Father Paul Weinberger, Pastor
St. William the Confessor Catholic Church
Greenville, Texas
23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 9, 2007
What man wishing to construct a tower does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if there is enough for its completion, otherwise after laying the foundation and finding himself unable to finish the work, the onlookers should laugh at him and say, “This man began to build but did not have the resources to finish.”
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen.
The image on the cover of the bulletin is very beautiful. Below the picture there is a description of the picture, “Relics of the True Cross”, in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome. This is a reliquary that is centuries old.
PHOTO
Look at the two angels on the bottom; the one on the left appears very casual. He is holding a symbol of the spear that the soldier used to pierce the side of Christ. The other angel is holding an image of the reed that someone put a sponge on the end of and soaked it in wine, holding it to the lips of Christ. Below the angels is a scene from the Passion. The main point of this is the transverse crossbeam, which holds a large piece of the actual transverse beam of the True Cross.
Perhaps you will recall that, Christians were persecuted from the very beginning of the Church, especially by the Emperors of Rome. Then, Emperor Constantine came along and made the persecutions against the Church against the law. His mother, St. Helena, went to Jerusalem and was led to the Relics of the True Cross, which she dutifully brought back to Rome. At the bottom it refers to this as “Relics of the True Cross, in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme”, because she didn’t just bring back the Cross, she brought back some Jerusalem real estate…load after load of soil. When the beautiful Church of Santa Croce was built, it was built on the soil of the City of Jerusalem.
Inside the bulletin you see that Friday is September 14th, which is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. How fitting that on the following day is the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. We have an image of Our Lady of Sorrows right there next to the Crucifix.
On page four you see that on Saturday we had two hours of Confession, as well as, the three Masses this morning. Confessions were heard for more than an hour this afternoon. Notice that on Tuesday morning there is scheduled the Office of Readings and Morning Prayer at 7 a.m., which, is followed by a Communion Service. Later on, we will have a Holy Hour and more Confessions, the holy Sacrifice of the Mass and Compline. You may notice that things are starting to show up in the schedule that was removed during the summer. Again, on Thursday is the Office of Readings, Communion Service, as well as, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Thursday also happens to be the tenth anniversary of the burial of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The schedule for the whole week is full and CCD classes start back up on Saturday. Summer is over, and the day after Labor Day, parents were doing the “Snoopy Dance” in the end zone. They are sending the kids back to school; the kids will like it for about a week and then they will complain, but that is life.
So, we are going back to a school year schedule. Hopefully, somewhere in the busy schedules of many a school district, they can fit “study” into the schedule. In between DVDs and the like, maybe they can fit in a little reading and memorizing things that will serve them later on. I pray that I am studying until the day I die, learning more about the world and especially my faith. Children that are going back to school are getting used to what it is like to be an adult; they are getting a slight taste of it.
If you noticed in the bulletin that on September 11th, which is the 6th Anniversary of the attack on the United States in New York, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania, you are encouraged to drop by the Church and make a visit to Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, praying for those who lost their lives in the cowardly attacks. Do you remember that day that those planes were used as weapons and people were pushed out of tall office buildings, some while sitting at their desks? Some, who were still in their chairs, went plummeting to their deaths.
I remember how the media, who never, ever wants to censor anything such as fowl language and especially jokes against the Catholic Church, as well as nudity, quickly censored the 9/11 film of the attack. It was too gruesome they said. No! Gruesome is what you see in theatres and on cable dumping right into living rooms. Many times I have heard in the Confessional, from children that their first encounter with pornography was at home on their own television. With HBO, the Movie Channel and Stars…isn’t America great?
How sad that the home is not the place to protect the innocence of children, but it is interesting how quickly we were censored after 9/11. There are bad people in the world and they don’t like us. They would like us under one condition, and that is if we were dead, but until then, we really get under their skin. I like TV for one reason and that is to watch Mother Angelica; the same goes for Radio. I know that it is earth shattering that I like TV because of EWTN, but, this is a way that the study of our Catholic Faith can actually reach us. There is not a person here who can stand before God and claim that they can’t continue studying. And heaven forbid that we open a book, especially the Catechism! We can access the Catechism online and there is no charge. We can and should study our Faith.
I was watching EWTN once, and Fr. Levis and Fr. Trujilio were answering questions. Fr. Levis, in his wisdom and old age, said that you know you annoy somebody if you have a pulse. Right? If you are alive then you can be guaranteed that you annoy someone. Take the highway for instance; people driving too slow are annoying to the people zooming past; and the people zooming past annoy the one poking along. People who drive with a cell phone are annoyed at those who don’t have one and vice versa. Isn’t it amazing how easy it is to annoy someone? You don’t even have to know them. So, if you have a pulse you annoy someone. This is really a truth and this will happen until the day we die. The people who attacked us on 9/11 are annoyed by so much. I must agree with their opposition to what serves as entertainment in this country. I agree with them that the trash should not be allowed, but they want to solve the problem by either converting us or killing us, and this is really sad.
So, this week you are asked to recall those who lost their lives, people like us going about their business, and died without any preparation. Our prayers for them and for the security of our country are most appropriate, as well as for the men and women, who protect us. I saw many of them last week at the airport as they were coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. I am sure they annoyed many people over there, but many are grateful.
This week we are getting back to a schedule where we leave the summer schedule behind and train our attention on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, Confession, prayers, and time with the Lord at Holy Hour. We need the strength that comes from the Sacraments, especially the holy Sacrifice of the Mass, to be able to do what our Lord says in the Gospel, to do the impossible.
If anyone comes to me without hating father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.
If I love someone, something, or myself more than I love Christ, well, I can’t be His disciple because I am either my own disciple or I am the disciple of someone else. So, Jesus is laying it out very clearly here. He gives us the example of someone who is about to construct a tower and first it is down to calculating the cost to see if there is enough for its completion, otherwise after laying its foundation and only finishing half of it, you look ridiculous. You can try out your own version of this without building a tower. Just take out the extension ladder on a Saturday or Sunday when the neighbors are at home and lean it against the house and climb up half way and stop. Wait until a crowd collects. You can see your neighbor drive up and when he gets out of the car the conversation goes something like this:
“Hey Joe, how are you doing?”
“I’m fine. Can I help you; are you stuck?”
“No no, I am just standing here.”
“Is something wrong with your roof?”
“No, I am just standing here.”
“Are you paralyzed, are you having a stroke? What is it? Can I help you down?”
“No, I am just standing here.”
“Well, ok then, I will be seeing you.”
Then, the neighbor runs home and calls a real estate agent and has a For Sale sign put in his yard so he can move away from another crazy neighbor. Right?
“You look ridiculous up there; you are not up there and you are not down here, you are just half way.”
You can get an idea about what Our Lord is talking about.
Our Catholic Faith is something that demands our attention, especially the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. If you want to get a good idea at how versed you are in your knowledge of this central mystery of our Faith, just write a couple of pages about what the Mass is according to the mind of the Church. Ask your children to do this and you will see where there are gaping holes. Study and prayer, as well as, regular reception of the Sacraments, especially Communion and Confession, can help to fill in. So, study is not something merely for children, but also, for adults so that we can appreciate the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
Last Monday I did something I never do and I hope I don’t do it again in the near future; I got up at 5 a.m. and drove to Corpus Christi, Texas. I am exaggerating a bit; I only drove to DFW, but it seemed as far as Corpus Christi. I had to catch a flight to Nebraska because I attended a workshop by the FSSP in Denton, which is in the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska. God forbid that something happens to my mom while I was gone. Then, I get a phone call that my mom is not well, and I asked how sick she was. I was told that she wasn’t dying.
”Is she going to hang on till this evening?”
I pray I would never say that. Mondays are terrible anyway; I hate them. That is why the Monday schedule always starts at 5 p.m. I am tired after the weekend schedule.
Going to Nebraska is like traveling to a place that you have never gone to before and meeting a lot of people, who turn out to be members of your family, and you like every one of them. You can’t even pull that off at a family reunion! This did happen to me at the FSSP seminar on the Traditional Mass.
In your bulletin on page seven you see a paragraph where I have a sentenced underlined.
Mass in the vernacular is the Mass you are attending right now. Even though I have written this in the bulletin and underlined it, and even though I have mentioned it, I can hear it now:In the weeks ahead I will continue studying the Traditional Latin Mass. It will take weeks and weeks before I will offer what is known as a “Low Mass.” This of course will not eclipse or replace the ordinary form of the Mass in the vernacular.
“Yep! Fr. Paul is going to replace every single Mass with the TLM. Yep, next week at both St. Williams and Our Lady of Fatima.”
Ok…at least I tried. That is not the goal but I want to tell you, and this is without any humor or exaggeration whatsoever; after being there five days I got a glimpse of what Moses probably felt like when he had to veil his face after being in the Divine Presence of God. In the Old Testament you can read about Moses having to veil his face. My life will never be the same. I am absolutely serious. What a tremendous blessing last week was.
The priests, deacons, and seminarians up there, while they are most hospitable, I think they got their training from Pharaoh. It was like the overseers of Pharaoh addressing the Israelites,
“Lash, back to work!” “Lash, back to the seminar!”
They were herding us from the classroom, to the practice Mass, to the Chapel and twenty-one other priests and I were allowing them to do that. It is interesting that usually when you attend a workshop, you are going to find that it isn’t really a workshop. Work…right? As a priest, many times I have been to a workshop or seminar, because I had to, and they were useless and worthless and nothing was learned. At these seminars it is interesting to watch priests picking and choosing which workshop to attend.
“I will go to that one and not that one.”
That is code for, “take a nap.” But at the seminar in Nebraska it was amazing to see the priest, who didn’t skip and actually attended. We were there because we wanted to be. Twenty-one other priests from all over the country were maxed out, and they were most gracious.
It appears that the topic was the Traditional Latin Mass and that is what it was. It was a series of talks, lectures, and meditations on Jesus Christ, because the Mass is the re-presentation of this.
Fr. Paul turns around and touches the Crucifix
The Triumph of the Cross is an un-bloody, re-presentation of this. The Sacrifice of Christ is a perfect Sacrifice and once it is perfect it never has to be repeated. It is a “once and for all” Sacrifice. Getting together with other men of the clergy and speaking about the Mass, I learned things that I have never heard before or heard things in ways I have never heard them explained. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to be studying this, because I know it is only a beginning.
Recently, I learned that in 1923, an astronomer was looking into a telescope at the Milky Way Galaxy. The guy’s last name was Hubble; you have probably heard of the Hubble telescope. Anyway, he was looking at the Milky Way and was looking at that smudge on the telescope, which is what it looked like with telescopes in 1923. It is known as the Andromeda Nebula. What Hubble discovered was not a smudge on the lens. Up until that point it appeared that this was the “be all/end all”, or the whole tamale. Then, Hubble discovered that in the Andromeda Nebula there were many galaxies, or, as Carl Sagan would say, “Billions and billions of stars.” They are moving away from us. It is amazing. By uncovering that mystery, it has led to more mysteries yet to be discovered.
It was and is the same way with this seminar in Nebraska on the Traditional Latin Mass. By studying the TLM, we were talking about the Central Mystery of our Faith, which is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass; we were talking about Christ.
Now, I have already unpacked and did it on Saturday. I did a couple of loads of laundry, made my bed by 1:30 p.m., and put away the suitcases. If you want to talk about a trip that changed my life, the suitcases don’t usually get put away for weeks. But, I was so charged about what we had been studying and what I will continue to study, that I did all that on Saturday.
There will come a day when you will breathe your last breath and that will be it. We will go before God and have no pulse. We will breathe our last breath and we won’t be annoying anyone. Well, I take that back; you will have to be buried and I will have to be buried. The diocese has tried to do that a couple of times, but here I am. We annoy people even in death.
Seriously though, when we go before God He is going to ask us about this Gospel.
“Why was it that you loved someone, something, or your own life more than me?”
“Well…I…I…I didn’t have the strength it took to resist her or him or myself.”
We can’t say that to Jesus because He gave without counting the cost. When He gives us the Sacraments and prayer, but especially, the Blessed Sacrament, there is nothing more that He can give us; He gives us His very Self. So, when we have everything we need to pick up our cross and follow Him, but we don’t, then, there we are looking ridiculous and we are not where we are supposed to be and that is in Heaven, and it is not His fault or anyone else’s, but our own. The next sound we will hear are the doors of hell opening; I am not exaggerating and I am certainly not making a joke. Our Lord says it very clearly to us here.
The study of our Faith is recommended, and it is so easy now with the use of computers and CDs, as well as television and radio. OR…receiving the Sacraments at our own local parish and through prayer. In studying the Faith, we can learn more about what Our Lord is calling us to do. This Gospel appears to be calling us to hate those we are supposed to love. We are not supposed to have a love that is inordinate, out of order, where we love them or ourselves more than we love God.
I have two older sisters and a younger brother; we are all fourteen months apart. My mother tells a story where my dad was called into work on a Sunday, which was unusual. Mother had to get dressed and get us all ready for Mass. She was getting us all in the car and my brother was still a baby so she probably put a blanket on the front seat. There were no car seats or seatbelts back then. The car had no power steering and so it was difficult to drive; it has a clutch and gear shift on the column, so you can imagine how much free time she would have had to talk on a cell phone had they been invented.
So, she is getting everyone out to the car; of course, I was already out there praying. [Laughter] I think I was about two. We get into the car and she is about to put my brother in and he threw up on her. If that had been me, I would have gone into the house and looked in the Yellow Pages for a traveling circus and sent him off to the circus, and then we would just head out to Mass. But mother didn’t do that; she picked him up and took everyone into the house but me; she left me in the car because she knew I wanted to pray. [Laughter] She cleaned my brother up and fixed whatever problem there was. I never gave her these kinds of problems. (Said with tongue in cheek) Mother got us all back into the car and we went to Church.
That is dedication; no one was standing over her. How many people under similar circumstances would not go because a baby threw up on them. Babies throw up, right? They do other things too, but moms and dads figure that out fast and take precautions. Anyway, this is the kind of love that parents are aware of. As we grow older, we say things to our parents kind of like what is in the Gospel today. I have heard so many instances of children saying to their parents,
“I hate you!”
Or, I like this chestnut; it seems very popular and is announced again and again.
“When I am eighteen I am moving out of here!”
“Oh that is nice dear. Is that 4, 733, 916 times that you have said that today, or 17 times today that you have told us of this decision and that you have been telling us about for quite a long time now?”
Do you love to live with someone like that? But what do good parents do when they hear this kind of thing? They just hit the delete button so that later on they don’t remember the terrible things we said and did to them; they just remember the good things.
I remember coming home from vacation after going to Cedar Creek Lake. We would get home late Sunday night and my parents had to get us ready for bed and school the next day. We were cranky and tired. Of course, I just prayed the whole way. The next morning I would get up to go to school and my dad would already be gone to work. That kind of dedication is what moves mothers and fathers to take care of their children, to put their own interest aside.
This is the kind of love that Christ knows we have in us, and He wants to continue this work in us, this love for each other. He even wants us to love the people we consider “throw aways”. There is no one, man, woman, or child that is a throw away person in the eyes of God. Where do we get the strength for this? We get it from the Lord Himself, especially, from the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Everything is there; and there is nothing lacking. Every grace we will need for the next seven days is there; and if I don’t access it, if I don’t pray, if I don’t think about my Faith, and if I don’t study, then I grow colder and colder, and eventually I might grow so weak that I die interiorly. That can happen. Faith is a gift and not a guarantee; and something that is abused can be taken away. If we do all these things it will well up inside and it has to be communicated to others, and before you know it, you are talking to perfect strangers and telling them about some aspect of the Faith. You will even carry your cross better at home or work.
This is what the Lord expects, and so, if we don’t complete the mission or the project as it were, it is not His fault, because He has given us everything we are going to need; He has left nothing out. It is not like that friend of yours that you found out isn’t really your friend.
“Oh I love this potato salad, can I have the recipe?”
“Sure, here it is. I am glad you asked.”
Then, you make the salad according to the recipe and it just doesn’t taste the same for some reason and it is probably because she didn’t give you the whole recipe. She is not the friend you thought she was, but Christ isn’t like that; He leaves nothing out. Without counting the cost He has given us everything, kind of like St. Paul describes in the Second Reading, because he knows what the First Reading says.
For the corruptible body burdens the soul and the earthen shelter weighs down the mind that has many concerns and scarce do we guess the things on earth and what is within our grasp we find with difficulty, but when things are in Heaven who can search them out?
If I don’t learn about my Faith it is my own fault. When I was at the seminar last week I sat on the back row on purpose, because I knew after a while, I would start to want to doze off, so, I would get on my chair and stand up. Feel free, those of you who are awake, to do the same thing here during the homily. Watch everyone stand up. [Laughter] I didn’t want to miss it, I wanted to hear everything, and I have to tell you, my heart is so full of so much that it is incredible. It is going to take a long time to unpack. I have a lot to learn and a lot to relate to you.
Every time we pull back and meditate upon the Mystery, Who is Jesus Christ, that God has revealed Himself to us and Heaven has come down to earth, and God has become a Man while still remaining God, it is too amazing and yet it rivets our attention. The next time or today, you are tempted to see someone else, look at someone else and consider your own desires over those of God…think about what you are giving up. We do this every day and it is called temptation - to choose this person, maybe one we don’t even know.
“Oh, he/she, they will complete me. This thing for me will complete me.”
The only thing that will complete the human heart is the Creator, Who made the heart, soul, mind, and body, and that is God Himself. So, temptation is to put father, mother, brother, sister, wife, husband, or self ahead of Him. Go to the front of the line and dump Him and it always ends the same way. But to do what Christ encourages us to do, and that is to study Him the way we study things that are good for us. People weigh things when they are on a diet or they go to the gym when they want to get into shape. Some read the financial section when they want to invest in the stock market. What do they do when it comes to hobbies?
“I got a new camera and I want to tell you all about it.”
Isn’t it interesting how most conversations never come around to talking about the Faith? The Faith is something like old shoes that are just here to use when we need to, but they are not really special for anything. The Faith is there to keep us going so that the mission that God has begun in us at Baptism will grow to completion in Heaven, and it will pull others along with us. This world is tempting, and that is where we have to rely on prayer and the Sacraments and the study of our Faith. We cannot go before Him, and convince Him, that we didn’t have everything we needed.
What man wishing to construct a tower does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if there is enough for its completion, otherwise after laying the foundation and finding himself unable to finish the work, the onlookers should laugh at him and say, “This man began to build but did not have the resources to finish.”
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen