23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time 2008

[Fr.Paul Weinberger]

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time 2008

Homily by:
Father Paul Weinberger, Pastor
St. William the Confessor Catholic Church
Greenville, Texas
August 7, 2008

”If he refuses to listen even to the Church”, Jesus said, “Then treat him as you would a gentile or a tax collector.”

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

Amen

This looks like a Bible and inside are Bible readings, but this is the Divine Office, the Breviary that priests, deacons, and religious pray every day. It is a prayer for the Church as well. Yesterday the first reading from the Divine Office was from Jeremiah 31.

Thus says the Lord, “In Ramah is heard the sound of moaning, of bitter weeping. Rachael mourns her children; she refused to be consoled because her children are no more.”

This reading is heard three days after Christmas, on the Feast of the Holy Innocence, which is the day we recall those children slain by King Herod because the children resembled Christ.

Rachael mourns her children; she refused to be consoled because her children are no more.”

Last week was the 88th Anniversary of the women’s suffrage. Women in our country now have the right to vote because of these pioneer feminists. If you go back and study the pioneers of the right for women to vote, these women agree on one thing, that abortion was not the reason they wanted to vote because they were 100% against abortion.

There was a woman alive at the time that did not share those thoughts. Her name was Margaret Sanger and she is the founder of Planned Parenthood. She led a very immoral life and as a result she became very wealthy. She used her husband’s wealth to promote Planned Parenthood because she was very interested in eugenics. Eugenics means being well bred. There were many people coming into this country in the northeast where she lived and she wanted to make sure that the minorities did not proliferate, blacks and other minorities. You’d be surprised who some of these minorities are. They were Irish, Italians, and Mexicans. If you know about Planned Parenthood today just type in Margaret Sanger’s name in google along with Planned Parenthood and you will be amazed at how intense was this woman’s desire to wipe out anyone who wasn’t white. It is amazing that so many people contribute to Planned Parenthood. It is like an arm of the KKK, just to be blunt.

Last week began the month of September and as it says on the cover of the bulletin, September is the month of
Our Lady of Sorrows How fitting a month for a man, who rose to prominence in a political party. Hitler came into power because people voted him into office. On September 1, 1939, WWII began with the first domino going over Poland and then other dominos tripped and millions of people suffered and died.

In the bulletin there is a story of a little woman, who has to be a marvel of medicine because she is the mother of 2,500 children. On Mother’s Day you probably couldn’t even see her due to all the people around her. She didn’t have children of her own, but these are children she’d saved from the Nazis. How did she do it? She did it one by one. She entered the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw with a pass from the health department, where the Nazis had quarantined them. She had many ways in which to take children out, even sneaking them out inside a coffin. If you read this article you will see that her one regret at the end of her life was that she didn’t do enough. She died in the late 90s.

Irena Sendler, An Unsung Heroine

I share that regret with Irena Sendler. Her name came up for the Nobel Peace Prize last year. Go online and find out who won the prize last year... somebody for global warming. This woman should have won because global warming is still a theory, but the children that Irena saved were real people.

As I said already, Irena, at the end of her life, felt that she should have done more and I felt like that last Thursday as I stood in front of the abortion clinic in Dallas. What? For nineteen years I have been a priest and I am just now getting around to it? What a terrible thing for me, and I say it to my shame. I was there with several other people.

There was a woman there named Joanne and she has a daughter named RACHAEL, just like in Jeremiah 31. Rachael is about 26. Rachael and Joanne are from Corpus Christi but they live here now and they are regulars in front of the abortion clinic. So, I am standing there with the two and Joanne tells me in front of Rachael that when Rachael was 15 or 16 they found out that she was with child. Joanne took her to Planned Parenthood and got some counseling and they were very nice there. The very nice people said that Rachael ought to have the abortion. Joanne told Rachael that she had to finish high school and that she was going to have the abortion. No, Rachael was 15 or 16 but God had given her the wisdom of someone three times her age. She looked at her mother and told her that she was going to finish high school AND she was going to have the baby. The child she had is now 13. The reason Joanne tells this story is because she was about to have her daughter do something very terrible and she found out that the nice people at Planned Parenthood were NOT so nice after all.

So as Joanne and I were in front of the abortion clinic watching people streaming in I smelled something, turned aound, and behind us were an office building and parking garage. There was some shade in between where they’d placed benches so that people could sit outside and smoke. People were out there smoking. Can you imagine people stopping outside of Auschwitz to take a smoke break? I turned around and looked at, no glared at the people and they walked away. Those people knew exactly what was happening in this place. Two people went in and one came out and it went on like this. A mother and her child went in and only the mother came out.

I remember seeing a car drive up and in the car was a woman, her mother, her sister, and a toddler of two years. The mother of the toddler went in and came back out and got her mother, sister, and her toddler and went back into the clinic. I asked her to please not take that toddler into that place, and told her it was not a good place. She went in anyway.

Two young ladies probably around 18 drove up and I recognized that they had a Rosary on the mirror. This is code for “Catholic”, right? Before they even got out of the car I approached them with my Rosary in my hand and a purple stole around my neck and pointed to the rosary, and asked them to please not go into the building because it was a bad place. So what did they do? They parked the car and went in. Obviously they were Catholic.

After a couple of hours the friend of the one having the abortion came out to move her car so she wouldn’t get a ticket. Now, if you look at the Second Reading today, there are commandments like, you shall not kill and you shall not commit adultery, but we won’t worry about those; we worry about not getting a parking ticket because that will cost. As she was leaving to move her car she stopped and talked to Joanne and Joanne called me over. In front of the young lady, who spoke perfect English, Joanne told me that the young lady had just told her that I baptized her and gave her First Communion when I was at Blessed Sacrament.

After that sank in and in the days since Thursday, I am so grateful. I know that there are people here who say, “I hate coming in here because he is always talking about abortion.” When I was at Blessed Sacrament for 10 ½ years I beat the same drum and obviously I didn’t do enough.

I spoke to a young man last Sunday after Mass. This young man was about my age when I was entering high school. Last Sunday the homily said that according to Jesus Christ and His Church there is never, zero, not one case where we are allowed to use abortion. So after this homily and after Mass I asked the young man if he’d learned anything in the homily and he said that he did learn some things. I asked him if there were any times that abortion could be used and he said, “Well, yea.”

When I would take my dad to the doctor when he had leukemia, the doctor would open a drawer, pull out an instrument, turn a light on and put it to my dad’s ear. My dad would always do this. Father takes his hand and waves it across his ear as though the doctor could see through his dad’s head. [Laughter] Parents, I pray for you and I only pray that you are repeating what Jesus tells us through His Church because some of it sinks in and some of it just goes right over a kid’s head.

Getting back to the young lady at the abortion clinic that I’d Baptized, I told her that if her friend had said to her that morning, “My brother is in the next room and he is in second grade; I am going to go in there and kill him.” I told her she would have gotten on the phone and called 911 and would have held her until the police came. I told her that instead, she drove the friend to this clinic.

Now, when you hear these words, and one of the things people always say about the Catholic Church or maybe just about me, “You are so judgmental,” remember that there is not a person here who was not judgmental on the way to Church this morning. Take the traffic lights…red light…yellow light…green light. Red light means stop and the green light means to go. But we do make the judgment when we see red lights and green lights, unless we are on the cell phone. That is a judgment and we make them everyday. If something costs too much you go somewhere else. That is a judgment.

My parents grew up very poor, but thanks be to God I have never been poor because my parents grew richer. How many people would rather be dead than poor? That tells the lie of Planned Parenthood and so many others, who promote abortion.

Rachael mourns her children; she refuses to be consoled because her children are no more.

When Hitler invaded Poland, Poland and the Soviet Union had an agreement and they literally ripped Poland apart, which is exactly what happens to a child during an abortion. What people at Planned Parenthood and those who promote abortion are doing is telling the lie. They would never understand the cover of the bulletin and they would ask if Our Lady knew that there was a dead person on her knee. Jesus is dead and of course Our Lady knows that; she is weeping. Even in death she loves him. There is no limit to the love in a mother’s heart and that is what Planned Parenthood doesn’t understand. Planned Parenthood and those who promote abortion say that there are limited resources in a mother’s heart for her children. This is the lie!

This is the last time between now and the election that I am going to talk about abortion in my homily. I did last Sunday and this Sunday. I will put things in my bulletin about it but I am not going to keep talking about it. That is it unless something monumental happens.

Dr. Alvita King, daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King has spoken out so eloquently about this subject. She went to her grandfather and asked about abortion and he said, “Of course that is a baby in you.” Dr. Alvita had two abortions and she speaks out against abortion to this day.

In the last six months it made the news that someone, who is pro-life pretended to be a racist and they called around to different Planned Parenthood clinics with this story.

“Yes, I would like to know if I can give a donation to Planned Parenthood.”

The person at Planned Parenthood said yes and asked to take down the information. The person goes on to say that they just had a baby, a little girl, and that 18 years from now she would be attending college and they wanted to donate money so that someone else can have an abortion. The caller asked if they could target their money to go toward an abortion for someone, who is a minority. Planned Parenthood told them that they certainly could and asked again to take down the information. The conversation can be heard on line. The caller just went on and on and on and on. What the Klan couldn’t do, Planned Parenthood is doing. When you contribute to the United Way you are giving to Planned Parenthood. The Susan G. Komen breast cancer foundation just gave five million dollars to build a Planned Parenthood here in Dallas. Whenever you plan to give to a charity, type in the name of the charity along with the name, Planned Parenthood, and see if that charity is giving to Planned Parenthood. Why would the Girl Scouts be connected to Planned Parenthood anywhere in their history, or the YWCA? What, is Planned Parenthood interested in cookies? No, they are interested in converts and it is a terrible thing.

This Gospel is the Gospel of excommunication. If someone knowingly votes for a pro-abortion candidate when there is a pro-life candidate, if you refuse to listen to the Church then you are to be treated as a gentile or a tax collector. That means excommunication. The excommunication is not going to arrive in the mail; you do it to yourself. If you decide that you’d rather voted for someone, who is pro-death other than someone, who is pro-life, then you cannot go to Communion. You need to go to Confession and repent. If our goal were Eternal Life then why would you vote for someone, who is pro-death?

”If he refuses to listen even to the Church”, Jesus said, “then treat him as you would a gentile or a tax collector.”

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

Amen