Father Paul Weinberger, Pastor
St. William Roman Catholic Church
Greenville, Texas
5 / 15 / 2005 Pentecost Sunday
As a body is one though it has many parts and all the parts of the body though many are one body, so also Christ. For in one spirit we are all baptized into one body.
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen
If today were not the Feast of Pentecost, May 15th is the Feast of St. Isidore the Farmer. The statue behind me is a statue of St. Isidore. He and his wife, St. Maria de la Cabeza are the patrons of Madrid, Spain. Madrid is full of tremendous old buildings that are significant. There are many modern ones on top of it. It is about the size of Dallas, Arlington and Ft. Worth combined and prides itself on being so technologically, every child born in Madrid, and there aren’t many, are born holding a cell phone. [Laughter] I don’t know how they do it…I don’t WANT to know how they do it.
This technologically advanced city, which is not reproducing itself, has as its Patrons, St. Isidore and St. Maria de la Cabeza. These are two saint would couldn’t read or write but they could listen to the Holy Spirit and follow His promptings. These are two tremendous saints and today would have been St. Isidore’s Feast Day.
On this day in 1990 when I was a priest for about a year, my father came over to St. Augustine’s for Mass. I’d called him the day before and told him, “Daddy, tomorrow is the Feast of St. Isidore, your Patron Saint.” His name was Isidore but everyone called him Izzy. My dad came over the following day for the 6:30 Mass and after Mass I invited him over to the rectory for coffee and breakfast.
Over breakfast my father told me that he wanted to return to the Sacraments and he wanted to go to Confession. Later on the Pastor heard his confession and from that time forward my dad stayed close to Confession and Communion. There was a time in my father’s life where he stopped receiving the Sacraments. He was always Catholic but had stopped receiving the Sacraments. I will never forget St. Isidore because he is very special for many reasons, most especially for his having helped my father return to Confession. I took Isidore for my Confirmation name back in grade school because I thought that I was going to be a farmer like my grandfather and his father and his father…you get the message! It was not to be.
St. Isidore and St. Maria de la Cabeza understood how God was calling them to be members of His family in a special way because he had work for them to do; part of His Son’s mission was to be completed through them. It is no small affair that these two are Patron Saints of one of the largest cities in Europe.
The sheet I provided for you in your bulletin, and that you might glance at, has something to do with Confession. After reading this, some people may be drawn, tragically drawn, to Confession. It is about a study that was done in Missouri concerning women who took a certain oral contraceptive and the side effects it had, not on the women because those are known, but on the male children born to women who took that contraceptive. It shows how there is a higher rate of cancer of the prostate in male children born to these women and also causes difficulties in the urinary tract. It is interesting to read about but when this study becomes apparent, like what happened back when I was a newborn and mothers took thalidomide, discovered that something they had taken had injured their children, there is going to be a lot of sorrow expressed and that sorrow has to have an outlet.
In George Weigel’s book, “Witness to Hope”, he mentions the young Karol Wojtyla, the Pope as a priest in Poland. As I mentioned last week, the Cure of Ars, St. John Vianney, inspired Pope John Paul II to dedicate himself to Confession. George Weigel is a world renowned philosopher, historian and theologian and you wonder what he does with his spare time. In Witness to Hope he writes,
Let me repeat that because in one sentence it encapsulates the thought that many Christians today prefer not confessing their sins to a priest but rather confessing personally to the Risen Christ.Many Christians today have a problem confessing their sins to a priest; they prefer however to confess their sins to the Risen Christ.
Now, if you would direct your attention to your readings. The Gospel Reading that I just finished reading is read in every Catholic Church, east to west, north to south, across the world. This is not the reading that I chose but is the reading for today, which is Pentecost Sunday, fifty days after Easter. We have the first words of the Risen Christ to His Church where He says, Peace be with you. He repeated Himself and said and then said, “As the Father has sent Me so I send you.” Then He breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit, whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven; the sins you hold bound, they are held bound.”
Now again, think back on how Weigel encapsulates the protest to Sacramental Confession to a priest. “No, no! I would rather just confess my sins to the Risen Christ!” Well…what does the Risen Christ say? Confess your sins to the “Church”. He gives this ability to His Church through the priests; interesting! Confession is something that is brushed aside as if it were an hors d'oeuvre that one can take or leave yet, it is so incredibly necessary for the Mission of the Church.
Friday was the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima. Our Lady of Fatima appeared in 1917 to three shepherd children under the age of ten. Lucia was ten and then there was Jacinta and Francisco who were younger. They were all cousins that lived in Portugal and were barely educated. As I said, Our Lady appeared to them in 1917 and spoke words of prophecy to them, which we can still marvel at today. Before I go on to Our Lady’s prophecy let me ask; what if in 1917, the Herald Banner in Greenville, Texas had prophesied that WWI would end but that after a while WWII would begin and that of all the counties in America who would become involved in WWII, Hunt county would boast the most highly decorated veteran of the war? People would cancel their subscriptions to the Herald Banner or maybe it would have turned into the National Enquirer, who knows! The most highly decorated veteran of WWII did come from Hunt County and his name was Audie Murphy.
It is amazing when you read the prophecies of Our Lady to these three shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal. Of course, she is speaking to two little girls and a little boy and she shows them Hell. She shows them what it is like to live in Hell and of course the children are frightened. “What a terrible thing”, some would say, to do to a child and show them Hell. Has anyone seen the kind of thing Hollywood puts out these days? It is common for video games to depict these things. But for the Blessed Mother to actually show them Hell, that is another thing. She told the children that they would not go to Hell but that they would all go to Heaven. She turned to the only boy and said, “But Francisco will have to pray many Rosaries.” The insight that she had in pointing to the only boy and telling him he was going to have to really work. Then she said to the children, ”You have seen Hell where the souls of poor sinners go.”
“Wait a minute, I thought that at every Catholic funeral that I have ever been to in the last thirty years, that we all go to Heaven when we die. You mean someone might have lied to me?” When you wake up, you will not remember the rest of this conversation! [laughter] , ”You have seen Hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world the devotion to my Immaculate Heart.” She doesn’t wish to establish it, God wishes to establish devotion to her Immaculate Heart. ”If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end but if people do not cease offending God a worse war will break out during the time of Pius XI.” That is exactly what happened! ”When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given to you by God that He is about to punish the world for crimes by means of war, famine and persecution of the Church and of the Holy Father.”
That sign did appear in January of 1938 or 1939; it stretched across Europe during the night. They call it the Aurora Borealis and when pressed, scientists explained it this way and that. Of course it is rare to find two scientists agreeing on how such a thing occurred. Most of the time they would just mumble about how it occurred. It was a great sign and they understand part of it but can’t explain sufficiently why it happens or predict it but Our Lady did! Right after that great sign, hostilities began to break out.
She next said to the children, ”to prevent all of this I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart and also the Communion of Reparation on First Saturday.” You know, the First Saturdays that you all go to Mass to make reparation; you know how we all do…. yea! ”If my requests are heeded Russia will be converted and there will be peace. If not, Russia will spread her errors throughout the world causing wars and persecutions of the Church.” Then she gets very specific. ”The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be wiped out and at last, my Immaculate Heart will triumph and the Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me and she will be converted and a period of peace will be granted to the world.”
Now lets put this in context; this is 1917 just before the Bolshevik Revolution and before the communists took the Czar prisoner and took his family and had them executed; before the communist revolution changed the face of Russia and the world. At this time many Russians were dying of hunger. The ones who were not dying of hunger were sufficiently weakened and were very prone to illness. If at the time Russia had made a lot of progress, they could have been included as a third world country. Russia was in the tank, the basement. When the prophecy came out that Russia was going to be so powerful, people were saying, “What? What is this?” People were scratching their heads with all the talk of Russia spreading her errors and wondering what this talk was all about. Our Lady was very specific.
On page 97 of “Witness to Hope”, there is an account of Pope John Paul II as a newly ordained priest in 1950, working in communist occupied Poland. The communists were spreading their errors in Poland. Listen to this description of Poland in 1950 and how the Church had to fight communism and its errors. Listen carefully about how the family was under attack by the communist regime.
Perhaps the hardest fought battle between the Church and the communist regime involved family life. For the communists understood that men and women secure in the love of their families, were a danger. The communists were afraid of strong families; strong families stick together; strong families are united; strong families do not throw themselves on the secular state, which is what they wanted.
They started attacking the family and this is how they did it.
You guys hear that?Housing, work schedules and school hours were all organized by the (communist) state to separate parents from their children as frequently as possible. Apartments were constructed to accommodate only small families so that children would be regarded as a problem.
Gee, I have heard this somewhere before, I can’t place it.Work was organized in four shifts and families were rarely together.
Can you say bussing?The workday began at 6 or 7 am so children had to be consigned to state run child care centers before school. The schools themselves were consolidated and children were move out of their local communities for schooling.
In 1950 Russia is spreading her errors abroad. Weigel goes on to point out something that happened with the young adults around eighteen to twenty five, and how they wanted to separate them from mom and dad. That tendency is already there but the communist state wanted to give it another shove. So what they would do is arrange for outings in the wilderness, the forest or the mountains. What they would do is take the young adults out to nature and away from their parents and then let the young men and women experiment. That is how Weigel words it in Witness to Hope. Of course, experiment meant that, “Well, mom and dad aren’t looking and the state is saying that we should...” You can see how the communist state was trying to separate the young adults not only from their families but also from the Church. Oh, morality, schmorality, right?A permissive law was passed that regarded abortion as a means of birth control.
The communists were indeed spreading their revolution abroad. It hit here like a fury in the 1960s; the sexual revolution, which led to the 70s, 80s, 90s, and the year 2005. It sounds like all of this was written about our country. People have not been praying the rosary and have not been praying for unity and Russia has indeed worked against the church. Now if you think this is just pie in the sky and that this is just my opinion…. Consider that on May 13th 1981 at 5:13pm, an assassin, a communist assassin named Mehemet Ali Agca, in St. Peter's Square amid 20,000 or so people, fired two shots at point blank range, from about nine feet away and hit Pope John Paul II. There were so many people crammed into the square that day it was like a sardine can. Do you remember how many people were killed that day? None! Three were wounded; the Holy Father and two Americans but no one died! “Oh, they were so lucky!” See me after Mass!
The Holy Father says again and again in God’s Providence that there is no mere coincidence. The bullet missed an artery and if it had just nicked the artery he would have bled to death before being moved from the Popemobile to the ambulance. There were clusters of nerves all around that were missed and if they had been hit, it would have left the Pope partially paralyzed. The other bullet ricocheted off the Pope’s elbow and struck two Americans wounding them. On the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima the following year, Pope John Paul II went to Our Lady’s Shrine in Portugal, in thanksgiving, and presented her with the bullet that was used in the attempt on his life, which was later set into her crown.
At the time the communists disassociated themselves from what had happened. This is before the fall of the Berlin Wall. But of course, the communists perfected the lie, the big lie, and now archival material from the former Soviet Union has come to light showing how the Soviets and Moscow had called on Bulgaria to find a hit man and send him to Rome to wipe out Pope John Paul II. Mehemet Ali Agca was the hit man and Bulgaria was to pretend that no one had ever called them.
When the Pope met Mehemet Ali Agca, they met in the jail and Agca kept asking one question of the Pope, “Why didn’t you die?” I would be asking the same question of the Italian Parliament, “Why didn’t you execute him?” But then again, I am not the Pope, ok? The Holy Father had tremendous mercy and he said to his would be assassin, “One hand fired and another guided the bullet.” Here we recognize the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima.
Our Lady of Fatima asked that we be united in praying the rosary for our brothers and sisters who are dedicated to lives of sin. So many people say, “I don’t like going to a Catholic Church; they are all a bunch of hypocrites.” OH really? Hypocrites? Hypocrites say one thing but do another. When we began Mass, we all said today, “I confess to Almighty God and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault; in my thought and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do.” Priests, deacons and laypersons alike, we all say that prayer at the beginning of Mass. The charge of being a hypocrite cannot stick in a Catholic Mass because we admit right up front that we are not doing our part or holding up our end of the mission and we need God’s grace.
Today is the Feast of Pentecost and Pentecost is all about starting God’s family over again. Even though the Prince of this World is attacking the family, and Jesus refers to the devil again and again in the Bible as the Prince of this World, who has your family in his cross hairs and is doing everything he can to separate one member of the family from the other using a million different tactics. In the Church, Jesus is called the New Adam, and is starting the family of man all over again; just as Adam and Eve started the human family, Christ is the New Adam and he is starting the family of God over again. He is pulling us to the Father and to Himself.
Reminiscent of that is what we see in the book of Genesis at the very beginning. We see the spirit of God over the waters of chaos and from those waters of chaos He creates something out of nothing; creates something out of the chaos that is there. Christ is the New Adam and on Easter Sunday morning what is He doing to His Church? He is breathing on Her. Of course some may say, “Ew, yuk! Get away and don’t breathe one me!” Sigh…. The Lord is giving us His Holy Spirit, which is the very Breath of God; the Risen Christ gives the very Breath of God to us to start drawing the family of God to Himself, uniting it to Him.
Unity was attacked in the Book of Genesis; remember the Tower of Babel? They built the tower so the next time God decided to flood the Earth they could just go to the upper floors of the tower and they could just walk to Heaven. The penalty that God inflicted on those who were building such an arrogant tower was the curse of many languages. Today we celebrate “diversity”. Pardon me for using that phrase in a Catholic Church” Today we celebrate diversity. Look, everyone should be happy about where they come from and be proud of what race they are, but I have had it up to here with celebrating “diversity”. Go back and read the story of the Tower of Babel; diversity BAD, UNITY is GOOD says Pentecost.
E Pluribus Unum, which is written on a coin in our country, says, “from the many, one.” If you think you would rather have diversity then I guess you wouldn’t mind driving down I-30 with all of the road instructions in English, Spanish, German, Swahili, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Tibetan. ‘No, o, we can just have it in English!” See what I mean? We have a natural urge for unity and yet we are so diverse we are pulling ourselves apart. How can the world be united? Jesus says that it is going to happen through the Holy Spirit.
As a body is one though it has many parts and all the parts of the body though many are one body, so also Christ. For in one spirit we are all baptized into one body.
Christ wants to take the nothing of our lives and make something of it. Look at this statue behind me; St. Isidore the Farmer. Is there anything more ordinary than a farmer? Yet, he and his wife are the patron saints of Madrid.
In the Catechism of the Catholic there are two paragraphs, #1105-06; maybe you could read them at home today. Today is the Feast of Pentecost and these two paragraphs are on the Holy Spirit acting in church. Paragraph #1105 talks about the Epiclesis, when you see the priest unite his hands over the bread and wine at Mass. This is called the Epiclesis, which is a Greek word and is the intercession in which the priest begs God the Father to send the Holy Spirit so that the offerings of bread and wine may become the Body and Blood of Christ and that the faithful, by receiving the Body and Blood of Christ may become a living offering themselves to God. We make lots of roadblocks for ourselves to being living offerings to God. We call those roadblocks sin.
When the Blessed Virgin Mary was asked to be the Mother of Jesus she said, ”I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be done to me as you have said.” She totally removed all the roadblocks from her life to God; she never sinned.
Paragraph #1106 quotes St. John Damascene, someone who wrote extensively on the faith and the Blessed Mother. Here he is speaking specifically about the Holy Spirit and the bread and win offered at Mass. He says
So you want to know how God can change the bread and wine into His Body and Blood? St. John Damascene, a Doctor of the Church, says it is the same way that He became incarnate in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary; through the power of the Holy Spirit. The Annunciation is all about the Holy Spirit and not about the Blessed Mother. She made that very clear by saying she was the handmaid of the Lord.You ask how the bread becomes the Body of Christ, and the wine the Blood of Christ. I shall tell you’ the Holy Spirit comes upon them and accomplishes what surpassed every word and thought. Let it be enough for you to understand that it is by the Holy Spirit just as it was of the Holy Virgin and by the Holy Spirit that the Lord through and in Himself took flesh.
The Lord wishes to complete His mission in the world and yet we have so many road blocks that come to our attention later on and we regret them. It is like this paper from Life news; so many things come up and later we regret them. No doubt that my father had his own list and there is no doubt that I have my own list. The other day we had Msgr. McCallum’s funeral here and Fr. Vogel was about to get away…er…I mean leave, when I said, “Get back in here, I need to go to confession; it’ll save me a trip over to your house.” As your pastor, I have to go to confession too. Sin is a part of our lives on earth and so for those who wish only to confess to the Risen Christ we must remember that He tell us very clearly in the Gospel today, that this is how I the Risen Christ want it done. ”Receive the Holy Spirit; whose sins you forgive they are forgiven, the sins you don’t, they aren’t.”
Because Jesus wants to unite His family, He gives us the very breath of God to be our breath.
As a body is one though it has many parts and all the parts of the body though many are one body, so also Christ. For in one spirit we are all baptized into one body.
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen