Have you ever noticed that in every aspect of life, there is a the need for the student to become the teacher?  In a way, it is how the Lord created us.  Starting with family life, the child will eventually become the parent, the apprentice become the professional, the student become the teacher.  

We do this in small ways and in small steps. For example, I remember my dad teaching me how to change a tire.  He did it once and then he told me to do it by myself so that I could be prepared to change a flat.  Or I remember in math class, the teacher would solve a problem on the  projector screen and then assign me to repeat the solution on ten other problems just like it.  Even studying for the priesthood, I had the opportunity to shadow many priests in their ministry with the hope that when I myself was ordained, I could do likewise. 

Everything in life, points to learning, doing it ourself, and even teaching others to do likewise!  Our faith is no different.  What was the Lord doing when he was with his disciples for 3 years?  He wasn’t just teaching them rules or concepts, but also how to live—even to the point that the early Church would describe the Christian religion as “the way” …the way to the Father, the way to beatitude, the way to salvation! What is the Ascension all about?  Yes, it is the account of our Lord ascending to the right hand of the Father in Heaven; but it also the story of our Lord asking his disciples to now live what they were taught, and to lead others on the way.

What about us?  Do we not only know but also live the faith well enough so as to be able to teach it to others?  Thankfully we don’t need to be Padre Pio or Mother Teresa to lead others to the next step on the way, because the Lord desires to send each and every one of us out—including you!  For all of the ways in which we feel inadequate, let us ask the Lord on this feast of the Ascension to give us the discipline, courage, and zeal to learn, live, and share the gift of our faith with others!

Father Michael

Spoiler: this has absolutely nothing to do with Mother’s Day—that’s for the homily.

A couple weeks ago I went to the movie theater (yes, they still exist) to watch the movie Nefarious with my fellow Companion of Christ Fr. Max. Now, I very rarely watch horror movies because they’re typically a gross exercise in the fascination with evil on top of the other forms of visual immodesty that numb us to the grotesque and pornographic. However, this year is the 50^th anniversary since the showing of The Exorcist, so there are several exorcism movies hitting the theaters these days. I wasn’t planning on partaking in the usual Hollywood exaggerations until I heard a review from an actual exorcist (a Catholic priest, of course) who deals with this stuff on a daily basis. He pooh-poohed The Pope’s Exorcist unsurprisingly because it was made by, well, Hollywood…and I think it’s safe to say that Hollywood doesn’t really care about the truth of things.

According to this exorcist, however, the creators of Nefarious did their homework. While it portrays a possessed man dialoguing with an atheistic psychologist, the movie is much like a visual version of C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters where we get a convincing and convicting glimpse into the mind of the enemy. If anything, the movie held back!—further convincing me that the producers cared more about faith than fireworks. Remember, the devil is not a threat to God’s omnipotence. The devil is just a rabid dog on a chain and can only do what God permits him to. God leaves us and the angels free to follow Him or not, but as one person put it rather brazenly, “If you play the devil’s stupid games, then you’ll win his stupid prizes.”

Nevertheless, we often think that the devil’s extraordinary activity like possession and puking up Nickelodeon slime is all that he really does. Nefarious reminds us that the devil is very much alive in the world today and that we need to “be sober and vigilant,” because “[our] opponent the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” (1 Peter 5:8)

Witchcraft, wicca, and other new-age materials had their own giant section at the Barnes and Noble in Naperville the last time I strolled in—probably because they’re selling! Likewise, most people don’t realize that Freemasonry is directly antithetical to our Catholic faith and needs to be formally renounced—even if your grandpa just showed up to the local lodge for the fraternity and business contacts. (Feel free to email me if your family has a history of Freemasonry.)

I was certainly shaken at one point in the movie, not because of any gross excesses, but because of how accurately the movie portrayed the evil of abortion—all without showing a drop of blood.  The movie is R for a reason, and I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone. But if you are going to watch it, just remember that the Creator is always infinitely more powerful than any of His creatures. Jesus Christ conquered Satan on a tree, just as Adam was conquered by the serpent on a tree. In Jesus Name, we can be free from any hold the enemy has on our lives, so long as we are willing to repent, surrender to Jesus, forgive others, renounce the enemy’s lies, and cling to our good, holy, true, and beautiful God.

PS the last ten minutes of the movie were out of place. The writing was solid up until that point when they reverted to the kind of unrealistic preachy-dialogue that makes some Christian movies painful to watch. Besides that, bravo!

Father James

Being the only son and “baby of the family,” I do have the claim to being my mom’s favorite and perfect son (her words, not mine).  It also doesn’t hurt that I also became a priest!  However, as you all know by now, I am certainly not perfect, nor completely self-sufficient.  This becomes particularly clear given the fact that I too seek out the Sacrament of Reconciliation about every other month—I need Jesus just as much as anyone else!—and given the fact that some ministerial tasks prove to be too big for me to handle on my own—I need to depend on others!  But there is a beauty in not being perfect in ourselves! As St. Aelred put it, “Almighty God can complete anyone He pleases. But God desires that we depend on each other, and what anyone does not have in himself, he finds in the other. Thus, humility is preserved, love increased, and unity realized.”

This quotation shows us that God has a beautiful purpose for giving us the gift of each other!  Do we realize what a gift it is to need to depend on others? Or to have to ask for help sometimes? This is seen in our first reading from Acts of the Apostles as a lesson to the early Church.  In this passage, there was a serious need being neglected as the Hellenist widows were being ignored.  So how did the Church respond?  It called forward seven new deacons, each with Greek names.  The response to the problem came from within the community! “Humility is preserved, love increased, and unity realized.”

What a beautiful lesson that we can learn from the early Church.  If we see a legitimate need within our community, that’s okay! We can trust that the Holy Spirit will call forward generous volunteers to complete the task. In fact, if God is raising that need before your eyes, perhaps He’s asking you to respond to it! Let’s ask the Holy Spirit this Easter season where He may be asking us to serve others within our beautiful parish of Our Lady of Mercy.  That way humility is preserved, love increased, and unity realized.

Father Michael

The road to Emmaus is a beautiful story about a journey of faith—a journey that we all know very well. 

It begins with two disciples walking alongside their Master.  Although initially filled with hope, they struggle to understand the reality of the suffering and the cross that they have encountered.  Jesus points to their foolishness, not only because they failed to understand his teaching and prophecy, but also because they chose to ignore the women in their own group who proclaimed that the tomb was empty and that Jesus was alive!  Imagine: if you were one of the disciples who had followed Jesus closely for several years, and you heard that he was alive, wouldn’t you stick around in Jerusalem to search for Him? Why walk away defeated as if Jesus never existed?

Yet we so often do that very thing—when we sin, we live as if Jesus were not risen! Thus, our Mass begins with a similar scenario where we call to mind all of the times where we have lived as if Jesus were not risen: “Lord, have mercy! Christ, have mercy! Lord, have mercy!”

Sufficiently reproached, we then humbly listen to Jesus who proceeds to open up the Scriptures for us in the liturgy of the word: the Old Testament and Psalms lay the foundation, and the letters and the Gospel bring it all to fulfillment in Jesus Christ.  Just as Jesus revealed to the two disciples that he was indeed the flawless continuation of God’s love affair with humanity, so too does the first part of the Mass immerse us in that same story.  “Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us?” Please, God, that my homilies do much the same for you!  That they complete the liturgy of the word by leading our hearts into a burning desire for the Lord!

But that’s not all. As the journey continues, the disciples plead with Jesus, “Stay with us!”  Jesus heeds their request, and begins to do something he had done when feeding the thousands, when instituting the Eucharist, and which would be repeated in his Church for millennia to come: he took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them… In this simple but iconic gesture, Jesus was recognized for who he truly was. It was and continues to be in the breaking of the bread that our eyes are opened to see him!  With hearts on fire, we are to go forth like the disciples proclaiming that, YES, “The Lord has truly been raised!”

The road to Emmaus is our road through the Mass.  Let us enter the Mass with great hope, with our hearts open to his word, recognize our Lord’s presence in the Eucharistic breaking of the bread, and go forth into the world proclaiming that Jesus is truly risen!

Father Michael

Although Catholicism is the largest single denomination in the US, we are doubly outnumbered by Protestants in general. This means that, like it or not, we American Catholics are deeply influenced by Protestants. In that light, on this Divine Mercy Sunday, allow me to share five arguments proving that Jesus gave us sacrament of divine mercy: confession.

#1: John 20:23 “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” There are three things that Jesus immediately does upon resurrecting and appearing to his apostles for the first time: first, He says, “Peace be with you”; second, He gives them the Holy Spirit; third, He gives them the authority to forgive sins on His behalf. Why in the world would He give men the authority to do what only God can do (Mark 2:7) if He didn’t want them to use that authority? And if that isn’t enough, Jesus did much the same when He gave Peter the authority to bind or loose things in heaven (Matt 16:18-19). Jesus Himself gave us the sacrament of confession.

#2: Catholicism or bust. If you believe that Jesus founded the Catholic Church and not the Lutheran, Calvinist, Baptist, etc. (see Matt 16:18-19), then you necessarily must believe in sacramental confession. Under the Holy Spirit, the Church has definitively declared this again and again, council after council; so for Catholics at least, if you’re going to be rationally consistent, confession isn’t optional.

#3: James 5:16 “Therefore confess your sins to one another.” James tells us to confess our sins to other Christians. Regardless of who he means by “one another”, this shows us that the confession of sins has always been more than a private prayer devotion for Christians. The Acts of the Apostles itself says of those who were converting, “Many also of those who were now believers came, confessing and divulging their practices.” (Acts 19:18) Confessing to another Christian (i.e. a priest) is essential because our sins affect the rest of the church and not just our personal relationship with God alone.

#4: History Proves It. If Scripture wasn’t enough, innumerable early Christian writings show us that those temporally closest to Jesus believed that Jesus intended a public confession of sins. We read from the Didache, written at about the same time as some New Testament books: “Confess your sins in church, and do not go up to your prayer with an evil conscience. This is the way of life… On the Lord’s Day gather together, break bread, and give thanks, after confessing your transgressions so that your sacrifice may be pure.” (Didache 4:14, 14:1) Or, to take an example from Origen: “[A final method of forgiveness], albeit hard and laborious [is] the remission of sins through penance, when the sinner . . . does not shrink from declaring his sin to a priest of the Lord and from seeking medicine, after the manner of him who say, ‘I said, “To the Lord I will accuse myself of my iniquity.”’” (Homilies on Leviticus 2:4 [A.D. 248])

#5: James 5:14-15 “Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the presbyters of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.” The same passage that clearly points to the sacrament of anointing of the sick also shows us that sins can be forgiven through the ministry of priests.

Jesus gave us a gift in sacramental confession, so it’s only reasonable to think that He had good reasons for doing so! I’d encourage you to go at least every couple months. I go every few weeks.

Father James