When the wall of water came there was little warning, but no surprise, for it had been raining for so, so long now. But we had hoped that being this high up, the water would not reach us.  But now it came in a wall and threw everything before it.  There was no place to go, no place to  hide, and it took me with its force and filled me with itself. I fought it by holding my breath and reaching upwards, trying to swim to the surface against the pull of the raging water.  With a final push I broke the surface, the surface littered with bodies and debris. And although I had broken the surface and could now breathe, I despaired, for I had no strength left to do anything at all and drowning seemed like a relief.  Ready to give into my despair and let the water take me, I looked up to see an arm outstretched to me, outstretched from a boat. I saw nothing but the arm, an arm which even in my terrible state impressed me as having immense strength, and I knew that if I could just swim the few strokes to the arm and the boat, that arm would grasp me and save me.  And I did manage to swim those few strokes and I was seized by the strength of that arm and hauled aboard, choking, gasping, near death.  I do not remember very much about my stay on that boat, for I was very will and delirious, but I do remember the animals, so many animals, I remember their smell and the sounds that each one made, I remember being tended to by the man with the strong arm. And I remember lying there gradually getting my strength back listening to the water lapping at the boat, and then one day seeing a rainbow which seemed to envelope the whole boat, and stillness, no sound of water, just stillness.

 

I was tired of the normal vacations. I had had it with the island, the South Pacific, helicopter skiing, safaris.  I was sick of absorbing European culture, so I decided to take a vacation alone in the desert.  They warned me that this was dangerous and a crazy thing to do, but I packed carefully and prudently and went off into the desert for two weeks. I got a lot of reading done the first week, and I was fascinated by the starkness of the place for a while, but then I got bored, and after eight days I decided to give it up and go back home.  I got into my tent that night determined to leave first thing in the morning.  I was awakened from my sleep by the sound of war:  the sounds of thousands of planes roaring overhead, the shriek of falling bombs, the deafening explosions of detonating bombs.  I was terrified and sat up and saw that it was already past dawn.  Here I was in a tent in the middle of the desert, and there was a war raging out there.  The noise was terrifying but I got up and looked out. And I saw nothing, no planes, no bombs. Then noise of the war continued unabated, but there was nothing to see out there except a man standing there with his arms lifted up.  He stood there in the desert morning not moving, his arms lifted up amidst the din of the war that I could not see.  And then some stones that lay just in front him started to glow and as they glowed gave off the wonderful aroma of baking bread. That aroma was so strong and so wonderful that even I, in the state I was, felt intensely hungry. And these stone rolls now began to dance around, to dance like on some Pillsbury TV commercial, and they began to dance around the man and aim themselves at his mouth. But he stood there with his arms upraised until the rolls fell back to the ground and turned back into stones.

 

The noise of the war increased in its fury, as the cactus growing in front of the man assumed huge proportions and turned into pure gold. My eyes nearly popped out of my head as I looked at this thing of intense beauty and I calculated that it would be worth trillions of dollars on the gold market and wondered if I could break off a small piece for myself. But the man stood there with his arms uplifted and the cactus returned to its normal state. The fury of the war sound track increased as now there was nothing in the desert except this man with his hands uplifted—nothing except a huge black scorpion a few feet from the man’s feet, slowly crawling towards the man. That is all there was in this stark, barren place, now: the man and the deadly scorpion advancing toward him. The man saw the scorpion but did not move. I wanted to shout out to him: “Move out of the way, you will die!” The scorpion was now at his feet, but then paused, almost as if to say: “Not now, not yet” and then went on his way.  At that point the sound of war ceased, and out the stillness came a helicopter, and sure enough, when I looked up at the sky, there was a helicopter flying in with camouflage markings on it. It hovered above the man and then let down two rings on ropes which the man grasped. The man was lifted off the ground holding on to the two rings and passed right over my tent, so that he was very close to me. And with a shock I recognized the arms. I recognized the arm that was outstretched to me from that boat when I was drowning. The strength in those arms I could never forget.  And I watched as the helicopter bore him hanging on those two rings, as they flew slowly towards a city in the distance, to hill just outside of that city, and there he was let down.

 

I was walking to Dunkin Donuts that day when the wall of water came.  This is what everybody had feared after 40 straight days of rain.  I could see the water coming down West Avenue in the distance.  I looked across the street and there was a big stone church there with a big cross in front of it.  It looked safe, and so I ran across the street and into the church. And there I saw a lot of people sitting there and a man with funny clothes was throwing smoke against some sort of stone table, and then it hit me, the water hit me and carried me up and with a violent force pushed me out the door and I thought I was drowning and I broke the surface trying to find something to hold onto. And in the torrent I saw that cross and I grabbed onto that cross and it floated and held me above the water,  but I soon realized that I could stay afloat only if I lay right on the cross with my arms exactly on the two cross pieces and my head on the upper part and my legs crossed on the lower beam.  I was lucky that the cross fit my body exactly. But there I was, lying on that cross, the raging flood beneath me, and I knew that if I moved an inch off that cross, I would die.

This sermon was delivered by Fr. Paul N. Check at St. Mary Church, Norwalk on July 2, 2011. Father Check is the national director of Courage, a Catholic apostolate that ministers to those with same-sex attractions and their loved ones. He is also priest in residence at St. Mary Church.

From today’s epistle: “May Christ find a dwelling place…in your hearts…may your lives be rooted in love, founded on love.” (Eph 3:17)

Sodom and Gomorrah are synonymous with fire and brimstone because that was the fate of the two cites, according to the Book of Genesis (19:24): a severe punishment for behavior gravely at variance with God’s will and with human nature. As Abraham surveyed the scene, “the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace,” in the words of the sacred writer. (Gen 19:28) We find references to this episode later in Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and Jeremiah…plain reminders and warnings, for those who have eyes that can see.

In three places in the New Testament, Our Blessed Lord compares the punishment that Sodom and Gomorrah received to the day of judgment, which He indicates will be worse:

1. About those who refuse the preaching of the Apostles (and by extension, their successors), He said, “Truly, I say to you, it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town.” (Mt 10:15)

2. About Capernaum, a city that refused to repent, Jesus said: “But I tell you that it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom than for you.” (Mt 11:24)

3. And finally, the Lord said, “But on the day Lot went out from Sodom fire and sulphur rained from heaven and destroyed them all, so will it be when the Son of man is revealed.” (Lk 17:29, 30)

These words fall heavily, painfully, upon us, and that, of course, is the intention. Every parent knows there come times when only a sharp reminder of punishment will rouse the child…and parents also know such messages do not always achieve their purpose. Such is the proof of our willfulness.

At the opening of his Confessions, St Augustine writes, “What am I to Thee that Thou demand my love, and unless I give it Thee art angry, and threaten me with great sorrows?” (1,1.5) Augustine seeks on our behalf to understand the cause of Divine anger, the reason behind the Divine threats…“What am I to you, Lord? Why do you threaten?” Perhaps, dear people, we find the answer in today’s Gospel for this Feast of the Sacred Heart: “But one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water.” (Jn 19:34) The humble Heart of Christ has opened itself to us in generosity and love, in sacrifice and self-forgetfulness, and now, it has been opened by a lance, and nothing—nothing—is withheld. At Calvary do we best see—if we are there, if we are sincere—the quality of Divine love…and this helps us to better understand the character of Divine justice. From a familiar Lenten hymn: “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”

In raising the names of Sodom and Gomorrah, and in particular Our Lord’s references to them, I want to make very clear that I am not drawing a direct line to events of the NY state government a week ago, nor to people who have same-sex attraction, and so somehow predicting any consequences in either case. But I am using the change in NY law to make a couple of points that I hope will be of benefit to you, to the people who are attending this Mass. Our fallen nature is such that we may first apply the warnings of Sacred Scripture to “them,” to others, and not first to ourselves. This, my brothers and sisters in Christ, is not the way of the Gospel. What happened in NY is but one tragic, albeit very perverse expression of a wider and deeper malady to which we are all vulnerable. I will return to this in a moment.

First, I do agree completely with the Holy Father, when he said, “Very soon it will not be possible to state that homosexuality, as the Catholic Church teaches, is an objective disorder in the structuring of human existence.” Paradoxically, those who seek tolerance will inevitably become less and less tolerant themselves, and more severe in disallowing any dissent.

Second, and more importantly for all of us, especially given today’s feast, I want to offer some fruits of my priestly experience and an idea of the source of the underlying problem that afflicts all us in some measure because of concupiscence and our own personal sins…and the blindness that can follow.

I have been teaching sexual ethics to our men in formation for Holy Orders and for the permanent diaconate, and to Mother Teresa’s nuns, for almost all 14 years of my priesthood. This was the purpose for the professional degree, the license in moral theology, that Bishop Egan sent me to Rome to obtain many years ago: to understand better the nature of human intimacy and to share that understanding with others. Many of you are familiar with my current assignment. My other experience includes hearing hundreds of confessions of Catholic high school students during a two year assignment at Notre Dame in Fairfield and six years of daily—seven days a week—confessional practice at St. John’s in Stamford. I would say (and I mean this without boasting) that in my first eight years of service to the diocese, I had as much confessional experience as any priest in Bridgeport…and please remember that what I share with you comes in part from what I have learned by people who are earnestly seeking to live the teachings of Christ and His Holy Church, as established by their presence in Confession.

Here are some of my conclusions that I will not attempt to prove this morning; you may do with them what you will. I offer them without any spirit of condemnation, and only out of priestly and fraternal charity.

The steady erosion of our sense of purity is something we probably don’t recognize as clearly as we might, because we are living in the midst of it all the time. One can tell a lot about a culture, for instance, by what it considers “funny,” from its humor…much of ours is what used to be called, “off-color.” TV shows—and I realize that that these are mild by comparison—like Friends and Seinfeld are not entertainment for the friends of Christ.

Fashion, and even that embraced by some Catholic women who regularly attend Mass, often presents a grave danger to the purity of men who see them, because objective standards of modesty (and they do exist…) are routinely violated. My opinion is that much of this is traceable to thoughtlessness or vanity, not from an intention to seduce.

There are many men who will go to Church today and who regularly, perhaps habitually, view pornography, and worse, who may not consider what they are doing to be contrary to their marriage vows.

If parents use contraception in their marriage, then they have every reason to expect that their children will use it outside of marriage. If we deliberately dissociate procreation from marriage, we will soon disassociate sexual relations from marriage.

It is a naive mistake to think that modern music, especially the video that often accompanies it, does not affect our relationships and how we view others.

Parents who allow their children—especially their boys—to have the internet in their own room (and even worse with the door closed) are putting a stumbling block in the path of those they should be protecting.

Now please let me be clear again: this is not a call to become the “Catholic Amish,” which is a tendency to which I think some who attend this Mass in particular are sometimes inclined, as a solution to the problems I have just numbered. The evangelical imperative of the Gospel, to be salt and light in a fallen world, remains, and parents and priests must prepare children to live in the world, while not falling prey to the world…a most demanding challenge today, I grant you.

The other day, the Holy Father said this, “The real question is this: Is what we believe true or not?” And he suggested that “custom” (again I refer to the examples I have given) is something very different than a “love of the truth”…and in saying this, he connected the two great faculties or powers of the human person: the capacity to love and the capacity to know the truth. Pope Benedict went on to say: “Love wants to know better the one it loves. Love, true love, does not make one blind but seeing. Part of it is a thirst for knowledge, true knowledge of the other.”

And so to conclude, dear people, I come back to the malady to which we can all succumb: that our search for love can easily become misdirected, and we can settle for a counterfeit instead: self-satisfaction…the very opposite of what see at Calvary, where the Sacred Heart, self-forgetful and self-giving, pours out blood and water, grace and mercy, from the Cross.

As the Pope suggests, we will only be interested in truth if we are striving to love after the example of the Heart of Jesus. Said another way, a lack of love precedes a loss of desire for the truth about our human condition and the gracious and free initiative of the Good God to rescue us from sin and selfishness. The only solution to the tangle of the human heart is the Sacred Heart of Christ, who loved us boldly to the end, and who invites us, begs us, even with strong words, to love Him boldly in return.

By Fr. Richard Cipolla

Given at St. Mary’s Church, Norwalk Connecticut on Sunday, January 2, 2011

From the introit:  At the name of Jesus every knee must bend.  From the epistle: For there is no other Name under heaven given to men by  which we must be saved. And  from the gospel: His name was called Jesus, the Name given Him by the angel before He was conceived in the womb.

It seems odd to us to have a feast celebrating a name, even if the name is Jesus.  One of the greatest of baroque illusionist paintings is the painting by Gaulli known by his nickname of Baciccia on the ceiling of the Gesu church in Rome.  It is the most amazing composition of painting and sculpture, with angels falling from and rising to heaven, and there in this wonderful center of light there is the apotheosis of the monogram IHS which is formed by the first three letters of Jesus’ name in Greek.  People come to this church to see this remarkable painting and there is a mirror installed in the nave so that you can look at the painting without crinking your neck.  I often ask myself:  what do people think about the apotheosis of a name, even if the name is Jesus.  For we breathe the air of a perverse nominalism that dismisses a name as something merely assigned to a person or thing without any relationship to the reality of that person or thing.  Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose ends with the chillingly enigmatic sentence; Stat rosa pristina nomine; nuda nomina tenemus.  For Eco, names are ultimately empty, for a rose is merely a name that exists quite apart from the reality of the rose. 

But to make sense of the devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus, from its beginning in St Paul’s epistle to the Philippians to St Bernadine of Siena and St Ignatius Loyola, we have to leave aside our dichotomy between names and reality and listen to the brief gospel once again:  his name was called Jesus,  the name given him by the angel before He was conceived in the womb.  From all eternity this child was given the name Yeshuah which means God who saves, because this name is not merely a name that Mary and Joseph gave to the child: the name of Jesus tells us who He is as both God and man: the God who saves by becoming man in order to die on the cross for the sins of the world.  Thus the name Jesus not only signifies who the child is: the name from the moment of the Incarnation becomes holy because it is a name from the depths of God Himself.  Or rather, the name is holy from the beginning of time when it would be the name of the enfleshment of God and that holy name becomes part of the history of this world, not merely as my name and your name, but as the real symbol of the God who saves.

But another problem for us modernists and post-modernists is the very idea not only of a holy name but also the very idea of the holy, period.  The grey ravages of secularism that are the logical outcome of the evacuation of meaning that is the triumph of nominalism has for so many evacuated the very meaning of the word, holy.  It is true that we still mouth the word holy in discourse, that we confess one holy Catholic and apostolic Church: but what does the word really mean to us today?  Isn’t it often just a part of religious jargon we use when we want to do God-talk? The holy cannot co-exist with self-sufficient man. The holy cannot co-exist with the collapse of morality into the amorality of self-love.  You see, holiness can exist only if we believe that we are not the center of being, only if we accept the possibility of something or someone extraordinary beyond our comprehension, only if we believe in fear and trembling at the center of our lives.  For the most part, a holy person today is merely a moral person. The phrase: holier than thou, says it all.  Holiness is not something we aspire to, despite our dutiful recitation of the call to holiness in religious texts.  If we encounter holiness we say:  that’s weird.  Which is not a bad thing to say, because holiness is indeed weird because the holy is radically different from us, for it deals with, it is about wholly Other who is holy. 

Catholics used to encounter at least a whiff of the holy, a hint at least, in the liturgy.  This was true not because Mass was always celebrated in the past with great beauty and reverence.  But the Mass itself, in its organically traditional form, was perceived as  an action rather than mere words, and so pointed to the possibility of holiness, gave glimmers into the presence of the Divine that went beyond mere doctrine about the Real Presence: the combination of the visible beauty in churches that pointed away from the mundane to a real splendor that lay beyond, the familiar ritual that was familiar in the deepest sense, the sense of family that went beyond time and space, the time of quiet, of silence, all helped the Catholic to in some sense understand holiness and its relationship to God and to himself. 

There can be no doubt, as Cardinal Canizares who heads the Congregation for Divine Worship says, that there is a certain crisis in the Catholic liturgy.  We really do not need poll data to tell us that this is true.  But if we want data, we can look at the survey done just a few weeks ago by a reputable firm that shows that 28% of Catholics now attend Mass regularly.  In 1960 it was 68%.  Now of course there are several reasons for this precipitous drop in Mass attendance these past 50 years.  But if one is scientific about it, one cannot help noting that this decline begins with the radical liturgical reform that was not a product of the Second Vatican Council but rather a product of that very rationalistic nominalistic mindset that was determined to demystify the mystery that is at the heart of the Mass, the mystery of the death of Christ and his living presence within the Church.  And so we now hear the call to revive and promote a new liturgical movement and revive the sense of the sacred and of mystery, putting God at the center of everything.  Can the understanding of Mass as high school assembly be overcome?  Can the ironical situation of the priest facing the people as he speaks to God be remedied by a return to the tradition of the priest and people together, united, facing God in prayer and thanksgiving?   Can the banality of Mass tunes be displaced by the Gregorian chant and polyphony that Vatican II denoted as pride of place in Catholic music?  Can canned sermons about feel good trivialities be driven out of the temple to allow sermons that challenge intellectually and spiritually based on scripture and tradition?  On this feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, I would say that what we are doing here is at least a start. It is a start not to some restoration project but to a return to the sense of the holy in Mass because the Mass IS holy. Without this all we can do is to look in a mirror on the floor of the church at a wonderful illusionist painting and say to ourselves:  what in the world is a holy name and why are all those angels staring at those three funny letters that make no sense?  Nomina nuda tenemus.  We have, we hold on to empty names.

The following sermon was given by Fr. Richard Cipolla on Gaudete Sunday, Dec. 12 at St.  Mary Church, Norwalk

At that time, the Jews sent to John from Jerusalem priests and Levites to ask him: “Who are you”?

Who are you, they asked.  A good question.  For he was impressively strange, or strangely impressive. And his answer:  a voice crying in the wilderness, crying out: make straight the way of the Lord!  Aha, they said: if you are the voice, then you are the Messiah, the one we have been waiting for, the one we have longed for, the one who will save us. But no, he tells them: I am the voice, not the word.  But they do not understand, because they do not know the difference between the voice and the word.  I am the voice, not the word. What is the difference?  The voice is he who cries, who cries out from the desert into the world, from the silence into the noise. And those who are in the noise always confuse the voice with the word. And they confuse the two because they do not notice within the noise that the voice dies out; in a while there is no voice. But they do not notice this, that the voice disappears, because they are surrounded by noise, the noise of their lives, the noise of the world, the noise which masks all attempts to hear anything at all except the static of the self, of the clamoring of the self shouting against and with the clamoring of the world. 

But under what circumstances could they have distinguished between the voice and the word?    Under only one condition:  the condition of silence. If they were surrounded by silence, or, more to the point, if they were silent, they would have heard the voice die out into the silence, and then, they would have heard the word, not with their ears, for the word is never heard with the ears: it is heard with the heart. For that is where the word, the meaning, the heart of the matter, is heard.

If I say something to you, my voice dies out; but the meaning, the heart of what I said to you, remains with you.  Cor ad cor loquitur.  But suppose I am filled with noise: my head, my heart, my mind. Then I do not notice that the voice dies out and this lack of attention because of the noise prevents me from understand what is being said, the word. It is only when I listen for meaning, when I have cleared out the noise of voices that blocks out meaning, can I distinguish the voice from the word and that I can understand what the voice has said. And so it is with us in this Advent: we hear the voice today, the voice that cries out of the silence of the wilderness into the noise of the world: prepare ye the way of the Lord: make straight the way of the Lord.  But we mistake the voice for the word. We mistake a reading at Mass for the Word.  The voice, the sound of the words,  blends in with the hustle and bustle, the business of our lives, the constant murmur of the world that masks any attempt to hear the word, and especially the horribly false silence  of the cyberworld of the internet chatter.  And we run from voice to voice, the latest voice, the newest voice, the voice that makes us feel good, the voice that satisfies, but we never notice amidst the noise that all these voices die out.

How can we distinguish between the voice and the word, the sound and the meaning, the movement of the molecules of air that dance on the receptors in our ears and heart of what is being said to us?  In only one way: by silence.  It is only in silence that we can hear the voice dying out and the word coming into our mind and heart.  I must decrease so that he may increase.  The irony of our situation is that the very feast we prepare to celebrate has at its very heart silence, and yet what surrounds this feast is so much noise that we do not notice the silence.  That wonderful introit for the Sunday in the Octave of Christmas points us in the right direction:   Dum medium silentium tenerent omnia:  While all things were in the heart of silence and the night was in the midst of her course, Thy almighty Word, O Lord, leaped down from heaven from Thy royal throne.  The Incarnation of the Word of God takes place in silence and that is why almost no one noticed.  The Roman powers did not notice, the Roman literati, did not notice. The Jews of that time who were waiting for the Messiah: they did not notice.  The only ones who noticed were some shepherds tending their sheep who were probably asleep and had stopped their constant bleating and baa-ing.  They noticed because they were silent. 

But this radical necessity for silence in order to hear the word, in order to distinguish between the voice that fades and the word, is grounded not merely in the human condition that revels in the noise that masks sin and therefore makes us so found of voices.  Silence is necessary to hear the word because silence is at the very heart of God himself.  St John of the Cross says that silence is the first language of God.  The communication within God, the communication between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit happens, is, in silence. The very heart of God is silence, a silence that is eternally fruitful, for it is out of this silence that the Word of God comes. The Logos speaks from the silence of God, and leaps down from his royal throne to be silent in the small darkness of the womb of Mary, and from the silence of her womb comes that Word in the flesh, and from that silence comes the baby’s cry and her response to that cry out of silence is the silent lullaby of her breast that gives food to Him who is the bread of angels.  The communication between this mother and her son reaches its fulfillment in that terrible silence at the cross, where both broken hearts communicate that terrible love that lies at the very center of the heart of the suffering and glorious God. 

A  priest said recently: what I hate most about the traditional Latin Mass is the silence.  A truly damning statement.  For if silence does not lie at the heart of the Mass, the pure worship in spirit and truth, then it must be false. If voices lie at the heart of Mass, if chatter is what the Mass is about, then all is lost, for how can one praise the God whose heart beats in silence if silence is not at the heart of the worship of this God?  But the silence of God is not the silence of man.  Words are not merely voices, verba non sunt voces solae.  This is one of main reasons why music is so important to the celebration of Mass.  Because liturgical music in its very nature resonates with the silence of God.  The Church’s chant is neumatic silence, where austerity and terrible ecstasy are distilled into a vehicle that allows the heart of man to sing the very silence of God.  Polyphony is a cascading waterfall of sound that is transparent to that silence that must lie at the heart of Catholic worship.  This is how one must understand liturgical music:  the question always is:  does this come from  and support and is true to the silence of God that lies at the heart of the Sacrifice of the Mass?  This is why the sentimental and shallow music that is so commonly sung at most celebrations of the Mass in most parishes is a denial of the Mass itself: for it comes from the voices of the individual, from the voices of the world at a particular time.  This music is voices, not word and has no place in the Mass.  But this is not merely a matter of taste.  Because even the best Protestant hymns that are now sung in the Catholic Church, hymns that I admire so much: Lo, he comes with clouds descending, one of the great Advent hymns:  For all the saints, The Church’s one foundation. All great texts, all good tunes.  But in the end they are voices that fade away. They are grounded in not in the silence of God but in the congregation who sings them, and therefore they are always foreign to the Roman Catholic Mass. 

But the heart of the role of silence in the traditional Mass, that is, the Mass until the reform of the Second Vatican Council, is in the Canon of the Mass, the prayer of consecration.  The custom of saying the Canon silently is an organic development in both the East and the West.  All sorts of rationalistic and historical guess reasons are given by liturgical historians for the silent Canon. None of them are definitive.  But is it not obvious that the Church realized that this prayer, which lies at the very heart of the oblation that is the Mass, is not voices but is word and therefore had to be protected by silence.  Medieval and baroque theologians offer many mystical meanings to the silent canon. There is nothing wrong with these ex post facto mystical meanings, but is it not more important that the Church understood organically through the centuries that the prayer of silence is demanded precisely when the Word made flesh comes once again to us in the form of bread and wine?  One of St Birgitta’s most intense and well-known visions is of the birth of Christ.  If you look at Christian art before these visions, the birth of Christ is always depicted in the then traditional position of Mary lying on her side to give birth.  After St Birgitta’s revelation, at least in the West, the artistic depiction of Christ’s birth always shows what she was shown.  Mary delivered Jesus in prayer in silence and the first act of Mary and Joseph after the birth of Jesus is to kneel in prayer and adoration.  Mary’s active participation in her giving birth to Jesus was silent prayer. There were no voices at the birth of Jesus, for how could there be, for how silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given, so God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven. 

My friends, Christmas is approaching. We will hear the carols, we will hear the trumpets, the Gloria in excelsis Deo, the often rote greetings of Merry Christmas, when this is allowed by the secular gulag police, we will hear the hawksters of the crass commercialism of this season. We will hear all these sounds, these voices, we will hear all of this and if these are only voices, our hearts will not be moved. But if we empty out our lives by deliberately going into the silent desert that lies at the heart of God, then we will hear the Word and the Word will come into our hearts and we will be filled with a joy that we did not even imagine could exist.

               Elected Silence, sing to me

               And beat upon my whorled ear,

               Pipe me to pastures still and be

               The music that I care to hear.

               Shape nothing, lips;be lovely-dumb

               It is the shut, the curfew sent

               From there where all surrenders come

               Which only makes you eloquent.

               Be shelled, eyes, with double dark,

               And find the uncreated light;

               This ruck and reel which you remark

               Coils, keeps and teases simple sight,

               Palate, the hutch of tasty lust,,

               Desire not to be rinsed with wine:

               The can must be so sweet, the crust

               So fresh that come in fasts divine!

               Nostrils, your careless breath that spend

               Upon the stir and keep of pride,

               What relish shall the censers send

               Along the sanctuary side!

               O feel-of primrose hands, O feet

               That want the yield of plushy sward,

               But you shall walk the golden street

               And you unhouse and house the Lord.

               And, Poverty, be thou the bride

               And now the marriage feast begun,

               And lily-coloured clothes provide

               Your spouse not laboured-at nor spun.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, 26 June 2010

Last Thursday we celebrated one of the great feasts of the Church. In the traditional calendar it is a first class feast. One can’t get much more first class than first class. In the Novus Ordo calendar it is a solemnity, the highest ranking of feasts. Do you know what this feast was? You would know if it were Christmas or Easter or the Ascension or the Assumption of Mary. You would know because these are all holy days of obligation and you would have had to come to Mass on those days. The feast we celebrated last Thursday was the feast of the man about whom Jesus said: no man born of a woman is greater than he. Last Thursday was the feast of the Nativity of S. John the Baptist. St Augustine points out in his sermon for the feast day at Matins in the Roman breviary that we mark the feast day of a saint usually by the day that the saint died and entered into heaven. But this is not the case with John the Baptist. He is the only saint other than Mary whose birthday we celebrate, and we celebrate his birthday with a higher solemnity than even that of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Why so? My seventh grade CCD students could give you the stock answer, which is also the proper answer: because he is the precursor of Christ, he is the forerunner of Christ. Both of those words: “precursor” and “forerunner” do not come lightly off the tongue of my CCD students, and they should not do so, because there is no one like John the Baptist in history: he comes before, he prepares the path, he announces the most important event in all human history: the coming into this world of the Word made flesh, the person of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. He is the link between the Old Testament prophets and the Gospel. He is the bridge over the law to the gospel. Even his naming is an awesome event. Most first born boys of that time were automatically named after their father. And in that dramatic and amazing moment when his father, Zechariah, struck dumb because of unbelief, writes on the tablet: his name is John: in this moment the very universe trembles with the anticipation of radical change. His name is John, and this name contains the names of Moses and Samuel and Isaiah and above all Jeremiah: from your mother’s womb I called you. And his first witness to Jesus is even before he is born as he leaps in his mother’s womb at the presence of Mary who is carrying Jesus in her womb. One of the great scenes of the New Testament, as heart speaks to heart, as womb speaks to womb, as child in the womb speaks to child in the womb.

John is at the pivot point of salvation history. And so he goes into the desert to prepare himself for his peculiar and unique role. He goes there to do what has to be done, for it is only in the desert, where there is nowhere to hide from oneself, there is no where to hide from one’s demons, only in the desert can one prepare for being John the Baptist. And he comes out of that desert in the fullness of time dressed in animal skins, looking fierce, and sounding even fiercer with his call to repentance, for he knows the time is short, he knows that all he can do is to baptize people as a sign of repentance. He can do nothing else than the sign: this is a lot in fact, but it is only the sign, because he knows that he who comes after him, whose sandals he is unfit to untie, is the forgiveness of sins, for he is God who has come into the world to die that sins may be forgiven.

John is imprisoned by Herod, and he sends his disciples to Jesus to ask the question: are you the one who is to come or should we look for another? John, in prison because of the injustice of the law, sends his disciples to the gospel: the law is sent to the gospel says St Augustine. And the answer: the lame walk, the blind see, the sick are healed, the kingdom of God, the kingdom of forgiveness of sins because of the love of God, has irrupted into the world and things will never be the same. And so John points his bony finger like in the Isenheim altar piece: Ecce Agnus Dei , ecce qui tollit peccata mundi: behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world. And it is this John who will be beheaded by the corruption of the law, by the law that cannot tolerate the horrible nakedness and starkness and blinding light of truth. And so John becomes the first martyr for the Truth who is Jesus Christ.

But you notice: John is a martyr for the truth in a moral situation. He refused to acknowledge the morality of the marriage between Herod and Herodias. That marriage was unlawful according to the moral law and John said so publically. and he incurred the wrath of the queen. In that famous scene involving Salome and her dance, depicted in so many artistic renderings, the king, because of a drunken promise, had to order John’s head to be cut off. John’s martyrdom, the martyrdom of the precursor of the Christ, the herald of the Gospel, is not, unlike the rest of the martyrs, because he refused to denounce Jesus Christ as the Son of God but rather, (and this is not contrary in the end at all,) because he refused to speak against the truth within a moral situation. But you see, this moral truth cannot be separated from his cry: ecce agnus dei qui tollit peccata mundi. The foundation of moral truth cannot be separated from the person of Jesus Christ who is the way, the truth and the life.

So many Christians today, including Catholics, think that they can separate their belief in Jesus Christ as the Savior of the world, as the Word made flesh, as God of God, light of light, and so forth and still live their lives not in accordance with the moral law that is taught by the Church of that same Jesus Christ whose Spirit guides her infallibly in matters of faith and morals. The cause of the death of mainline Protestantism is precisely because of the refusal to see that belief in the person of Jesus Christ demands adherence to the moral law that is based on that love shown by Christ on the cross. They have confused love with sentimentality; they have confused knowledge with intellectual reasoning. But there are all too many Catholics who are ready to jump on the same popular bandwagon that leads to unfaithfulness and death. And they are ready to jump on the religious bandstand of the American idol, because there are no men today like St John the Baptist who have done their time in the harshness of the desert, there are no men with bony fingers to point to the truth, there are no men who will put their lives on the line for the truth that the world refuses to hear and will do everything it can to kill those who speak that truth.

John the Baptist was a man of truth. He was a man. And that is what we need today: men who will defend and stand up for the truth, not in a fanatical and self-righteous way but because they are men who love above all: we need popes and bishops and priests and deacons in the Church who are men in this way, who will do what needs to be done to be a man for Jesus Christ for his Church. But more basically, for the clergy are in the great minority in the Church,(thanks be to God!), the question is this: are there men here today who are husbands and fathers and young men and old men who will do what it takes to be champions of the truth who is Jesus Christ, who will live their lives according to that truth and be willing to suffer for that truth? And are their women who will not only support these men but show in themselves that manliness that the mother of the Maccabees showed in her glorious defense of the specificity of the truth, urging her sons to death rather than break the law of their faith?

In a few minutes we will hear those words of St John the Baptist: ecce agnus dei, behold the Lamb of God, as the invitation to Communion. Resist the temptation to treat this invitation as just a knee jerk motion of the Mass. Ask yourself: have I prepared myself for this encounter with the living God, have I gone into the desert of confession to do what has to be done, do I want to live my life empowered by the holy incarnation of the man of God, the Son of God, am I the man who has the courage to witness to the truth, am I the woman who has the courage to respond, ecce ancilla Domini, behold the handmaiden of the Lord, be it done to me according to thy word? St John the Baptist, ora pro nobis, pray for us.

Sermon by Fr. Richard Cipolla delivered on Pentecost Sunday, May 31, at St. Mary Church, Norwalk

Remarkable. The Medes and the Parthians and the Cappodocians and the Romans: they all heard the same thing. They understood what Mary and the apostles were saying at the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Church even though they were not speaking their language per se. The point is not that at Pentecost diversity was canonized by the Holy Spirit. The point is that in the power of the Holy Spirit human language is transcended. We have to remember that the Old Testament understanding of the fact that there are many languages is negative: it is understood as God’s punishment on the pride of man and the many languages of the world is a symbol of the confusion of the human race, on the non-understandability that lies at the heart of human language. Now this scene at Pentecost has to be understood in this context. It has nothing to do with some pious effusion that made language irrelevant. It has nothing to do with the birthday of the Church, as if the Church, the body of Christ, did not exist in utero before the creation, as if the Church did not pour forth from the crucified body of Christ on the Cross. The descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Church is the event we celebrate today; and it is this Spirit that leads the Church into all truth, and it is this Spirit that transcends culture and language and that is able to bind all men into one. The oneness of mankind does not issue from some program or from some basic common denominator. It issues from the heart of God in the person of the Holy Spirit who binds all things into one. This has nothing to do with social or political programs, although such programs are not to be dismissed as irrelevant in the Christian life. This has to do with the God who is three in one within himself, drawing all mankind, drawing the whole creation into that unity that is at the very heart of God.

Does this make any sense to you? Have you already tuned out, hoping that this priest will not talk too long, and we can get out of here and fulfill our obligation to be here? Now this is not altogether a bad attitude, for sermons are not the point of the Mass. You don’t come here to be talked to. You come here to worship the almighty God in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. To worship. For so many people, including Catholics, this is a strange word. The highlight of the Catholic’s week is what we are doing here right now. Is this the highlight of your week? Now, that is not a fair question, for worship cannot be compared to other things we do and enjoy and which are fine and good. But do you at least know and believe that what goes on here is in fact, whether we understand this or not, is the most important thing we can do as Catholics?

This question will have to hang in the air for a few minutes and it has to hang so it can dry and be cured like a fantastic prosciutto and we hope it does not get damaged by too much hot air coming from this side of the church. Much time and energy and angst has been spent in the last month on Notre Dame’s graduation. College graduations are usually normal, happy occasions, not much to think about, parties after for the graduates, the beginning of the lull of summer, time to move on, all these things. And yet this graduation at a school that so many people see as the symbol of the Catholic university has caused not only a media stir, but has stirred up in a deep way the Catholic Church herself in this country. But this stirring up has nothing about it akin to the stirring up of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. Quite the contrary. It has exposed the deep divisions within the Church in this country, a division that is contrary to the oneness in the Holy Spirit that is the heart of the celebration of Pentecost. Now remember the reading from the Acts of the Apostles that we heard: the point is not the different languages, the point is certainly not diversity of what was heard: what was heard was common to all for it was the truth: I will send you the Holy Spirit and he will lead you into all truth. A Church divided against herself cannot be the Catholic Church. For the Catholic Church is one, holy and apostolic and the oneness at its very heart includes and demands that oneness and clarity of faith that is a bulwark against the tidal wave of relativism that destroys everything in its path. And that is what was playing out at Notre Dame. What was playing out is much deeper than the cast of characters, namely Fr Jenkins, the president of the University and Barak Obama the president of the United States. And because what is at stake is beyond personalities, T\there is no need to demonize Fr Jenkins or President Obama, as if they were the cause of what is happening. For their own personal sins against God and their neighbors they will be judged, not by us but by God.

No Catholic can ever understand history as irrelevant to the Church and our faith. There are sects who believe that human history has nothing to do with Christianity. But they are totally wrong, because God entered into human history with the birth of Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, and therefore human history cannot be separated from God. God became man for us in history, so we cannot ever think that we are above human history, existing in some sort of special place that is impervious to the mixture of tragedy and heroism that is human history. There is no little house on the prairie with appropriate costumes for Catholics. What we saw at Notre Dame is but the continuing trajectory of a phenomenon that is an integral part of American history. It is true that a similar phenomenon can be seen in Europe, but that cannot concern us here today. The phenomenon is what I have called for so many years the great American steam-roller, that huge, seemingly irresistible, force that flattens anything in its path, that steam roller forged of that strange but potent amalgam of individualism and conformity that has flattened American Protestantism, sucking from it any faith with specificity and transcendence and reducing it to a moralism that has ended up as a reflection of the contemporary society. One cannot distinguish most mainline American Christianity today from whatever cause is advocated by the New York Times or Oprah Winfrey. The sting of Christianity is gone, dead, buried. There can be no martyrs to the faith any longer, for the faith has been sold out to the most telegenic personality of the day.

Now the question is on this Pentecost Sunday is whether the Catholic Church will allow herself to be flattened out by the American steamroller. I must insist at this point that one can be a good American and not be part of the steamroller—let us not worry about the specious issues of patriotism. What happened at Notre Dame was a sign that the American steamroller is indeed pressing down on the Catholic Church in this country. That many Catholics, including the president of Notre Dame, clucked approvingly at President Obama’s plea with respect to abortion for tolerance and understanding and middle ground, shows how far we have been flattened. It is not a matter of not engaging the world with the weapons of reason and humanity. We must do this and at the same time we must, once again, never demonize the opponents. But what has been given up is the absolute commitment to life that is based both on the natural law and on Christian revelation. Come, let us reason together, says God to the Jews in Isaiah. But this does not mean what made Fr Jenkins face glow with pride and happiness. For the rest of God’s line in Isaiah is as follows; though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be whiter than snow, but if you refuse and rebel you shall be devoured by the sword….it is the Lord calling his people to repentance and a change of heart.

And yet, and this must be said, that what happened at Notre Dame is not the heart of the matter. The greater danger is allowing the world to reduce Catholicism to moralism. We must never allow ourselves to think that the abortion question is at the heart of what is at stake. If to be Catholic today means only to be against abortion, we have lost the battle, we are reduced to moralism. No, it is much, much more than this, for being pro-life points to the heart of the matter; being pro-life is not the heart of the matter; the heart of the matter is the person of Jesus Christ, the sign and the reality of the love of God for us and for all men. And it is the Mass, what we do here, that is the ground in this world for that Pentecost that is never a mere feast and once and for all thing. For here by the power of the Holy Spirit bread becomes the living God, wine the source of all forgiveness and heavenly delight. Without this, there is nothing. Without this, there is only talk, there are only competing opinions. On this Pentecost let us not sing Come Holy Spirit as if he never came. He has come and he fills the world with his goodness and truth, the truth that saves. He fills this parish church and seeks entrance into our hearts, our lives, our very beings, he comes to breathe life into our lives deadened by sin, he comes to refresh, to comfort, he comes to lead us into all truth.