Mass Intentions

Bulletin Letter, Ordinary Sunday 12B

One responsibility of the pastor of the eight parishes in our Saint Martin of Tours Pastorate is to offer—or have another priest offer—one of the Masses for all the people of the parishes, on every Sunday and holy day of obligation. This Mass is usually referred to as the Missa Pro Populo, Latin for the Mass “for the people.” We’ve been scheduling these Masses at Saint Benedict Parish, but the intention includes all the parishes entrusted to Father Tom’s care. What many do not often consider is that the “people of the parishes” includes everyone who lives within the parish boundaries, whether they are Catholic or not, whether they are registered members in one of our parishes or elsewhere. 

There is just one Church that Jesus founded upon the Apostles as the sacrament of salvation for all the world, the Mystical Body of Christ that continues down to our own day as the Roman Catholic Church. The one perfect Sacrifice of Christ made present in every Catholic Mass was entrusted to His Apostles at the Last Supper to be regularly celebrated, continuing Christ’s work of redemption in the world today. The fruits of the Mass benefit everyone in the territory—and indeed the whole Church of God—and call down God’s blessings upon all the land. 

Other Masses celebrated are usually offered for particular intentions, by request, and often accompanied by a stipend or offering to the parish from the one requesting. These intentions are listed next to the schedule of Masses in the bulletins or on a Mass intentions sheet. I’m not in the habit of announcing the intention, and it is not necessary to do so. Not everyone who requests a Mass wants the intention announced, and if the person being prayed for is still living, it can cause concern or confusion. There’s also the possibility of my reading the wrong line and announcing the wrong intention. Rest assured that each Mass is offered for the intention listed, so please consult the lists that are made available if you prefer to know the particular intention. 

Many who request Masses have certain dates or locations where they’d like the Mass offered, but this is not always possible, especially when requests include a large number of Masses. There are only so many Masses scheduled in each place. The benefit of Christ’s Sacrifice reaches the intended parties regardless of the time or place of the Mass. 

Church law also requires each requested intention to be fulfilled within one year from the date on which the request was made. If too many Masses are requested for us to fit in within the year, we have to send the remaining stipends to other priests (often retired) who will be able to offer the Masses in time. The standard suggested stipend for each Mass in this diocese is ten dollars, but a larger stipend can be offered for each Mass, especially when offering a larger sum if there is concern for fitting them in within the year and keeping the full gift local to support the parish.

Letting God Drive

Homily, Ordinary Sunday 11B

Patience is a virtue. We’ve all probably heard this saying, and at some point, we’ve probably been annoyed at someone for saying it. We usually hear it in situations that make us feel impatient and angry. I’ve often wondered what it is about driving that is such a test of patience for me. Usually, I think it’s because of all the other drivers on the road, because obviously, I know how to drive, but I can’t control the actions of the people in the other cars. I’m in control of my own vehicle, but almost constantly, traffic lights and other drivers present themselves as obstacles between me and my destination. On the road, I’m constantly confronted with factors that are out of my own control. 

In our Gospel today, Jesus presents the farmer as the model of patience. After whatever preparations he is able to make for the seed and the soil, at some point he is left waiting, at the mercy of so many elements outside his control, waiting for signs of the imperceptible growth that only God can provide. In those parts of our state and areas of the world where irrigation is still limited, if it doesn’t rain, there’s not much the farmer can do to force the plants to grow. And even when they do grow, there’s the threat of hail and wind and disease and pestilence that can destroy crops fairly quickly. There’s a natural appreciation for providence and plenty of opportunities for exercising patience for those who live close to the land.  

As in the life of the farmer, the kingdom of God and growth in the spiritual life often comes through patient acceptance and cooperation with forces that are outside our control, growth that God provides invisibly, underneath the surface, through the many trials and crosses of this life. In our first reading today, the Prophet Ezekiel was writing during one of the most difficult times in Israel’s history, the Babylonian exile. The leaders of God’s people had been forcibly taken away from the promised land. The Temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed. They found themselves unable to live out their faith the way they wanted to, the way that God Himself had commanded them to by sacrifice in the Temple.  

Yet through this trial, God promises that He is preparing something even greater for them. Not only will He restore Israel, but all the nations of the world will be gathered to the Lord under the branches of the tree of life. In John’s Gospel, Jesus says that when He is lifted up, He will draw all people to Himself. First, Jesus was lifted, upon the wood of the Cross, the New Tree of Life, freely submitting Himself to suffering and death for our sake, to gather the nations under the branches and standard of His Cross. Still today, Jesus is lifted up at each and every Mass, to draw each one of us to His Eucharistic Heart, as He feeds us with His own Body and Blood.  

But who would have survived, to return from the Babylonian exile, if the Jews had not trusted in God’s mysterious and difficult plans? If instead they had constantly rebelled and started wars and insurrections, to try and free themselves from their captors, instead of waiting on God’s time and His deliverance, how many—do you suppose—would have ever made it back to Jerusalem? How often do we rebel against the trials and crosses of our lives and refuse to accept them with patience, even when God is trying to bring us new life and something greater through them? 

I often think of parents trying to teach their children to drive, and how stressful that can be. It often feels like that, when we finally allow God to sit in the driver’s seat of our lives. When we start to see where God is taking us, we want to slam on the breaks, grab the wheel, and say, “No, God, not that way!” We treat God as if He’s still too young and inexperienced to hand over the reins to Him completely. But no matter how many times we’ve refused Him in the past, God still wants to give us the grace and strength to really trust Him, to be able to relax and enjoy the ride, no matter how rough it gets.  

Today and during this week, I invite us to try and identify just one rough area of our life that God has been trying to get us to go through but that we’ve resisted. Maybe it’s an area of sin that we’ve grown comfortable with; maybe it’s a relationship that has become easier to avoid, a conversation with someone that we should have had a long time ago, an area of excess that God has been calling us to simplify. Jesus, draw us to Yourself in this Eucharist. Help us to fully trust in Your direction for our lives, to grow in real patience, to know—in a new way—that God’s will is our peace. 

Blaming God for Our Own Missteps

Homily, Ordinary Sunday 10B

A lot of Catholics are at least somewhat familiar with the canonization process, through which the Church investigates and then formally declares whether a particular person lived and died practicing heroic virtue, that they can be publicly venerated in the Church’s prayer and their own intercession invoked, and that they have already reached eternal beatitude in heavenly glory, seeing God face to face. The Diocese of Rapid City here in South Dakota has actually begun that investigation for the Servant of God Nicholas Black Elk, for whom the highest point in South Dakota has been renamed and who worked as a Catholic catechist to spread the Gospel. Part of the criteria for those Saints who have been canonized following the formal process is almost always the verification of two or three miracles obtained through the intercession of the Saint in question.

When investigating these miracles, the Church exercises a healthy amount of skepticism, to make sure that the event was truly supernatural and exhaust all other natural causes that could offer another explanation. It’s not enough for someone to say: “My brother was sick. We asked Black Elk to intercede, then he got better.” For something to qualify as a real medical miracle, it usually involves documented evidence and testimony from experts of swift and lasting healing, recovery, or improvement in a patient that cannot reasonably be attributed to any treatment or medical intervention they received or any natural processes of the human body’s ability to repair and heal itself. One of my theology professors explained that this skepticism the Church exercises when investigating miracles is not due to any lack of faith or belief that God can and does still work miracles, but this skepticism is motivated out of deep respect and reverence for the Holy Spirit, that we should exhaust all other natural explanations before claiming that something is indeed miraculous and supernatural in origin.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the one unforgiveable sin. Now the usual explanation for this is that God can forgive any sin as long as we repent and ask His forgiveness, and so blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the specific sin of final impenitence, a stubborn refusal to ask for and to accept God’s mercy. Rest assured, God will forgive any sin as long as we repent. But in the original context of this Gospel, I think there is more that we can learn that’s related to the healthy skepticism I mentioned earlier about supernatural events.

What was the blasphemy that the scribes from Jerusalem were saying about Jesus and about the Holy Spirit? “He is possessed by Beelzebul. By the prince of demons, he drives out demons.” The scribes looked at what Jesus was doing, His many healings, signs and wonders, exorcisms, freeing so many people from the snares of evil spirits, they saw these good works, these miraculous and divine works, these actions of the Holy Spirit, and they attribute them instead to an evil spirit. To say that the works of God are coming instead from Satan. What do you think will happen to someone who makes a habit of this? Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the One Anointed with the Holy Spirit in all fullness. He is also the One source of salvation, the One Name from heaven through which all men must be saved, the One Way to the Father. Now if someone convinces themselves that Jesus is instead not from God or heaven but from the devil, sent to deceive us, how likely will they be willing or able to approach Him for the forgiveness of their sins?

Now today, there still are some people who can convince themselves that Jesus or the Church that He founded is evil and continue to attribute the actions of God to Satan, but far more common today even among Christians and Catholics is the bad habit of just lackadaisically attributing ordinary things, human ideas, our own thoughts, mundane and natural events directly to the Holy Spirit. To say things like, “The Holy Spirit told me this in prayer.” Well, okay. Maybe. And again, this healthy skepticism about things having a divine origin is not motivated by a lack of faith. I certainly believe and hope that God is constantly at work around us and within us to bring us and as many as possible to salvation. What I’m not as confident about is our ability to know when specifically God has intervened, which specific ideas, words, events, and actions come directly from Him, aside from Scripture itself and Sacred Tradition, including the sacraments of His Church. Most often, God is at work in the background of our lives. And He has entrusted to us as His stewards the various gifts, talents, faculties of mind and heart, for us to reason, think things through, come to a decision, and then take responsibility for our actions. If we make it a habit of saying, “The Holy Spirit told me to do this or that,” and then things don’t work out like we had hoped, are we going to blame God for leading us down the wrong path? When maybe we were the ones who just misread the signs.

Blaming the Devil for the divine works of Jesus and the Holy Spirit is not the only type of blasphemy. Blaming the Holy Spirit for our own thoughts and actions, for ordinary and natural events, even for sinful things, attributing things too readily to the Holy Spirit can be just as dangerous, if not moreso because of the illusion of good intentions and having a more “spiritual” outlook. The Church has always respected both the natural and the supernatural, as evidenced in her investigations into the lives and intercessions of the Saints. We should exercise the same caution in speaking of the Holy Spirit and our own ability to know and recognize His actions in our lives, all the while praying every day that God would direct our steps to Himself and bring us in spite of every obstacle to eternal salvation, with Mary the Mother of God and all the Saints forever.

Committing to Christ

Homily, Corpus Christi B

When was it that you gave your life to God? When were you saved? As Catholics, we don’t often ask these questions. They’re much more common among other Christians, but it’s helpful for us to reflect on what our answers would be. Have you given your life to God? Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? One obvious answer would be: at our baptism. At least that’s where it began for most of us. Even if we were infants, at our baptism, we began to participate, to take part in the life, death, and Resurrection, in the whole saving mystery of Jesus Christ. We were washed clean in His Most Precious Blood. But as we grow and develop as human beings, our faith and our response of faith need to grow and mature as well. When we’re able to think for ourselves and to make free choices and our own decisions, do we use that freedom to recommit ourselves to Christ, or do we stop following Jesus in any tangible way? 

Some time ago, I attended a Catholic youth conference in St. Paul, Minnesota, with 43 young people from Sioux Falls. During one of the talks, the speaker led those of us who were willing, in a prayer and pledge, to stand and commit our lives to Jesus Christ. He warned us not to do this lightly, not to just do it because of the people around us, and not to feel pressured into it, but he invited us to freely commit our lives to Christ, if God had prepared us to do so at that time. Now this was a great thing, and a powerful moment for many who felt they had never really done something like that before, and we need to renew our commitment to Christ time and again in our own words or in words that we find fitting for the occasion.  

But, as I listened to the speaker emphasize the seriousness of making this commitment to Christ, I couldn’t help but to find myself asking: Don’t we realize, as Catholics, that this is exactly what we’re doing, every time we go to Mass, recommitting our lives to Jesus Christ in an even more real way? Granted, it’s a serious thing to stand and speak your commitment to Christ at a youth conference, but I would say, it’s a more serious thing to become witnesses and participants in the eternal, saving sacrifice of the Son of God, renewed for us at every Mass upon this altar. And much more serious still is to come forward for Communion, to say “Amen, I believe,” to the very Body of Christ, and to receive Jesus Himself, the Most Holy One of God, into our own bodies.  

Whether we realize it or not, in coming to Mass and in receiving Holy Communion, our actions and words make the proclamation that we belong to Jesus Christ, that we have been purchased at a price, ransomed for God by the Blood of His Son. We no longer belong to ourselves but to Him who died and rose again for our salvation. That’s what our words and actions proclaim at every Holy Communion, whether we realize it or not. So do we realize it? Is Jesus in the Eucharist truly the source and summit of our entire lives, or are we just mouthing the words, going through the motions? 

Do we realize that when we stand together and profess the Creed on Sundays, when we stand and say together, “I believe in one God,” when we profess the faith of the Universal Church, the same faith for which thousands of martyrs gave up their property, freedom, and life, do we realize that we recommit ourselves to God in that moment and are meant to cling to that faith with the same fidelity as the countless martyrs who shed their blood for it? Do we realize that when we offer the bread and wine at Mass—and it’s not just the priest who offers the bread and wine, but the priest together with and on behalf of everyone here and of all the Church—that when we offer the bread and wine, we are also meant to offer our work, our joys, our sufferings, all our cares from throughout the rest of the week, and our very lives to be placed upon this altar, to be united to the one saving sacrifice of Christ, signified and made present here? 

Do we realize what we do at each and every Mass? Do we say what we mean and mean what we say? Or do we just go through the motions? When we’re young or new at it, it’s important that we learn what to do and what to say during the Mass, the right responses and the postures and everything else, but as we grow and develop and are able to think and act intelligently and deliberately, do we become more aware of what it is we’re actually saying and doing, or are we still infants in our faith? Most of us here graduated high school, maybe even had several more years of schooling after that, but how many of us are still around a 3rd or 5th grade level when it comes to our understanding of the catholic faith? Do we pay attention to the words and prayers of the Mass, so that we can understand what we’re doing, and pray intentionally, or are we just waiting for it to be over?  

All of us here, decided to be at this Mass today. We each decided more or less freely, and perhaps for various reasons, but we’re here now, so let’s be here. Be present to what we’re doing here, to the prayers and actions and what it is that they mean. At every Mass, Jesus makes Himself really present to us. The question for us is: How much are we really present to Him?