The One Who Sees Us Through Disaster

Happy Transfiguration Day. This coming Sunday, at Holy Mass we will read…

The boat was already a considerable distance from land, buffeted by the waves because the wind was against it.

Shortly before dawn Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. “It’s a ghost,” they said, and cried out in fear.

But Jesus immediately said to them: “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.”

“Lord, if it’s you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.”

“Come,” he said.

Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!”

Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?”

(Matthew 14:24-31)

Christ at the Sea of Galilee, School of Tintoretto

O you of little faith, why did you doubt?

The God-man walked on water. He can overcome gravity, since He invented gravity. This man stands at the center of the life of His Church. He remains with us, offering us the same strong hand He offered St. Peter.

We need it. Not just individually, but as a community of Christians. Because gravity does not appear to be on our side.

What has happened here? With our communities already deeply compromised by the virus, our bishop has intervened in the life of our parishes–not help them, but to wreck them. He takes a priest—admittedly kind of an annoying goofball, but who nonetheless can show up for work every day—he takes me and throws me in the dumpster. We try to reason with him, and with his superiors, and we get absolutely nowhere.

What is going on?

It’s actually not that big a mystery. Over the second half of the twentieth century, an incredibly talented New Yorker with a moral blind spot the size of the Sea of Galilee became a highly prominent Church politician. He connived his way into becoming the pope of New Jersey. Then he maneuvered himself into the College of Cardinals and became the confidante of three popes.

Meanwhile, Theodore McCarrick left behind him a wide trail of broken souls. Every time the man celebrated Holy Mass, surrounded by sycophants trying to please him, he delivered another painful blow to his victims.

Wait. Every time he celebrated Mass. But isn’t this Jesus Christ’s holy Presence with us? The Mass?

We need big, big faith. Because Yes, it is His Presence. Yes, Jesus Christ does stand at the center of the life of His Church. Jesus can lead us through this disaster. We need to have enough faith to believe that. Because this disaster is bigger than what we think we can deal with.

We little Rocky Mounters and Martinsvillians find ourselves caught up in a heavy drama. The man who ordained me had made it basically impossible for the people he hurt to continue to believe in the Holy Mass. And to continue to believe in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church that celebrates the Mass.

They went to Pope John Paul II for help, and he did not believe them. Benedict XVI believed them, but he wanted to keep the whole thing hush-hush. Then Pope Francis chose mercy for his friend, Theodore McCarrick, over justice and healing for McCarrick’s victims.

McCarrick was not the only one with a moral blind spot the size of Lake Como. They had a blind spot in the Apostolic Palace in Rome, also.

The thing is this: Every time a priest who abused you says Mass, and no one stops him, and everyone acts as if everything is holy and normal, you feel something far worse than a five-fingered death punch to the face. You feel like a demon-sized lie has pinned your truth to the mat on the lowest floor in hell, like a sumo wrestler crushing your ribcage.

God must not care.

But He does. The Mass is the Holy Mass of Christ crucified.

We will have to face the fact that three popes presided over a colossal institutional failure. The institution failed so magnificently that we will have to admit that we never knew Satan was so smart. We never knew anyone, even Satan, could orchestrate something so damaging to the Christian faith.

Here in the U.S., a lot of us thought the Church saved Her credibility with the bureaucratic maneuvers of 2002, after the Boston Globe blew the lid off decades of priestly sex-abuse cover-ups. But we will have to face the fact that the lies just moved farther up the chain-of-command that year. After all, the man who called the shots in 2002 was Theodore McCarrick.

All this horribleness has now rained down pain and confusion in our little bucolic corner of southwest Virginia. It will get worse before it gets better, uglier before it beautifies.

We will have to remember that the Lord Jesus endured a series of unimaginably agonizing hours. He suffered blows and lashes and wounds all over His sacred Body. He bled from everywhere. He has drawn us into this, in our interior lives.

But He lives. We need big, big faith. He conquered all that agony, and He will reconcile us all to Himself. Truth can seem to wound. But, in the end, it heals, restores, and brings real peace.

Jesus Christ, brutally tortured and crucified to death, risen again from the dead, and present with us. The man Who pulled St. Peter out of the water. He stands at the center of the life of His Church. He stands there, immovable, full of love.

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The Kind Beginning of the Culture of Life

The Lord Jesus worked His first miracle in Cana, a small town in Galilee, near Nazareth.

Two months ago, I was in the town of Cana. All the couples in our pilgrim group renewed their wedding vows in the church built on the spot where the Lord turned water into wine.

Church of the Miracle at Cana

Then we went on to the Sea of Galilee, where we spent the day. In the evening, we got on the bus to head back to Nazareth, where we were staying. On the way, the perfect thing happened.

We had to pass through Cana on the way back. The region of Galilee is rural countryside. There are not a lot of roads, and the roads are narrow. The only way from the Sea of Galilee to Nazareth is through Cana.

So we drove back into Cana, and, like I said, the perfect thing happened: We got stuck in a traffic jam.

It took us 40 minutes to get through two traffic lights. There were just too many cars and not enough road. Rush hour in Cana of Galilee.

This was the perfect thing to happen. The miracles of Christ are things that really took place, in this very world of ours, where traffic also occurs. The world where Jesus worked miracles, and the world where you and I get stuck in traffic: It is the same world.

Alveda King

In the town where we sat at a red light for half an hour, the God-man went to a wedding of poor people.

The family had done everything within their means to provide for their guests. Now they were confronted with an embarrassing situation.

What Christ did for them is very revealing.

Let us first take note of what He did not do. He did not say, “It’s just as well the wine ran out, because these people have already had more than enough fun.”

No. He did not frown. He smiled. He turned water for ritual purification into an enormous amount of choice table wine. The joy and revelry did not end. The Son of God kept it going.

The fact that our Lord did this is revealing for two reasons. First: It reveals the kind of human heart He has. His Heart is generous. He does not measure His kindness. He does not give with one hand and take with the other. He just loves.

Bl. Columba Marmion, O.S.B.

The second thing His action reveals is even more profound. The loving kindness of Christ the man reveals to us the infinite divine love of Christ our God.

We can neither perceive nor imagine the love of God. God’s qualities are altogether beyond the capacities of our little minds. But the human love of Christ give us a glimpse of the ineffable divine love. One of the saints put it like this:

Nothing so much attracts our poor hearts as to contemplate Jesus Christ, true God as well as true man, translating the eternal goodness into human deeds.

In Christ, the unknowable eternal goodness turned water into wine for a poor family in the little town where we sat in traffic. We cannot know God by ourselves, dear brothers and sisters. But Jesus reveals Him. And we see the sweet truth: God is kind.

Now, it is no accident that this revelation took place at a wedding.

The Lord Jesus was not destined to marry on earth. He came to die for the sins of all the children of Adam and Eve.

But He worked His first miracle at a wedding to show us this: God loves marriage and child-bearing. Yes, when we are born, we are born sinners. But it is still a good thing to be born. The human race is meant to be fruitful, to multiply, to fill the earth. Christ came to save everyone ever born.

The miracle at Cana, then, was the beginning of what we call the “Culture of Life.” Christ showed us that day: God wants babies to be born.

This is what the March for Life is about. It is a continuation of the wedding at Cana.

Speaking of births, yesterday would have been Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 81st birthday. Dr. King has a niece named Alveda. She recently wrote the following message to us:

I work in the civil rights movement of our century — the right of every one of every race to live.

I am asking you to join me. Let me tell you why. Abortion and racism are evil twins, born of the same lie…

Racism springs from the lie that certain human beings are less than fully human…So it is with abortion.

Racism oppresses its victims, but also binds the oppressors, who sear their consciences with more and more lies until they become prisoners of those lies. They cannot face the truth of human equality because it reveals the horror of the injustices they commit…So it is with abortion.

Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals. So it is with abortion.

Listen: Dr. King was killed before Roe v. Wade made abortion legal on January 22, 1973. But you know that if he were still alive, he would be marching on Friday.

If any of us think that the pro-life cause is not our problem, not our fight to fight, we need to think again.

Dr. King would be yelling at us right now. He yelled a lot louder in the pulpit than I ever do.

He would yell, “Get yourself up! Stand up for what you know is right! Every little baby in the womb—every black one, every white, yellow, or red one—every last one has the right to be born!”

Plenty to Look Forward To, Provided We Can Get There

Don’t get mad at me: I was hoping for the Chargers to beat Pittsburgh. Just to make it a clean sweep of upsets for the weekend.

What do football fans BOTH in Dixieland AND near the Empire State Building have in common? They are all wondering how their powerhouse teams managed to let it slip away.

Meanwhile, we mid-Atlantic-ers have the pyrrhic consolation of having two teams left. But there is no joy in it when one of those teams is the Philadelphia Eagles.

This Flacco guy is good. When I lived in Mexico, they called me “flaco,” which is Spanish for ‘skinny.’

Whoever wins the AFC is going to win the SuperBowl. And we Redskins fans have to deal with the frustration that the NFC Championship game will be played by two teams we beat.

Here is a homily for yesterday’s Feast of the Baptism of the Lord.

“They will look upon Him” (Zechariah 12:10)

Homily for the Feast of the Triumph of the Cross

“As the serpent was lifted up in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.”

In the first reading we heard the account of what happened to the Israelites in the desert. The Lord Jesus referred to this episode in order to explain the mystery of salvation.

The journey the freed slaves had to make from Egypt to the Promised Land was long and hard. It was a trial. The Lord had promised His people that He would provide for them and get them to the land of milk and honey, but He did not “beam” them there like Scottie on the Starship Enterprise—they had to make the long and arduous pilgrimage.

In this way, the journey of the Israelites is an image of human life. God starts us out on the journey to heaven, and He accompanies us the whole way. But most of us have to persevere and bear up under the strain of traveling a long distance. We don’t get beamed-up to heaven until we finish the work the Lord gives us to do here, whatever it may be.

The Israelites did not bear up well under the strain. They grew tired and impatient with God’s plan. Therefore, they were subjected to the attack of poisonous snakes. Many of the Israelites were bitten and died. The poison in these snakes is also an image for us: It represents the weakness of our human nature. The poison in us is our propensity to selfishness, pride, self-indulgence, cowardice, and malice. The snakes in the desert would have been harmless if they weren’t poisonous, just as our human nature would not be dangerous to us if Adam and Eve had never fallen. But as it is, our flesh does have poison in it. The poison can strike us and kill us spiritually, which is what happens when you or I commit a mortal sin.

As the Lord Jesus explained it, though, the imagery from the Old Testament reading does not end here by any means—thanks be to God. What did the Lord command Moses to do to heal His people who were poisoned? He ordered Moses to mount a bronze serpent on an upright pole for the people to gaze upon. But the serpent on the pole was not full of poison. It looked like the poisonous serpents which had stung the people. But the bronze serpent was itself perfectly pure and free of poison.

As the Lord Jesus explained to Nicodemus: The mounted bronze serpent–in the image of the poisonous beast but itself free from poison–is the image of the Son of Man sacrificed on the Cross. God hung on the Cross in the likeness of our sinful flesh, even though He was completely free from sin. Those who have looked upon Him without faith saw nothing but a criminal being executed in the notorious Roman way. But those who know Who the Crucified One truly is see something else: We see a perfectly pure and innocent man offering Himself to the Father on our behalf.

Dear brother, dear sister: you and I deserve to be on the cross. For forsaking the truth, for pouring contempt on the weak, for smiling at evil, for distracting ourselves from our duties, for running my brother down behind his back, for putting me, me, me in the center—for these and countless more faults, wrongs, and sins, you and I deserve agony and death. God owes us nothing; all we have is a gift. And we have not been grateful, submissive, and obedient like we should be.

But the man on the Cross was never ungrateful. He was never disobedient; He was never selfish. He was never petty or mean; He never lied or prevaricated—to anyone else or to Himself. He walked in this world with the gentleness of a doe, the deft strength of a lioness protecting her cubs, and the pure beauty of a lark singing.

There has never been one ounce of poison in the flesh of the Son of Man. On the contrary: His humanity oozes healthful medicine. When He walked the earth, it was as if His hands secreted aloes and balms that soothed every wound He touched. The same healing powers flow out from His heavenly Body which He makes present to us on the altar.

Christ made His pilgrimage on earth with perfect abandonment to the will of the Father. He preserved what the Israelites lost in the desert. God was leading them to the Promised Land, but their way there passed through the desert, and they ran out of trust. The Father was leading the Lord Jesus to the Promised Land, too. His way there passed through the Cross. He walked calmly to it. The Lord’s execution did not take Him unawares. He knew and accepted His mission with serenity from the beginning. He had come to suffer our punishment for us, so that we would not have to suffer it.

The purity and innocence of Christ’s obedience to the Father is reflected in the pure and innocent obedience of His saints. Today our Holy Father Pope Benedict has gone on pilgrimage to the place where St. Bernadette humbly and simply obeyed the orders of the heavenly Lady 150 years ago—Lourdes, France.

Pure water flows out from our Lady’s spring in the grotto there, water with the power to cleanse and heal. Lourdes water is an image, too—an image of the cleansing, invigorating spiritual water that flows from the Sacred Heart of the Crucified One. This spiritual water flows out onto all those who gaze upon Him in faith. Let us draw near to the holy altar of Calvary to bathe our souls.