27th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2007

[Fr.Paul Weinberger]

Homily by:
Father Paul Weinberger
Saint William the Confessor Catholic Church
Greenville, Texas
27th Sunday in Ordinary Time
October 7, 2007

Is he grateful to that servant because he did what was commanded? So should it be with you; when you have done all you have been commanded say, “We are unprofitable servants, we have done what we were obliged to do.

In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit

Amen

I have been a priest for eighteen years but I have always marveled at how patient good mothers are in caring for their children from the beginning of the child’s life. Mothers have patience that most men do not possess. The feeding of children is something women have elevated to an art so that the child begins to thrive instead of diminish. The child begins to grow in a healthy manner and it is because of the care that mothers give to the task of feeding. The feeding of children, especially infants is not just another item on a punch list because it varies from moment to moment, day by day with the child and the circumstances.

When mothers wean their children and get them to the point where they can begin giving them baby food, it poses a new problem because the mother doesn’t know what the child is allergic to or if they will like the food. I am sure mothers are the ones, who invented all the games with the spoon as an airplane or a choo choo train. Fathers probably picked this game up from mothers, but many times when fathers attempt the same game at feeding time; they throw up their hands because evidentially the baby is broken. When the mother feeds, the baby is not broken. When the father tries and fails he says,

“Well, I got it all down him just in time for the GAME but he spit it all back up! There is something wrong with this baby, we need to take him back and get another one! ”

That would be the attitude and approach of many men, who would place the feeding of the child between mowing the lawn and watching the game. Mothers realize that as fickle as infants and children in general are, there is much more to it and they approach the task with a concentration and focus that men don’t have. So often men are impatient with this task. God gives different gifts to different people.

When parents are passed the baby food stage they really encounter difficult children, like those who cross their arms or frown when the thought of eating any vegetable that is not catsup or fried is presented to them.

“You mean you expect me to put that green vegetable in my mouth and eat it?”

Parents, especially good mothers, have the future of healthy bones and teeth in mind for their children, but they are shaking their heads because they know that given the choice, those in grade school, high school, and many in college will want to eat pizza three times a day as well as a night time snack. This is not going to produce the results in the future that are intended.

This is very much like what Our Lord hears from His Apostles.

Lord, increase our faith.

Mothers know how to increase the health of a child so the child can grow and thrive. Our Lady is a mother and she is interested not only in the physical growth of her children but like a good mother she recognizes that the children have souls. She is interested in seeing our faith grow.

On this day in 1571 a great battle occurred at sea just off the coast of Greece at a place called Lapanto. If today were not a Sunday we would be celebrating the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. This statue is of Our Lady of the Rosary. Because of this day she is also known as Our Lady of Victory.

Click on image to enlarge.
Our Lady of Victory

The Moslem Turks had taken much of the Holy Land into their possession and they began to move from there to the west. They appeared to be invincible and even took the imperial city of Constantinople, which was thought to be invincible up to that time. The Turks managed to conquer it and they turned that beautiful Church of Our Lady into a mosque. Pope Benedict visited that mosque last November when he visited Istanbul. They even changed the name from Constantinople.

They set their eyes westward and said they were going to put a crescent, the moon symbol of Islam, on top of St. Peter’s dome after they removed the cross. They planned to do this all across Europe. Up until that point no one had defeated them and it appeared that they would accomplish what they set out to do.

The Turks were cooling their heels off the coast of Greece at Lapanto. They had information about the depth of the harbor there and they also had more and better ships than the Christians. On this day in 1571 they even had the advantage of the wind in their favor. On the other hand, Pope St. Pius V was gathering Christian forces from across Europe to send to counter the invasion of the Turks, who were headed straight for Rome and Europe. The Christian force was known as the Holy League and Don Juan of Austria led it. The Christians were from different countries, spoke different languages, and some of the ships were not very sea worthy. The men were not united under one country and had fewer men and ships than the Turks and as I already mentioned, the wind was against them at the beginning of the day.

Right off the toe of the boot of Italy, the Isle of Sicily is where they departed and just before they departed someone brought them a gift to present to Don Juan. It was a large picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe just forty years after she had appeared to St. Juan Diego in Mexico City.

EDITOR’S NOTE: If one looks carefully at a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe, she is standing upon the crescent moon. Irony or Divine coincidence? Our Lady presented herself to JUAN Diego and then Don JUAN

Don Juan accepted the gift and she actually has a part in the battle of Lapanto. An American, if you will, was there at the battle of Lapanto…Our Lady of the Americas.

The Christians traveled east with everything against them. Don Juan was a man of faith and the many Rosaries that were prayed for this endeavor supported him. Pope St. Pius V was a pope who was from the Dominican Order. Dominicans wore the Most Holy Rosary on their belt. He was promoting devotion to the Rosary and I really don’t care what you think about it, but the truth of the Catholic Church is that anyone who prays the Rosary is meditating upon Jesus…His Life, Death and Resurrection. If you think it is something else then you are wrong; if someone else told you something else they are wrong!

The pope had united many people in Europe by praying the Rosary and meditating on the Life of Jesus and praying for the success of the Holy League. They prayed the Rosary in procession, in Churches and in individual homes.

On October 7, 1571 the pope was in Rome hundreds of miles away when the battle of Lapanto took place and he interrupted a meeting that he had that day and went to look out of a window that had an eastern exposure. He began to recount to the people there the events that were happening hundreds of miles away. There were many witnesses to this miracle concerning Pope SAINT Pius V. Weeks would go by before the messengers would come and relate what happened during the battle. With limited vision of the human eye along with the curvature of the earth there was no way that the pope could have seen the events by merely human force; this was a miracle in itself connected with the victory at Lepanto.

The Christian forces formed their ships in the sign of a cross and the Moslem forces formed theirs in the form of a crescent, confident that they would be winning yet another battle. At this moment the wind changed. You see, Don Juan had placed the picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe on his flagship in the very front and so when he led his force into battle Our Lady was the first person seen by the opposing Moslems, the Turks. In a miraculous way, like an arrow meeting its mark, his ship met up with the Ali pasha and the battle was on and very quickly the Ali pasha was killed. When the other Turkish ships saw that he’d died they began to flee; many were chased and some were brought back. This was indeed a battle won by the Christian forces. This is why Pope Pius X declared this day the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary; also know as Our Lady of Victory.

It is amazing that so few people pray the Rosary today. Ninety years ago next Saturday Our Lady appeared at Fatima and asked us to pray the Rosary for the conversion of sinners, for an end to wars, for peace in the world, and for greater love and devotion to be given to Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart. Next year we will celebrate the 150th year of Lourdes where Our Lady asked us to pray the Rosary for the conversion of sinners, the sick, and the suffering. Before I came over for Mass today I checked and there are still sinners left in the world; one is speaking into the microphone at this moment to a room full of sinners. I checked and there are still wars and there is no peace in the world. We treat Our Lady terrible! What are we waiting for? What is going to take? Is it going to take a nuclear bomb to go off in a city near us or in our own town for us to finally get serious and take “what’s her name” seriously? Yes! Isn’t that very disrespectful for Our Lady to appear so many times and ask us to meditate on HIM and we won’t even lift a finger!

“Father, you don’t expect me to pull myself away from the TV or the computer do you? But, we do expect and end to wars and peace in the world.”

It is kind of like children walking up to the table and wanting to know where the food is. The mother is just considered a short-order cook.

“Mom, when I am ready I will come to the table and you’d better have dinner ready, missy!”

That wouldn’t work at home so why should we expect the Blessed Mother to take this from us? What does Jesus say in the Gospel today? In the end when you and I have done all that we have been commanded to do…well, when you have done all that you have been commanded to do you say that you are unprofitable servants and have done what we were obliged to do.

The Blessed Mother wants to see us grow spiritually and physically because she knows that we are not just a body but also a body and a soul. We have a combination and both body and soul need attention. The Blessed Mothers wants us to grown in our faith and she and her Son hold out the Rosary to us so we might meditate on Christ, and we will be fed spiritually.

Yesterday I was teaching the CCD class for three hours here in the Church, with the mother, father or grandparent right there present with the children. We were going over a decade of the Rosary. This doesn’t seem to be very perilous with first through fourth graders or their parents sitting right next to them, but you have no idea. We started with the beginning of the Rosary, you know, with the Rosary beads and then after the Apostles Creed, the Our Father and the three Hail Marys we come to the Glory Be and the children are trying to figure out how the Rosary “Be” is different from the Glory “Be” or the bee that stung me at home yesterday. Children are just little lawyers; that is all they are. [Laughter] We have to explain this to them or they get into real difficulty. Remember the little boy, who went home one day and announced that he knew God’s name? He’d learned God’s name at CCD. When the parents asked what God’s name was the boy said,

“Howard.””

The parent told him that this was not God’s name and the little boy said,

“Sure it is; we learned a prayer…Our Father Who art in Heaven, Howard be thy name.”

So, the little children need to be instructed in something as fundamental as, bead, be, and bee because in their minds they are just throwing it in all together. They are little and have to be shown.

I began talking with them about a decade of the Rosary. There is the Our Father and then ten Hail Marys and one Glory Be. We went over and over it again and again and when I finally went down to where many of the children had Rosaries, I would ask what each bead was and I expected to hear Our Father then ten Hail Mary and one Glory Be. Some of the children would just not know. It reminds me of the times I would take my dad to his chemotherapy and the doctor would shine the light in the this ear and my dad would wave his hand across the other ear as though the doctor could see right through because the brain had evaporated. Well, evidentially what I had gone over again and again with the children concerning the Rosary had just evaporated. That is why I tell parents all the time that I am praying for them!

The way for children to learn the Rosary is to hand them one at home and tell them that you will pray the Rosary to the end of the first decade. You will see how many children and teenagers can do it. They will be asking for the instruction booklet and so the test has shown us that work is needed in this area. Our Lady wants us to grow spiritually just as she wants us to grow in a healthy way physically.

At the top of page eight in your bulletin you see a prayer that you have seen in the bulletin for about two years. This prayer is based on the words of Pope Benedict in “The Spirit of the Liturgy,” p.88-89. After receiving Holy Communion return to your place, kneel or sit down – then pray the following prayer:

#1 - Jesus, my Living Lord, I know that You have just entered my Soul - my Heart.
#2 - Thank You! I surrender myself to You!
#3 - Please raise me up AND transform me! Amen.

This is a beautiful prayer right from the pope’s own pen. Below it there are forty-two intentions that I have asked you to pray for, or at least one of them after Communion. I mention these every Sunday. For the past several weeks I haven’t asked and I am not going to ask any more. I will keep publishing it but you are going to have to direct your children to this page and make sure they are praying that prayer. You will have to quiz them on the way home and ask which one of the intentions they prayed for. They have to learn and we have to wean them from getting the cue and they have to do it own their own.

On page nine there is a prayer before Holy Communion. There are some quotes taken from the Spirit of the Liturgy, written by the pope, largely on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The top half of this are quotes and the bottom half includes two prayers, silent prayer #1 and #2 of the book, which will be on the Altar in just a moment. This is the Roman Missal, formerly called the Sacramentary from which the priest reads the prayers for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The Holy Father has written about these two prayers and I have numbered each line so it will be easy for you to follow. You can read along with me.

Father’s comments are found “after” each numbered statement by the Pope.

(#1) “The silent prayers of the Priest invite him to make his task truly personal, so that he may give his whole self to the Lord.

This is someone who is eighty years old and he knows the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in a most profound way and is teaching priests and lay people about something, which is so familiar.

(#2) They [the silent prayers of the Priest] highlight the way in which all of us, each one [of us] personally [and] yet together with everyone else, have to approach the Lord.

He is not merely speaking to priests but to all of us.

(#3) The number of these [silent] priestly prayers has been greatly reduced in the liturgical reform [of the Mass] but, thank God, they do exist – they have to exist, now as before...

The Liturgical reform that the pope is speaking of is the Second Vatican Council. Some people started a form referring to Vatican II but it wasn’t written down anywhere. That is a false reform and if you have reading what the pope writes in the past few years as well as over the last 45 years, he has written again and again about the need to have a reform of the reform because people are making things up and taking advantage of the reform and they are hijacking the true reform in certain respects. The pope has coined a term…”The Reform of the Reform.” Before the changes in the Second Vatican Council around 1965 the priest would offer many prayers, silent prayers before receiving Holy Communion and now there are two and the pope thanks God that they exist.

(#4) Two very beautiful and profound prayers, from which, precede the Priest’s reception of Holy Communion to avoid the silence being too long, he [the Priest] is [directed by the instructions in the Roman Missal] to choose [and say only] one [silent prayer].

Right! We don’t want the Mass being too long. I really hate it when I am alone in silence with Jesus for too long.

Father is being facetious here

Test! Test! To be alone with Jesus and rest on His Sacred Heart is Heaven on earth. We see how the pope realizes how many people distort this.

(#5) Perhaps we shall again one day take the time to use both [of the silent prayers].

Now ladies, you recognize that every priest is a man and most of you ladies are married. Look at the two silent prayers and if you were just going to take a guess, knowing men, which prayer do you think most priests would offer before receiving Holy Communion? That is right, number two is a dead ringer, right? It is SHORTER, right? That is just a guess on my part. The Holy Father said that we used to say more than two prayers and now we have cut it down to two and get a choice of one or the other. He is hoping that we come to the day when both are offered.

(#6) But even if only one of them is prayed [that is, if only one of the 2 silent prayers of the Priest before Holy Communion is prayed], the Priest should with all the more reason really pray it in recollected silence as a personal preparation for receiving the Lord.

The priest has to get ready just as you have to get ready and I am sorry parents…just as you have to teach your children to get ready. I know, there is trouble with the Rosary and there will be trouble with this but we do what we can and slug on, right?

(#7) This will help to bring everyone else into silence before the Sacred Presence [of Christ in Holy Communion], and then going to Communion will not degenerate into something merely external.

I will give you and example; maybe you have been to the doctor or dentist’s office and you walk up to that little window and the lady slides the window open and asks if she can help you. You hand her a ticket and ask if she can validate your parking. She stamps it or informs you like so many do that they don’t do that. In my life as a Catholic and a Catholic priest it is sad to say but, some people do approach Holy Communion as something that they “gotta do”, as if the floor just tilted and the marbles just rolled to the front, or they were having their parking validated. They approach Holy Communion and go on to do something “more important” after Mass. It is just something external. The Holy Father says that we must not let it degenerate into something merely external.

(#8) This is particularly necessary, because in the present order of the Mass the sign of peace frequently causes a lot of hustle and bustle in the congregation into which the invitation to ‘Behold the Lamb of God’ then comes as a rather abrupt intervention.

This is a good one. First of all the Sign of Peace is an option in the Mass. If I read this correctly I would say that the Holy Father is signaling us that perhaps that in future changes in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the Sign of Peace be moved elsewhere. It is an option and we can have it or not; we don’t have it here. But you will notice that the ushers have not been issued firearms and if they see someone shake hands with someone they don’t shoot. No. The Sign of Peace frequently causes a lot of hustle and bustle. I wish I had a dime for every time I have been present in a Catholic Church when someone is sitting at the very back of the Church on the far side and ends up at the very front of the Church during the Sign of Peace. They don’t even know those in the front; it is amazing! It is like they had been shot out of a canon like last Sunday, right? This is a time when the pope says we need to be cultivating silence.

(#9) If in a moment of quiet the eyes of the hearts of all are directed toward the Lamb, this [time before Holy Communion] can become a time of blessed silence.

Yes indeed. Wait a minute, the eyes of the heart? Hearts don’t have physical eyes! It is a literary phrase of course. The eyes of the heart can detect many things that the bodily eyes cannot.

I threw in number ten for something in the future. There is a prayer after Holy Communion for the priest to say.

(#10) After the Priest’s reception of Communion another (formerly, there were two)
silent prayer of thanksgiving is provided for him [the Priest] which again CAN and SHOULD be made their own by the faithful [people who are attending the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass].”

This prayer at the bottom of the page will not be published for you every week. If you like it you can cut it out at home. Don’t tear it out here. I can just hear the ripping going on at the period of silence. If you don’t want to pray these prayers consider some other appropriate prayer that might be helpful to you or your children.

“Private Preparation of the Priest (General Instruction on the Roman Missal, no.56 and following.)

[Silent Prayer #1]

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, by the Will of the Father and the Work of the Holy Spirit Your death brought life to the world. By Your Holy Body and Blood free me from all my sins and from every evil. Keep me faithful to Your teaching, and never let me be parted from You.

[Silent Prayer #2]

Lord Jesus Christ, with Faith in Your Love and Mercy I eat Your Body and drink Your Blood. Let it not bring me condemnation but health in mind and body.”

This is the kind of attention that the pope is expecting of you and me as we approach Holy Communion. We have to be very clear in approaching Holy Communion, that we have our eyes riveted on what we are about to do, focused on the Lord as a slave has his eyes trained on the hand of his master. What Our Lord is telling us is that we have work for Him to do. Those who have children, you have to teach your children; the only thing more difficult than having children is not having children. It is very difficult for those who have no children, myself among them. So, no one gets off. We have nieces, nephews, parishioners and friends and we have to communicate these prayers them. While driving you can hand your child a Rosary and ask them to lead.

“Here Suzie, you lead. Oh! It that heart attack? Are you ok?”

If you want to see a kid have a heart attack, hand them a Rosary and ask them to lead down to the end of the decade. The next sound you will hear is,

“Argh, ghag”

So many children do not know how to lead a Rosary and the only way they will learn is if we teach them and it is the same with this prayer before receiving Our Lord in Holy Communion. As I said parents, I am praying for you! I really am because you and I together have to do what Our Blessed Mother is scratching her head over in Heaven and hoping to do and achieve. She wants to see us grown in our faith and thrive and not just maintain some lower level here on earth. In the end if we do complete these things we still have nothing to brag about. The last words out of Jesus’ mouth before He ascended into Heaven and is at the end of St. Matthew’s Gospel are these.

Full authority has been given to Me in Heaven and on earth; go therefore and make disciples of all the nations. Baptize them in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teach them to observe everything that I have commanded you and know that I am always with you until the end of time.

So, we are nothing more than unprofitable servants should we do all that we are commanded. Lets face it, if I asked right now if you have done all that you have been commanded to do in this department, my hand and your hand would not go up if we are honest.

Is he grateful to that servant because he did what was commanded? So should it be with you; when you have done all you have been commanded say, “We are unprofitable servants, we have done what we were obliged to do.

In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit

Amen