Homily for Memorial of Sts. Basil & Gregory Nazianzen

Homily for the Memorial of
Sts. Basil & Gregory Nazianzen

Jan. 2, 2025
Collect
Christian Brothers, St. Joseph’s Residence, N.R.

This is an adaptation of a homily given 5 years ago to a different community.

St. Basil the Great
(Kyiv Cathedral)

In this season of light, the collect for Sts. Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen speaks of the light that they brought to Christ’s Church by their example and teaching.  They came from the same part of the Roman Empire, from Cappadocia in what’s now Turkey, and they were friends, admirers, and supporters of each other from their youth.  As the excerpt from Gregory in today’s Office of Readings indicates, they had a friendly rivalry—each promoting the excellence of the other.

Basil apparently was marked for greatness from the start.  Gregory was more retiring and had to be pushed toward ecclesiastical office, including by his friend.  Both became bishops, and both were staunch defenders of the divinity of Jesus Christ in the face of Arianism, a heresy that didn’t heed St. John’s teaching:  “Whoever denies the Son doesn’t have the Father, but whoever confesses the Son has the Father as well” (1 John 2:23).

Arianism was politically correct at the time and caused a lot of grief particularly to Gregory, who had the misfortune, shall we say, of being made patriarch of Constantinople and thus thrust into the teeth of the Arian-inclined imperial court.  His theological writing was so sound and so clear that he became known as “the Theologian,” a title he retains in the Eastern Churches.  Nevertheless, the opposition in Constantinople induced his resignation after just a couple of years, and he retired to a life of recollection and hymn-writing in the friendlier neighborhood of his homeland.

St. Gregory the Theologian
(Kariye Camii, Istanbul)

Basil, on the other hand, didn’t encounter political difficulties.  He mixed a life of prayer with very active pastoral care and practical charity—supporting schools, founding hospitals, promoting monasticism (St. Benedict learned from him a century and a half later), and fostering liturgical life (composing texts for the Eucharist and teaching people to pray the Psalms).  He urged the political authorities to care for the poor and defended true doctrine in writing.

From Basil and Gregory we may learn, as the collect suggests, to pursue the truth with humility and to practice charity.  Humility helps us be loving brothers to each other, to staff, and to others whom Providence sends in our direction.  It takes humility to recognize the truth and not to identify it with just our own opinions.  Pursuing the truth, I suggest, includes taking a keen interest in contemporary events and everything else that touches Christ’s Church, human dignity, natural law, and the common good, so that, like doctors Basil and Gregory we may enlighten others with the Gospel.

Cardinal Angelo Amato, SDB (1938-2024)

Cardinal Angelo Amato Has Died

“Spiritual son of St. John Bosco spent himself for the Gospel for many years with generosity”

Photo: Vatican News

(ANS - Vatican City – January 2, 2025) - Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, passed away on December 31. He was 86 years old. Following his death, the College of Cardinals now consists of 252 cardinals, of whom 139 are electors and 113 are non-electors.

There are now 10 living Salesian cardinals, 5 of whom are potential electors in a conclave.

“I give thanks to God for the edifying witness of this spiritual son of St. John Bosco who for so many years spent himself with human finesse and generosity for the Gospel and the Church. I think of his priestly spirit and the theological preparation with which he served the Holy See, especially in the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints. I assure you of my prayers for the soul of this good servant.” This is how Pope Francis remembers Salesian Cardinal Angelo Amato, in a telegram addressed to the vicar of the Rector Major, Fr. Stefano Martoglio.

Angelo Amato was born in Molfetta (Bari), on June 8, 1938, to a family of shipbuilders. The first of four children, he had undertaken his studies at the Nautical Institute in Bari, in the long-distance captains department. But at the beginning of his third year of studies, in October 1953, he decided to abandon this career to enter the Salesian aspirantate in Torre Annunziata. In 1956, he made his first religious profession. After moving to Rome, he studied at the Pontifical  Salesian Athenaeum (now the Pontifical Salesian University), obtaining a licentiate in philosophy. In 1962 he made his perpetual religious profession and began 2 years of practical training at the Salesian school in Cisternino (Brindisi), where he taught literature in the middle school. After obtaining a licentiate in theology at the Salesian University’s School of Theology in Rome, he was ordained a priest on December 22, 1967.

He enrolled at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and in 1974 obtained a doctorate in theology and was immediately called to teach the subject. In 1977 he was sent to Greece by the Secretariat for Christian Unity, spending 4 months in the Jesuits’ Athens residence to prepare for university enrolment. After passing the entrance exam (modern written and spoken Greek), he moved to Thessaloniki as a scholarship holder for the patriarchate of Constantinople. He resided at the Vlatadon Monastery, home of the Orthodox monks’ convent and the Idrima ton Paterikon Meleton (Institute of Patristic Studies), with a library specializing in Orthodox theology and a valuable microfilm collection of Mount Athos manuscripts. He then enrolled in the School of Theology at the University of Thessaloniki, attending Jannis Kaloghirou’s lectures on the history of dogma and Jannis Romanidis’s lectures on systematic dogmatics. At the same time, he conducted research on the sacrament of penance in Greek Orthodox theology from the 16th to the 20th century, which was published in the Analekta Vlatadon series (1982).

Back in Rome, Fr. Amato taught Christology in the School of Theology at the Pontifical Salesian University, of which he was dean from 1981 to 1987 and 1994 to 1999. From 1997 to 2000 he was also vice rector of the university. In 1988 he was sent to Washington for studies on the theology of religions and to complete the Christology textbook. He was then appointed consultant to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Pontifical Councils for Promoting Christian Unity and for Interreligious Dialogue, and councilor of the Pontifical International Marian Academy. In 1999 he was appointed prelate secretary of the restructured Pontifical Academy of Theology and editor of the newly founded theological magazine Path. From 1996 to 2000 he was a member of the theological-historical commission for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000.

Appointed secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on December 19, 2002, and elected to the titular See of Sila with the personal title of archbishop, he received episcopal ordination on January 6, 2003, from Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Basilica.

On July 9, 2008, Benedict XVI called him to succeed Cardinal José Saraiva Martins as prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, and in the consistory of November 20, 2010, created him cardinal of the Diaconia of Santa Maria in Aquiro. He participated in the conclave of March 2013 that elected Pope Francis. On December 19, 2013, Pope Francis confirmed him “donec aliter provideatur” as prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, a post he left in 2018 shortly before turning 80.

In November 2013, Cardinal Amato closed the diocesan phase of the beatification and canonization process of Bishop Tonino Bello in Molfetta Cathedral. “Freedom of thought and action, appreciation of the laity, education for the young, the value of peace, love for one’s neighbor, consideration for the poor,” said the cardinal, “were the teachings” of Bishop Tonino, bishop of Molfetta from 1982 to 1986. His testimony, Cardinal Amato emphasized, “tells us that holiness is not a privilege of the few, but a vocation for all,” because we are all called “to follow Jesus and the theological virtues: faith, hope and charity.”

The Bishop Domenico Cornacchia of Molfetta, together with the entire diocese, remembers Cardinal Amato “with profound gratitude” as “a man of faith and tireless pastor, who served the universal Church and the people of God with great dedication.”

Source: Vatican News

Homily for Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God

Homily for the Solemnity of
Mary, Mother of God

January 1, 2025
Luke 2: 16-21
Gal 4: 4-7
Christian Brothers, St. Joseph’s Residence, N.R.
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx

Madonna with Sleeping Child
(Andrea Mantegna)

Liturgically, today’s a mass of confusion (pun intended).  We begin a new calendar year by invoking God’s blessing upon his people.  It’s World Day of Peace, and we pray that God bless the whole world with that gift from heaven, more noted for its absence.

It’s the octave day of Christ’s birth, and we repeat one of the gospel readings from Christmas Day, adding the verse about Jesus’ circumcision and naming.  We’re all (Some here, myself included, are) old enuf to remember when the feast was called “the Circumcision of the Lord.”  Now it’s called the solemnity of Mary, Mother of God.  She appears in the gospel reading and, unnamed, in the epistle on account of her part in God’s plan to adopt us as his children.

God’s plan is evident in the Christ Child’s naming:  Jesus, “YHWH is salvation.”  He’s named our Savior, “the name given him by the angel before he was conceived in the womb” (Luke 2:21).  In that role of savior, he brings us into God’s family.  He “ransoms those under the law,” Paul says (Gal 4:5); the law would condemn us all because of our transgressions.

The name of Jesus—a name that stands for his whole person, for his nature, for his salvation—is a source of blessing for us.  He personalizes for every Christian the blessing that Aaron was told to bestow on the Israelites (Num 6:22-27).  He’s the embodiment of divine graciousness and kindness (6:25-26).  He blesses his family—all God’s adopted children—with the Holy Spirit, the very Spirit that overshadowed Mary, God the Father’s most highly favored one (Luke 1:28).

Those who heard from the shepherds about their angelic visitation and their finding the child in the manger “were amazed,” Luke tells us (2:18).  The shepherds must have told a lot of people what they’d seen and heard.  Were they all so amazed that the experience changed their lives?  We have no evidence of that.  Theirs may have been an amazement like what we feel when we watch a magician at work or the athletic feats of Shohei Ohtani or Patrick Mahomes.  We gape, then go on about our ordinary lives, unfazed, unchanged.

In contrast to Mother Mary, who “kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart” (2:19).  What she learned from her meditations, she eventually used to teach her Son, to help him grow from infant to adolescent to mature man, to help him become Jesus, YHWH saves.  Given to all of us as mother at the culmination of Jesus’ saving activity (John 20:26-27), she remains our mother, teacher, and helper in our adopted sonship, leading us in our lives as disciples toward the inheritance (cf. Gal 4:7) that Jesus Savior wants to share with us.

Message of the Vicar of the Rector Major

THE MESSAGE OF THE VICAR

Fr. Stefano Martoglio, SDB

WHAT A GIFT TIME IS! 

The beginning of the new year is illuminated in our liturgy by the ancient formula with which the Israelite priests blessed the people: “May the Lord bless you and keep you. May he let his face shine upon you and show you his mercy. May he turn his countenance toward you and give you his peace.” 

Dear friends and readers of Salesian media, we’re at the beginning of a new year. Let’s give each other our best wishes for the time that will be, for the time ahead of us, because time is the gift that contains all the others as our lives unfold.

   So let’s amplify this wish with what will illuminate it. Let’s give our attention to Don Bosco who, when he arrived at the seminary of Chieri, fixed his thoughts on the sundial that still appears on the courtyard wall, and said: “On a sundial I read the following verse: Afflictis lentae, celeres gaudentibus horae. [Time will fly, if you are cheerful; it will drag on, if you are not.] ‘That’s it!’ I said to my friend, ‘There is our program. Let’s always be of good cheer and time will pass quickly.’” (Biographical Memoirs, I, 279).

The first wish we exchange at the beginning of this new year is to live this advice in the way that Don Bosco would urge us: Live well, live serenely, transmit serenity to those around you, and time will have another meaning! Every moment of time is a treasure; but it’s a treasure that passes quickly. Don Bosco always loved to comment: “The three enemies of man are: Death, which overtakes him by surprise; Time, which keeps slipping by; the Devil, who seeks to ensnare him.” (Biographical Memoirs, V, 606).

“Remember that being happy isn’t having a sky without storms, a road without accidents, work without fatigue, relationships without disappointments,” recommends an ancient saying. “Being happy isn’t just celebrating successes, but learning lessons from failures. To be happy is to recognize that life is worth living, despite all the challenges, misunderstandings, and periods of crisis. It’s thanking God every morning for the miracle of life.”

A wise man kept in his study a huge pendulum clock that at every hour sounded solemnly and slowly, but also with a great rumble.

“But doesn’t that bother you?” asked a student.

“No,” replied the wise man. “Because at every hour I have to ask myself: what have I done with the hour that’s just passed?”

Time is the only non-renewable resource. It wears out at an incredible speed. We know that we won’t get a second chance. So all the good we can do, all the love, goodness, and kindness of which we are capable, we must give now because we won’t return to this earth ever again. With a perennial veil of remorse in our hearts, we know that Someone will ask us, “What have you done with all that time I gave you?”

Our Hope Has a Name: Jesus

In the new time that we’ve just begun, the dates and numbers on the calendar are signs agreed upon, symbols and numbers invented to measure time. Very little has changed in the transition from the old year to the new year, yet the perception of a year coming to an end always makes us take stock. How much have we loved? How much have we lost? How much better have we become, or how much worse have we become? Time that passes never leaves us the same.

The liturgy has its own way of making us take stock as the new year dawns. It does so through the opening words of John’s Gospel—words that may seem difficult but that actually reflect the depth of life: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” In the depths of each of our lives resounds a Word greater than we are. It’s the reason why we exist, why the world exists, why everything exists. This Word, this Verbum, is God himself; he is the Son, he is Jesus. The Name given to the reason why we were made is “Jesus.”

He’s the true reason why everything exists; in him that we can understand everything that exists. We shouldn’t judge our life by comparing it with history, with its events and its mentality. Our life can’t be judged by looking at ourselves and our experience alone. Our life is comprehensible only if we draw it close to Jesus. In him everything makes sense and takes on a meaning, even those things that happened to us that were contradictory and unjust. It’s by looking at Jesus that we understand things about ourselves. A psalm says this well when it states, “In your light we see light.”

This is the way of seeing Time according to God’s Heart. Our wish for each other and for ourselves is to live this new time in this way.

The new year will bring with it important events and news for each of us, for the Salesian Family, for our Congregation—everything within the gift of the Jubilee Year that we’re celebrating in the Church.

May we let ourselves be carried away in the spirit of the Jubilee by that Hope which is God’s presence in our lives.

January, the first month of this new year, is dotted with Salesian feasts that lead up to the feast of Don Bosco. We thank God for this delicate touch of the Lord as we begin the new year. Therefore, let’s give the final word to Don Bosco, and let’s set this maxim of his firmly in our lives so that it may shape 2025 for us: My children, treasure time, and time will preserve you for eternity.

Salesian Bishop Opens Jubilee Door in Ukraine

Salesian Bishop Opens Jubilee Door in Ukraine

Bishop Maksym Ryabukha of Donetsk is 12 miles from the front

by Giacomo Gambassi

Photo © Giacomo Gambassi

(ANS – Kramatorsk, Ukraine – December 31, 2024) – The echo of artillery shells broke the silence of the celebration. The alarms went off several times. The sounds of war accompanied the beginning of the Jubilee of Hope in the Donetsk region. In Ukraine the Holy Year opened along the front. It is the one that marked the entire oblast from which the Greek-Catholic diocese also takes its name, led by Salesian Bishop Maksym Ryabukha. Unable to set foot in the cathedral in Donetsk city because it is occupied by the Russian army, he chose the church closest to the line of combat for the rite of opening the Jubilee Door.

It was the small church in Kramatorsk, the last major city in the region that remains entirely Ukrainian. Half of Donetsk is under Russian control and is the area of the fiercest battles in recent months, which see the Kremlin battalions advance. Putin’s troops are less than 12 miles away, and it is as if the horror of the fighting entered the celebration that took place on Sunday, December 29, simultaneously with the dioceses around the world.

The Holy Year door has a wreath, and above the door jamb the words “Pray for Ukraine” set in the yellow and blue colors of the flag. Bishop Ryabukha knocked the cross on the wood of the door three times. And the threshold was crossed by a small crowd defying missiles and fear, gathered for an appointment that was kept secret until the last moment for security reasons: there were young and old, mothers with children, and soldiers who asked for a few hours of leave from the trenches to be present.

“The Jubilee Door is a sign of hope for the entire region,” Bp. Ryabukha said. “Hope is our greatest strength because it gives us the courage to go beyond circumstances and human weakness. Kramatorsk is a crossroads for all our faithful, and therefore it is a kind of beacon for both free and occupied territories.”

In the homily the bishop recalled that everyone is invited to “seek the good that leads to seeing the light even in the midst of darkness.” He stressed that it is “Christ who welcomes us and helps us to look up from the drama of war and discover the beauty of life.”

On a pilgrimage to the Jubilee Door in Kramatorsk, the Salesian bishop brought his entire Church, which includes four regions – a pilgrimage of suffering that becomes hope, despite a conflict that has been going on for over a thousand days and has continued uninterruptedly since 2014. “Even if we are tired, God repeats to us that peace will come and evil never has the last word,” the bishop said.

The diocese of Donetsk will also have Jubilee Doors in the cities of Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia. “But not in Lugansk,” Bishop Ryabukha says, “which is entirely occupied. For this reason, our thoughts go to those who live in the occupied territories. Each of them knows that, despite not being able to come through the Jubilee Door, they will be able to experience the Jubilee with prayer and spiritual communion.”

According to the bishop of Donetsk, “These moments make us feel the closeness of the whole Church and remind us that the Lord is close to us and wants our good.”

Source: Avvenire

Presentation Ceremony of Strenna 2025

Presentation Ceremony of Strenna 2025
“Anchored in hope, pilgrims with young people”

 

(ANS – Rome – December 30, 2024) – The ancient and traditional yet always significant delivery of the Salesian strenna for the New Year was repeated on Friday, December 27, at the generalate of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians (FMA) in Rome. In the presence of the mother general, Mother Chiara Cazzuola, her sisters, and many Salesians and members of the Salesian Family, Fr. Stefano Martoglio, vicar of the rector major, currently at the head of the Salesian Congregation, officially presented the message and the video that illustrate the guiding theme that will accompany the Salesian Family in 2025, the Jubilee Holy Year, and the 150th anniversary of the first Salesian missionary expedition: “Anchored in hope, pilgrims with young people.”

In a room filled to the back rows, among the many notable guests, Mother Chiara Cazzuola’s sisters of the FMA general council, Fr. Gildasio Mendes, Salesiangeneral councilor for communications, and Antonio Boccia, world coordinator of the Association of Salesian Cooperators, stand out in particular.

Before this audience, Sr. Leslie Sandigo, FMA general councilor for the Salesian Family, opened the ceremony with a welcome to all those present and those who were connected online through direct streaming, and then led the introductory prayer, focused on peace: “Together, as a Salesian Family, we want to thank Fr. Stefano for the gift of the strenna, which invites us to look in the same direction, following the footsteps of Don Bosco and the origins of our charism, toward the needs of young people and today’s society who cry out for peace, hope,, and no more war. We are called, as a Family, to give ourselves and to build peace where we live.”

Afterwards, Sr. Sandigo introduced the vision of the strenna presentation video, made by IME Comunicazione, screened as a world premiere.

“Hope in the Lord, be strong, let your heart be refreshed, and hope in the Lord” (Psalm 27). Where the present makes noise, it’s there that our hope must forcefully burst forth. But how do you do so?”

This is the beginning of the video, which through the stories of some young people from different situations around the world, commented on by Fr. Stefano Martoglio, speaks about hope in daily life with dreams, expectations, worries: “Hope isn’t the conviction that something will go well regardless, it’s not something that eliminates worries, but the certainty that something makes sense, beyond its result.”

After the video, Sr. Ausilia De Siena, FMA councilor for communications, opened an interesting moment of debate, in which Flaminia, a high school student at the FMAs’ Mary Help of Christians Institute in Rome, and Antonio, a young radio presenter, began a conversation on stage with Fr. Martoglio, to develop further the theme of Strenna 2025. The vicar of the rector major recalled that the meaning of life for a Christian is to “anchor oneself to Christ,” and that the theme of the 2025 Jubilee is that of “hope of the encounter with Christ.”

Again, Fr. Martoglio stressed the need to consider “the double movement of hope, first of God toward us, and then of us toward God,” because, often, he noted, “we take the opposite path; we put ourselves at the center: ‘I believe, I do not believe....’ But the news of the Jubilee is that God believes in you, God hopes in you, God hopes in humanity!”

The 3-way conversation then touched on many other topics, from educational challenges to the throwaway culture, from ways of transmitting hope to young people and to society as a whole, to the missionary commitment that must involve the entire Salesian Family in the proclamation of the Christian message. And the vicar, for his part, continuously focused attention on hope as a vital energy originated by God that arouses and moves the deepest cords of humanity, which allows us to act and commit even where the future appears compromised by wars, poverty, migrations, environmental challenges, etc. And, with a couple of quotations, he reiterated at first that “young people are not the future, they are the present of humanity,” as Fr. Pascual Chavez Villanueva, rector major emeritus, often asserted; and then he encouraged us to continue with confidence, recalling the last words spoken by Don Bosco: “Forward, ever forward.”

After some comments and questions from the room, Mother Chiara closed the evening, thanking Fr. Martoglio for the beauty and richness of the strenna’s contents, “which can mark a path and also a renewal for us, in the sense of our being a Salesian Family, of our personal and community vocation, because we share a great charism, and also to revive our missionary spirit.”

The delivery of Strenna 2025 ended with a final significant gesture when several representatives of the Salesian Family and a missionary lit a candle which represented Christ, with the commitment to bring light to their areas of daily commitment, “to be artisans of peace, men and women of hope.”

The full presentation ceremony of Strenna 2025 can be viewed on the web:

Italian: https://youtube.com/live/7TRMfmrz8C8?feature=share 
English: https://youtube.com/live/pGxPZnSl3D0?feature=share 
Spanish: https://youtube.com/live/3LcrYWxbLHE?feature=share 
Portuguese: https://youtube.com/live/f3KvtnfGZ9o?feature=share 
French: https://youtube.com/live/qVroiWc_rwA?feature=share 

Homily for Feast of the Holy Family

Homily for the
Feast of the Holy Family

Dec. 29, 2024
Ps 84: 2-3, 5-6, 9-10
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx

“How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts!” (Ps 84: 2).

Jerusalem (by Edward Lear)

The responsorial psalm today expresses the longings of pious Jews as they go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and to the Temple in particular.  According to St. Luke, that’s what the Holy Family did habitually for the celebration of Passover, one of 3 feasts on the Jewish calendar for which the Law of Moses urged worship in God’s holy city.  Perhaps it’s Jesus’ 1st time accompanying his mother and foster father on the pilgrimage.

Such pilgrimages weren’t easy.  It wasn’t “over the river and thru the woods to grandmother’s house.”  From Nazareth it was a 90-mile hike over rough roads thru inhospitable Samaria, or 100+ safer miles down the Jordan Valley to Jericho, then a climb up to Jerusalem, perched on Mt. Zion.  Pilgrims traveled in caravans for safety as well as for the company.  Either way would take 6-8 days.  (Can you imagine how many times parents were asked, “Are we there yet?”)

So the psalmist cries out, “Happy the men whose strength you are!  Their hearts are set upon the pilgrimage” (84:6).

The prayer for today’s feast—the prayer properly called the “collect” because it gathers together and voices all our aspirations and pleadings—points to the Holy Family as a “shining example” for us, a family whose virtues, especially charity, we ought to imitate.  That means your families of parents, kids, and perhaps extended family members, and it means my family, too, 14 Salesian priests and brothers dwelling together in New Rochelle—3 Salesian generations ranging in age from 32 to 76, coming from foreign places like India, Vietnam, Poland, and Massachusetts as well as New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Florida.  The “bonds of charity” are necessary in every family, yours and mine.

The psalm acclaims, “Happy are they who dwell in your house!”  That’s addressed to the Lord.  The Temple at Jerusalem was his home, literally considered his dwelling place.  So young Jesus explains to his mother, “Didn’t you know that I had to be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49).

By the grace of our Lord Jesus, every Christian home is a dwelling place of the Holy Trinity.  Where “the bonds of charity” bind us together, God dwells.  An 8th-century hymn that the Church still chants on Holy Thursday states “Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est”—“Where charity and love are, God is there,” or as one English hymn puts it, “Where charity and love prevail, there God is ever found.”

The psalmist sings, “My soul yearns and pines for the courts of the Lord” (84:3).  We yearn for the peace and harmony of a loving family life centered on God—like the Holy Family dwelling in Nazareth or on pilgrimage to God’s holy city.  The proverb “charity begins at home” reminds us that the 1st people we want to love, the 1st we need to love, are those to whom we belong, those we spend most of our time with, those most important in our lives.

Family life can be hard (even in a religious house).  That’s why we need God’s help in married life and religious life.  “Happy the people whose strength you are!” the psalmist prays.  “O Lord of hosts, hear our prayer” (84:9).  Prayer won’t remove all the difficulties of family life, but it will help us handle the difficulties.  Without God’s help, we don’t have a chance—or, as the saying goes, “We don’t have a prayer.”

The psalmist speaks of the pilgrimage of the faithful up to Jerusalem.  The 2d Vatican Council’s teaching on the Church reminds us that we’re all pilgrims, away from the Lord but journeying toward him as if in a foreign land,[1] journeying toward the heavenly Jerusalem, our eternal home with God.  One of the classics of 17th-century English literature is the Puritan book The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come.

The dangers on our pilgrimage are very different from those encountered by 1st-century Jews going up to the Temple.  The Pilgrim’s Progress alludes to numerous vices that obstruct our way toward heaven; we all know the temptations and falls that are part of our life’s journey.  Like the psalmist, we invoke God to shield us from danger and to forgive our sins; we plead with him, “look upon the face of your anointed” (84:10).  In the psalm, God’s anointed is the king, who protects God’s people and the holy city.  But all of us are God’s anointed; we were anointed at Baptism and Confirmation, anointed with sacred chrism that bonds us to Christ, makes us Christians.  So we pray that God our Father recognize us as his Son’s kin, and in our families we strive to imitate Jesus’ immediate kin, Mary and Joseph—so that, like them, “one day we may delight in eternal rewards in the joy of God’s house” (cf. Collect).

[1] Lumen gentium, 6, 8.

Homily for Feast of St. John the Apostle

Homily for the Feast of St. John the Apostle

Dec. 27, 2024
Collect
Missionaries of Charity, Bronx

The collect credits “the blessed Apostle John” with “unlocking for us the secrets” of God’s Word.  Word has a double meaning, which is appropriate for a reference to the 4th Gospel, which is fond of word-play.  Word means the revelation presented in the Gospel, and it also means God the Son, God’s Word that became flesh.  As you know well, that’s where the 4th Gospel begins (John 1:1-5,10-14).

That Gospel is traditionally attributed to the apostle John, son of Zebedee, a fisherman from Galilee.  He’s one of the figures wrapped up in this name John and this feastday.  It’s possible that the author of the Gospel was someone else; in fact, biblical scholars generally think the Gospel is the work of several writers or editors who may have been disciples of the apostle John.

Another figure is the mysterious, unnamed “beloved disciple,” who appears only in the 4th Gospel, and only in the passion and resurrection stories.

Finally, the author of the Book of Revelation is explicitly named John (1:1,4,9).

Our feast today is about all of these figures, whether they were one, two, three, or more.  He or they unlock divine secrets for us.

John the apostle was totally committed to Jesus.  He quickly left his father and his livelihood as a fisherman to follow Jesus (Mark 1:19-20).  Jesus made him one of his inner circle with his brother James and Simon Peter.  St. Paul calls him one of the “pillars” of the early Church (Gal 2:9).  But even he had to undergo conversion, to learn what being a disciple of Jesus really means; for he and his brother were ambitious—“we want seats at your right and your left, Master” (Mark 10:35-37)—and wanted to call down fire and brimstone on a village that wouldn’t let Jesus in, so that Jesus nicknamed them “sons of thunder” (Luke 9:54; Mark 3:17).  But John was converted to genuine discipleship and lived out his commitment to Jesus.  He reminds us that we also need fuller conversion, deeper commitment.

John the evangelist, whether or not he was the apostle, seems to be also the author of the 3 New Testament letters that bear his name.  In 2 of them, he identifies himself as “the Elder” (2 John 1:1; 3 John 1:1), the respected leader of several local churches, one who has received Jesus’ authentic teaching and preserves it. He gives us a marvelous picture of Jesus’ divinity, stresses God’s love for us, and emphasizes the command that we love one another.

The Beloved Disciple generally is taken to be the author of the 4th Gospel, altho this is disputed, because he stresses that he was at the Last Supper (John 13:23-25), was an eyewitness to Jesus’ death (19:26,35), was the 1st to believe he had risen, as we heard in this morning’s gospel (20:8), and then saw him at the Sea of Galilee (21:7).  He models closeness to Jesus and faithfulness; he was at the cross.  He became the protector of Jesus’ mother, and thru him she becomes our mother (19:26-27).

John the visionary or John the seer writes the Book of Revelation with a very different Greek style and theological approach than John the evangelist-letter writer, meaning almost certainly that he’s a different person.[1]  He was an authority figure among the churches of Asia Minor.  He bore witness to Jesus by being exiled to a penal colony, and he exhorts his immediate readers and us to persevere thru persecution and other trials so that we may attain the heavenly Jerusalem, where the Lamb of God reigns.

Today we honor the apostle, the evangelist, the visionary, and the beloved disciple.  May their example and their teachings penetrate our hearts, our words, and our actions.

---

[1] John L. McKenzie, SJ, “Apocalypse,” in Dictionary of the Bible (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1965), p. 41; Ronald Brownrigg, Who’s Who in the New Testament, vol. 2 of Who’s Who in the Bible (New York: Wings Books, 1971), 2:235.

Homily for Feast of St. Stephen

Homily for the Feast of St. Stephen

Dec. 26, 2024
Acts 6: 8-10; 7: 54-59
Collect
Christian Brothers, St. Joseph’s Residence, N.R.

The Stoning of St. Stephen (Adam Elsheimer)

“Stephen, filled with grace and power, was working great wonders and signs among the people” (Acts 6: 8).

The whole story of St. Stephen—the little that Acts tells us of his life and death—is the story of a man who imitated Jesus.  He’s a man of grace and power; he works signs and wonders.  Acts doesn’t give us details except in a long speech that recaps the history of Israel and ends with Stephen’s calling the Sanhedrin “stiff-necked” (7:51) and murderers of “the Righteous One,” viz., Jesus (7:52)—a powerful speech that wasn’t designed to win friends and influence people positively, but did echo some of the charges that Jesus aimed at the scribes and Pharisees.

Then Stephen dies commending his spirit to Jesus (7:9) as Jesus had commended his spirit to his Father (Luke 23:46).  I don’t think it’s coincidental that Luke is the author of both of those commendations.

Our passage today ends without the last verse of Stephen’s story:  “Then he fell to his knees and cried out in a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them’” (7:60).  Again, it’s only Luke who records that Jesus prayed that his judges and executioners be forgiven (23:34).

Altho today’s reading omits that line, the collect cites it:  Stephen was “a man who knew how to pray even for his persecutors.”  (Those who designed the missal and who designed the lectionary followed Jesus’ advice not to let the left hand know what the right hand was doing [Matt 6:3]).  Stephen’s prayer for his killers cues our prayer “that we may imitate what we worship and so learn to love even our enemies”; we worship our Lord Jesus in the Eucharist and pray that we may imitate him even as Stephen did.

It’s a challenge to overlook slights and other harms done to us.  It’s a challenge even to be patient and kind, to bite our tongues instead of giving a sharp response or making a cutting comment.  If we can be patient, kind, gentle, that will be evidence of God’s grace and the power of the Holy Spirit, evidence that we are placing our lives in God’s hands.