Father Paul Weinberger
Saint William the Confessor Catholic Church
Greenville, Texas
6th Sunday of Easter
May 13, 2007
Jesus said, “I have told you this while I Am with you; the Advocate, the Holy Spirit Whom the Father will send in My Name will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you. Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.”
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen
Forty days before Easter is Ash Wednesday; forty days after Easter is Ascension Thursday. And just so everyone knows, the obligation to attend Mass this Thursday, May17, has been dispensed in this diocese and the Feast is moved to Sunday. If you are able to attend Mass on Ascension Thursday I know you will, just as you would any other day of the year if you are able to attend the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass anywhere. This is the greatest thing you will do that day.
On the Sunday before Ascension Thursday, 90 years ago today, Our Lady appeared to the three children at Fatima. I mentioned them in detail last Sunday. In this book on Fatima, it talks about the Sunday before the Feast of the Ascension and then it goes into great detail and description about what Our Lady said to the children that day and then over a period of months, ending October 13th, 90 years ago.
The message of Fatima has not been forgotten because most people never learned it. The message of Fatima is obviously in total agreement with the teachings of Christ. Our Lady asked the three children to pray the Rosary everyday, which is a meditation on the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Christ. She asked them to pray the Rosary everyday for the conversion of sinners. You and I fit into that category. Also they were to pray for an end to wars and for peace in the world, and then she mentioned that her Son desired greatly that more honor and devotion to her Immaculate Heart be spread throughout the world.
So, an end to wars. During the time that Our Lady appeared to the three children in Fatima Portugal, WWI was continuing and was called the “Great War.” Millions of people died needlessly and of course what it did was weaken Europe to the point where we had to come in with WWII.
Just as last week’s very short Gospel where Jesus was saying glorify, glorify, glorify, and then the second half of the Gospel was love, love, love, and how easy people can hear those words and not understand it, when Jesus said those words, this is His idea of “glorify.”
Father Paul points to the crucifix
This is not the world’s understanding of “glorify”. Also, Jesus said love, love, love, and the world today thinks it understands “love.” A terrible example of recent memory happened last Sunday in the Zocalo Plaza in Mexico City, a plaza that is surrounded on three sides by government buildings. Over 18,000 Mexicans, and I would guess a few were Catholic, disrobed and took part in a series of photos. Oh, I am sorry…the plaza was surrounded on three sides by government buildings and the 4th building was only the Cathedral of Mexico City.
You see, so many today understand love but they identify lust and they call it love. Both have four letters and both begin with “L”; we can see how that could be a government mistake but it cannot be a mistake for us. Love is NOT lust, but what the world sees as love is in most instances is lust.
Today Our Lord talks about “peace”.
Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you, not as the world gives peace do I give it to you.
When Our Lady is praying at Fatima she tells the children to pray the Rosary every day for the conversion of sinners, and end to wars, and peace in the world. It may be considered incorrectly that peace is maybe an absence of war…not at all! If you have never gotten the silent treatment at home or at work, there is peace but the war is going on.
”How DARE he put that there! I’ll show him!”
Right? It just happens to those people in Dallas; it is not you. The kind of peace Our Lord is referring to is the kind of peace that comes from that first sentence in the Gospel. If you search the Gospels it would be difficult or impossible to find a sentence more beautiful than that first sentence.
Jesus said to His disciples, “Whoever loves Me will keep My Word and My Father will love him and We will come to him and make Our dwelling with him.”
Just hearing the words wash across you, you can feel the peace those words confer. The peace comes not from us but from the Lord; this is His gift to the Church. As the Bridegroom after having been glorified, Jesus appeared in His risen glorified Body as we sang in that opening hymn. You can see the marks of the nails and the mark of the sword that pierced His Sacred Heart. That statue of Jesus over there depicts the Sacred Heart in His risen, glorified and resurrected Body and it is no longer constrained by matter. Oh yes, He has a real Body; He is not Casper the friendly Messiah; He is truly there. Again, we see Him asking for something to eat.
See that I Am not a ghost.
A ghost cannot eat. He has Thomas probe the nail marks. No, no, He is there but the laws of this world have been conquered. When Jesus was glorified He conquered sin and death. When Our Lady and the Apostles and some of the disciples are gathered in the Upper Room on Easter Sunday evening, the doors and windows having been closed for fear of the Jews, Jesus knocked….No…He didn’t knock on the door, He entered into their midst and said to them,
”Peace be with you.” Then He breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit; the sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven; the sins you hold bound, they are held bound.”
Do you notice that the first thing He said was “peace be with you?” There is that word again, peace. After being glorified He came to give us peace. That is not fly-over territory. His first gift to His Bride, the Church, the first time He is alone after having been glorified is to give Her peace and then He breathes on them and tells them to receive the Holy Spirit. Jesus is breathing on the Church; no longer is there air in the room but the very breath of God…the Spirit of God.
Ascension Thursday is this week. After Jesus led them out of Jerusalem and after spending 40 days teaching them and being with them, He spoke to them one last time and the He ascended into heaven. They went back to Jerusalem and back to the Upper Room and began to pray intensely for nine days. Novena is Latin for nine. We have Ascension Thursday and ten days after they were praying for the coming of the Holy Spirit; “Please send the Holy Spirit.” Penta, like Pentagon, has five sides. Pentecost, is 50 days after Easter, God the Father and God the Son, Jesus, sent God the Holy Spirit down upon the Church, turning common, ordinary, cowardly individuals, well, most of them, into Evangelists. They were inside with doors and windows closed when they heard the sound of a strong, driving wind that filled the room where they were. You can’t get a good breeze in a place where the doors and windows are closed, so that was the Breath of God descending upon the Church in what was most likely the Upper Room of the Last Supper and of the first appearance of Jesus on Easter Sunday evening.
The breath of God descended upon them and in doing so, God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit took up residence in them, and this is the same with us when we are baptized. For the first time the Triune God makes their dwelling in my soul. Baptism is that Sacrament, which takes away original sin and confers the life of the Trinity on the soul. We have a Divine Guest now in the Holy Spirit, and wherever you find the Holy Spirit you also find God the Father and God the Son.
I was at a baptism once and I had to travel far to attend. A friend of mine is a priest in New York and I was invited to attend the baptism of a child. I will never forget what I saw. We were in a small area and there were a lot of people there. I guess they heard I was coming. [Laughter] I was standing here and the priest doing the baptism was there and over there was a baptismal font there. The Godparents were standing together and the Godmother was holding the baby before the baptism, during and after the baptism. The baby was a little girl and she was about two month old and was the premier idea of what a baby should be for a baptism. ASLEEP [Laughter]
My friend the priest, began the baptism and the way he began was the way everyone was baptized before about 1965. Thank you Lord that I was born in 1959! He started by blowing on the face of the child three times and did it in the form of a Cross and then continued with the baptism. I had never seen that before. I’d just finished reading a book by an exorcist in Rome. Believe it or not, today when children are baptized there is an exorcism and the word is Greek for “a blessing.” Of course when someone says the word “exorcism”, the first thing we think of is “blessing”…. right! [Laughter] There is an exorcism in the current Rite of Baptism but evidentially the blowing on the face of the child was a minor exorcism in the older Rite.
I’d just read in Gabriel Amorth’s Book, An Exorcist Tell His Story, which is a book for common reading where one will find some uncommon things contained in those pages, where Father Amorth mentions again and again how a priest, who has been designated an exorcist by his bishop, will often use a test to determine whether someone is in need of exorcism. They bring the person in and the Exorcist will blow in the face of the person. Now, this is not a case of morning breath or halitosis or whatever it is. If the person is indeed oppressed, many times they will just crumple to the floor. Yes, with just the breath, and it is a test.
So it was interesting because when I was present for this child’s baptism I saw the priest do that and recalled reading what I just described in Fr. Amorth’s book. But I noticed that the baby didn’t cry. She had her hands clutched to her chest and when the priest blew on her, her little hands went up and shook and her feet did the same. She wasn’t thrashing about but calmly put her little arms up and kind of waved them around in the air. After the baptism we were out in the front talking about the baptism and I asked the Godmother if she noticed what the baby had done when the priest blew on the baby. She said she didn’t notice that. I thought,
What? Are you blind? She has a blind woman for a Godmother?”
The reason she didn’t notice it was because she said she was too busy concentrating on the heartbeat of the child. The baby’s heart was beating so hard it was as if it was about to jump out of her chest. It was interesting.
We are in a sense, in the grip of the “other team”. That is why it is good in so many ways to baptize children soon after they are born. Remember that 80 years ago, on April 16th, Pope Benedict was born on Holy Saturday morning and that night he was baptized at the Easter Vigil, less than 24 hours later. I know it is probably the greatest disappointment in my parent’s minds that I wasn’t baptized sooner. They waited a couple of months and look at the problems I have caused them. The priest should have been present at my birth with the holy water.
“Father, let the whole baby be born and then we can baptize.”
But, they waited a couple of months and I’ve been picking up the pieces ever since.
At the end of baptism the child is anointed on the crown of the head with chrism. Later on we receive chrism on the forehead in the Sacrament of Confirmation, when the bishop says, “Be sealed with the Holy Spirit.” Then he says, “Peace be with you.” Again, it is such a one-two punch…peace, peace, peace, glorify, glorify, glorify, love, love, love. You have to see this as Jesus understands it and not as the world sees it because,
”Peace be with you, um, yea.”
We have the Sign of Peace and we have totally lost the idea of what Jesus means by peace. Peace be with you in the Catholic Church today means a fifteen-minute hug. Right? That is not what Jesus is talking about and it is not just the absence of war; it is the peace that only He can confer. Jesus says,
My peace I give to you, not as the world gives do I give it to you.
Also in the Sacrament of Holy Orders my hands were consecrated with Holy Chrism. In November when I went to see my friend be made Auxiliary Bishop of Detroit, they poured Chrism over his head; Chrism is olive oil with balsam added as a perfume. If you have ever been present at a baptism, when the Chrism is administered the aroma pervades the whole place; it is a beautiful scent. The reason the bishop’s head is consecrated is because if the head is consecrated then all the members are as well. The reason a priest’s hands are consecrated is for dispensing the Sacraments. This is all in connection with what the Church is doing these 9 days in praying for the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete and the Advocate, who will bring peace to the soul.
Last week the Pope was flying from Italy to Brazil and on page six of your bulletin I have an excerpt of a story from Reuters. I cut some things out because children do not need to read about it. You can go on the Internet and find it. The pope was on the plane and it was a long ride I imagine. The reporters probably thought,
“Ah ha! We have him trapped! He can’t get away.”
The Pope was probably thinking the same thing.
”I’ll have them for lunch!”
[Laughter]
Now last month in Mexico, before they decided to disrobe last Sunday, some of the Catholic legislators in Mexico decided to bring abortion back to Mexico.
”Father, what do you mean by bring it back? Abortion has never been allowed in Mexico!”
No, it was there before 1519 under the Aztecs. Abortion was allowed and promoted…that’s right! It is not a joke! In the very place where Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared in 1531 and left her image and who is the Patroness of the unborn, the Catholic and non-Catholic legislators made it possible to abort a child. Some of the bishops in Mexico have been talking about excommunicating the legislators who did this.
The reporters on the Pope’s plane loaded a question and said,
”Holy Father, it is good to see that you are going to Brazil. So, do you agree with those bishops in Mexico?”
The Holy Father said “yes”. That kind of puts a damper on a loaded question, right? The Holy Father said,
By saying “Amen” to abortion on demand is not consistent with saying “Amen” to receiving the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus in Holy Communion. Let me give you an example since I see “he” just walked in the back door.“Yes, this excommunication was not an arbitrary one but is allowed by Canon Law (Church Law) which says that the killing of an innocent child is incompatible with receiving Communion, which is receiving the Body of Christ,” he [the Pope] said.
As many of you know, 65 years ago the Deacon was born on May 10th. In Mexico, Mother’s Day is celebrated on May 10th. So 65 years ago the Deacon’s mother received the greatest Mother’s Day gift that anyone in Mexico or anywhere could ever receive; he was born. He probably told his mother,
”I am not giving you a gift.
”Why son?”
”I am here! What else would you want for Mother’s Day? ”
[Laughter]
So, God’s gift to Mexico was born last week on Thursday, 65 years ago, Deacon Ismael Guerra. Let us pretend that Deacon Ismael and I went into Dallas last week to rob a bank. I have plans and I want to do some good things but I need money so I tell him to get in the car and drive and we will go and rob a bank. We finally get to Dallas after getting lost several times. Did I tell you he lives in Dallas? [Laughter] Anyway, we get to Dallas and rob the bank and get away; we are not caught. I put a mask on so they can’t identify me but they did say that it was probably a priest because he had a Roman collar on and he kept laughing and he needs to start a walking program. [Laughter] But, they didn’t catch us and we are driving away like going through a school zone, driving 25 mph. The police are zooming past us thinking that we can’t be the robbers because we were going so slowly.
Days later we make it back to Greenville because the Deacon is driving so slowly and I am not caught. So, I share some of the loot with the Deacon.
“Here, here is a twenty.”
I then stick the rest of the money away for what I intend to do with it, which will be good things. But then I realize I have to offer Mass and that I have put my life in danger just getting into a car with the Deacon. I put his life in danger by inviting him to help me rob the bank and we put other lives in danger. Those are all mortal sins, and then stealing a large amount of money, that is a mortal sin as well. It is like a mortal sin wedding cake. Mortal sins stacked on top of others. Well, I decided I had better go to Confession because I have to offer Mass. So I knock on Fr. Vogel’s door and he does what he always does when I go to Confession to him…he groans and then begins to hear my Confession.
“Father, I need to say Mass tonight; I just robbed the bank with the Deacon. Oh by the way, here is a $5.00. I just need absolution so I can go and offer Mass.”
[Laughter]
Fr. Vogel then tells me he can’t give me absolution because I haven’t given the money back and that I haven’t told the Deacon that it was wrong for him to drive the get-away car. He says that I need to be reconciled before I can be forgiven. Who listens to Fr. Vogel anyway? So I come back and say Mass and receive Holy Communion. I have been to Confession and I keep doing that the rest of my life.
You see, I didn’t get a letter in the mail saying that they knew I robbed the bank None of that!
On the back of your bulletin is a paragraph from the document that Pope Benedict, along with all the bishops of the world wrote and published, just like with that First Reading, which is the Council of Jerusalem in 70 AD. They had some questions and some bishops got together and prayed about it. There is a part that says,
They name the necessities. Some thought that to be a Christian you had to stay away from those, be circumcised and eat the way an observant Jew would eat. No, the Council of Jerusalem and the bishops praying to the Holy Spirit made that pronouncement; it is in the First Reading in the Acts of the Apostles. In this same way, Pope Benedict, in union with the bishops published Sacramentum Cartitas, which is about the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Number 83 in this document supports what excommunication really means. Mortal sin is not consistent with Holy Communion. It says that these are NOT NEGOTIABLE.It is the decision of the Holy Spirit and of us not to place any burden beyond these necessities.
So, the way peace is restored to my soul if I disturb that peace after baptism by killing grace in my soul through mortal sin, then as a Catholic, I go to Confession. Our Lord has given us His Sacrament, which gives pardon and peace, which the world cannot give. Besides last Thursday being Deacon Ismael’s birthday, it was also the Feast of Blessed Damien de Veuster of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. In the 1870s he left Belgium as a young priest and went to Hawaii. At the time Hawaii had a king and queen and wasn’t yet gobbled up by the USA. The king and queen saw their beautiful islands decimated through leprosy. Leprosy of course is Hansen’s disease where people of any age can be afflicted. When the flesh is afflicted it begins to putrefy or rot and the smell of rotting human flesh will never leave your nostrils once you have smelled it. You will recognize the smell immediately. The terrible thing was that these sick people were being untreated and from baby to adult, were being dumped on the island of Molokai and were left to fend for themselves. Some of the evil members among them would prey on the weaker. They were living as though they were animals.
The Sacred Heart Fathers had built a chapel there and put a cemetery next to it but they were just burying the people in shallow graves. The dogs and hogs were growing fat digging up the bodies of those where were buried there. When Fr. Damien voluntarily went to Molokai, it was as if he was entering hell and signing a life contract. Molokai was an island of quarantine. If you went there you knew you would never leave. Fr. Damien went there to care for the people and to teach them about God and how to read and write. He also helped to build shelter for the people and he did all this in no short time. Leprosy is a vicious disease and it ravages the body and the flesh rots; limbs can fall off. Fr. Damien took up smoking a pipe because he preferred the smell of tobacco on his clothes to the stench of the lepers he was treating.
Once the bishop was coming to visit Molokai. Fr. Damien thought this was great and that it showed they were worthy of a visit by their bishop. The ship sailed into the bay and dropped anchor and of course Fr. Damien rode a little boat out to the ship to receive the bishop and take him to the island. The captain of the ship would not allow the bishop to leave the ship and get into the boat with Fr. Damien. Hanging over the side of the ship was the captain, the bishop and all the sailors, who were looking at Fr. Damien in his little boat as well as listening to everything he was saying.
Fr. Damien was urging the bishop to come down but the captain still would not allow it. Fr. Damien had a second reason why he wanted the bishop to come to the island; there was not another priest there and no one to hear Fr. Damien’s confession. He asked if the bishop could come down just to hear his confession and the captain wouldn’t allow even that. So, from his dinghy Fr. Damien yells up to the ship and asks if they would allow the bishop to hear his confession in this manner. Tears were streaming down Blessed Damien’s face. The captain granted permission for the bishop to hear his confession from the boat. Not only was the bishop present but also the captain and all those sailors hanging over the side like monkeys were listening to Fr. Damien shout his confession.
Fr. Damien was more intent on peace of soul than he was on pride. People want their pride over everything else and pride is the first sin in every other sin since Adam and Eve. We think we know best. The fact is, I can consume a mountain of Holy Communion after committing a mortal sin and it will not bring me peace.
The reason I included those documents in the bulletin is because the day after the pope gave that pronouncement on the plane, Fr. Federico Lombardi, the spokesman for the Vatican had to explain to reporters what the pope said. Well, why don’t we just read what the pope said; there it is right there. I guess some of these guys had grown up when Becket was a movie in the 60s. Richard Burton played the Archbishop of Canterbury and there was a very riveting scene where the archbishop is about to excommunicate King Henry centuries before Henry VIII is excommunicated. So he, the archbishop, takes a candle, lights it and goes through this elaborate ceremony of excommunication and at the very end, Richard Burton takes the lighted candle and turns it upside down and smashes it into the floor.
“HEY! Who is going to clean that up?”/b]
That is what I thought when I was watching the movie.
I guess the reporters are thinking that this ceremony is going to happen for every Catholic legislator who is pro abortion. There are not enough candles in the world for this. Fr. Lombardi explained that Catholics who vote in this manner and Catholics who elect them are not going to get a letter in the mail telling them they are excommunicated. It is like me robbing that bank and no one knew except the Deacon, and I paid him off right…but I excommunicate myself.
I was not baptized to live in the state of excommunication and without being able to go to Holy Communion. Our Lord says,
I have told you this will I Am with you; the Advocate, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in My Name will teach you everything and will remind you of all that I told you. Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you, not as the world gives do I give to you.
If you look at the lives of those three little children at Fatima after Our Lady appeared to them…their lives were wrecked and were utter chaos. Little Francisco died within 18 months and Jacinta lived about as long. Lucia lived on until about a year or so ago. The same goes for St. Bernadette after she saw Our Lady of Lourdes; after it was known, her life became unbearable.
Think of this…with His peace in our soul, war, chaos and the rage around us by whatever the world throws our way matters but is not a deal breaker. It is like St. Max Kolbe kneeling at Auschwitz in the starvation bunker singing hymns and having been stripped of all his clothes and still having peace of soul. They finally had to inject him so he would die. This is the peace that the world does not know and it is the peace that God wants to share with us. We must protect that peace in the Sacrament of Reconciliation that God has given us.
Jesus said, “I have told you this while I Am with you; the Advocate, the Holy Spirit Whom the Father will send in My Name will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you. Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.”
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen