Be the 10%

Homily
21st Sunday in Ordinary Time B
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas
Registration Weekend
26 August 2012
Daily Readings

Taken out of context, it would be hard to find more offensive words to our modern liberal feminist sensibilities than to say that wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.  Couples typically shy away from Ephesians Chapter 5 as a lectionary selection for their wedding, even though it contains the most profound theological explanation of how Christ and His Church ground the great sacrament of marriage between a man and a woman.  They don't choose this reading because that line is so hard to hear.  Taken out of context, wives be subordinate to your husbands in everything sounds like something from Islam, or makes our Church sound stuck in the patriarchal dark ages rather than a player in the modern dynamic between men and women.

Taken in context, however, this hard saying becomes beautiful and true, as do all of the hard sayings of our Lord Jesus.  Taken in the context of what St. Paul says about the role of men, that their mission is to make women holy by cleansing them with the sacrifice of their own bodies, in imitation of Christ, the words find their power.  Taken in the context of being able to look at a crucifix, and to see what it means for Christ the bridegroom to become one flesh, one spirit with his bride the Church, then the words wives be subordinate to your husbands in everything become quite easy to hear, since we all as Christ's bride the Church gladly place ourselves under the beauty and power of our Lord's beautiful mission to bring mercy and reconciliation to the world.

To be Catholic today is to live hard truths, and to be faithful to hard sayings, that cause many to shy away from Christ and from a Church they find irrelevant to their lives.  To be Catholic particularly at a public university is to live at the intersection of good or evil, truth or relativism, and vocation or ambition.  With every challenge to your Catholic faith, there is the reality that 90% of Catholics will walk away from their faith like almost all of Jesus's disciples, because his saying were too hard, whereas only 10% will use the challenge to deepen their understanding of what they believe, and more importantly, will take the challenge as an invitation to deepen their relationship with Jesus Christ.

I pray that this year more than 10% of you will use the resources of the St. Lawence Catholic Center to deepen your understanding of Catholicism and consequently, to take the next steps in the development of your relationship with Jesus.  

Don't water down, double down

Homily
20th Sunday in Ordinary Time B
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas
19 August 2012
Daily Readings
Audio

Have there ever been more radical, more divisive, more scandalous or more outrageous words ever uttered from the lips of a human person than the words uttered by our Lord in tonight's Gospel - unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.  Talk about an absolute statement.  Talk about words that do not admit of equivocation.  When asked to water down his talk about his flesh being living bread sent from heaven, Jesus our Lord does the opposite.  He doubles down.  He says those who are not eating his flesh and drinking his blood are already dead.

What a tremendous blessing to have these strong words about the Holy Eucharist before we receive our Lord on the eve of the beginning of classes at KU.  When Jesus was asked to water down his teaching about  his flesh being real food and his blood being real drink, he doubled down instead.  As those of you who are returning to KU already know, and as those of you who are new are about to find out, for every opportunity there is to strengthen your Catholic faith while at KU, there are hundreds of other moral, spiritual and intellectual temptations to water it down.  Unfortunately, only a small percentage of Catholics arrive at KU with a gameplan that is up to the task of standing strong in the truth, the beauty and the wisdom of the Catholic faith and tradition.  There are unfortunately more Catholics at KU ready to water down than to double down, too many who are ready to allow their Catholic faith to be stolen from them without even putting up a decent fight.

If you haven't noticed, perhaps you will soon that there is getting to be less and less room in the culture wars around us for a watered down, lukewarm, anonymous Catholicism.  There is less and less room for those Catholics who hit Mass when it is convenient for them, and who are casual not intentional Catholics, those who settle for being a good person rather than having their heart set on being a saint.  There will be so many temptations this year for most of you to hide your Catholicism, for to some of your peers and professors, merely being Catholic is to be homophobic and anti-woman.  Very soon it could be that you will be accused of being filled with hate merely for ordering a chicken sandwich on campus, even though you have never had a hateful thought or feeling toward a gay person.  You may be vilified even if you can intelligently articulate the natural law which shows a unique fruitfulness to traditional marriage, and can demonstrate the harm to individuals, children and society for not upholding the traditional definition, and you may especially be hated if you are obedient to the divine law of Christ which esteems the marriage of a man and woman to the level of a sacrament.  In this light, even if you are interested in vigorously defending human rights, merely to be a Catholic is to be dubbed irrational and hateful, so a decision to go to Mass and to live out your faith is increasingly counter-cultural.  At every moral, spiritual and intellectual challenge to your faith, you will need to decide again this year whether you will water down or double down.

As Jesus tells us plainly, to receive the Eucharist is tantamount to putting your whole life on the line.  To receive the Eucharist means to stake your very life on the truth of what Jesus says, and to radically orient yourself toward the distinctive kind of life, the life we call eternal, which comes to those are his fervent and obedient disciples.  It is a life marked by a faith, hope and love so powerful and so distinct from the wisdom of the world, that the life a Christian is living might truly be called supernatural, or eternal.  It is not a life that is the fruit of compromise and tolerance, but a life borne of mercy and grace, a life of profound communion with the innocent victim who loves me and heals me where I cannot love and heal myself.

Standing against abortion or in favor of traditional marriage at a campus like KU may seem hard, but it is easy compared to the risk of receiving the Eucharist.  For there is only one way not to receive the Eucharist in vain, and that is to know and to live out what the Eucharist really means.  To be attached to the Eucharist, to receive Jesus body, blood, soul and divinity in the Eucharist, means for us to be radically detached from ourselves, and what is best for me, and to be radically attached to God and to my brothers and sisters within the Church and without, serving them, not myself, with all my heart and mind and strength.  To receive the Eucharist is nothing less than to desire holiness and to fight for heroic virtue, which is a far more difficult battle than the culture wars raging around us.

To receive the Eucharist means not only to be in communion with Christ individually, but to stand fully and without compromise with the Catholic Church, the mystical body of Christ and his beloved bride. To receive the Eucharist is to try to know, to love and to live the teachings of the Church because for the last 2000 years, through teaching the world who Jesus Christ is, the Catholic Church, though filled with sinners, has proven to be surest defender of the dignity of every human person and the promoter of the high destiny of man.  The Catholic Church provides the surest path to unity and peace and prosperity for mankind.  But more than this, to receive the Eucharist is to claim the Church as my family and as my home forever, and to declare that I love the Church so much that I would die for her.

All this is not to start a fight with the culture because we are Catholics, but it is to say that we will not back down from one if one comes our way.  Serving others wins more converts than fighting.  Whether we serve or fight however, because we are all sinners, we must live out this beautiful and difficult Catholic faith with as much humility and contrition as we can muster.  Our job as Catholics is not to horde and to lord our secret, magical path to eternal life, but to evangelize, and to invite others to be a part of our family . Our job is never, ever to point the finger at someone else, especially when we are teaching and living what the Church believes, but to always, always, always point the finger at ourselves, for we know ourselves to be hypocrites and sinners, and it is our cowardice that has allowed the world to ignore and to reject the beautiful person of Jesus Christ.

As you receive the Eucharist faithfully each Sunday this year, the only way not to receive our Lord in vain, is to try as we might to understand what the Eucharist really means.  When we come to this holy place to receive this blessed sacrament, we must always double down.  Amen.

Companion til the end

Homily
18th Sunday in Ordinary Time B
5 August 2012
Football Complex at the University of Kansas
Daily Readings

You all as football players know the difference between fans and friends.  Fans can be fickle.  They want results.  Their support not always, but oftentimes, reaches a frenzy when you're winning, and fades when you're losing. They are quick to judge and have a hard time seeing things from your perspective.  They don't see things from the inside out.  They don't see all the Sundays in August when you are working your tail off for Saturdays in October.  This is not to say anything bad against fans.  Every team needs fans, and the more  fans the better.  But they are not friends.  They are not companions.

To be a companion means to be the one whom you break bread with.  The Latin 'cum' means 'with' and the Latin 'pane' means bread.  A companion is the guy that is with you most often, the one you eat with most often.  In this light, although I am breaking bread with you this morning, I am more often a fan than a companion.  I am a KU grad, and have had KU football tickets for 20 years.  My priest friends call me a sports fan who happens to be a priest, and I'm looking forward to this season, and am privileged to say this Mass for you, because I am one of those KU fans who truly likes football more than basketball.  Still, I am not with you day in and day out - I'm not a companion.  I'm a fan.  A companion will always be there.  A fan is fickle and weak.

Both Moses and Jesus in today's scriptures are working through this distinction between fans and companions.  Moses realizes that he had lots of fans when he performed the signs against Pharaoh in Egypt, but few friends when things got tough in the desert.  Jesus warns those who started following him because he fed the 5000 that they will need to be more than fans of the bread that feeds stomachs, but must be true disciples and friends and companions of the one who himself is the bread of life if they are to follow him through the tough time of the cross to the glory of the Resurrection.

As you all build this new era of KU football, you know that there are thousands of fans who want to be inspired by you, but it all starts with you believing in yourself.  The improvements and victories on the football field are dependent upon the victory that starts in your own heart, and if you can honestly say in your heart that I am a man who does not turn back at the sign of trouble, who will never give up no matter what on myself or on my teammates, then you are firmly on the road that our Lord Jesus himself trod, and you already share in his victory over sin and death.  I pray that you find not just fans, but companions on this journey that you have committed yourself to.  I thank you as a fan for the hard work that you are putting in.  But more importantly, I bring you the Bread of Life this morning, the one who is more than a fan of yours, but he who is your deepest and truest companion, not only through a tough season, but through the end of your life, even through the grave to the eternal life God has promised you.  May Jesus coming among us humbly this morning help you to seek true companionship, as you strive with you coaches and teammates to make manifest on the field, the victory that Jesus has won in your own heart.  Amen.  

3 apostolic things

Homily
15th Sunday of Ordinary Time B
15 July 2012
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas
Daily Readings
Audio

The gospel of Jesus' sending of the first apostles is not just a chance for us to remember the foundations of our Church.  No, in a very personal and real way, it is a chance for us to reconnect with our mission in life ,a mission that is in every way for each of us and for all of us, apostolic.  When we talk about the mission of the first apostles, we talk about three things - they were sent to teach, to sanctify and to rule.  They were sent to announce the Gospel, to drive out evil and to make God's kingdom more visible and real.  This apostolic mission has remain unchanged for thousands of years now, carried on by the bishops of the Catholic Church, the unbroken successors of the apostles.  This is the simple mission of the Church, lest we get confused about what the Church really does.  It is simple - the Church, teaches, sanctifies and governs.  By the Church, I mean not only the bishops, I mean all of us.  The bishop is ultimately responsible for ensuring that the mission of the Church is accomplished, and his priests are his closest helpers, but his ministry is ultimately at the service of our mission.  The bishop doesn't do the work of the Church for us, he animates our work, for we have all been baptized as priest, prophet and king.

So Jesus' sending in today's Gospel should remind us of our baptismal grace and of our confirmation, through which we received the fullness of God's Spirit to do these very things.  And there are no excuses for not doing them, for without cost we have all received our status as God's beloved and graced children, so without cost we are to give.  God can call anyone, and indeed he calls everyone, as Amos attests to in today's first reading.  Amos was just a dresser of sycamores, a tree man, and nothing more, and yet the Lord called him to prophesy to the strongest in Israel.  So none of us has an excuse.  Instead of  accepting our excuses, Jesus gives us instructions so that if we have stopped teaching the Gospel by our words and example, if we have stopped in our struggle against evil, or if we have stopped building up God's kingdom, we may start again.

The first thing Jesus says is that we are to go out two by two at the very least.  It is true that the world is changed more by heroes, prophets and saints than by committee meetings, but Christianity is not ultimately an individualistic religion.  Jesus from the beginning forms a communion of persons and his Church is never a collection of individuals but always a mystical body, an organism.  In living out our apostolic mission in life, it is never our mission to start our own church, for Christianity only makes sense if there is one church, the one church Jesus founded, and no others.  It is rarely our mission to seek holiness alone or to go on mission alone, for ultimately Christianity is not a me project, it's a we project.  If our sense of mission in life does not work together in the Church with others, or doesn't attract others, then it is not apostolic.  It is not from God.  We reject many guys who want to go to seminary simply because they are doing their own thing in life, and are not heavily involved in their local parish.  Christianity is not a religion of loners working on their own thing.  Jesus sends us out two by two.

The second thing Jesus says is that we are to go out poor.  Imagine going on your next trip with no wallet and no suitcase.  What we will find, of course, is that the more poor, vulnerable and dependent we are, the more we are able to see God at work and to trust in his divine providence.  Christianity can never be ultimately about seeking security, insurance and self-sufficiency.  No, it is a radical dependence and focus upon God and others.  This summer, I gave three KU college students and three of our seminarians at our inner city prayer and action mission in KCK the task of trying to feed 60 high school kids for 5 days with $500.  That's less than $10 a week or $2 a day, and yes, there were lots of hungry boys in the group.  I gave them an impossible task, but by the end of the fourth week of our prayer and action mission experience, the group only spent $200 a week.  By asking for help, and letting people know what we were doing, the group realized how many resources were out there.  Even though we were in a poor area of Kansas City, Kansas painting houses and doing yardwork, still the donations kept coming in, and we had to give our leftover to someone else.

Thirdly, Jesus says to stay in the same place until we leave.  I have to admit, that for quite a while, I laughed at this line in the Gospel, like it was a mistranslation or the most redundant and least helpful phrase in the Bible.  I usually dismissed the line as unimportant.  But I've had others explain to me that Jesus is giving great advice here, against people who always think the grass is greener on the other side.  This is a spiritual mistake, to think that if this or that external circumstance is changed, then I will be holy.  We often times feel limited where we are, when the truth is there is every opportunity to love and to preach, sanctify and build up in the exact circumstances in which we find ourselves.  So we find in the end that this is profound spiritual advice.  Stay where you are until you leave.  It means, I think, that unless we find a way to be holy where we are right now, we'll find the same excuses in the next place as well.

May the Lord's good advice and instructions take away our excuses for not fulfilling the apostolic mission he has entrusted to each one of us.  Instead of shying away from it, let us embrace it again joyfully, and find new ways to teach by what we say and do, to battle against evil with all our heart, mind and strength, and so drive it out of the world, and to make God's kingdom more real and visible through our service in the Church.  Amen.

14th Sunday B

Homily
14th Sunday in Ordinary Time B
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas
8 July 2012
Daily Readings

As priests we get asked a lot why we move around so much.  By that the question means - why do you travel and why do you get new assignments so often?  Why don't you just stay put, and why doesn't the bishop just let you stay put?  Well, if you have a priest you don't particularly care for, you might be asking the opposite question, but if you'll humor me, we'll stick tonight with the first question.  Why do priests travel so much and change assignments so much?

The answer lies in the priest's commitment to celibacy and obedience.  Although a spiritual father and a true shepherd, and so tied to a particular parish or mission that he is to serve, the priest also belongs to the greater diocese and indeed to the greater church, and has a prophetic dimension to his priesthood that he must fulfill.  He does this in imitation of Jesus, who moved around very freely because he was celibate and poor, and so did not need to make major plans in order to move to the next town, but also because he had this prophetic mission to go out and proclaim the good news elsewhere.  In tonight's Gospel, Jesus hits his hometown and does not receive a hero's welcome.  In this case, familiarity breeded contempt, and Jesus' deeds and words were met with a complete lack of faith.  In this Gospel story, we see the wisdom of moving priests in our Church's tradition.  It is not proper for a priest himself to get comfortable and happy with his parish, nor is it proper for the parish to do vice versa with her priest.  Although we do not take a formal vow of poverty as diocesan priests like our religious brethren, we are expected to be free enough from possessions to be able to move from parish to parish in short order, taking next to nothing with us when we go.  This is in the end one way of avoiding the worst possible situation that we see in the Gospel, which is having a flock unable to listen to a prophetic word or see a prophetic sign, because they are too familiar with the prophet.

It is good to say, then, that a priest should be unattached to things and external circumstances and ready to move, in imitation of Jesus.  In a word, a priest should be vulnerable and dependent, or as St. Paul tells us in the second reading, he should be filled with weakness.  St. Paul gives great advice to the Corinthians that every Christian life should be marked not with self-sufficiency nor with conservative fear but with reckless love and profound vulnerability and dependence.  St. Paul reminds us well that the security that we sometimes feel in the middle of our lives is mostly illusory, and the pursuit of it vanity.  He tells us plainly that we are either in survival mode or prophetic mode.  Survival mode is dismayed by every trial or curveball that comes our way.  Prophetic mode welcomes all kinds of suffering as a means by which we attach ourselves to the things that really matter, and allow those things to shine forth from us.  Survival mode tries in vain to make the middle part of our life last forever, while prophetic mode lives in the truth that how we started our lives, and how we will end them, vulnerable and dependent, is who we always are, whether we like it or not.  In this light we see that St. Paul is not just telling us ironic things that sound clever, he is bringing the truth to light.  It is when we are weak that we are living in the truth, and so are strong.  It is when we are weak that we are strong in our relationships with God and one another, and these things in the end are all that matter.

We need look no farther for the perfect demonstration of this humility, vulnerability and dependence than at the Eucharist about to be made present to us here.  If we pause for a moment to imagine what it costs our Lord to make himself fully and immediately present to us here tonight in the most obscure place and in the most humble of ways, we know our Lord is not afraid of weakness.  May we grow strong only by wanting to receive him fruitfully tonight, helped by the intercession of our Blessed Mother, who first received him perfectly because she was aware of nothing but her lowliness.  Amen.

13th Sunday in Ordinary Time B

Homily
13th Sunday of Ordinary Time B
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas
1 July 2012
Daily Readings
Audio

Whenever we get a good scriptural commentary on death like we have in today's first reading from the Book of Wisdom, I always try to take advantage of it and make a point of emphasis.  We know as Christians we are not supposed to be afraid of death.  For the love of Jesus Christ is stronger than death, and the Lord's Resurrection is a central tenet of our faith, and a sure sign that He is waiting for us His beloved on the other side of death.  For us death is a passover, in many ways no more worrisome than our falling asleep each night before passing into a new day tomorrow.  While it is a sign of stewardship of the goodness of this life that we now experience that we do not want to die, and we want to put it off as long as possible, the greatest fear for a Christian must be not death,  but living forever as we are now, without ever passing over into the fullness of life that corresponds to our deepest desires.  Death for us is a just punishment for sin, as the book of Wisdom rightly says, for since love is the source of life, those who do not always love should not always live.  Death is a welcome deadline for each person who wants to love with all their heart, mind and strength, and thus to truly live.  In Christ, death is not just a welcome deadline, it is a true passover.  Woe to us then if we do not as Christians look forward to, and daily prepare for, our own death.

Christ demonstrates the love that is the source of all life, including the eternal life borne from His Resurrection, in his willingness to touch a young girl who was thought to be dead.  Not only this, but He allows himself to be touched by a woman who was hemorrhaging, and thus known to be unclean.  In the Mosaic law, most clearly defined in the book of Leviticus, there were strict provisions for the maintenance of the Jewish community, including prohibitions against eating or touching things or persons that were unclean.  The law was meant to preserve life and community, and lest we think such laws to be primitive, it is important for us to admit that we still today belong to many groups that have rituals and rules for who is in and who is out.  Sometimes the strongest of groups have the strictest of rules and rituals.  Think of the consequences for a KU basketball or football player who misses a practice or is late for a game?  Think of how quickly we ostracize someone who says something or does something or wears something that we deem inappropriate.  The Leviticus rules of the Israelite community may sound primitive to us, but we make as many rules today or more in the forming of our groups.  The Catholic Church herself has endured for many centuries now, a group to which all people and nations are invited, but a group with strict rules for things like communion, delineating who is ready and who is not ready to receive communion.  Group identity and belonging is one of the strongest forces in human behavior and sociology.

When Jesus goes against these rules, then, as a faithful Jew who came as he said not to abolish the law but to fulfill it, he is doing something big.  He is starting a new group, a group that knows not only how to avoid evil but how to conquer it by love and relationship.  Two of the strictest rules in the Levitical law were rules against touching human blood, for example, from a woman who is hemorrhaging, and against touching dead persons, unless you were the family member preparing the body for burial.  The hemorrhaging woman, then, had every reason to think that Jesus, a faithful Jew, would be hopping mad at her for making him unclean by touching him.  Yet Jesus says the opposite, telling the woman that her faith has saved her, and that she may go in peace.  Likewise for the daughter of Jairus, Jesus shows himself to be the closer to this girl than any family member, by touching her body that was thought to be dead.  Traditionally, the waking of this girl is not  a Resurrection miracle on the scale of the raising of Lazarus, for we take the Lord at his word when he says the girl was only sleeping.  Nevertheless, though, Jesus' touching of the girl, and healing her through love and relationship, and through his power as the author of life, shows clearly that the old laws delineating the family of Israel are being fulfilled and transcended by Jesus.

So too the Church is our deepest family, for it is the family to which we belong through the healing and powerful touch of our Lord.  We can think of the group or family that is the Catholic Church in many ways, by looking at her boundaries and measuring the length and breadth of her tradition, by studying the laws of inclusion and exclusion that define her.  Yet most simply and profoundly, we can think of the Church profitably as those who have been healed and made alive by the uniquely powerful and loving touch of Jesus Christ.  The Church includes those who have been touched by Christ, particularly through the physical touch of the holy sacraments, and most profoundly by a touch more intimate than the touch experienced by the women of today's Gospel, the touch of the Eucharist, the loving reception under the roofs of our bodies of the Body and Blood of our Lord.  The Eucharist then defines who is in and out of the Church, who is part of the new group and family that is destined to last forever, even beyond the boundaries of death, because the Eucharist is truly the perfect healing and loving touch of Jesus Christ.  Amen.

2012 11th Sunday B

Homily
11th Sunday in Ordinary Time B
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas
17 June 2012
Daily Readings
Audio

Happy Father's Day this weekend to all our dads out there.  As most of you know, I am in the business of recruiting, not to natural fatherhood, but to spiritual fatherhood - to the priesthood.  When I first got the job for the Archdiocese from Archbishop Naumann 5 years ago, I was excited, and in many ways I still am.  But I have to be honest, although we have made lots of progress, and have been blessed with incredible men preparing to become priests, and although we are hoping to ordain 15 men or more in the next 3 years, the job has been much harder than I thought it would be.  Either I thought the priesthood was more attractive to guys than it really is, or I thought there would be more men willing to make the sacrifice to say something beautiful with their lives, and to do something so important as being a priest.  Though we've been blessed, it's been hard.

The Archbishop has asked us to rally on June 29th in Topeka for religious freedom. The fortnight for freedom organized by the Church is in response to a pending federal mandate that would force religious employers, including Catholic schools,hospitals, universities and charities, to violate their consciences and provide contraception and abortion-inducing drugs to all employees.  Although in response to opposition the federal administration has compromised and put the onus for this mandate not on the Church but on insurance companies, this is not an acceptable compromise given that many Catholic entities are self-insured and at any rate, will still be paying for most of an insurance policy that covers things contrary to Catholic moral teaching.  I hope you have heard about this in the news, and have heard about the rally already.  The Archbishop will speak about it next weekend.  Unless a strong exemption from this mandate is obtained, the Catholic church is prepared to defy this unjust mandate, and pay the consequences for doing so, or in the worst case scenario, close her schools, universities, hospitals and charities.

Some have labeled the Church's opposition to providing contraception and abortion-inducing drugs to all employees as a war on women, and have tried to find support for the mandate by using this rhetoric.  But on this Father's Day weekend I want to put forth that there can be no war on women when a society is raising up just and holy men.  What I want to say this weekend is that underlying a perceived need and right to contraception and abortion inducing drugs is a deeper crisis in fatherhood.  Just as I have had a hard time as vocation director finding men to address the crisis of spiritual fatherhood in the priesthood, so also in the current situation where there is the consistent breakdown of marriage and the family aided by a contraceptive mentality, the crisis of natural fatherhood is all the more urgent.  Trust me, if I find a man who has the virtue and maturity to make others holy by the way he loves them and teaches them - if I find a man who would make a great priest - there are ten women or more who think he would make a better husband.  I can't overemphasize how great the need for husbands and fathers in our society really is.  Nowhere is this more apparent than at the university, where women outnumber men by a significant majority, and men seem to have a more difficult time all the time maturing into men who can make a sacrificial gift of themselves.  So again I repeat, there can be no war on women in a culture where men are laying down their lives for them as Christ laid down his life for his bride the Church. But finding men willing to do this is hard indeed.

This summer Archbishop Naumann is taking me and our seminarians to Montreal, to the shrine of St. Joseph constructed principally through the work of a simple and humble new saint of our Church, St. Andre Bessette.  Talk about a man who started out as a mustard seed!  St. Andre was thought to lack the talent to be much of a priest, or even a religious for that matter.  He was assigned for many years in his religious congregation to the most insignificant of jobs - to be the porter, the doorman.  Yet he did this job with such zeal and love, and prayed for the people entrusted to him with such sincerity, that people soon came to realize that the Lord was answering the prayers of little Andre with great efficacy.  Thousands began coming to him to ask him to pray for them, and eventually the Lord entrusted this smallest of men with the task of building a great oratory to St. Joseph, to whom Andre had entrusted the prayers of so many.  The Lord was pleased to do his work in honor of the great St. Joseph through the smallest of men, and this summer all our seminarians will visit the relics of this new saint who taught us how devotion to St. Joseph is a sure path to justice and chastity for every man.


As our seminarians begin preparing for this pilgrimage, as part of their formation to be future spiritual fathers, I invite all dads, and all of us, to take a moment today to consecrate the men in our lives to St. Joseph.  I fear that devotion to St. Joseph and consecration to him is dying out in our Catholic piety.  In my own simple piety, when I find that as a sinner I often do not love like Jesus I go to Mary, who simply allows the Lord's will to be done unto her.  And when I lack the humility, readiness and joy of Mary to let it be done unto me,  I go to Joseph, who though not possessing a Sacred Heart like Jesus nor the Immaculate Heart of Mary still is known for being just - for doing the right thing even when it became difficult or confusing.  We honor him as well, as a go-between for those men who want to be chaste both inside and outside of marriage as he was, for those men preparing to be both spiritual fathers and natural fathers, as he was.  In preserving the virginity and unique motherhood of the Mary both inside and outside of marriage, and in protecting the child Jesus, he is a sure exemplar for every man especially in a culture that has a hard time raising up worthy fathers.  He is in every way close to those who seek his powerful intercession.  As the beautiful Catholic piety says, every man should go to Joseph.  Especially for those who wish to be fathers in a culture that is losing the meaning of fatherhood, let us pray for them on this Father's Day weekend, that they will not be afraid to go to Joseph.  Amen.