“It’s Not Your Job.” Homily for the 7th Sunday in Ordinary Time
You don't have to work so hard. Let Christ do it for you.
Feb 22
Reflections on the St.Blaise Men’s Retreat (Part 2)
Exchanging the business of life for peace and tranquility.
Reflections on the St. Blaise Men’s Retreat (Part 1)
About 170 men were at Malvern Retreat House for their annual St. Blaise Retreat Weekend. They share their reflections here.
Homily for the 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time
What are the steps to the ritual for the “elect“ to be received into the Catholic Church?
Homily For the 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time
The Gospel readings this weekend reflect the theme that was chosen for the 2002 World Youth Day that was held in Toronto. The theme was “You Are The Light of The World: You Are The Salt of The Earth.” I looked back on what was being said ten years, and fifteen years, after the event.
Massive planning and logistics are behind such events. Safety and medical care of pilgrims is one of the most critical components of any successful World Youth Day. Dr. Katherine Rouleau Medical Director, World Youth Day, 2002 Toronto and her brigade of doctors, nurses and EMS workers were dealing with heat exhaustion, dehydration, 
hypothermia, heart attacks and seizures, sprained ankles, asthma attacks and more. Over six days the World Youth Day medical team treated close to 5,000 and more than half of them needed the care of a doctor. In one case, a young, mother had brought her new born baby to the temporary medical center. In the sweltering heat, the prematurely-born baby had become deathly dehydrated. A member of Dr. Rouleau’s team quickly assessed the situation and administered necessary fluids.
The baby survived. In fact, nobody died during the massive week-long event that sent young people from around the world into Canadian parishes serving meals to the poor, constructing a Habitat for Humanity home, discovering themselves, their capacity for friendship and the meaning of Church.
Nicholas Pappalardo met his future wife Marta while working on World Youth Day. They have two children and Pappalardo worked at one point in Ottawa in the Prime Minister’s Office. At 22 all Pappalardo had to do was persuade 200 pastors in Toronto to get on board so he could assemble and train 1,000 volunteers who coordinated sleeping arrangements for the 35,000 pilgrims who were billeted in 15,000 private homes. There were also the 118,000 pilgrims to be put up in 395 area schools.
After the planes slammed into World Trade Center and the Pentagon Sept. 11, 2001, persuading people to trust complete strangers from far-off lands was not easy. He spent a year going from parish to parish to persuade each to establish a hosting committee to match families with pilgrims.
As national director of World Youth Day 2002, Fr. Tom Rosica oversaw a staff of about 300, most of them too young and inexperienced to be reasonably entrusted with the jobs they were doing. They came from 40 countries and spoke even more languages. From July 23 to 28 the team managed a core participation of 145,000 pilgrims from 70 countries. But the final Mass and stations of the cross on University Avenue drew extraordinary crowds — more than half-a-million to see the passion of Christ acted out and projected onto the office towers of a downtown boulevard and then 800,000 to see frail, elderly Pope John Paul II celebrate Mass and challenge a generation to risk everything, to go out into the deep water, for the sake of Christ.
Father Rosica worked together with Deacon Pedro Guevara Mann. As the deacon later related, “My vocation, clearly, was born in World Youth Day,” who was ordained about 10 years after World Youth Day. Guevara Mann certainly didn’t know he was on that path when he signed up as artistic director of World Youth Day. Back then he was a young actor and some-time musician. Working for the Church on this massive event was a major shift from shooting TV commercials and auditioning for plays. By the time it was over, he discovered he wasn’t quite so interested in the working life of an actor.
Ten years later, Guevara Mann was still working with Rosica as a radio host and film producer at Salt+Light TV — the television, Internet and publishing entity established in the wake of WYD 2002. Father Rosica was still repeating a message he began pitching a year before the crowds gathered. His favorite image for World Youth Day is of a timed-release capsule. “It’s about sowing seeds. It’s not a story of success for a rock concert, but it’s about sowing seeds. It’s little changes that happen, that shift your idea of what it means to be a disciple, what it means to be an apostle, what it means to serve, what it means to work for the Church. It’s not a panacea. It’s not a quick fix. Those who expected the churches to be full and all kinds of other things, they sort of say, ‘Well, what happened?’ ” said Rosica. “World Youth Day is supposed to stir things up and give people new lenses to look at the Church. It’s for the whole Church. It gives the Church hope.”
At 35, Rouleau was one of the older members of the team. But at 45 she knew she was an innocent entrusted with a huge task. “Knowing what I know now, I would have asked a million questions (before taking the job).” Now she teaches University of Toronto medical students things she learned during World Youth Day about leadership, collaboration, trust.
Nobody would say WYD 2002 was just a big Mass, but then again, the Eucharist is the source and summit of Christian life. Maybe it was a big Mass painted on the canvas of an entire country over six days.
The 2002 World Youth Day in Toronto was St. John Paul II’ last. He died in April 2005, the year World Youth Day 2005 was still being planned for August in Cologne in Germany. The Pope was old and frail. He was suffering with the severe effects of Parkinson’s Disease. His hands shook. His speech was slurred. Nevertheless, close to 800,000 young people came out to see him. They braved heat, cold and rain.
Why? What was the message of the Holy Father? It was the same message that we heard in today’s Gospel dealing with “salt and light.”
Jesus offers one thing, and the “spirit of the world” offers another. Saint Paul tells us that Jesus leads us from darkness into light (cf. Ephesians 5:8). Perhaps the great Apostle is thinking of the light that blinded him, the persecutor of Christians, on the road to Damascus. When later he recovered his sight, nothing was as before. He had been born anew and nothing would ever take his new-found joy away from him.
You too are called to be transformed. “Awake, O sleeper, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light” (Ephesians 5:14). 
The “spirit of the world” offers many false illusions and parodies of happiness. There is perhaps no darkness deeper than the darkness that enters young people’s souls when false prophets extinguish in them the light of faith and hope and love. The greatest deception, and the deepest source of unhappiness, is the illusion of finding life by excluding God, of finding freedom by excluding moral truths and personal responsibility.
The world you are inheriting is a world which desperately needs a new sense of brotherhood and human solidarity. It is a world which needs to be touched and healed by the beauty and richness of God’s love. It needs witnesses to that love. The world needs salt. It needs you – to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
WYD Toronto was 18 years ago. Why is it important to hear the message from Toronto today? Because Canada needs to hear the message of “Salt and Light” again. It is one of many countries that seem to be choosing darkness instead of light.
The president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops recently wrote to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau decrying the effort to further expand euthanasia within the country. Trudeau and others want to pass legislation to allow Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) to be extended to mature minors with depression, the mentally ill, and the cognitively impaired.
There are some who openly advocate for the opportunity to officially and legally dismiss particular categories of people. For example, in Iceland, upward of 85 percent of pregnant women opt for the prenatal testing, which has produced a Down syndrome elimination rate approaching 100 percent. In a March 18, 2018 Washington Post article, the author introduces us to Agusta. Agusta was one of only three Down syndrome babies born there in 2009.
An Iceland geneticist says “we have basically eradicated” Down syndrome people, but regrets what he considers “heavy-handed genetic counseling” that is influencing “decisions that are not medical.
“First They Came …” is the poetic form of a prose post-war confession first made in German in 1946 by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984). It is about the cowardice of German intellectuals and certain clergy (including, by his own admission, Niemöller himself) following the Nazis’ rise to power and subsequent incremental purging of their chosen targets, group after group:
First they came for the Communists, And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists, And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists, And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews, And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me …
And there was no one left, To speak out for me
It is reported that El Salvador priest Father Óscar Romero once said, “You cannot really have empathy for- and love a person until you look at them through eyes of tears.” These are times when devotion to the Immaculate Heart and the Sacred Heart seem especially prescient. Mary certainly weeps for her lost children. Jesus looks to forgive and heal the darkness in those who would toss away human persons so casually. In the meantime, we are called by a Polish saint to continue to be light and salt in our immediate surroundings.
The Homily for the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
As he was walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter, and his brother Andrew, casting a net into the sea; they were fishermen.
He said to them, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” At once they left their nets and followed him.
He walked along from there and saw two other brothers, James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John. They were in a boat, with their father Zebedee, mending their nets.
He called them, and immediately they left their boat and their father and followed him.
Mending nets is hard.
Mending nets take time.
Cardinal Robert Sarah is a member of the Roman Curia and Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. I have been reading through parts of his book, The Day is Far Spent. In it Sarah lays out a detailed list of challenges facing the Church today. Needless to say, it’s a long list. He presents the issues with detail and clarity. He shows where the nets are torn. What I find missing is that he doesn’t invest an equal amount of time saying how we can mend the nets.
There is a lot of talk in Catholic land about what is wrong. That’s important. If you’re going to cure something that is sick, you need a proper diagnosis first.
What comes next?
There are a number of tendencies. One is to be the spiritual culture warrior. Let’s go out, identify the enemy and fight them. Understand, this is tactic that is absolutely necessary today. There are forces that are aimed at destroying our religious liberties and hurting the Church. They need to be countered. However, this is a tactic, not a long term strategy. It is not an effective and comprehensive program for the long run.
A second tactic is to run away and hide. 30 years ago, Orthodox Father Alexander Schmemann expressed an exasperation with people he was spiritually guiding. They were developing a growing infatuation with monasticism among people. The problem was that they had no idea what living within a community, much less in a monastery, was really like. They were attracted to the “vaudeville” of monastic-community life.
Or we develop a fortress mentality. We wall ourselves within a Catholic cocoon. We only associate with people in the tribe. That feels safe. It doesn’t fulfill the Great Commission, “Go out – make disciples – baptize – teach them all that I told you.”
There’s a fourth way. That is to inoculate the culture and change it from the inside. It’s that whole “salt of the earth, light of the world, be like yeast in a loaf of bread” thing. To do that – first – we have to change on the inside.
Ross Douthat is an author and a columnist for the New York Times. He’s a former Pentecostal who converted to Catholicism. He has a blog and writes commentaries on religion in general, and on the Catholic Church specifically. I like his writing style. It’s pithy and punchy. He doesn’t mess around.
Ross said that, right now, the Church doesn’t need a “checklist of practices. Rather, what we need is an invitation to start from wherever we are, then take one step forward towards a greater rigor and a coherent way to marry faith and life.”
Leah Libresco, author of Building the Benedict Option, writes that “creating community” starts small. Here’s an example… At work, look at each encounter with a client, colleague, customer as if they were specifically sent to you by God. Be nice to them when they’re nice to you. If they’re not, throw a prayer at them while they’re walking away.
It’s not glamorous. Net mending is not glamorous. It’s tedious, slimy, smelly … and important. You need to mend nets before you try and fish with them. “Creating community throws you into the paths of others, giving you more chances to learn to love them – and to let them love you.”
Here’s a prayer from today’s Liturgy of the Hour:
All-powerful, ever-living God, direct our steps in the way of your love, so that our whole life may be fragrant with all we do in the name of Jesus, your beloved Son.
Here’s some homework:
- Say something nice to someone, or about someone today.
- Do one act of charity today. Try doing one that no one else sees.
- Do something nice for yourself today.
That’s a life that is fragrant. That’s mending nets.
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