began to have intense experiences of prayer. Her father sent her to be educated at the convent of the Sisters of St. Zita in Lucca. Under the guidance of the sisters she developed a deep love for the passion of the Lord, for the Blessed Virgin Mary, and for Jesus in the Holy Eucharist.

          On the Feast of the Sacred Heart in 1887, when she was nine, she received the Love of her life within for the first time. She said innocently to one of her friends afterward, "I feel a fire burning here," and pointed to her breast. "Do you feel like that, too?" She couldn't fathom that there was anything exceptional in her own experience.

          Her love for Jesus in the Eucharist only grew the more she received the Lord as if it were the last time. She would write later to Jesus in prayer, "What would become of me if I did not dedicate all my affections to the Sacred Host? Oh yes, I know it, Lord; that in order to make me deserve paradise in heaven, you give me Communion here on earth!" She would call the Eucharist "the school of paradise where one learns how to love."

          In a passage that would be good for all communicants—first and veteran—to contemplate, she wrote to her priest spiritual director. "Oh, what precious moments are those at Holy Communion! Communion is a happiness, Father, that seems to me cannot be equaled even by the beatitude of the saints and angels. They admire the face of Jesus, and are certain of not committing sin or of being lost; and I admire those two things, and I should like to be of their company, but I, too, have reason for exulting, for Jesus enters everyday into my heart. Jesus gives me all of Himself!"

This Year's First Communicants

          These child Eucharistic saints are just some of the many who have been led through communion with the Lord on the altar here on earth to an eternal communion with Him around the celestial throne. Together let us pray that the children making their first Holy Communion very soon may imitate their love for Jesus in the Eucharist, follow their example in living Eucharistic lives, and be spurred on to become, themselves, Eucharistic saints for children of future generations.

April 19, 2020

            Catholics can easily recall when Jesus instituted the Sacrament of the Eucharist. He did it during the first Mass, which began during the Last Supper with the words of consecration and finished the following afternoon when Jesus literally gave His body and shed His blood for us on the Cross. However, far fewer Catholics know when Jesus instituted the Sacrament of Reconciliation, which may be one of the reasons many today take it for granted. He did it on the day He rose from the dead! The timing of its inception shows just how crucial Jesus considered it in His salvific mission.

            By instituting it on Easter Sunday evening, He also manifested what the sacrament of reconciliation is meant to bring about. Just like in the parable of the prodigal son, whenever we return to the Father’s house through this sacrament, the Father rejoices because His “son who was dead has come to life again” (Lk 15:24). Jesus wanted explicitly to link our resurrection through this Sacrament to His resurrection from the dead. Therefore, on the day He rose from the dead, He walked through the closed doors of the room where ten of His apostles were huddled together. His first words to them were “peace be with you.” He had come from heaven to establish the definitive peace treaty between God and man through the forgiveness of our sins and He was about to commission them to continue this very mission.

           “Just as the Father sent me,” He said, “so I send you!” But since “no one can forgive sins but God alone” (Mk 2:7), Jesus had to give them God’s power to fulfill this mission. So, He breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Then He said words that point clearly to the structure of the sacrament of confession as we know it: “Those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven; those whose sins you retain, they are retained.” Jesus did not give them the ability to read minds or hearts; therefore, the only way that they would know which sins to forgive or retain is if individual sinners told them their sins.

            Just as Jesus, three days beforehand, had made them His instruments in order to give us His body and blood through the sacrament of the Eucharist, so He was making them His instruments, His ambassadors, through whom He would forgive our sin. These two sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist are intrinsically related. Just like a loving mother both cleans and feeds a child, so God through these sacraments both wipes us clean of our sins and fills us with supernatural nourishment.

           Pope St. John Paul II had called all of us in the Church to renewal in two areas: a revival in all parishes of the celebration of Sunday Mass and an increase in Eucharistic adoration. He wanted us to receive Christ more worthily and worship our Eucharistic Lord with greater love and gratitude. The whole Church would benefit from a similar two-fold renewal with respect to the Sacrament of Reconciliation. There needs to a revival both in terms of our receiving Christ’s forgiveness through the sacrament and an increase in worship of our Merciful Lord. This Sunday’s Feast of Divine Mercy is an opportunity for us to focus on each of these two priorities.

            In 2000, Pope St. John Paul II instituted this feast on the Second Sunday of Easter so that the Church might rejoice over Christ’s gift of mercy within the Easter Octave. The Pope announced this new feast during the canonization of St. Faustina Kowalska, a Polish nun to whom the Lord appeared in the 1930s asking her to spread throughout the world devotion to His merciful love. Private revelations like the one to St. Faustina never disclose to us anything truly new; their purpose is to remind us of what God has revealed in Scripture and Tradition and apply those truths to particular circumstances we face.

           As Jesus instructed Faustina: "My daughter, faithfully live up to the words which I speak to you. Do not value any external thing too highly, even if it were to seem very precious to you. Let go of yourself and abide with Me continually. Entrust everything to Me and do nothing on your own, and you will always have great freedom of spirit. No circumstances or events will ever be able to upset you. Set little store on what people say. Let everyone judge you as they like. Do not make excuses for yourself, it will do you no harm. Give away everything at the first sign of a demand, even if they were the most necessary things. Do not ask for anything without consulting Me. Allow them to take away even what is due you – respect, your good name – let your spirit rise above all that. And so, set free from everything, rest close to My Heart, not allowing your peace to be disturbed by anything. My pupil, consider the words which I have spoken to you" (Diary, 1685).

           In His appearances to Faustina, Jesus wanted to remind all of us of what He said throughout the Gospel: that we need His mercy, that we have to trust in, ask for, and receive that mercy, and that we need to share that mercy with others. And through her, He called us to live five new devotions by which we could more deeply assimilate all these realities.

           Jesus asked that a feast of His Divine Mercy be established on the Second Sunday of Easter, prepared for by a novena beginning Good Friday. He showed her an image of Divine Mercy, with blood and water flowing from His pierced side, and asked her to spread its veneration. He called on all of us to unite ourselves in prayer to Him on the Cross at 3 pm each day. And He taught us to pray the beautiful Chaplet of Divine Mercy, which explicitly links our prayers for God’s mercy to Jesus in the Eucharist.

          As we continue to celebrate Easter, we turn with trust to Jesus and ask Him to help us experience the true joy of His resurrection through each of these devotions and especially through the resurrection from death to life He wants to give us in a confessional nearby.

April 12, 2020

           Today we mark, with Christians throughout the world, the greatest day and the most important event in all of history. Today, the Son of God made man, who loved us enough to become one of us, and who loved us even more to give His life for us, rose from the dead, defeating death once and for all. Today, all Christians can jubilantly shout with St. Paul, “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (1 Cor 15:55). Because of this day, evil does not have the last word. Because of this day, death is not a period, but a comma in a book without a final chapter. Because of this day, dying is just a change of address, in which those who are and live as God’s children move to an eternal mansion full of love.

          But the significance of this day of days is not merely supposed to be future, in terms of what it means for life after our death—as if we were just dealing with an eternal retirement plan. It is also not merely supposed to be the past, looking back to what happened to Christ nearly two thousand years ago. The most important thing for us is to consider what it means for our PRESENT, for you and me, today. The celebration of Easter today is supposed to have the same dramatic impact on us as it did on Jesus’ first disciples because the Jesus who arose that day is still ALIVE and He wants to fill us with the same life-giving joy that He gave to His beloved disciples 20 centuries ago.

          To capture the transformation the Risen Jesus wants to work in us, it would be good, briefly, to reflect on what it was like for Mary Magdalene, Peter, John, and the rest of His disciples on the day of the Resurrection. To call them dejected, lost, and profoundly saddened only begins to describe what they were going through. Their whole universe had been turned upside down. Not only had they witnessed Jesus, their friend, brutally tortured and massacred, nailed naked to a cross as a common criminal, but they also had believed deeply that He was the long-awaited Messiah, that He was God. Therefore, not only were they mourning the death of a loved one—which is already hard enough, as any of us who have lost a loved one recognize—but they were also trying to come to grips with whether God indeed had died or whether their friend, in whom they trusted, was, despite all His gifts, ultimately an imposter. Despite the fact that Jesus had told them on three occasions that He “must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again” (Mk 8:31; 9:31; 10:34), the words had not penetrated their hearts. When His critics had asked Him for a sign, He told them that “no sign would be given it except the sign of Jonah” (Mt 16:4), meaning that He would spend three days in the belly of the earth just as Jonah had spent three days in the belly of the whale. But that did not register. Even when Jesus identified Himself as the “Resurrection and the Life” (Jn 11:25), they did not capture what those words meant: in order for Him to be “resurrection personified,” He needed to rise again, which means that He first needed to die.

          When Mary Magdalene, Salome, and Mary, the mother of James, went to the tomb on Sunday morning, they were going reverently to anoint Jesus’ corpse. Little did they realize what a great transformation had already occurred and what a great personal transformation awaited them. The stone had already been rolled away. The tomb was empty. A dazzling angel told them that Jesus had been raised. Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene in the Garden and filled her with exhilaration when He pronounced her name! He appeared to the ten in the Upper Room, filled them with His joy and peace, and gave them His own mission—“Just as the Father sent me, so I send you,” bestowing on them the Holy Spirit so that they could forgive sins in God’s name. He appeared to the disciples on the Road to Emmaus and made their hearts burn as He described how the Son of Man had to suffer, and then revealed Himself to them in the “breaking of the bread.” THEIR WHOLE UNIVERSE, which had been turned upside down two days before, was now turned RIGHT-SIDE UP AGAIN. And what incredible joy must have raced through all the cells of their body, the type of joy to which words cannot even do justice! Everything for them would have forever changed. The resurrection was the answer to all their questions, the resolution to all their doubts, the definitive peace to all their angst, the joy to all their sadness, God’s ultimate response to the mystery of all suffering and death. Life in general—and their life in particular—not only was no longer a tragedy; their life now had immeasurable meaning. They were the disciples and intimate friends of the one who had conquered even sin and death—and they were now empowered and emboldened by Him to take that greatest news ever told to the ends of the earth. No amount of disdain, threats, persecutions, torture, or even death could dissuade them, because the resurrection taught them, unmistakably and unforgettably, that God is in charge and makes good on all His promises.

         Jesus wants to bring about the same type of revolution in us today. He wants to give us the same joy He gave His first disciples because He loves us no less than He loved them. The only thing that will stop Him from doing so is if we do not let Him do what He wants to do. He who is the “Resurrection and the Life” wants us to experience in the present the full meaning of that resurrection and that life, but for that to happen, we have to recognize and structure our lives in correspondence to the fact that Jesus truly is ALIVE. Almost every Christian knows that Jesus is alive theoretically, but many Christians do not behave as if Jesus is alive practically. We can treat Jesus like a distant relative, someone whom we respect and care for, but whom for the most part in our day-to-day lives we ignore. Or we can treat Him like our best high school teacher, who has obviously had an impact in making us the people we are today, but who is no longer practically involved in continuing to guide our decision making. Or we can treat Jesus like a good doctor, to whom we go when we have problems, but, outside of those times, with whom we really have no relationship at all.

          The point I am trying to make by analogy is this: Few Christians treat the Risen Jesus as if He is DEAD, but many Christians treat Jesus as if He is BARELY ALIVE. Today, on this Easter, Jesus wants to change that. He came, as He Himself said, “so that [we] might have life and have it to the full” (Jn 10:10), but for us to come fully alive, we need first to allow Jesus to become fully alive in us. We need to rise with Him and live a resurrected life with him! We need to stop treating Him as a concept, or as someone we turn to at our whim and convenience—or only at times of great inconvenience—but rather base our whole lives on Him. For the first disciples, the joy of that first Easter did not end the day after Easter, because they knew that Jesus, risen from the dead, would be with them “until the end of time” (Mt 28:20). They structured their whole lives on a deep personal relationship with the Risen Jesus, grounding all the aspects of their lives on the basis of this living communion of love. We are called to do the same! Christ has truly risen! And this changes everything! Alleluia!

April 12, 2020

            During the 1576 plague that menaced Milan and eventually took 25,000 lives, the civil government fled the city out of fear. The Archbishop of Milan, Saint Charles Borromeo, took over, assured the people he would not abandon them and, together with priests from the parishes and religious orders, began to care for their material and spiritual needs. He organized hospitals, cared for orphans, and brought the sacraments to those who were quarantined in their homes. He got priests to offer Masses in public squares and the middle of streets so that people could participate from their houses. He sold his personal goods and much of the diocesan treasury to feed the hungry and had the tapestries of his residence converted into blankets to warm the poor.

          As a Good Shepherd, he was willing to risk his life to care for both the souls and the bodies of those entrusted to him and was able to persuade so many of his brother priests to join him. Recalling how Christ died for them first, he declared that Christ “does not even request this pathetic life of ours, but only that we put it at risk.” He challenged them to pay attention not only to what can kill the body, like the pestilence, but also to what can harm the soul, commenting, “the devout souls of our brethren languish with desire for divine things.” And providing them, he argued, is not a small matter.

          “I will certainly say that the sick do not need our assistance in such a way that without it they would have no hope of salvation, but often our services are necessary. Besides, it is indisputably clear that we all understand how much [the sacraments] benefit not only the bad but also the good, and how much alleviation they usually bring to the sick body and above all to the soul solicitous for its salvation.”

          The greatest illustration of that point was how he scaled a mountain of corpses to give absolution and viaticum to a man at the top of the heap who had been placed there prematurely. His example of courage tied to charity is a mirror for the Church and her leaders in every age, most especially at times of crisis. As all of us confront the coronavirus, we can profit from how St. Charles put the Catholic faith into action in the most demanding and dangerous circumstances. I would heartily recommend reading Msgr. John Cihak’s superb 2017 work Charles Borromeo: Selected Orations, Homilies and Writings.

          To become courageous like he was, what virtues do we need?

          The first is faith, to recognize that Christ, who promised to be with us always until the end of time (Mt 28:20), is good to His word. Faith likewise helps us trust in God’s providential care. There’s a temptation, in times of crisis, to try to take control even over things that human beings cannot control. This can come from a practical atheism, from living as if God does not exist or does not care. Faith inspires us to do all we can, but in tandem, rather than apart, from God, knowing that our life is in God’s hands.

          The second is prudence, which helps us to discern the good in each circumstance among many competing goods—and to choose the right means to achieve it. It helps us set a proper rule or measure, something desperately needed in times of crisis when certain goods can be emphasized disproportionately and others can be forgotten. Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas after him, taught that moral virtue is a middle point between two extremes, deficiency and excess. Compassion, for example, is the mean between apathy and sentimental indulgence. Courage is found between the extremes of cowardice and recklessness.

          In this present circumstance, prudence can help us to see that an “overabundance of caution” is not a virtue but a vice. Prudence focuses on the right measure of caution, balancing, for example, the duty we need to protect those most vulnerable to infection by “flattening the curve” through social distancing, hand-washing, and various other practices, with other needs, like providing for one’s family, nourishing one’s soul and others’, providing goods and services, etc. Prudence assists courage in helping people know how to take the right risks.

          The third virtue is charity, which helps us to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others. “No one has greater love,” Jesus said during the Last Supper, “to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn 15:13), and charity motivates us to take risks, even dangerous ones, to protect and provide for those we love. Moms and Dads, even the most temperamentally timid and conflict adverse, instinctively protect their children in the face of gunmen, bombs, and tornados. The greater the love, the greater the audacity. Courage does not mean fearlessness, but doing what we ought despite our fear, and love gives us the strength to overcome fear and do what love demands.

           The fourth is patience, which means principally not an ability to wait but a capacity to suffer. The word patience comes from the Latin patior, to “suffer,” which is why we call the sick in hospitals “patients.” Courage requires that we do not have an excessive fear of pain and of where our fear of pain ultimately derives, the fear of death.

            In the present circumstance, many, including young people at very low risk of serious consequences from Covid-19, are terrified of contracting it, as if it were an automatic death sentence, even though, for 80 percent of those who get it, the symptoms are mild and pass like a cold or flu, and only those whose bodies are compromised by old age or other serious health conditions are in serious danger.

          We should all be doing everything reasonable to prevent transmission out of concern for those who would be most vulnerable, conscious of the reality that our health care system is inadequate to handle more than 120,000 people in ICUs at the same time. We need to work together to ensure that no one dies when medical services, received promptly, could save their lives. At the same time, however, we should not be giving in to an epidemic of fear, as if catching Covid-19 were getting leprosy or stage-4 pancreatic cancer. Hysteria, based on fear of pain and death, does not help.

          The Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis’ 15th-century spiritual classic, advised us that the easiest way to overcome the fear of death is to ponder it each day. “In every deed and every thought, act as though you were to die this very day.” Once we begin doing that, we start taking every day more seriously: we do not procrastinate on telling family members and friends that we love them; we ask forgiveness from God and those we have wronged while we still have time; we let pass so many things that in the final analysis do not matter much; and we start to get our real priorities straight. When we pray each day Jesus’ last words from the Cross, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Lk 23:46), we become emboldened, like Jesus, not to have our life taken from us but rather freely to lay it down (Jn 10:18). When we are not afraid to die because we have rehearsed it daily in prayer, we will be ready to offer our life without fear should that prove necessary.

          Crises, like the present situation of the coronavirus, are times for Catholics united with Christ truly to shine. As salt, light and leaven, Catholics are called to help everyone else to become courageous in the face of the threats, to be willing to act to help others and save their lives, and to show everyone how unite their situations to God. It is a time for Catholics to show that we truly believe Jesus’ words, “Take courage. It is I. Do not be afraid!” (Mk 6:50), and, like waves of apostles and martyrs throughout the centuries, and saints like Charles Borromeo, boldly lead society not only in response to people’s material needs, but in care for their even more important spiritual needs.

April 5, 2020

           No greater homily has ever been given than the one Jesus preaches today, nailed to his perpendicular pulpit. It consists of a mere seven sentences, spread over the span of three cold and dark hours. For Jesus to have spoken at all shows how important He considered every word. The human person speaks during exhalation, and for a crucified man to talk, he has to thrust himself upward by his legs to open his lungs sufficiently to exhale. Under ordinary circumstances, this would have been immensely painful, but for someone like Jesus with nails through the nerves of His feet, such an action would have also sent piercing bolts racing through His beaten body. Not only was He suffering while He said these words, but He was suffering anew precisely in order to say these words.

          Well before the Roman soldier had pierced His heart with a lance to let forth a torrent of blood and water, Jesus Himself revealed its contents through His scabbed and parched lips. And in them, Jesus, like any great orator and teacher, summarized the most important parts of what He had spent His life trying to communicate.

          The first word came when He was being hammered to His cruciform podium. While others would have naturally cried out in agony, Jesus cried, rather, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” These words of mercy were invoked not just for His executioners and mockers, but for everyone who has ever sinned. Little did His executioners realize they were killing the God-man; little have we known that by our sins we were doing the same. But in the midst of suffering the worst sin of all, Jesus was begging forgiveness for us all. The “friend of tax collectors and sinners” was a faithful friend to all such sinners to the end.

          His second word was to one sinner in particular who, in the midst of his own pain, recognized Jesus not as a fellow crucified criminal about to die, but as a king about to conquer and reign. After defending Jesus, he did not ask to be saved from death, only to be remembered. And Jesus responded with words that have never been forgotten: “Today I tell you: you will be with me in paradise.” The good thief knocked and the door of heaven was opened, and the Good Shepherd arrived in verdant pastures with one of His lost sheep.

          His third word was to saints. Jesus had come from heaven to bring into being a new family. That family already had a father, but needed a mother. In a second annunciation, Jesus declared to Mary that she was to become a mother again: “Woman behold your son!” Then he turned to His beloved disciple and said, “Behold your mother.” The new “mother of all the living,” Mary repeated her “fiat!” and has ever since helped John and her other spiritual children to say the same.

          In the fourth word, Jesus shows how He was fulfilling all the Old Testament prophecies. In the words of Psalm 22, He turned to his Father and prayed: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This psalm had predicted that He would be mocked and encircled by evildoers, that others would cast lots for His clothing, and that He would be able to count all His bones. But that is just a prelude to a message of great hope: that He would live in God and even those who “sleep in the earth” would bow before God. Despite contrary perceptions, God was shouting that He had never abandoned His beloved children and would call them back to life!

          In the fifth word, He fulfilled Psalm 69, which foretold that He would be thirsty and given vinegar to drink. He who had created all the water in the world nevertheless clamored “I thirst!” As with the time He asked the Samaritan woman for a drink, however, His thirst was to give us Himself as “living water,” to quench our thirsts and desires forever.

          That fifth word leads to the sixth. Scripture scholars say that the wine mixed with gall given to Jesus constituted the fourth cup of the Jewish Passover rite, which brought to completion what Jesus had begun at the Last Supper the night before. As the new paschal victim, the Lamb of God was giving His body and shedding His blood to inaugurate the new and eternal covenant. He cried out in triumph “it is finished!” With His mission successfully accomplished, He could now turn to His heavenly Father and in his last word put an exclamation point on the infinite trust that characterized His entire life: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit!”

          Jesus had strained to speak these words aloud so that we could know what was in His heart as that heart was about to beat its last. He proclaimed them so that we could hear them and base our lives on them. Today their power and eloquence echo unabated in the contrite, contemplative hearts of His faithful followers.

March 29, 2020

          There are many saints fittingly associated with Good Friday: The Blessed Mother, the apostle John, Mary Magdalene, Simon of Cyrene, and Veronica, all of them, in one way or another, supported Jesus as He took our place on death row. The most remarkable saint of all, however, was the one who was with Jesus on death row. The Good Thief certainly was the least likely saint of Good Friday—and maybe of all time. But he is, in some ways, the most fitting Good Friday saint, because he is the greatest model of what Good Friday is all about.

          As He was being nailed to the Cross, Jesus did not cry out in pain. He did not shriek, as men would be expected to do in such circumstances, either insisting on His innocence, or condemning those who sentenced them, or imploring forgiveness for their misdeeds. Jesus, instead, cried out to His Father and begged Him to forgive the sins of others: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” His first thought for those who were brutally killing Him was not retaliation but exculpation. He had come to call and save sinners and, even in agony, never wavered from that mission.

          We see Him fulfill that mission in His interaction with the bandit on His right. After Jesus, hanging on the Cross, had been mocked by the Jewish leaders, by the soldiers, and even by those passing by, He received what may have been the most piercing mockery of all from the thief on His left. St. Luke tells us that the brigand “kept deriding him and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’” While the jeers from soldiers, the Sanhedrin, and the passing mob were probably anticipated, the sneers from the burglar on His side were likely totally unexpected. Jesus had long been known as the “friend of tax collectors and sinners.” He had stuck up for them and risked His reputation for their sake. To be attacked by one of those malefactors with whom Jesus identified with special predilection probably stung as much as the blistering kiss of Judas.

          But God seeks to bring good out of every evil, and from the ridicule from the sinister swindler came the conversion of the dextral. We do not know what it was that got this man, so accustomed to prey on the innocent, to stick up for one. Maybe it was watching Jesus suffer the same pain of crucifixion in a totally different way from him and his fellow thief. Maybe it was hearing His strange plea to the one He called “Father” for the forgiveness of those who were executing Him. Maybe he had concluded at the end of his life that evil simply does not pay and, having wasted his life until then, he did not want to squander the few precious moments he had left.

          Whatever the reason, honesty and the fear of God returned to him. He twisted toward his fellow thief and tried to revivify these traits in him before the time when there would be no time left. Even though it would have been excruciatingly painful for him to talk, he rebuked his fellow rustler and said, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.”

In doing so, the thief on the right earned for all eternity the paradoxical adjective “good.” He had humbly told the truth. He had thought of someone other than himself. He had stuck up for someone who was innocent. This humble, other-centered honesty is a necessary condition for effective prayer, and it occasioned what might have been the first—and maybe the only—real prayer of his life. Whereas before he might have been tempted to steal what he did not deserve, he now realized, with his pick-pocketing hands nailed to wood, that there was another way: he could ask. He saw now that there was the possibility that someone else, out of sheer goodness and generosity, might give what he could never have merited. So, he turned to the putative malefactor in the middle and asked, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”   

          This prayer showed tremendously deep faith in Jesus. It is quite natural for those who are about to die to desire that people will remember them after they are gone. But in this case, he was asking a dying man—one who would in fact expire before him—to keep him in mind. In doing so, moreover, he saw something that perhaps no one present on Calvary except the Blessed Mother recognized: that this despised, naked, lacerated, blood-soaked, crucified man next to him was a sovereign whose reign was not about to end but to begin. He knew that Jesus would be able to remember.

          Jesus turned His aching head toward His companion in suffering. From His throne on Golgotha, with the largesse benefiting a king, Jesus vastly exceeded what was sought. Not only would the dying thief have a place in His thoughts, he would have a place in His kingdom. “Amen, I say to you,” Jesus declared, “this day you shall be with me in paradise.”

          In the span of an instant, the good thief passed from a sinner to a saint, from a criminal to someone canonized even before his death. And as Jesus once promised, heaven rejoiced more for that repentant sinner than for 99 who never needed to repent. In his great Eucharistic hymn, Adoro Te Devote, St. Thomas Aquinas sings to his Eucharistic Lord, peto quod petivit latro poenitens, “I ask for what the repentant thief asked for!” There is no greater prayer. Jesus died on Good Friday wishing to be able to respond personally to that request from each of us.

March 22, 2020

           At the beginning of the recitation of the Passion according to St. John, we hear of the treachery of the most famous traitor of all time, Judas Iscariot. This was a man who had watched Jesus raise at least three people from the dead, miraculously multiply food to feed multitudes, walk on water, cast out countless demons, and cure scores of people of leprosy, paralysis, withered hands, blindness, hypochondria, and other maladies. He had listened to Him preach and teach vast crowds, leaving them astonished. Along with the other eleven, he had been instructed by the Lord for three years in an intimate mobile seminary. He had even been given the Lord’s own incredible power to cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and cast out demons. Yet, after all of this, he valued Jesus less than thirty pieces of silver. He led a band of soldiers to capture his innocent teacher and friend in the Garden of Gethsemane, betraying Him by faking a gesture of love. What happened next, to Jesus and to Judas, we all know.
 
            Some years ago, National Geographic Magazine and many either gullible or complicit media outlets sought to call into question the whole nature of Judas’ betrayal. National Geographic had a dramatic roll-out of the rediscovery of “The Gospel of Judas,” a fourth or fifth-century copy of a second-century document that makes the outrageous claim that Judas was asked by Jesus to betray Him. It paints a story that Judas was considered the strongest and most courageous of the apostles. It describes that Judas would be called apart by Jesus to receive special instruction on the mysteries of the kingdom and was once told by Jesus that he would come to rule over all the others. All of these actions and assertions are found in the midst of flamboyantly outlandish cosmological claims placed either in the mouth of Jesus or in lengthy visions received by Judas himself.
 
              It is silly and surprising that National Geographic and many in the mainstream are taking this document seriously. It was written well over a hundred years after Judas died by a crazy religious group widely known to invent documents and put them into the mouth of famous historical personages. These Gnostics were responsible for the eccentric pseudo-gospels of “the Consummation,” “Eve,” “The Egyptians,” “Peter,” “Matthias,” “Philip,” “Thomas,” and the equally off-the-wall “Acts” of “Peter,” “Andrew,” and “John.” Despite this track record, some are treating the pseudo-gospel of Judas as a primary historical source on par with the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It would be as if the Unabomber, pretending to be John Wilkes Booth, wrote a document that, within the context of bizarre musings like those found in his infamous Manifesto, claimed that Abraham Lincoln actually asked Booth to kill him in Ford Theater—and National Geographic and media outlets treated it as equivalent to eye witness accounts and hyped that it would “shake Lincolnian historiography to its foundations.”
 
             Early Christians were not so naive. St. Ireneus of Lyons, to whom Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI referred to as the first true Christian theologian, refuted and ridiculed the Gospel of Judas in a treatise against heresies written about the year 180. He described that it was written by a gnostic sect called the Cainites, famous for attempting to turn the most infamous Scriptural villains into saints. They tried, for example, to rehabilitate Cain, whom they said was just following God’s instructions in murdering his brother Abel, as well as Korah, the insurrectionist against Moses, and the people of Sodom. Ireneus said that the Cainites produced “a fictitious history of this [“black is white”] kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas.”

          Christians today likewise cannot be naïve. We are living in an age—like that of the time of St. Ireneus—when so many, including those who by their education should know better, are willing uncritically to accept even the most outrageous claims against the faith. Millions have treated the fanciful concoctions of Dan Brown in the Da Vinci Code, such as the assertions that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lovers and that their progeny became the French kings, as exciting revelations rather than what they really are: blasphemous fabrications. The only way for Christians to sift through truth and falsity—and to help others to do so—is to know the faith better and, like Ireneus, to do what is necessary to defend and promote it.
 
           On  that first Good Friday, Christ gave His life in “witness to the truth” (Jn 18:37). St. Ireneus spent his life doing the same. Now it is our turn. Love for God and for others demands it.

March 15, 2020

          Each year of his pontificate, Pope St. John Paul II wrote a Lenten message to guide and inspire Catholics throughout the world to better understand and live the meaning of this season. This traditional has been continued by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Pope Francis. I believe that one of Pope St. John Paul II’s most moving Lenten messages was written in 2005 as it provides the prism by which Catholics could better understand the significance of the rest of his pontificate.

          His 2005 Lenten message was dedicated above all to the vocation of the elderly—especially of suffering seniors—within society and the Church. “If growing old, with its inevitable conditions, is accepted serenely in the light of faith,” the pope writes, “it can become an invaluable opportunity for better comprehending the Mystery of the Cross, which gives full sense to human existence.”

          The terminally sick, who in some respects have entered a long existential Lent in longing preparation for an eternal Easter, provide all of us with a deeper wisdom of what’s most important. “Knowledge of the nearness of the final goal,” he continues, “leads the elderly person to focus on that which is essential, giving importance to those things that the passing of years do not destroy.” Capable of a much deeper penetration into the mystery of death, the suffering elderly are given a “more profound knowledge of Christ dead and risen, who is the ultimate reason for our existence.”

            While the statement was written to guide all of us to recognize that “reaching old age” is a “special divine gift,” one of its beneficial side effects would be for the Church to recognize that Pope St. John Paul II’s old age and even his infirmity were also special heavenly gifts to the whole Church. We live in a culture that sees little value in old age and none in suffering. In many places of the world—from the Netherlands to Oregon, legally, and with increasing frequency illegally in other places—those with the Pope’s health difficulties are voluntarily or involuntarily put to death. Even when their lives are not immediately threatened, many see the elderly as a burden requiring too many sacrifices to care for. And to a modern mentality in which the logic of business efficiency has become a new morality, and telegenic gifts are increasingly valued, a person who struggles to get around, who drools, who has a tracheotomy and who now has difficulty even talking is someone whose leadership qualities have definitely expired.

          For all of these reasons, Pope St. John Paul II’s highly visible witness about bearing suffering and senescence with dignity was so precious. But it has an even greater meaning within the Church. Too many in the Church today—at every level, including high-ranking members of the hierarchy—view the Church too much as a business or even as a government. While the Church obviously has necessary institutional aspects to it, Christ did not come from heaven to earth to establish a new multi-national corporation, but a FAMILY. In a family, a father may get old, a father may get ill, but he does not forfeit his paternity.

            Old age is an opportunity, the pope says, for “better comprehending the Mystery of the Cross, which gives full sense to human existence.” John Paul II found great meaning in his entering more deeply into the Mystery of the Cross. One lesson that he drew is that just as Christ did not come down from His Cross, neither will he come down from the Cross God has given him. He trusted that the Lord who called him to be St. Peter’s successor would call him home when the time is right.

            The best way for us to reflect on the Pope’s illness is to follow his example of trust in God. Perhaps God thought that the greatest service any pope could give the Church and the world today, when so many are pushing to kill the youngest human beings to harvest stem cells to try to cure people with Parkinson’s disease and other maladies, is to have the most noticeable sufferer of Parkinson’s in the world stand and say “no!” Perhaps Christ recognizes that the greatest witness to the value of old age and the true meaning of “death with dignity” is to have a Pope not just write about it, but to show us with his body language.

          Lent is the season, the Pope tells us in his 2005 message, to intensify prayer and penance, “opening hearts to the docile welcoming of the divine will.” That’s precisely what Pope St. John Paul II did by his life and witness. May God help all of us do the same!

March 8, 20202

         Scripture scholars often describe the four Gospels as “passion accounts with very long introductions.” This is because the preaching of the apostles—and the earliest Christian writings—focused above all on the details of Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection.

         St. Peter, immediately after bursting through the doors of the upper room on Pentecost, proclaimed in an idiom understandable to all: “Jesus of Nazareth—you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up” (Acts 2:22-24). St. Paul tells us that the catechesis he received upon his conversion focused precisely on this: “I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3-4). So much did St. Paul specialize in the proclamation of Jesus’ paschal mystery that he says he resolved to know and to preach nothing other than “Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2).

         In 2004, we saw what happened when that Gospel of Christ crucified was proclaimed on the big screen. Just as when St. Paul preached it, Mel Gibson’s visual portrayal in The Passion of the Christ became a “scandal to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Cor 1:23). Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League attacked the film, saying that it would fuel anti-Semitism. It didn’t. In fact, it had the opposite effect: it led some at-large criminals to turn themselves in to the authorities. Gentiles in Hollywood and the secular media ridiculed the film, saying that it was nothing more than an orgy of “religious sadism.” Folly indeed!

        But just as with St. Paul’s original proclamation, the visual presentation of Christ crucified became “for those who are called … the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:23). People came back to the sacraments after long years away. Catholics and Protestants prayed together—in public cinemas. Many Protestants were intrigued by the presentation of Mary, the Mother of the Redeemer, and her fortitude as she followed in the bloody footsteps of her Son. Many Protestants also saw for the first time, in Gibson’s artful flashbacks, the connections between the Eucharist and the Cross that to Catholics are second nature. Most of all, it helped all Christians realize just how much Jesus suffered—voluntarily, out of love—for each of us.

          One group that was particularly moved by The Passion of Christ was Catholic men. For the first time in a long time, there was a depiction of an unmistakably masculine Christ. Jim Caviezel’s portrayal was of a Savior whom today’s men would leave “fishing boats” and “tax tables,” “houses, family members and fields” (Mt 19:29) to follow.

          In much of recent Christian art, Jesus hasn’t even appeared human, not to mention masculine. Many modern crucifixes make him look like an emaciated extra-terrestrial. On Missalette covers, Jesus’ sacred humanity is reduced to a stick figure. In the last major Hollywood movie about the Gospel—Zeffirelli’s 1977 film Jesus of Nazareth—actor Robert Powell’s portrayal made men wonder if Jesus ever could have been a carpenter, since he looked barely capable of lifting a hammer. It seemed that Powell had taken Jesus’ statement that He was “meek and humble of heart” (Mt 11:29) and absolutized it. There was no room for the same Jesus who once identified Himself as the “stronger man” who would overpower the devil and divide his spoils (Lk 11:22).

            This is one reason why Jim Caviezel’s performance in Gibson’s superbly directed movie was so refreshing. He combined both Jesus’ strength and His tenderness. His portrayal of Christ helped men to see with their own eyes more clearly who they are called to be and how they are called to love. Men at last witnessed an image of their Lord that was faithful to the call of manhood. They finally saw a Jesus consistent with their images of a hero.

            It is no surprise, therefore, that Jim Caviezel has become so popular among Catholic men. The fact that he is a devout, practicing Catholic increases that admiration. He turns down blockbuster roles if they require immoral scenes. Every penny he earns from his speaking engagements goes to the pregnancy help center his wife Kerri helps to run. He often speaks on how portraying the crucified Christ changed his life and encourages men to have their lives altered by imitating the love of the same Christ crucified.

March 1, 2020

           Lent is a forty-day uphill pilgrimage with Jesus. Jesus starts by taking us, on the first Sunday, to a desert mountain where He teaches us by example how to say no to the devil’s temptations. Next, we climb Mt. Tabor with Him, where His Father gives us the secret to life: “This is my beloved Son, listen to him!” On the third Sunday, we travel with Jesus to the top of Mt. Gerazim, where He reveals Himself as the “living water” and inspires us to thirst for Him. We next ascend with Him to Jerusalem where He cures the man born blind and speaks about His desire to cure our spiritual blindness. On the fifth Sunday, He takes us over the Mount of Olives to Bethany, where He prophesies our resurrection by raising Lazarus from the dead. And on Palm Sunday, we climb the hill of Calvary with Him and stand with horror and amazement at the foot of His salvific Cross.

          At the start of Lent, Jesus says to us, as he said to Peter, James and John in Gethsemane, “Get up, let’s go!” Just as he points to Matthew at his customs post and says “Come, follow me!,” so He puts each of us in His divine cross-hairs and beckons us to leave our customary posts and habits and journey with Him along the path He knows we need to trod.

          That path is the way of the Cross. It is the way of the grain of wheat. It is the way of true discipleship. “Whoever wishes to be my disciple,” Jesus declared, “must deny his very self, take up his cross each day and follow in my footsteps” (Lk 9:24).

          Each Lent, the Church gives us practical means by which to work on these fundamentals of discipleship.

           We see this, first, in the practices of fasting, almsgiving, and prayer. Fasting is one of the most effective means of self-denial; in controlling our desire for food, rather than being controlled by it, we grow in self-mastery, which helps us to deny ourselves in other areas. Almsgiving is a particularly efficacious way of making our daily cross, like Jesus’, an altar on which we sacrifice our lives and goods out of love for others. Prayer is the best way we keep our eyes on Christ so that we may both see the path He wants us to follow and receive His strength to complete that journey.

          The Church, secondly, proposes the Stations of the Cross, which our parish prays communally on each of the Fridays of Lent. This devotion makes visible and concrete where Jesus is leading us and reminds us of the reality that His Cross is really our cross and ours His.

           I also want to suggest a third means by which to work on these fundamentals: the ancient practice of Lenten Station Churches. Since the time of Pope St. Gregory the Great (590-604), Catholics in Rome have had the custom of making a pilgrimage to specific ancient churches on particular days in Lent. There they pray through the intercession of the Church’s saintly patron for the grace to make a good Lent. They also petition for strength on the pilgrimage of life, so that they might follow Christ all the way through the Cross to the eternal Easter.

           It is similar to the local practice of “Walking the Nine Churches” on Good Friday. However, it serves as a reminder that visiting local Churches throughout the Lenten Season is an additional way for us to live an intensely Eucharistic Lent, focused on a deeper communion with Christ and with the other members of His Mystical Body. The practice of visiting various Churches, moreover, makes Lent an actual pilgrimage, which reinforces the spiritual pilgrimage of the season. Sometimes we can become so comfortable and stable at our own parish that we can stop moving spiritually. This is a great danger, for as Archbishop Sheen used to say, “There are no plateaus in the spiritual life: if we’re not moving uphill, we’re sliding downhill!”

          Visiting various Churches during the Lenten season, helps us to keep moving upward, which is the true purpose of every parish. The word parish comes from the Biblical word for pilgrimage (paroikia). Our parish church of Divine Mercy is meant to be like a hostel on the pilgrimage toward heaven, a way station—“a station church”—that gives us nourishment precisely so that we can continue on the journey. Our Archdiocese has many beautiful such way stations, which provide Christ as nourishment for the pilgrimage of Lent and of life. During these forty days, may you discover many of them and rediscover in them Christ, who continues to say, “Get up, let’s go” and is the guide and goal of our journey home.

February 23, 2020

          “The most holy Church of the Lateran, the mother and head of all the churches of the city and the world!” Those words, in Latin, greet every pilgrim entering through the front door of the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran in Rome and clearly proclaim the Lateran’s significance in Christianity.

          The Lateran is the mother of every church edifice because it was the first Christian basilica in history; it is the head, because Rome, the see of St. Peter, is the principal local Church in the world, and the Lateran is the principal Church of the Diocese of Rome. The Lateran, not St. Peter’s Basilica, is the Pope’s Cathedral, where his cathedra, the chair symbolic of his teaching authority, rests. The Lateran, not the Vatican, is where the Popes resided for the first millennium of legalized Christianity. St. John Lateran is, we can loosely say, the Cathedral of the world.

         The history of the Lateran is, in many ways, the history of the Church as a whole. Over the course of the centuries, the Lateran has been pillaged by vandals, decimated by fire three times, toppled by an earthquake, and neglected by the Popes and people sometimes for decades. After every fall on its Way of the Cross through time, however, the Lateran rose again, continuing to proclaim to the city and the world the Church’s faith, through the words of the popes and five ecumenical councils held there, and through the language of its art and architecture.

        The symbolism of the latter is a potent summary of the faith.

• At the top of the center of the façade stands the Risen Christ, demonstrating that to enter the Church, we must enter into Christ’s body.
• Directly underneath this statue is the Papal loggia, from which the Popes address the faithful. The placement is not coincidental: the Popes are meant literally to stand-under Christ as His vicar on earth—“he who hears you, hears me”—so that we might better understand what the Lord is asking of us.
• Directly above the pillars and the pilasters on the façade are 12 bishops of the early Church famed for their teaching of the faith (called “doctors”), to symbolize that the visible face of the Church is found in the hierarchy of bishops throughout the East and West who teach authoritatively in the name of Christ.
• Each of the huge foundational pillars of the basilica’s interior contains an enormous statue of one of the apostles, to symbolize that the Church is built literally on the foundation of the Apostles.
• In the baldachino above the altar, there are busts of SS. Peter and Paul, the founders of the Church of Rome, to indicate that the Pope who celebrates Mass on that altar is the living Rock on whom Christ has built his Church and the living Doctor (teacher) of the Gentiles.
• Finally, above the papal cathedra at the apse in the back of the Church, there is an ancient mosaic with face of Christ the Savior hovering over His Cross, depicted full of precious Jewels. The Papal Cathedra, the symbol of the teaching authority of the Pope, rests therefore directly underneath Christ and His throne—the Cross—on which the King of Kings was exalted.

           That last mosaic points to the original and true name of the Basilica, which Pope St. Sylvester dedicated to “Christ the Savior” soon after the emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in 313AD and built it—the first Christian basilica—to be the principal Church of the bishop and faithful of Rome. When Pope Sergius III rebuilt it after a 9^th century earthquake, he rededicated it to the Savior through the intercession of St. John the Baptist; Pope Lucius II (1144-1145) added the intercession of St. John the Evangelist to the dedication. This is how it obtained its present common name, the Archbasilica of St. John in the Lateran.

           Reflecting on this great Cathedral gives us an opportunity, in her daughter Churches throughout the world, to rededicate ourselves to Christ, the Savior, to whom this Church—and the Church universal which it symbolizes—is dedicated!

February 16, 2020

            Archbishop Fulton Sheen, easily the most famous and perhaps the most influential American Catholic priest of the 20^th century, was scheduled to be beatified on December 21, 2019, at the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Peoria until the ceremony was abruptly postponed by the Vatican. This is the same cathedral where Fulton Sheen was ordained a priest 100 years ago on September 20, 1919.

         Almost every Catholic senior can recount stories of huddling with family members around the radio to listen to Sheen on NBC Radio’s “Catholic Hour.” Many others can recall his top-rated television program, “Life is Worth Living,” viewed by thirty million people each week of all faiths. Still today his voice resonates to Catholics, young and old, through the treasure of audio and video recordings.

          He did so much—and so much good—in his 84 years. In addition to his priestly duties and to being America’s first radio and television evangelist, he was a philosophy and theology professor, a newspaper columnist and magazine editor, a patient instructor of countless converts, an intrepid foe of communism, a popular retreat and mission preacher, the author of 67 books, for 16 years the National Director of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith, and finally bishop of Rochester, NY.

            It is hard to fathom that one man could have done so much, so well, for so long. The reason why he was able to bear so much fruit was not principally because of the talents God had given him. Cemeteries are full of enormously talented priests whose deeds remain known only to God. It was also not because he was merely “in the right place at the right time,” ready to tap the potential of the inventions of the radio and television to proclaim the Gospel. The reason for his fruitfulness, as he often pointed out, was much simpler: he began each morning with a Eucharistic Holy Hour and Mass.

            Jesus told us that if we abided in Him the Vine, we would bear much fruit (Jn 15:5), and Sheen did both. Each morning he abided in Christ’s real presence and welcomed Him within. That was the fuel for the supersonic engine that powered his whole priestly life. On the day of his priestly ordination, Sheen made a commitment to make a Holy Hour every day in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. Sixty years later, he thanked God for giving him the grace to keep that promise, and confessed that “the hour that made my day” was the source of his fidelity and his fruitfulness.

          “It is impossible for me to explain how helpful the Holy Hour has been in preserving my vocation,” Sheen wrote in his autobiography. “Scripture gives considerable evidence to prove that a priest begins to fail his priesthood when he fails in his love of the Eucharist. The beginning of the fall of Judas and the end of Judas both revolved around the Eucharist. The first mention that Our Lord knew who it was who would betray Him is at the end of the sixth chapter of John, which is the announcement of the Eucharist. The fall of Judas came the night Our Lord gave the Eucharist, the night of the Last Supper.”

           “The Holy Hour, quite apart from all its positive spiritual benefits, kept my feet from wandering too far. Being tethered to a tabernacle, one’s rope for finding other pastures is not so long.” He added that the Holy Hour “became like an oxygen tank to revive the breath of the Holy Spirit in the midst of the foul and fetid atmosphere of the world. Even when it seemed so unprofitable and lacking in spiritual intimacy, I still had the sensation of being at least like a dog at the master’s door, ready in case he called me.”

            It was in this daily holy hour that Sheen’s booming voice was silent as he listened to gentle whisper of His Master. It was here that he discussed with Jesus his homilies, difficulties, hopes, projects, and potential converts. It was here that his heart was set on fire. “Looking at the Eucharistic Lord for an hour transforms the heart in a mysterious way as the face of Moses was transformed after his companionship with God on the mountain.” So convinced was he of the connection between the Eucharist and fruitful fidelity that he judged the success or failure of every retreat he preached on how many retreatants he could convince to make a Eucharistic holy hour every day for the rest of their life.

            If Sheen were alive today, he would mount the pulpit enthusiastically to echo Pope St. John Paul II’s call for us to grow in “Eucharistic amazement” and make the Eucharistic Lord the “magnetic pole” of our whole existence. And he would fall to his knees again in Eucharistic adoration. Fulton Sheen lived over sixty Eucharistic years. That was the open secret of his enormous success. May it be ours too! God love you!

February 9, 2020

           Because of the Incarnation, every part of Jesus’ body is sacred. We have never celebrated the feast of the Lord’s sacred brain, however, even though through it the Word-made-flesh taught us the way to salvation. We have likewise never feted the Lord’s sacred hands, full of callouses from the carpenter shop in Nazareth and yet so gentle in reaching out to touch and heal sinners, cure the sick, and even raise the dead. Nor have we given public adoration to Jesus’ sacred throat, sacred lips, sacred feet, sacred eyes, or any other part of his sacred body, even though each and every part of Jesus’ body is worthy of adoration. The only part of Jesus’ holy corpus that the Church has adored over time has been Jesus’ sacred heart.

            Why Jesus’ heart–and only His heart? The answer is both simple and profound. In the Bible, the “heart” refers to the “center” of the person, where reason, will, temperament, and tenderness converge. To refer to a person’s moral character, the sacred writers routinely describe that person’s heart, because there the person finds his unity and interior orientation. The heart is the symbol and synthesis of the person. Therefore, to adore Jesus’ sacred heart is to worship Him in His totality. But the heart is also the most striking symbol of love. To focus on Jesus’ sacred heart is to focus on Jesus as love incarnate. Jesus said as much when He appeared to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in 1675, “Behold the heart which has so much loved men that it has spared nothing, even exhausting and consuming itself in testimony of its love.”

            But the heart which St. Margaret Mary beheld was surrounded by a crown of thorns. It was wounded. Thus, the image of the sacred heart is not only a symbol of the love that made those sufferings bearable, but also of the sins that cause that heart to be pierced by a lance on Good Friday. Those sins continue. Jesus told St. Margaret Mary that the reason He asked her to spread throughout the world devotion to His heart was because so many ignore that love or treat it with scorn. He made a particular reference to the way people treat Him in the sacrament of the Eucharist. “Instead of gratitude,” He told her, “I receive from most only indifference, by irreverence and sacrilege and the coldness and scorn that men have for me in the sacrament of love.”

            Jesus asked St. Margaret Mary to begin the reparation, inviting her to take St. John’s place during the celebration of the Mass, to rest her head on His heart and, not only sense His love, but share in it. She felt the Lord take her heart, put it within His own, and return it burning with divine love into her breast. Jesus wants, in essence, through the Mass to give us the same type of transplant. He wants us to rest our heart on His as He celebrates in the Upper Room and to receive from Him His own heart so that we might love God and others as He loves us. Through the prophet Ezekiel, God had prophesied, “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek 36:24). He said He would do this first by “sprinkling clean water” upon us to “cleanse [us] from all [our] uncleanness” (v. 25), which is what happens in the sacrament of baptism. But that was just “pre-operative” preparation for what the Lord wishes to do in the Eucharist.

              When Pope Paul VI in 1970 authorized doctors to examine, with state-of-the-art techniques, the almost 1,300-year-old Eucharistic miracle of Lanciano, Italy, we were able to get a glimpse of the connection between the Eucharist and the Sacred Heart. The doctors determined that the consecrated priest’s host that had turned into flesh right after the words of consecration was actually human heart wall (myocardium), cut in a cross section that would be impossible to make even with present day tools. In working such a miracle, the Lord obviously could have taken on the composition of any human body part, but chose the texture of the human heart, not simply because He was giving us the fullness of His love in this sacrament, but He was also giving us His heart so that we might be able to love like Him.

              Because of the connection, it is also easy to see, in retrospect, why the Lord, through St. Margaret Mary, asked that the feast of His Sacred Heart be celebrated on Friday right after Corpus Christi and to venerate His heart by receiving Holy Communion on first Fridays. In the Eucharist, Jesus gives us a heart transplant, so that we might not just worship His sacred heart but receive from Him a sacred heart in return. The Mass is how Jesus fulfills the prayer Catholics have lifted up for centuries: “O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make our hearts like unto thine!”

February 2, 2020

           “What would become of the world if there were no religious?” That’s the question St. Teresa of Avila asked aloud in her 16^th century autobiography. It is also the question that all of us should reflect upon as we celebrate this Sunday the World Day for Consecrated Life. Pope St. John Paul II instituted the annual World Day for Consecrated Life in 1997 with three objectives: to praise and thank the Lord more solemnly for the great gift of consecrated life; to promote a knowledge of and esteem for the consecrated life by the entire people of God; and to help consecrated persons, within and across their communities, to acquire a more vivid consciousness of the beauty of their life and their irreplaceable mission in the Church and in the world.

          Implicit in all of these objectives is the fact that, in the recent past, the Church and the world—and, frankly, even some religious—have taken the gift of consecrated life for granted. To be consecrated means to be set aside for a special purpose, to be dedicated to something out-of-the-ordinary, in short, to be different. It was above all a failure to appreciate this DIFFERENCE—in vesture, in commitment, in the way of worldly interaction—that led to depreciation for religious life in general. In recent decades, as the numbers of religious have plummeted, St. Teresa’s question has taken on a particular resonance. Many Catholics now live in a world where they no longer come into contact with religious. The whole Church suffers as a result.

           Catholic schools are simply not the same as when they were staffed, almost entirely, by communities of religious women or men. Catholic hospitals are different than when their spirit, and much of their medical and pastoral care, were dominated by sisters or brothers. Our Catholic parishes often struggle to provide the maternal complement to the clergy that mother superior and the sisters did so gracefully. And the whole Church can only begin to assess the impact of fewer contemplative monasteries and cloistered communities.

          Sometimes I have heard Catholics say that the decrease in priestly and religious vocations is not altogether bad, for without it, the Church would have never achieved a deeper understanding of the apostolate and call to holiness of Catholic lay people. While that is debatable, no one can contest that lay people have stepped into the vacuum caused by the shortage of priests and religious and have given ample witness that one does not have to be a priest or religious to become a saint, or a good Catholic school teacher, or effectively run a Catholic hospital or charitable institution. But the development of the laity does not require the decline of religious life. The two are not in competition, just as the limbs and the heart are not in competition! One of the challenges of our era is to demonstrate how they strengthen each other, so that all the states of life in the Church may flourish simultaneously.

            Pope St. John Paul II established the World Day for Consecrated Life on the Feast of the Presentation (the day on which it is celebrated in the Vatican each year) precisely to stress the interconnection between the lay and religious states. Jesus’ presentation evokes our baptism, the time at the beginning of our lives when we, like Jesus, were presented in God’s temple and consecrated to His service. Through this baptismal consecration, each of us has begun a consecrated life, participating in Jesus’ consecrated life offered to the Father in the Holy Spirit. This general consecration is the foundation of the consecrated life of religious in particular.

            At the same time, however, religious life shows those consecrated by baptism the full scope of their life in Christ. The profession of the evangelical counsels is a public identification with Christ, who Himself was poor, chaste, and obedient to His Father in everything. From Christ’s poverty, reflected in the poverty of religious, we learn the antidote to the materialism of our age and how to trust in God as our sole treasure. From His chastity, reflected in religious chastity, we discern the proper response to contemporary hedonism and how to master ourselves in order to give ourselves in love to God and others. From the Lord’s obedience to the Father until death, reflected in religious obedience, we discover the remedy for today’s exaggerated autonomy and how God’s truth alone sets us free.

           Religious men and women, through living the evangelical counsels, become icons of Christ and signposts to the joy of His kingdom. They show us that God is our greatest gift and is worth everything we are in return. May we never take them for granted, and may we all follow their beautiful and timely witness!

June 7, 2020

           In Caesarea Philippi, Jesus asked who people said He was, and His two polls showed that only one person said He believed Jesus was who He truly was, the Messiah and Son of God (Mt 16:13-20). Recently the Pew Research Center asked U.S. Catholics who or what they understood the Eucharist to be. The response, like in Caesarea, was sobering. Only 50 percent of U.S. Catholics said that they knew the Church’s teaching that after the consecration, the bread and wine are totally changed into Jesus’ body and blood; 45 percent said that the Church teaches that the “bread” and “wine” are only symbols, and five percent did not know what the Church teaches. Even among the 50 percent of those who were aware of the Church’s teaching, a third said that they still regarded the Eucharist as a symbol, leaving a total of only 31 percent who believed the Church’s teaching. Sixty-nine percent of Catholics said that they believe that the Eucharist was just a symbol—that Jesus is not on the altar after the consecration, or in the tabernacle, or within us after Holy Communion.

          Rather than news, the report was a confirmation of what had long been known and inferred: there is a grave crisis in Eucharistic faith. That crisis is ultimately at the root of many others: low Mass attendance, shuttered parishes, closed schools, insufficient priestly vocations, waning Catholic influence in society, growing secularism, and, as Pope-emeritus Benedict incisively wrote in April 2019, even the clerical sexual abuse of minors. That is why the results have justly been occupying the attention of bishops, priests, commentators, and all those who care about the Church and the Lord. Many have focused on the need for much better catechesis across the board. That is absolutely true, but inadequate and shortsighted. Christianity is not a classroom trying to help people pass a standardized test, but a way of life. Even if the results came back and 100 percent of surveyed Catholics identified the Church’s teaching with precision and affirmed faith in it, the larger question would remain: are they living Eucharistic lives, with Jesus in the Eucharist as the source, summit, root, and center of their existence? Knowing and believing are indispensable steps, but the goal is Eucharistic living. This is something that goes far beyond mere Sunday Mass attendance. It is whether we live in holy communion with the Risen Lord incarnate in the Eucharist, whether we draw our life from Him, whether we permit Him from within to make our life a commentary on the words of consecration.

           Knowing how we got here is key to knowing how to respond adequately. After the Second Vatican Council, there were many ideas and practices that undermined knowledge and faith in the Real Presence. Some priests, religious, and theologians advanced a desacralizing ideology that, falsely claiming to be the “Spirit of Vatican II,” attacked Eucharistic piety, destroyed high altars and altar rails, banished tabernacles to side altars or chapels, and basically sought to effect a Copernican shift in Eucharistic focus away from worshipping God and onto idolatry of the community. Many of these iconoclasts taught in seminaries and Catholic universities, where, with impunity, they diabolically derided Eucharistic adoration as the superstitious “worship of a breadbox” and persecuted seminarians who wanted to make holy hours or have exposition. This sadly was not isolated. And it certainly impacted those future priests who did not know the faith well enough to recognize the voice of false prophets.

            But that is not the principal explanation. The bigger one is a series of practices regarding the Eucharist that, regardless of the intentions in inaugurating them, impacted what the faithful know and believe. The ancient aphorism lex orandi, lex credendi reminds us that how we pray impacts what we believe. The way we have spoken about the Eucharist in word and body language, in music and architecture, over the last half-century has unquestionably impacted what people understand and believe. The location and beauty of the tabernacle, the posture with which we receive Holy Communion, the pace at which Holy Communion is distributed, the direction of our worship, the liturgical vocabulary we use, the widespread encouragement and allowance of almost everyone to receive, the accessibility of Churches for prayer, the frequency of Eucharistic adoration, and the Eucharistic piety of the priests and others who lead the Church’s prayer all matter.

          How do we increase knowledge and faith in the reality of Jesus in the Eucharist? It begins with taking seriously what the Church believes and courageously living it, so that others might come to believe. Faith is not just taught but caught, and everything the Church does ought to help people catch it.

           In next week’s article, I would like to mention nine practices for consideration. I hope in doing so that we can get beyond the “liturgical wars,” beyond even our preferences, to concentrate on what is truly conducive to communicating clearly and effectively the Church’s Eucharistic faith.