Father Paul Weinberger, Pastor
St. William the Confessor Catholic Church
Greenville, Texas
Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 14, 2006
Mother’s Day
”My Father is the vine grower; He takes away every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, and everyone that does He prunes so that it bears more fruit. I AM the Vine, you are the branches, whoever remains in Me and I in him will bear much fruit because without Me, you can do nothing.”
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen
Today of course is Mother’s Day, a secular holiday but a day that is so important to recall. It is one day out of three hundred sixty five days. If we speak to, write to, think of, or pray for our mothers only on this day, our love for our mother is not true love or it is very immature love. As the Second Reading says so clearly, St. John says,
Let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth.
This is how we know our love is real, if we love in deed and truth. In fact, in the First Reading when Saul arrived in Jerusalem he tried to join the disciples but they were afraid of him. Not believing that he was a disciple they wanted to see some word, deed, and truth in this guy, who had previously persecuted the Church. After a while they did accept him after his words, deeds, and the truth that he promoted was sufficient for them.
Our love has to develop or blossom. On this day we can maybe look back with a chuckle at the ways in which our love was immature. A sign of immature love toward our mothers is when we recognize that we have a good mother but when mother has to tell us multiple times to take out the trash or clean the table and dishes, that is not a sign of love or responsibility on our part. We should do it the first time. I remember my mother having this battle with my brother and me. I would tell her it wasn’t my turn to take out the trash. My mother wasn’t worried about that; she just wanted the trash out. The same thing goes with all the other chores in the house; the complaints, such as it wasn’t my turn or I didn’t want to…I never tried that one, it wasn’t allowed.
It is interesting that we had to be asked so many times and yet, our hearing was never called into question when our parents wanted to give us something we wanted like money, a trip to Six Flags, or something fun. Our hearing was perfect. Whenever we were being called to do chores we always seemed to fail that hearing test. Of course it is only those kids from Dallas who do this, right? I am from Dallas so I can say that. Of course it isn’t just the kids from Dallas; it is fallen human nature and we are very patient knowing that children will eventually grow up and, say around the age of thirty-five move out of the house and strike out on their own. [Laughter] That is how it probably seems to parents. Love has to mature.
If you look in your bulletin on page nine, I have added an excerpt from a post that was on the Catholic World News website, called “The DaVinci Code Misses the Point Altogether”. You need to brace yourselves because they Friday they will release the movie, “The DaVinci Code”. The author of the writing I have posted is someone known as “Diogenes”, someone looking for an honest man; looking for the truth in a person. He says,
It's simple: martyrdom.
From the very beginnings of the Church the faithful were tortured and put to death because they believed the Gospel was true and because they refused to deny this truth, and the same witness has been given throughout the history of the Church up to and including the present day. Gnosticism, by contrast, never produced martyrs, and was somewhat embarrassed by its collaborationist tendency already in the time of Valerian.
The Roman Emperor always seemed to find the Gnostics on his side and against the Christians. Of course, they were Gnostic Christians but we don’t want to take this stuff too seriously now, right? Not this Christianity stuff. So, Gnostics always ended up finding themselves on the side of the Roman Emperor, who was persecuting the Church. The Gnostics were the first heresy the Church had to deal with and heresies are always with the Church. Once the heresy is beaten back it remains just below the surface, kind of like when you are chopping out Johnson grass, it is always there just below the surface and it will come back and cause problems again.
Gnosticism’s most noted defect is what it said about Jesus, that He was true God but the true man part is just an appearance. So that would mean that when we look at the crucifix with the corpus on it that all we see is a ghost. We just nailed a ghost to the cross and He “appeared” to die for us…he appeared to take a human body.
Before the Resurrection Christ had been scourged, tortured, and nailed to the cross. After the Resurrection that same Body appeared to Thomas and Christ commanded him to probe the nail marks in His hands and feet and to place his hand in His side. So, Christ appeared to the Apostles and they were afraid that they were seeing a ghost. Christ asked them for something to eat and He would eat baked fish and other food. He wasn’t asking for food because rising from the dead can really give you an appetite but to show them He wasn’t merely an appearance…a ghost.
So the Gnostics are particularly insidious at the beginning of the Church; they were trying to sow doubt about the Incarnation, the Passion, the Death and the Resurrection of Christ essentially.
Diogenes continues;
Today's Gnostics are no different. When someone assures you he thinks the The Da Vinci Code tells the real story of Jesus, ask him: "Would you go to your death for the belief that Dan Brown has it right?" If he says no, the conclusion is obvious: "Ah, I see. You weren't talking about truth. You meant to say that life would be easier for you if the Catholic Church were wrong."
That kind of nails it doesn’t it? Exactly! The Church for two thousand years proclaimed the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Christ consistently and now the flower of those two thousand years appears in the person of Dan Brown, Tom Hanks, and all the other scandalous people connected with the DaVinci Code? And now the truth finally blossoms for all of mankind. How sad!
I remember a story I’d heard about St. Anthony of Padua. Many people ask for his intercession when they lose something. I love St. Anthony; he was a great brother of St. Francis of Assisi. St. Anthony was a tremendous preacher but he also performed many miracles and everyone one that he performed was because of the power of Christ, and St. Anthony proclaiming the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Christ. Every era knows a Dan Brown or two and there was a guy alive at the time of St. Anthony, who was running St. Anthony down the way Dan Brown is running down Christ, St. Mary Magdalene and the teachings of the Church.
This guy in the time of St. Anthony told his friends that he would show them what a fake this Fr. Anthony was. He was going to cure all these people of their belief in the saint. He knew that St. Anthony was coming by so he gathered his friends around and blindfolded himself. As St. Anthony passed by the man said,
”Father Anthony! I am blind, please cure me!”
Saint Anthony stopped and held a conversation with the man asking him to repeat what his problem was. The man told him again that he was blind and St. Anthony had this man repeat what he’d said over and over. The man had the idea that when St. Anthony pulled the blindfold away, he could proclaim his sight and call the saint into question. He wanted to mock St. Anthony but when the blindfold came off the man was blind.
Now, that was St. Anthony and it wasn’t Christ, so when you are buying your ticket to the DaVinci Code, don’t think about this story, ok? You know, those theatres are going to be full of Christians. Yea, there is nothing like a good movie where we can all just laugh at Christ, mock Christ, and just replay Holy Week all over again. What a sad state when people who declare themselves to be Disciples of Christ can mock Him and not even have a pang of conscience.
Our Lord tells us that He is looking for the vine to produce fruit. Christ says,
. I AM the Vine, you are the branches, whoever remains in Me and I in him will bear much fruit because without Me, you can do nothing.”
Yesterday was the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima. On May 13th Our Lady appeared to the three shepherd children and again every month, on the 13th of the month until October of 1917. Our Lady of Fatima told the children many things and among one of those things she told them was to pray the Rosary every day. These Are children ten years old and younger, two girls and a boy. Our Lady told the children they would all go to heaven but told Francisco that he would have to pray many Rosaries. Francisco died around the age of ten. I can look back from one to ten years old and those were my best years and FRANCISCO HAS TO PRAY MANY ROSARIES? All men here should be shaking in their boots or planning the next fifteen Rosaries for today and then for tomorrow, right?
”You mean fifteen decades don’t you Father?”
No, forget that! I mean fifteen Rosaries right now! Our Lady of Fatima asked that we pray the Rosary every day for the conversion of sinners and for an end to wars. Why don’t we just admit it? We don’t do that! So please pray the Rosary every day for the conversion of sinners and an end to wars, load the dishwasher and take out the trash, and our mother hears her children say again and again either nothing, we act as though we didn’t hear or we rebel. She has told us and this isn’t the only occasion but since yesterday was the feast of Our Lady of Fatima I will use it.
When she told the children they were going to Heaven but that Francisco would have to pray many Rosaries, she gave them a vision of Hell. The children later described Hell in this way. .
"Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repulsive likeness to frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent.”
After she gave them this vision she told them,
You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done many souls will be saved and there will be peace."
She is telling us that GOD wishes to establish in this world a devotion to her Immaculate Heart. In other words, God wants us to honor the Immaculate Heart of Mary and Our Lady will help our love bloom and grow for her Son; she will guide us to her Son. God is the one Who wants this. That is why I put the Immaculate Heart of Mary on the cover of the bulletin cover last week.
Our Lady goes on to talk about the consecration of Russia and she says that the good will be martyred, the Holy Father would have much to suffer and various nations would be annihilated and the her Immaculate Heart would Triumph. So the Blessed Mother has asked us to do something very specific and yet we have to admit that not only do we not do what she asked but also we aren’t planning on starting any time soon. Even after hearing this there will be people who will say that this is just my opinion. Thank you! Dan Brown, call your office! It will be to some as if I made up Our Lady of Fatima.
The fact is that the Rosary is a very easy way to meditate on the Life, Passion and Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ for a good thirty or forty minutes unless you have someone leading the Rosary who also auctions tobacco and you need an oxygen tank to keep up with them. What’s the hurry? Since this is the wish of Our Lady of Fatima and is also in accord with what Our Lady said at Lourdes, we should listen. I am so glad that I have the Rosary scheduled here at church; that way I can also get my Rosary in as I pray along with those who come for the Rosary. When I get into the car and travel to Dallas I have plenty of time to pray the Rosary and I plan to do it. Many times I do it and many times I won’t because I start to think to myself,
”I better listen to traffic reports.”
As if WBAP is going to give me a traffic report for Royce City!
” They are backing up there, at the fried chicken place.”
What is that? [Laughter] Or, if I know the traffic report will be broadcast in eight minutes I will wait the eight minutes and by that time I am almost in Rockwall. Anyway, I can make excuses to delay praying the Rosary or not praying it at all. We can really talk ourselves into some good reasons not to pray the Rosary. Don’t pray the Rosary, and if you don’t then how are you going to spend thirty or forty minutes meditating on the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus? If the truth were told, without a devotion like the Rosary, twenty-four hours can go by and we never meditate in a substantial way, the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Christ. Can anyone call himself a Christian and declare a love of Christ if twenty-four hours can go by without having meditated on the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus?
”Well, Happy Mother’s Day! It is so good to hear your voice mom. I will call you on this same day next year.”
That is the same kind of thing and it isn’t love. If someone thinks it is love then it is a very immature love that we would show to a good mother. The Blessed Mother is our mother; she is not imaginary or a pretend mother like those of a child’s game. The last gift Christ gave to us before He gave up His Spirit was His mother. He gave her to St. John and St. John to her and St. John took her into his care. I know this is hard to believe because it flies in the face of the DaVinci Code.
”Gee, am I going to believe the church who is Mother and Teacher or am I going to believe Dan Brown.
The fact is that, if our faith is so immature that Dan Brown can knock down our faith with such a tissue of lies such as with the DaVinci Code, then we evidentially don’t have a well rounded daily connection with Christ.
On the back page of your bulletin you will see a paragraph that I have supplied for you from Novo Millennio Ineunte, which was published January 6, 2001 by Pope John Paul II.
But we well know that prayer cannot be taken for granted.
Why sure we can. Just like with our mother or father, anything that is important, we can take it for granted.
Yes, dear brothers and sisters, our Christian communities must become genuine "schools" of prayer, where the meeting with Christ is expressed not just in imploring help but also in thanksgiving, praise, adoration, contemplation, listening and ardent devotion, until the heart truly "falls in love.
Prayer is our way of falling in love with God. We take an immature love and see it blossom and develop in an encounter with God. In Pope Benedict’s Encyclical, DEUS CARITAS EST, God is Love, he says,
He loves us, he makes us see and experience his love, and since he has “loved us first”, love can also blossom as a response within us.
In the gradual unfolding of this encounter, it is clearly revealed that love is not merely a sentiment
Isn’t that what a flower does? It unfolds and blossoms. The Pope goes on to say how we love God in our feeling, our minds and our will in the way we make choices. He says that this is a sign of mature love.
The love-story between God and man consists in the very fact that this communion of will increases in a communion of thought and sentiment, and thus our will and God's will increasingly coincide: God's will is no longer for me an alien will, something imposed on me from without by the commandments, but it is now my own will, based on the realization that God is in fact more deeply present to me than I am to myself.
When I was a boy I thought my mother and father were trying to impose something on me, trying to take up all of my spare time. You may not know it but when I was young I was someone very important. My idea was that they were tying to impose this all on me. How many kids come to mom and ask for a glass of milk and ask for the dirtiest glass she has? Then when they get hungry they ask for a dirty plate to eat from. Of course they don’t. We all want clean dishes to eat and drink from and neither ghosts nor elves appear at night to produce clean dishes. Our parents are not our slaves and we have to work with them. This should all be very obvious to adults and teenagers who understand the way things work, otherwise it is a foreign or alien will being imposed on me.
Why would I, Fr. Paul, fight praying the Rosary? If you look real close at your Rosary it says,
Pray only one of these a day.
Oh wait a minute; it doesn’t say that! What if Our Lady of Fatima has said that you can only pray one Rosary a day? We’d all be rebelling and deciding to say more than one because we need to convert sinners and end wars! Our Lady said this yet I fight praying the Rosary when I drive into Dallas alone. Who is telling me this?
The Aztecs had a god that was really a demon and they called him,
The one that is always at your elbow,
An elbow is a very important part of your body because when you are doing something delicate they can bump you. Think of the Byron Nelson happening today; someone is going for a putt and all of a sudden their elbow gets bumped. So, who is there bumping my elbow and talking me out of praying the Rosary? I am allowing myself to be talked out of this because I am a big boy. I have to follow God with my feelings, intellect and my will. In paragraph 17 Pope Benedict says so beautifully.
Indeed, God is visible in a number of ways. In the love-story recounted by the Bible, He comes towards us, He seeks to win our hearts, all the way to the Last Supper, to the piercing of His heart on the Cross, to His appearances after the Resurrection and to the great deeds by which, through the activity of the Apostles, He guided the nascent Church along its path. Nor has the Lord been absent from subsequent Church history: He encounters us ever anew, in the men and women who reflect His presence, in His word, in the sacraments, and especially in the Eucharist. In the Church's Liturgy, in her prayer, in the living community of believers, we experience the love of God, we perceive His presence and we thus learn to recognize that presence in our daily lives.
The Blessed Mother wants to lead us to her Son so that our faith can develop and blossom.
Look at the lilies on the Altar. They have been up here for two weeks now and had not bloomed. I thought that by bringing them in with large buds that they would flower automatically. It took them until the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima and Mother’s Day before they bloomed. There are the lilies from last year. We see these flowers and the azaleas but what you see here also in the Sanctuary is the fruit of the Church, the saints. You see St. Francis Xavier, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Joseph, St. John Birchman, and the one in blue is St. Isidore, whose Feast Day is tomorrow. Over on this side behind me are St. Joan of Arc, Our Lady, and St. Therese’.
They are just part of the fruit of the Church. Their love blossomed and produced much fruit. If you study their lives, they each in their own way, in their own country and in their own discipline, time and circumstances produced much fruit. I can guarantee you that they were surrounding their daily lives with prayer. They meditated on the Life. Passion and Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
I know that when I go before God I will not have prayed as I should; I will not have dedicated enough time meditating on the most important truths, which the Rosary spells out for us. I can do what I can in the remaining years that God gives me to make up for it and not because it is some foreign will. God has loved me and that demands a response and not just the appearance of a response as someone stamps my card and gives me entry into Heaven. I have to show not only in word or speech but also in truth that I love God. Jesus expects us to produce fruit but how can we achieve this without constant prayer? We can have a School of Prayer in our homes and in our parish. Our Lord says that without Him we can do nothing and that is exactly what we will get if our love remains immature and doesn’t blossom.
”My Father is the vine grower; He takes away every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, and everyone that does He prunes so that it bears more fruit. I AM the Vine, you are the branches, whoever remains in Me and I in him will bear much fruit because without Me, you can do nothing.”
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen