Homily by:
Father Paul Weinberger
Saint William the Confessor Catholic Church
Greenville, Texas
July 20, 2008
The Son of Man will send His angels and they will collect out of His kingdom all who cause others to sin and all evildoers and will throw them into the fiery furnace where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father. Whoever has ears ought to hear.
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen
Most of the time you see a picture of the pope and he is seated on a throne or somewhere mobile and it is easier to take a picture. This is an action shot of the Holy Father taken last week. It is a photo of the pope as he is coming into the Sydney Harbor, about to dock at Barangaroo. Think about that the next time you name a child. Barangaroo is in Sydney Australia.
I want to read something to you from last week’s Gospel. You recognize Blessed Pier Giorgio on the cover of last week’s bulletin and the first few lines of the Gospel and nothing more. As I do this keep the pope’s initial disembarkation and teaching there in mind as I read these words from the Gospel.
On that day Jesus went out of the house and sat down by the sea. Such large crowds gathered around Him that He got into a boat and sat down. The whole crowd stood along the shore and He spoke to them at length.
The Holy Father is continuing what St. Peter and the Apostles have done since the time of Christ. As the Successor of Saint Peter he is speaking the truth of Christ to those young men and women in Australia and by extension, to people of every place. On the back of today’s bulletin you can see what a longing is recognized in young women and men. The priest, who spoke on Wednesday near the relics of Blessed Pier Giorgio in Australia, said that ours is a time in which young people need true heroes. As parents you recognize when your children meet false heroes or make false friends, like friends who lie to them. Usually it goes along these lines; the mother or father says to the son or daughter,
“Who is your new friend at school?”
And the first sign that something isn’t right is when they answer,
‘HUH?”
You never say “Huh?” to an adult. So, someone who has always said, “Yes Sir, no ma’am, please, thank you”, has now been reduced to “Huh?” Or, they grunt. We know that this is a change that has happened in the past few days or so and that is when parents start to investigate.
“So, who is your new friend”
“HUH?”
“Way are you talking like that”
‘HUH?”
The hearing goes first! Whoever they are, the friends, they don’t respect their parents and so the lie begins to spread quickly to the son or daughter and they bring it home; it is kind of like chickenpox.
Pier Giorgio did not choose to be a priest or a religious but instead preferred to be a witness to the Gospel as a layman. What a very beautiful talk that priest gave at World Youth Day on Pier Giorgio. Those young man and his life were being held up to those young people in Australia because of the truth of his life.
If you would, please pick up your Adoremus Hymnal and open it to page #511. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote Page #510 in Latin and page #511 is the English translation. We are going to sing page #511 for the Communion hymn. Look at verse two, the third line.
The last line of verse to says,What God’s Son has told me, take for truth.
Truth Himself speaks truly or there is nothing true.
Jesus says that He is the Way, Truth and the Life. The fact is that the Holy Father is speaking to the young men and women at WYD and by extension to all of us about the sinister hand of the enemy as the Gospel said,
He answered, “An enemy has done this.”
I mentioned the pope’s initial remarks to the youth at WYD. He said,
This is really disordered, believing that there are not truths and in a sense it is a way of distracting us from the beauty around us. That opening chant helped us to enter into the beauty of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.There is also something sinister, which stems from the fact that freedom and tolerance are so often separated from truth. This is fueled by the notion widely held today that there are no absolute truths to guide our lives.
For two weeks now, Tom has been leading a class here in Gregorian chant. It is amazing how quickly children can pick up Gregorian chant. On the first day at the first class Tom mentioned the first chapter of Proverbs, which is part of the Wisdom literature. Tom mentioned that the beginning of Wisdom is the “fear of the Lord”, which has to do with awe at God’s grandeur, beauty and majesty. Children today grow into young men and women who cannot see the grandeur and majesty of God. If you read that piece about Pier Giorgio I gave you last Sunday or the one in the bulletin today, you recognize that he marveled with awe at the beauty and grandeur of the mountains and he wished to go there as often as he could and this was probably so he could enter into prayer all the more deeply like Our Lord did so many times in the Gospels. But the lies of the world produce jaded men and women, who have no fear of the Lord or sense of awe at the beauty and majesty of the great and small around us, which leads to this remark by the Holy Father speaking on God’s creation.
The Holy Father is not lying to these young men and women but is telling them the truth. It is amazing how long we have heard lies repeated.They cannot however be understood apart from a profound reflection upon the innate dignity of every human life from conception to natural death, a dignity conferred by God Himself, and thus enviable
If you would turn to page five in your bulletin you will see that someone has a Feast Day next Tuesday. This person, at the first part of her life would have appeared to have been weeds, but the last part of her life helps us to recognize who she really is; she is wheat. St. Mary Magdalene is so often portrayed as the woman caught in adultery, but when she met Jesus, had her encounter with Him, she never went back to that former way of life. She was the first witness of the Resurrection of Christ on Easter Sunday. How easy it would be for us to write her off. Look at the lies told about Mary Magdalene in the Da Vinci Code and its sequel. If you pay money to go to these things you are contributing to spreading the lies. How many men and women actually believe those lies about Saint Mary Magdalene and Our Lord; God have mercy on their souls!
As the hymn so beautifully says,
Friday is the Feast Day of St. James, the Apostle. It is also the 4th Anniversary of an event that largely goes unnoticed. Forty years ago on July 26th Pope Paul VI wrote and published Humane Vitae. Now, I took the word “human” and added “ae” to it and the other word is “Vitae”. I put it into google and when I pulled it up and printed it out I got a document about this size. It is not War and Peace; it is about the size of the Scurry phone book with pages left over. So Humane Vitae is there for anyone to read and study 40 years later. It contains a lot of truth that today commercials despise. You know those commercials that talk about the pill for women or a pill for men and all the side effects that could happen with these pills, along with surgeries and operations? Offer void where prohibited, blah blah blah, and all that lawyer stuff at the end. There are natural and moral consequences to these things. So in 1968 Pope Paul VI wrote Human Vitae and yes, it does deal with the contraceptive pill.Truth Himself speaks truly or there is nothing true.
This is a book written by a professor at the University of Dallas. She taught Tom. Her name is Dr. Janet Smith and she wrote this book on the 25th Anniversary of Humane Vitae. The name of the book is “Why Humane Vitae Was Right”. There are many offerings here from different authors about that topic. On page #529 of the book is the center, if you will, of why the Holy Father wrote Humane Vitae. Dr. Smith also makes mention of Pope John Paul II.
Pope John Paul II had written a book, “Love and Responsibility”, which had come to the attention of Pope Paul VI and so he asked this Archbishop to help him, which he did, and so in a great way Pope John Paul II as an Archbishop of Poland contributed to Humane Vitae, published by Paul VI. Shortly after Pope Paul VI died, Pope John Paul II would become pope. There is continuity in teaching; there is no rupture. On page #529 of Dr. Smith’s book, this passage of Humane Vitae is rarely studied.
Isn’t it interesting that we are told that it is impossible for young men and women to master themselves, for them to be in control of themselves? The common phraseology is,John Paul II is one commentator, who recognizes its deep wisdom. It plays the central role in his reflection on Humane Vitae. He focuses himself on self mastery for the proper use of sexuality and explains the meaning of the human body and the human person as these bear upon our sexuality.
“Oh come on…we know they are going to do it!”
Now, it is interesting that Pope Paul VI published Humane Vitae right at the time that our country did something which is awesome. Maybe you remember the picture of men walking on the moon and there in the distance is the earth. Something is wrong with this picture, right? No, something is very right; engineers and scientists cooperated and they put a man on the moon. What a tremendous feat and it shows you how much control we have in this world over our environment, that we can travel to another planet and yet we are told that we have no means of personal control. Remember that.
In just a couple of weeks they are going to start something that is going to captivate the attention of the world and they are going to say things like this.
“These young men and women have been trainings YEARS and they have gotten up early and have trained hard and they have sacrificed for THIS moment!”
Wait a minute; I thought they couldn’t do all of that. And the explanation is
“Uh, ohhh, errr”
The fact is that Humane Vitae tells the truth about how to live as a man or woman, especially as a follower of Christ in this world. We can have self-mastery over ourselves and St. Mary Magdalene is a great example having put the brakes on her former life. Talk about self-mastery. This is the truth that the world refused to tell and yet, we see the enemy’s hand in this. We cannot judge others. At most we can judge ourselves and try to be what Christ is calling us to be while at the same time help direct those around us to see and do the same. Whether it is the television or movies, newspapers or the manner of dress and undress today, lie after lie is told and it is all based on the fact that we can’t have self-mastery.
The anniversary of “telling the truth of Jesus Christ” is coming up this Friday”
The Son of Man will send His angels and they will collect out of His kingdom all who cause others to sin and all evildoers and will throw them into the fiery furnace where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father. Whoever has ears ought to hear.
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen