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  • July 4: Independence Day—USA

    July 4: Independence Day—USA
    2024/07/03
    July 4: Independence Day—USAOptional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White“...nobis donet en patria.”Father hunger—the primordial longing to impress, to emulate, or just to find dad—moves us more fundamentally than any thirst for mom. Mom’s warm love and constant presence is typically assumed. She is always near. We spend the first nine months of life sheltered inside her sanctuary, a memory of closeness and protection buried deep in our psyche. But dad comes later, a remote creature orbiting around mother and child with a deep voice, sandpaper face, and rugged hands. Knowing him, and loving him, takes some work, and for that reason seems more worth it. The desire for a pater, a father, goes hand in hand with our need for a patria, or fatherland. To be a citizen of the world is not to be a citizen at all. The world is not a country. We don’t want to be born at sea, drifting under a flag, any more than we want to be born into family. We want to be born into a family. We want to master one language, stir upon hearing one hymn, and stand with our civic siblings to honor one flag. We want, and need, to love a patria. Independence Day of the United States of America commemorates the founding events of a country as worthy of admiration and appreciation as any country ever was. The United States merits respect for a thousand compelling reasons, but honoring her also points to the inherent limits of even the healthiest love of fatherland.There are only a few things a man will die for: family, religion, and country being the most obvious. To emigrate to the United States many immigrants have, for centuries now, disrupted family life, bid farewell to well-loved homelands, abandoned historic family farms, and been absent from spouses and children for months and years. Why? Because it was worth it! A country worth dying for is a country worth dying to get into. No country has ever afforded its citizens what America has afforded them. Its success is unequalled. And yet, for all of its flourishing opportunity, robust legal structures, and protection of human rights, the patria of the U.S. is not, and no patria could ever be, Heaven itself. A country provides meaning, but not ultimate meaning.When Americans die they will not be judged by Uncle Sam. An old man with a long white beard wearing a star-spangled waistcoat will not stand before the individual soul. Uncle Sam won’t judge anyone because Uncle Sam doesn’t exist. He is as real as the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, or Lady Liberty. The Statue of Liberty consists of a rigid iron frame draped in thin copper. That’s it. “She” rusts. Meaningful secular holidays invite reflection upon what kind of truth perdures and upon the difference between two close cousins, faith and patriotism. Jesus Christ is not like Uncle Sam. He is not an anthropomorphism, a depiction in human form of a non-human reality. We have statues and paintings of Jesus Christ for the same reason we have statues and paintings of George Washington—because the camera hadn’t been invented yet. If there had been cameras in first-century Palestine, Jesus’ face would be as correctly shown as Abraham Lincoln’s.Our crucifixes don’t symbolize God. They show God. Jesus is not a metaphor. He is not the human representation of ethereal God-like qualities. Jesus thundered with the authority of God, referred to Himself as God, and performed Godly acts, including the ultimate miracle of raising Himself from the dead. Jesus doesn’t represent something else, or someone else, that hides behind a curtain or a mask. Our love of God, then, should run deeper than our love of country because God will, by definition, never end. Mighty Rome ended. Weeds grew, and still grow, in the bustling forum where Julius Caesar was knifed in the back. America’s raw military power, global cultural reach, and thumping economy will not last forever. Countries rise and countries fall, but God and His Church will endure. Geological time uses immense spans of millennia, ages, and eons to capture the reality of glacial movement, tectonic shifts, and continental splitting. We should use similar references of time when describing the vastness of God. A two-thousand-year-old Church is ancient of days in man-time. But in God-time the Church is just a babe rocking in a cradle. Geologically we would understand this. Theologically we should as well. The United States will pass into history in one blink of God’s eyelashes. So we should love more what deserves more love. We should love less what deserves less love. And we should live more fully only for a deathless God who grants endless life in a true homeland that will never cease.God the Father, may our hearts bear a deep love for our earthly fatherland as an extension of our love for You, our Father in Heaven. May our one heart burst with love for all those that deserve our love, most especially our family, our nation, and our Church.
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    7 分
  • July 3: Saint Thomas the Apostle

    July 3: Saint Thomas the Apostle
    2024/07/02
    July 3: Saint Thomas the Apostle
    First Century
    Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of doubters and architects

    ‘Perhaps’ - the crack in the unbeliever’s wall of certainty

    All unbelievers have a type of faith. They firmly believe in God’s non-existence and in the weakness, not wisdom, of trusting in a reality greater than oneself. Atheism is a belief system, though its object of faith is obviously not God but other sacrosanct, secular “doctrines.” Yet the unbeliever’s secular faith, just like every believer’s, is continually tempted by doubt. The unbeliever, whether fixated on a friend’s lifeless body in a coffin, dumbstruck while gazing at the vastness of the sea, or just when lying in the dark of night, wonders if he has everything figured out. Although he shows a brave front, the unbeliever secretly doubts. He is not certain. He is threatened. There is always the great “perhaps.” Perhaps, just perhaps…the believer is…right. The atheist is under constant assault from faith, primarily from inside himself. Only when trying to quit religion does he realize, painfully, that the drama of being a man cannot be avoided. He exchanges the uncertainty of belief for the uncertainty of unbelief.

    Today’s saint, known as “Doubting Thomas,” is Christianity’s icon of doubt. He loves, serves, and follows the Lord. Upon hearing of the death of Lazarus, Christ decides to go to Judea, where He had previously come under attack. The Apostles are concerned for Christ’s safety, but Thomas supports Him, saying, “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (Jn 11:16). Thomas is strong and generous. But he is also a man, so he does what men do—he doubts. Christ’s crucifixion was a searing experience for His Apostles, and Thomas doubts that one so cruelly and publicly murdered could be alive. He is told by his co-Apostles that the Lord is risen and has appeared to them. Yet still Thomas doubts. He will only believe if he can place his hands in Christ’s very wounds.

    To satisfy his skepticism, Thomas joins the others and waits patiently on the Sunday after Easter. The risen Lord appears again in the same place. “Peace be with you,” He says to all. And then to Thomas himself, “Put your finger here and see my hands...Do not doubt but believe.” “My Lord and my God!” is all the flabbergasted Thomas can muster in response (Jn 20:24–29). Thomas’ simple declaration of faith—“My Lord and my God!”—is whispered by millions of faithful at the consecration at Mass, words of faith forged from the anvil of doubt.

    Doubt is often the starting point, the context, and the invitation to faith for so many modern doubting Thomases. Yet true doubting leads to true searching. And a true search is not perennially open-ended but risks finding what is sought. Saint Thomas’ doubt, his moment of weakness, served a higher purpose when Thomas found what he was looking for. The Son of God said “...the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls…” (Mt 13:45) and “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground…and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how” (Mk 4:26–27). The kingdom is not the fine pearl. The kingdom is the merchant in search of fine pearls. The kingdom is not the seed. It is the man scattering the seed. The search, the scattering, the effort, the struggle, the journey. These are often the first stages of finding God. Honest, authentic inquiry is god-like. Every legitimate search presupposes, after all, that there is something, or someone, to find.

    Doubt is the plow that opens the furrow where the seed of faith can fall and germinate. Saint Thomas the Apostle is our guide and patron in understanding how doubt sparks faith. Being absent, he heard. Hearing, he doubted. Doubting, he came. Coming, he touched. Touching, he believed. And believing, he served.

    Saint Thomas, help all who struggle with belief in God. Through your example and intercession, assist all those overwhelmed by distractions and doubts to come to a well-informed trust in the Father and Lord of all.
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    6 分
  • July 1: Saint Junipero Serra, Priest

    July 1: Saint Junipero Serra, Priest
    2024/07/01
    July 1: Saint Junipero Serra, Priest 1713–1784Memorial; Liturgical Color: WhitePatron Saint of California and vocations“Always forward!” was his motto and his lifeThe United States of America’s impressive Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., includes the majestic, semicircular Statuary Hall. Each of the fifty states chooses two citizens of historic importance to represent it in the Hall. Statues of one nun and four Catholic priests, two of them saints, grace Statuary Hall, including today’s saint. Junipero Serra was the founder of California. He was the pathbreaking, indestructible priest who trekked California’s mountains, valleys, deserts, and shores to found nine of its eventual twenty-one missions. California’s rugged cattle culture, its luxurious orchards and rolling vineyards, its distinctive Mission architecture, and its blending of Mexican and Native American heritage are the legacy of Father Serra and his Franciscan confreres. The Franciscan city names tell the story: San Francisco, Ventura (Saint Bonaventure), San Luis Obispo, Santa Clara, Our Lady Queen of the Angels (Los Angeles) and on and on. The Franciscans simply made California what it is.Father Junipero Serra was baptized as Michael Joseph on Mallorca, an island in the Mediterranean off the coast of Spain. He grew up dirt poor and devoutly Catholic. He joined the Franciscans as a youth and moved to the large city of Palma de Mallorca, where he took the religious name of Junipero in honor of one of Saint Francis of Assisi’s first followers. After priestly ordination, Father Junipero obtained a doctorate in philosophy and taught Franciscan seminarians. He was destined to lead a successful life as an intelligent, holy, and pious intellectual. But in the Spring of 1749, he felt the Lord calling him to become a missionary to New Spain (Mexico). On the fateful day of his departure from his large Franciscan monastery, he kissed the feet of all his brother Franciscans, from the oldest to the youngest. He then boarded a ship and sailed away from his native island for the first time and the last time. He would never see his family again. Our saint’s life began in earnest in middle age. Long years of intellectual, spiritual, and ascetic preparation steeled his body, mind, and will for the rigors to come.Arriving in the port of Veracruz, Father Serra walked hundreds of miles to Mexico City rather than travel on horseback. Along this first of many treks, he was bitten by either a snake or a spider and developed an open wound that never healed, causing him near constant pain for the rest of his life. Father Serra spent the first several years of his missionary life in a mountainous region of Central Mexico among an indigenous population that had encountered Spaniards, and the Catholic religion, two centuries before. Father Serra wanted a rawer missionary experience. He wanted to meet and convert pagans who knew nothing of Christianity. After years of faithful service as a missionary, church builder, preacher, and teacher in Central Mexico, Father Junipero finally had his chance. The Franciscans were tasked with leading the religious dimension of the first great Spanish expedition into Alta California, the present day American state. If Father Serra had never gone to California, he may still have been a saint, but one known to God alone. It was the challenge of California that made Father Junipero into Saint Junipero.Already in his mid-fifties, Father Serra was the head priest of a large migration of men, women, soldiers, cattle, and provisions whose goal was to establish Spanish Catholic settlements in California. Integral to this cultural and evangelical effort was the founding of California’s missions, the vast farms, cattle ranches, churches, communities, and schools that have left such an enduring mark on California. For the last fifteen years of his life, Saint Junipero was seemingly everywhere in California—walking, confirming, working, building, preaching, fasting, planning, sailing, writing, arguing, founding, and praying. He exhausted his poor, emaciated body. He was recognized by all as the indispensable man. Father Junipero died quietly at the San Carlos Mission in Carmel just as the United States was becoming a country on the other side of the continent. He did for the West Coast what George Washington and better known founders did for the East Coast. He founded a society, in all of its complexity. Decades later, Americans migrated to far-off California, newly incorporated into the federal union, looking for gold, and were surprised to discover a distinctive culture as rugged, layered, and rich as the one they had left behind.California’s foundational events were distinctly Catholic just as the Eastern colonies’ were distinctly Protestant. When ceremoniously inaugurating an early mission, Father Junipero said a High Mass, sang Gregorian chant, processed with an image of the Virgin Mary, and had the Spanish ...
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    7 分
  • June 30: First Martyrs of the Church of Rome

    June 30: First Martyrs of the Church of Rome
    2024/06/30
    June 30: First Martyrs of the Church of Rome
    64
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red or White

    A madman burns Christians like human torches

    Wave after wave of huge British and American bombers, pregnant with ordnance, opened their bays over Dresden, Germany, on February 13 and 14, 1945. Fire joined fire until the city itself was a raging, screaming bonfire. A tornado of flames hungered for oxygen, sucked all air from the atmosphere, and suffocated to death anyone caught in its vortex. The center of Dresden melted. Only some stone walls remained erect. Human skeletons were mixed into the rubble of a skeletal city. In the old town of Dresden today, a modest memorial marks a mass grave, the location where an unknown number of civilians’ scant remains were cremated shortly after the fire. It’s easy to walk by without noticing it. Any number of countries have similar memorials marking the mass graves of the victims of plane crashes, sunken ships, war atrocities, or natural disasters.

    Many countries also have a memorial to an unknown soldier. That unknown fighter represents all those drowned at sea, lost in the jungle canopy, eviscerated by enemy fire, or simply never recovered in the heat and sweat of battle. On civic feast days, presidents, governors, and mayors lay wreaths and flowers at the graves of the unknown. In honoring him, they honor all. A nation’s official remembering—in stone, statue, speech, or ceremony—preserves the past. A nation’s common memory is preserved by its government, which guards against national forgetting through official acts of national remembering.

    The Church’s liturgical calendar is a continual, public remembering of saints, feasts, and theology, by mankind’s most ancient source and carrier of institutional memory—the Catholic Church. Today’s feast day commemorating the First Martyrs of the Church of Rome did not exist prior to the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Instead, the sanctoral calendar was crowded with various feast days to particular martyrs from this early Roman persecution. Apart from their centuries on the calendar, however, little else supported these particular martyrs’ existence.

    Today’s feast is a liturgical expression of the wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier or the flowers left at a mass grave marker. This feast commemorates those unknown and unnamed men and women who were cruelly tortured and executed in the city of Rome in 64 A.D. But instead of meeting in a park to sing a patriotic hymn and to see an official lay a wreath, we do what Christians do to remember these martyrs. We meet as the faithful in a church, in front of an altar, to participate in the sacrifice of the Mass and to remember our remote ancestors in the faith who died so that the true faith would not.

    In 64 A.D. a huge fire of suspicious origins consumed large sections of Rome. A deranged emperor named The Black (Nero) blamed Christians for the conflagration and executed large numbers of them in retribution for their supposed treachery. A vivid description of the persecution survives from a Roman historian named Tacitus, who relates that some Christians were sewn into the skins of animals to be attacked and consumed by beasts. Other Christians were slathered with wax, tied to posts, and then burned alive, human torches whose glow illuminated Nero’s garden parties. Still others were crucified. This was not the barbarous hacking off of limbs and splitting of skulls later suffered by missionaries in the forests of Northern Europe. Nero’s madness was highly refined evil. Today, we commemorate these Christians in the same fashion in which they would have commemorated the Lord’s own death—by prayer and sacrifice. We are separated from 64 A.D. by many centuries, but we are united to 64 A.D. by our common faith. We remember because the Church remembers.

    Anonymous first martyrs of Rome, your blood is still wet, and your sufferings still felt, in the same Church of Christ to which you belonged through baptism. Through your intercession, help the baptized of today be as courageous as you in all things.
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    6 分
  • June 29: Saints Peter and Paul, Apostles

    June 29: Saints Peter and Paul, Apostles
    2024/06/29
    June 29: Saints Peter and Paul, Apostles
    First Century 
    Solemnity; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saints of the city of Rome

    Like the sun, Peter and Paul rose in the East but set in the West

    Jesus Christ is the head of the Church. The Pope is the head of the churches. The invisible, heavenly Church, mystically depicted by the Book of Revelation and described by Saint Paul as “our mother,” is the “Jerusalem above” (Ga 4:26). This perfect, inner, Church of God has theological priority over all earthly churches, which are its shadow. The first Christian congregation, in Jerusalem, anticipated and grew into the universal Church. For a short period, the Jerusalem Church was the universal church. And from this original whole, smaller parts formed, until the one Church became present throughout the world. Unity exists, then spreads. The children do not create the parents. The many dioceses throughout the world are not stitched together into a patchwork quilt called the universal Church. Catholicism is not an international federation of dioceses or the end result of its own geographic stretch. The one Church precedes the many churches. It gives them birth. The progression is from God outward, from spirit to flesh, from ontological to historical, from Jerusalem to Rome, and from Rome to the world.

    All dioceses are sisters to one another. So Manila, Philippines, is a sister diocese to that of Vilnius, Lithuania; and Lagos, Nigeria, is a sister diocese to that of La Paz, Bolivia. But the universal Church is not herself a diocese. She has no sisters, lest her oneness be compromised by having a mirror church. The universal Church is a mother, not a sister. And the Mother Church was established in Rome by Saints Peter and Paul, whose feast  we celebrate today. This feast also implicitly commemorates Rome’s position as head of all the churches. Rome’s particular vocation is to preserve the unity of God’s Church on earth. This vocation is not an accidental historical addition to the Church’s original nature. Unity is intrinsic to the Church’s theology, and so there must be a practical force or power, internal to the Church, to preserve her unity. God’s Son, after all, has only one bride, with whom he celebrates only one heavenly banquet for only one eternal, mystical wedding. 

    In Matthew’s Gospel, Christ states in unmistakably clear language that He will build His Church on Saint Peter (Mt 16:17–19). This was not a claim from Peter but a statement of fact from Christ. For many centuries, this text has been cited in support of both Roman primacy and papal infallibility. Yet an even more fundamental historical, not biblical, fact originally supported Roman primacy. The great Saint Irenaeus in the late second century clarifies that Rome is “the greatest and most ancient Church, founded by the two glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul.” No other city could claim to be the seat of two martyred Apostles. Not Jerusalem, not Antioch, and not Alexandria. Constantinople, the “New Rome,” could not claim to have been built over the bones of even one Apostle. Rome’s headship over all the churches is rooted most deeply in the martyrdoms in the eternal city of Saints Peter and Paul, the Christian counterparts of Rome’s twin pagan founders Romulus and Remus.

    Rome, the two-Apostle city, continues to draw pilgrims. If a plumb line were dropped hundreds of feet from the apex of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, it would come to rest directly over the tomb of the Apostle himself in the necropolis below the Basilica’s main altar. A few miles away, under the main altar of the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, lies the mortal remains of the great Apostle to the Gentiles. The inscription naming Saint Paul on an ancient marble cover for his tomb leaves no doubt whose bones were placed there. The cover even has small holes through which pilgrims could lower ribbons to touch Saint Paul’s bones and thus complete their pilgrimage to Rome with a third class relic. It is a recent phenomenon to go to Rome to see the reigning pope. Traditionally, pilgrims went specifically to pray at the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul.

    Our beautiful Church is a miracle. Theologically perfect but humanly flawed. Mystical and historical. All soul and all body. The Church reflects mankind—capable of so much, yet limited by her imperfections. The Church is founded upon a perfect God and two very different, great, and imperfect men whom God chose—Peter and Paul.

    Saints Peter and Paul, deepen our filial devotion to our Mother the Church, who gives us life through the sacraments and who preserves our hope of attending the eternal banquet of God in heaven. Protect our Mother from corruption to be a more perfect spouse of Christ.
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    6 分
  • June 28: Saint Irenaeus, Bishop and Martyr

    June 28: Saint Irenaeus, Bishop and Martyr
    2024/06/28
    June 28: Saint Irenaeus, Bishop and Martyr c. 125–c. 200 Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red Patron Saint of apologists and catechists The Church was explicitly Catholic from the start The iconic opening words of Julius Caesar’s Gallic War are “All Gaul is divided into three parts.” The chieftains of these three regions of Roman Gaul (France) met yearly in the southern city of Lugdunum, known today as Lyon. These rough noblemen and their large retinues trekked to Lyon in 12 B.C. for the dedication of the Sanctuary of the Three Gauls on the slope of Lyon’s hill of the Croix Rousse. The inauguration ceremony was an elaborate reinforcement of Rome’s military, religious, and commercial dominance. Pagan priests performed pagan rites on pagan altars to pagan gods, asking those gods to favor the new sanctuary, the tribes present, and the city. This important sanctuary remained a focal point of Lyon’s civic and religious life for centuries. And in the sand and dirt of this Sanctuary of the Three Gauls, in 177 A.D., the blood of the first Christian martyrs of Gaul was spilled. Here they were abused, tortured, and executed. Killed for their faith were about fifty Christians, including the Bishop of Lyon, Pothinus, and a slave woman named Blandine. While they were imprisoned and awaiting their fate, these future martyrs wrote a letter to the Pope and gave it to a priest of Lyon to carry to Rome. That priest was today’s saint, Irenaeus. With the dead bishop Pothinus’ mutilated remains tossed into the river, Irenaeus was chosen as his replacement. He would remain the Bishop of Lyon until his death. It was in this way that the tragic end of some raised others to prominence. As the first generation of Christians in Gaul retreated from history, the great Saint Irenaeus, the most important theologian of the late second century, emerged. Copies of Saint Irenaeus’ most important works survived through the ages, likely due to their fame and importance, and are now irreplaceable texts for understanding the mind of an early Church thinker on a number of matters. Irenaeus was from Asia Minor and a disciple of Saint Polycarp, a martyr-bishop of Smyrna, who was himself a disciple of Saint John the Evangelist. The voice of Saint Irenaeus is, then, the very last, remote echo of the age of the Apostles. Similar to those of Saint Justin Martyr, Irenaeus’ writings astonish in proving just how early the Church developed a fully Catholic theology. In keeping with other theologians of the patristic era, Irenaeus focused more on the mystery of the Incarnation, and Christ as the “New Adam,” than on a theology of the Cross. He also called Mary the “New Eve” whose obedience undoes Eve’s disobedience. Irenaeus’ writings primarily critique Gnosticism, which held that Christianity’s truths were a form of secret knowledge confined to a select few. The only true knowledge is knowledge of Christ, Irenaeus argued, and this knowledge is accessible, public, and communicated by the broader Church, not secret societies. Irenaeus fought schismatics and heretics, showing just how early the connection between correct theology and Church unity was understood. His main work is even entitled “Against Heresies.” He promoted apostolic authority as the only true guide to the correct interpretation of Scripture and, in a classic statement of theology, Irenaeus explicitly cited the Bishop of Rome as the primary example of unbroken Church authority. Like Saint Cyprian fifty years after him, Irenaeus described the Church as the mother of all Christians: “...one must cling to the Church, be brought up within her womb and feed there on the Lord’s Scripture.” This theology notes a beautiful paradox. While in the physical order, a child leaves his mother’s womb and grows ever more apart from her as he matures, the Church’s motherhood exercises an opposite pull on her children. Once she gives us new life through baptism, our bonds with Mother Church grow ever stronger and tighter as we mature. We become more dependent on her sacraments, more intimate with her life and knowledge, as we grow into adulthood. The Church becomes more our mother, not less, as we age. On Pope Saint John Paul II’s third pastoral visit to France, in October 1986, his very first stop was the Sanctuary of the Three Gauls in Lyon. Excavated and opened to the public in the mid-twentieth century, it rests largely unknown, a ruin, in a residential neighborhood. Before dignitaries and a large crowd, the Pope prostrated himself and kissed the site where the many martyrs of Lyon died so many centuries before. Saint Irenaeus may have been looking on from the stone benches that fateful day in 177 A.D. when his co-religionists were murdered. The blood of those forgotten martyrs watered the seed that later flowered into the great saint we commemorate today. Saint Irenaeus, may your intercession strengthen our wills, enlighten our minds, and deepen our trust....
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    7 分
  • Immaculate Heart of Mary

    Immaculate Heart of Mary
    2024/06/08
    Immaculate Heart of Mary
    Saturday following the Second Sunday after Pentecost
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

    Wing to wing, oar to oar, heart to heart

    The images by which the Church describes Herself are primarily feminine—Bride, Mother, Virgin, Spouse—while masculine terms are used for the Church’s ministry— the Office of Saint Peter, Office of Bishop, Holy Orders, etc. The fatherly labor and paternal structure of the Church are an outgrowth of her essentially maternal nature. Ecclesia Mater, Mother Church, loves with a huge heart, while Apostles, bishops, priests, and deacons hold souls together in their common mother’s embrace. In the thinking of Pope Saint John Paul II, the “Marian Church,” the Church of discipleship, precedes and makes possible the “Petrine Church,” the Church of office and authority. So authority serves discipleship, and discipleship has preeminence over, and makes sense of, authority. Even the fatherly and authoritative Saint Paul speaks with maternal concern, calling new Christians his “children,” saying he is like a “nurse” to them, and bragging that he has “begotten” them through the Gospel.

    On today’s Feast of Mary’s Immaculate Heart, the maternal warmth radiating from the core of Mary bakes the faithful soul. Our hearts glow when we look upon the seven-pierced heart of the mother of Jesus and commiserate with the holy longing in her tender eyes. Our love for Mary also softens our love for our mother the Church. Our minds know that the Church loves us and nourishes us with sanctifying grace. But intellectual convictions need to be felt. In the same way that Christ concretely and historically images the Father, so too Mary images, concretely and historically, the Church. Mary is not a mere symbol of the Church but anticipates and embodies what she gave birth to. Absent Mary, the Church would be just a little bit too hard, too distant, and too austere. It would be like a camping site or a large, cold, house, providing shelter but lacking a woman’s touch. Mary converts the dry household of faith into a cozy family home. Without her heartfelt love, the house would simply not be the same.

    The prophecy of Simeon in the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel is the first biblical indication of Mary’s interior suffering. Simeon tells Mary that Jesus will be a sign that will be contradicted and that a sword shall pierce her own heart. Years later, Mary and Joseph panic when Jesus stays behind in Jerusalem while they return to Nazareth. When they recover him in the temple and return home, Luke tells us that Mary “treasured all these things in her heart” (Lk 2:51). At the foot of the cross, Mary’s pondering heart is crushed and bewildered when sin closes in on her Son. But just when Christ’s life appears to be stillborn, Mary’s heart is vivified by the resurrection, and she becomes the first-century Church’s indipensable witness and most sturdy anchor.

    The Immaculate Heart of Mary is not a closed garden. We don’t peek in through the window of the family home in Nazareth to spy Mary standing in the kitchen. Mary’s life was not as public as her Son’s, but it was not as private as her contemporaries. And in the Book of Revelation, her mystical significance is exposed for all to see. She straddles heaven and earth in a duel with the devil. Mary’s wounded maternal heart beats strong and fast for the faithful and for the world, then, on a cosmic stage. Her heart is sinless but bruised, slit by seven swords of sorrow and dripping red for love of man. Vatican II’s description of Mary as the Temple of the Holy Spirit (Lumen Gentium 52-53) implies that her heart is the red-hot tabernacle of that Temple. Today’s feast was first referred to as Mary’s “Admirable Heart” or “Most Pure Heart.” Yet all the titles reflect the same truth; just like the love of Jesus’s Sacred Heart, Mary’s love for Christ and us is a tangible, human love. The Queen and King of Hearts are united in their love of all that is worth loving.

    Immaculate Heart of Mary, your bruised but beating heart softens our love for you and the Church. Your love is maternal, warm, docile, and concerned. Infuse our hearts with love like yours so we can live like you in this world and the next.
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    5 分
  • Sacred Heart of Jesus

    Sacred Heart of Jesus
    2025/06/26
    Sacred Heart of Jesus
    Friday following the Second Sunday after Pentecost
    Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White

    Behold the heart which drips red for love of man

    It’s always the tissue of male heart muscle when the molecular structure of a Eucharistic miracle is examined under a microscope. Jesus had “heart” but, more importantly, He had a heart. The word “heart” is synonymous with grit, soul, intuition, love, strength, generosity, and, in its most total sense, the very center of man. Today’s feast embraces all of those meanings. Christ’s Sacred Heart teaches us that God loves us as a friend loves a friend, as a parent loves a child, or as a sibling loves his closest brother or sister. That is, Christ loves us in the same way as a person loves us, only more intensely. Our God doesn’t shift the planetary order, redirect the rays of the sun, or create a parallel gravitational field to magnetize His love for mankind. Science fiction requires a fluid imagination. Understanding God’s love should not, and does not, demand such mental contortionism. Understanding God’s love should be as simple as recalling your little hand in your father’s big hand as you walked next to him at night as a little girl. It requires remembering running into your mother’s soft embrace, cheek to cheek, after skinning your knee. Jesus Christ’s love for man is as human and as clear as a beating heart. Simply put, Jesus loves us from just above His solar plexus, where His heart pulsates with emotion for every sacred creature who harbors a human soul.

    The widely loved devotion to the Sacred Heart is not rooted in a feast of ancient pedigree similar to those of Holy Week. No Christian of the first millenium ever gazed into the haunting eyes of Christ as He stared out from a Sacred Heart image enthroned on the family-room wall. It was only in 1856 that Pope Pius IX placed this feast on the Church’s universal calendar. The Pope acted after almost two centuries of devotion to the Sacred Heart, which had grown out of the thinking, preaching, and prayer of the indefatigable Saint John Eudes and out of the visions of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. Both of these saints were indebted, in turn, to the medieval revelations of the Sacred Heart granted to Saint Gertrude the Great.

    We love the Heart of Christ because His heart loved us first. We adore the adorer, love the lover, and worship the worshiper. Because God comes first, all of our love for Him is the repayment of a debt. We are not doing God a favor by loving him any more than a hammer does a carpenter a favor by slamming nails into wood. Religion is about raw justice, not doing God favors. That God loves us is not readily apparent from creation itself or from the history of mankind. The gods were many things to many races throughout the ages, but love was not one of them. Christianity had to tell the world that God was love. And Jesus had to attach His arms to a cross and die for that message to be convincing. The visions of Saint Margaret Mary made God’s love concrete and comprehensible, while the visions of Saint Faustina Kowolska deepened the meaning of this feast still more. In these challenging visions, Christ rips open His heart to Sister Faustina and shows her a calm and deep ocean of mercy waiting to bathe repentant sinners in its saving waters. Three strands—the Sacred Heart, love, and mercy—are now braided in a tight belt of spiritual truth.

    True heart is not proven by waving to the crowds from a car in a victory parade or by luxuriating on the beach with friends. Real heart is in the last stretch of the neck over the finish line, in climbing the stage to receive a diploma after years of academic struggle, or in pulling yourself out of bed to go to nocturnal adoration. True heart is synonymous with long suffering, perseverance, and conquering through adversity. True heart is dying on the cross when you didn’t deserve it. A true heart is a Sacred Heart. That’s the heart of our God. No athlete goes to the Olympics to compete for the silver. Jesus reached for the gold from the dais of the cross, slick with his own blood. There’s no need for us to keep on searching for a heart of gold in this world. We know in exactly whose body that heart beats. It’s all gold, it’s all sacredness, and it loves us like Himself.

    Sacred Heart of Jesus, You told us to ask and we shall receive, to seek and we shall find, to knock and the door shall be opened. Today, we ask, we seek, and we knock, in the sure and certain hope that you will hear us and answer us.
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