This past week on Tuesday, our daily readings addressed the question of the Sabbath and what role in plays in the life of faith. The passage that we read is Mark 2:23-28. The Gospels depict Jesus and his disciples walking through a field of grain (maybe wheat or barley) on a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. As they walked, they picked some of the grain from the stalks, and I assume that they ate it too. The Pharisees criticized Jesus and said that what his disciples were doing was unlawful. They were referring to the Third Commandment in which God commanded his people to keep holy the Lord’s Day. The Lord’s Day was a day of rest, but the question was how far that rest should extend. Some like the Pharisees took a very strict interpretation, and these people criticized Jesus for picking grain or even offering healing on the Sabbath. 

This Gospel scene is a good one for us to focus on as we discuss the role of the Lord’s Day in our life as Christians. In response to the criticisms of the Pharisees, Jesus called them to reflect on the meaning of the Lord’s Day and why it exists in the first place. Profoundly and succinctly, he said, “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.” As Jesus often does, he calls us to think about how God made things “from the beginning.” This was his strategy when it came to teaching on marriage, as he points us to Genesis for the true meaning of marriage. In the same way, we can look to Genesis for the meaning of the Sabbath. 

The creation story in Genesis says that on the seventh day, God rested. The number seven is always significant in scripture, symbolizing completion or harmony. Seven is also the number of a covenant. To make a covenant official, the word used in Hebrew is similar to the number seven (so I’m told). So, giving the seventh day of each week to God was a sign of their covenant with him. This covenant was renewed every Sabbath by prayer and rest. 

The Sabbath was made for man. The Jewish people, and later the Church, have always recognized the importance of keeping holy the Lord’s Day. With the beginning of the New Covenant, the covenant day has been transferred from Saturday to Sunday. This is to honor the resurrection of Jesus, and in keeping with the traditions of the earliest Christians. The primary way that Catholics can keep the Lord’s Day holy is by attending Mass. To voluntarily not attend Mass is a way of breaking the covenant that we have with God. We need to go to Mass each Sunday (or Saturday evening) to renew that covenant relationship and be sustained with the Body and Blood of Jesus. For those in our parish who cannot attend Mass because of being homebound or quarantined, it is good to watch Mass if possible (although not required), or at least set some time apart during the day to pray with the Sunday readings. 

However, attending Mass is not the only way that we should keep Sunday holy. The Lord’s Day should still be a day of rest for us as Christians. This does not necessarily mean physically resting (although that is good too), but it is primarily a sort of spiritual rest. The day should be marked and set apart from the other six days in the week by some family prayer time or visits to the homebound. Sunday is a good day to study a spiritual book or renew connections with family and friends. Keeping Sunday as a day of rest is a reminder to us that we are made for more than work. In heaven, there will be no more work to do, and we will be able to enter into the rest that is eternal with our heavenly Father. The Sabbath was made for man, because we need rest and renewal in God’s merciful love. 

Feast Day: January 27^th 

Sometimes the Lord’s call comes amidst a constellation of positive elements – talents, affinities, capacities, charisms – that come together in one particular person.  Think of the boldness combined with theological acumen of St. Paul, or the fervor and energy and love for the Gospel of St. Ignatius Loyola, or the patient and merciful character of Mother Teresa.  This is not simply “following your heart”, for we all know how far our instincts and character can carry us far from the Lord and living out of His love, yet at the same time, God’s call often does fit with some of our own inclinations and proclivities.  

Other times, our vocation, our call, grows from a place of pain and loss.  Here still, God does not call us to something that is disingenuous from who we are, but He can often surprise and transform us by His graces of conversion, conviction, or consolation.  Notice that this fits as well with the examples above: St. Paul – who’s life was turned upside down on the way to Damascus; St. Ignatius Loyola, who was moved to turn aside from the glorious life of the battlefield; and St. Mother Teresa, who lost much in leaving her family and religious community to serve the poorest of the poor.

This second means seems to be the one that we see especially operative in the life of St. Angela Merici.  Born of Italian farmers in 1474, she lost both her parents by the age of ten, after which she and her older sister Giana we raised by an uncle, but sadly, she lost that older sister a few years later, and by the time Angela was 20, she also lost her uncle.  Of course, we only have a sketch of her story – we don’t know the waves of grief and struggles with responsibility that may have swept over this young woman – and yet by this time in her life she had already grown to a deep level of intimacy with the Lord.  From Him she received the consolation that her sister had entered heaven (she died without receiving the Last Rites, and so had no chance to prepare to meet her Judge) as well as the first urgings to devote her life to the Lord, choosing to become a third-order Franciscan.  

She was a beautiful young lady and worked hard to dislodge from her heart any of the many temptations towards vanity that were offered to her.  She felt no call towards the contemplative life and ended moving back to her hometown where her brothers still worked the land.  How did she feel walking through her childhood home again?  Did the weight of those losses crash down on her anew?   What was happening in her heart as she contemplated her future?  We fruitfully ask these questions because they are the same questions that we confront in our own lives sometimes. 

Perhaps she could not see the Lord at work right then, but we can because it was there, back home, that she came to know many young girls poor, stuck without education, not knowing Jesus, and she began to invite them into that home, to care, and teach, and love them.  And it was there, over the years to come, that other women joined her in that mission of helping to raise and restore those hurting girls.  They dedicated themselves to prayer and penance and charity in their homes, and entrusted themselves to the patroness of St. Ursula.  Eventually Angela would more formally establish the group with a rule, working towards becoming a religious order, the Ursuline Nuns, in the decades to come.  Her mission stemmed from her own early suffering: “disorder in society is the result of disorder in the family”, she would say.  The Ursulines would be the first nuns to set foot in our country in 1719, and came to our diocese in 1857 at the request of Bp. Juncker, where they would establish multiple different schools and educate many thousands of young-people over a century and a half.  

– Fr. Dominic Rankin visited the Holy Land during Christmas break 2015-2016. It was moving to see all the actual places where so much of the Bible happened.  St. Angela Merici also was able to go on pilgrimage to the land of Jesus (in 1524).  She did not get to see any of it though because she was struck with a fluke episode of blindness during the entire trip (being spontaneously healed on her journey back).  Like so much of her life, she astonishingly took it as another cross to carry with Jesus, and came back with greater faith and love than when she left. 

As we continue to consider the Ten Commandments, the road map given to us by God to help us to get to Heaven, Jesus teaches that these commandments can be understood as two expressions of love – for God and our neighbor.  In Matthew’s Gospel, He teaches the following:

You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul,
and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment.
The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.
(Mt 22:37-40)

The first three commandments are directed toward the love of God and the following seven commandments are directed toward the love of neighbor.  I would like to focus on the Fourth Commandment in particular this week.  In beginning to address this commandment, the Catechism says the following:

The fourth commandment opens the second table of the Decalogue. It shows us the order of charity. God has willed that, after him, we should honor our parents to whom we owe life and who have handed on to us the knowledge of God. We are obliged to honor and respect all those whom God, for our good, has vested with his authority. (CCC 2197)

The Catechism explains how observance of this commandment extends beyond honoring and respecting our physical parents, but touches on the many and various types of relationships that exist in society and how they should be lived out according to our faith.  One such relationship is that of “citizens to their country, and to those who administer or govern it.” (CCC 2199) In that regard, the Church reminds us of the obligation that exists on both sides.  On the part of the government, care must always be taken so that no laws are established which are “contrary to the dignity of persons and the natural law.” (CCC 2235) Assuming that is the case, then citizens have the obligation to obey and collaborate with the government in securing the common good.  However, the Catechism also makes it clear that as citizens, our “loyal collaboration includes the right, and at times the duty, to voice [our] just criticisms of that which seems harmful to the dignity of persons and to the good of the community.”  (CCC 2238) Furthermore, the Catechism teaches us that “the citizen is obliged in conscience not to follow the directives of civil authorities when they are contrary to the demands of the moral order, to the fundamental rights of persons or the teachings of the Gospels.” (CCC 2242)

There is a lot to ponder here, and it is well worth our prayerful consideration of this important teaching.  On the one hand, our general posture should be one of submission to authority, not always assuming that it is contrary to the common good.  But we must not be naïve either, for there are indeed many laws which do threaten the fundamental rights of the human person, which then require our response, not simply to oppose those in authority as an end in itself, but to work for securing the common good and the respect of humanity.

This coming Saturday marks the 49^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade which cleared the way to easier access to abortion in our country.  The Catholic Church continues to remind us of our right and duty to decry this violation against human dignity of our most vulnerable, the children in the womb.  Our efforts to address this sad situation is more than just changing laws, which is necessary.  More fundamentally, it is about changing hearts so that our love of neighbor is shown in concrete ways to those who struggle with a pregnancy for which they do not feel prepared.  When these women can experience a society that shows genuine love for them, they will have the courage to choose the great gift of life that has been given to them by God.  In comparison, changing laws is much easier than changing the hearts in a society that has, in many ways, grown cold toward one another.  Either way, much is asked of us as Catholics to ensure that our love of neighbor is something we actually live, not just simply profess.

Father Alford    

Parents are often shocked to hear their kids say their first “cuss word.” While it may be funny to hear a child give voice to a word that they do not know the meaning of, it is also a cause of embarrassment and shame for their parents at the same time. This is because the parents know exactly who taught them how and when to say this word! It is an important lesson in using our words only for building others up and praising God.

The Second Commandment reads, “You shall not use the name of the Lord, your God, in vain.” By extension, this commandment means that we should also not use vulgar or suggestive speech. At certain points in our lives, I am sure we have all struggled to keep purity of speech. Young people often tend toward making lewd or suggestive jokes with their friends, and it can be hard to not fall into peer pressure to join in on what is thought to be fun. Some workplaces, especially with workers who do manual labor, are so full of foul language that it just becomes a regular part of one’s vocabulary. And many people have the habit of saying, “O my God” for no good reason.

As Christians, our speech is very important. Even if we do not say bad words in front of our kids or friends, God still hears our speech and our own ears hear our speech. It can be easy to write off using cuss words as not being a big deal, and in some cases, this may be true. However, we should not underestimate the power of the words we say. Imagine if “O my God” were replaced with a racial slur. The people around you would be shocked and ask you why you said that. If you said you didn’t really mean it, so it is no big deal, the people around you would say that it is still a big deal. Jesus talked about how our speech expresses the depths of our hearts when he said, “Do you not realize that everything that enters the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled into the latrine? But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile” (Matthew 15:17-18). What comes out of our mouth first comes from our heart (and our brain).

One of my favorite scripture passages on this topic is found in the letter of St. James. James is one of the most practical books in the bible, and if you think your faith needs to be more practical, turn to this book. He writes at length about the power of speech in chapter 3: “If anyone does not fall short in speech, he is a perfect man, able to bridle his whole body also. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we also guide their whole bodies. It is the same with ships: even though they are so large and driven by fierce winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot’s inclination wishes. In the same way the tongue is a small member and yet has great pretentions. Consider how small a fire can set a huge forest ablaze. The tongue is also a fire. It exists among our members as a world of malice, defiling the whole body and setting the entire course of our lives on fire, itself set on fire by Gehenna” (James 3:2-6). Our tongue is like a bridle in a horse’s mouth or a rudder on a ship. We can usually tell by someone’s speech if they are happy or sad, angry or content, Christian or not. May we all use our speech to build others up and give honor to our God. If we struggle with profanity or saying God’s name in vain, the Hail Mary can be a good remedy. The best way to overcome a struggle is with a counterattack. The Hail Mary is centered on the name of Jesus. When you find yourself struggling with speech, say a few Hail Mary’s and focus on giving honor to the name of Jesus.