Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

By Father Richard Cipolla

And they will not leave one stone upon another in you; because you did not know the time
of your visitation.

Today’s gospel is not a parable, it is not a specific teaching of Jesus. It is one of the most
dramatic scenes in the Gospel: Jesus’ weeping over Jerusalem as he enters the city and
the driving out of the money changers from the Temple. What can we make of this
scene? What does it mean for us? It is true that it describes a particular event in Jesus’
history and that it can be analyzed in this way. But the gospel at Mass is not merely to
give information of Jesus’ life. The gospel is the making present of Christ as the living
Word, that Word that has to speak to us and penetrate our hearts.

The context is always important. Jesus weeps over Jerusalem as he enters the holy city
on Palm Sunday. This is the beginning of the events of the Passion and Death of the
Lord. Despite the shouts of hosannas from the crowd, Jesus knows that he enters
Jerusalem for the last time, that this entrance is the beginning of those events that will
lead to his crucifixion. The hosannas break his heart, for he knows that they bear no
meaning, he knows that his preaching and teaching has not borne fruit among his own
people, he knows that the very religious and political center of his people has rejected
him and await to do what has to be done to get rid of him. And he feels the deep irony:
the city whose name bears the name of peace, jeru shalom, has not a clue as to what
peace is all about, that peace that is the very presence of God. And he predicts the
destruction of the city and therefore the religious heart of the city, the temple, with its
symbol of the presence of God, with its daily offerings of animal sacrifices for the sins of
the people. And he weeps, he weeps because Jerusalem did not recognize the time of its
visitation, that is, the moment when the very truth and peace of God tented among his
people to give them that salvation for which they always longed.

Jesus goes right up to the temple, for there is the heart of the matter, there is where the
presence of God was, there the teaching of the Law, there the sacrifices for sin. And the
Lord comes to his temple. He came into this temple when he was a baby, when Mary and
Joseph brought him to be redeemed and blessed forty days after his birth, that event we
commemorate every year as the Feast of the Presentation in the Temple, or Candlemass,
when we hear Simeon’s song,” Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. For my
eyes have seen thy salvation”. And now he comes to the temple to do what has to be
done before he starts on the road to Calvary: to teach and preach within this center of the
Jewish faith and culture, to teach and preach not as one of the scribes or Pharisees, but
with the authority of God himself.

But before he begins this last phase of his life, he cleanses the temple by driving out the
sellers and money changers. “My house shall be a house of prayer; you have made it a
den of robbers”. Who were these sellers and money changers? They were in the temple
precincts for practical reasons: they sold the small and big animals that the people would then bring to the priest to offer as a sacrifice for their sins. And the money changers were there to make sure that everyone had the right change to pay the one shekel temple tax.
They must have been there in the past times Jesus had visited the temple. But this time
was different: The line from the temple to the Cross was in place: the symbolic presence
of God in the temple, the daily sacrifices: all these shadows were about to be replaced
with the reality of the fullness of the truth of God and the Lamb of God who will offer
himself once and for all for the sins of the world. So the cleansing of the temple is a
symbolic act, the signal that the end of the shadows had come and the beginning of the
light of God in the world as a real presence.

“Types and shadows have their ending”, so wrote St Thomas Aquinas. The temple was
razed to the ground by the Romans in 70 AD and was never rebuilt. And the Christian
understanding is that the Church took the place of the temple, for it is the Church as the
body of Christ in which the real presence of God in Word and Sacrament is known and
experienced in the world of time and place, the world of history. And it is the worship of
the Church that fulfills the daily sacrifices of the temple by the Mass, which is the
renewal of the one, true and eternal sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross, the source of life and love.
And yet Jesus’ act of purification of the temple reminds us as well of the need for
purification of the Church. Church history even read cursively shows times in which the
human structure of the Church threatened to stifle her very life, corruption far beyond
money-changers and sellers. These past 40 years have been one of those times when
corruption at the human level of the Church has threatened the efficacy of the missionary
effort of the Church and has wounded Her deeply. For this is church corruption as
reality, from the horrific acts of sexual abuse committed by Catholic clergy that have
destroyed lives and families, to the subculture within the Church that allowed these
priests to flourish in the bosom of holy Church, to the corruption of the Shepherds who
refused to protect their people from wolves and who prefer payouts to truth.
And today we face a deeper, if that is possible, threat to the very fabric of the Church,
that fabric that is her liturgy, the very worship of God in the Church, The publication of
Traditionis Custodes, the Motu Properio of Pope Francis that dared to make null and void
Pope Benedict’s Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum that declared the obvious truth that
the Traditional Roman Mass of the ages could never be abrogated as a form of worship in
the Catholic Church. We now live in a time in which the Mass we celebrate here today
has been declared as something now foreign to the body of the Church and that the Novus
Ordo form of the Mass to be the only true form of the Roman Mass: this has no basis in
fact nor faith. As if what we do here at this moment in this church has no relevance to
the worship of God in the Catholic Church. This corruption of the understanding of the
liturgy of the Catholic Church is deeper than that of the moral corruption of the clergy.

And yet that real corruption of the human face of the Church, and the corruption that is
the sin of those entrusted with the God-given power to exercise authority over the
Church on earth, but also our own personal sin, can never and does never prevent the
saving grace of God to be truly present in his Church. The faith of the people, despite
being shaken by these events, endures. The mission of the Church to bring Jesus Christ
to all peoples of the world, despite cynicism and broken hearts among her priests and
bishops, and despite the suffering of the faithful laity, goes on every time the Gospel is
heard and preached, every time a cup of cold water is given to someone thirsty in the
name of Christ, and in particular every time someone is deeply moved by the beauty of
the Traditional Roman Mass,. And the Real Presence of Christ, imparting healing and
saving grace to each of us here, still resides in humble glory in our tabernacle in this
church and in all of the tabernacles of the world. And for this and the reality of grace
among us every day of our lives, we can only say: Deo gratias.

         

The Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a holy day of obligation, is on Monday, August 15. The following churches will offer the Traditional Mass on August 15th. Please notify us with additional information.

Connecticut

St. Mary Church, Norwalk, CT, 8 am, low Mass.

Sts. Cyril and Methodius Oratory, Bridgeport, 7:45 am low Mass, 6 pm Solemn Mass. Blessing of herbs: Please place fresh herbs for the traditional blessing on the table by the statue of Our Lady of Grace before Mass.

St. Patrick Oratory, Watebury, CT, 8am Low Mass; 6pm High Mass and Benediction

Oratory of the Most Sacred Heart, Georgetown, CT, Missa Cantata, 6 pm.

St. Marguerite Bourgeoys, 138 Candlewood Lake Road, Brookfield, CT, 07:00 am Low Mass.

St. Pius X, Fairfield, CT, 7 pm Solemn Mass

St. Martha Church, Enfield, CT, 7 pm

New York

Holy Innocents, New York, NY, 8 am low Mass; 6 pm Missa Cantata

Our Lady of Mount Carmel, New York, NY, 7 am and 7:45 am Low Masses; 7 pm Missa Cantata.

St. Josaphat, Bayside (Queens), 7pm

St. Matthew, Dix Hills, NY (Long Island) , 10:30 AM.

St. Rocco, Glen Cove (Long Island), 7pm

St. Paul the Apostle, Yonkers, NY, 12 noon

Annunication-Our Lady of Fatima, Crestwood, NY, 7:30 pm Solemn Mass followed by a Marian Procession through Crestwood.

Immaculate Conception Church, Sleepy Hollow, NY, Low Mass, 7 pm

Sacred Heart in Esopus NY, 11 am

St Mary-St Andrew, Ellenville, NY, 7 pm Missa Cantata

New Jersey

Our Lady of Sorrows, Jersey City, 7 pm.

Our Lady of Victories, Harrington Park, NY, 5:30 pm, low Mass.

Shrine Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, 52 West Somerset St., Raritan, NJ, Solemn Mass 7 pm.

Sermon by Fr. Richard Cipolla for the Feast of St. James given this evening at the Church of St. Pius X in Fairfield, CT.

One of the most dramatic scenes in the gospels is the calling by Jesus of James and
John. They are in their fishing boat with their father, Zebedee. And Jesus calls to
them: Come, follow me and I will make you fishers of men. So they drop their
nets, get out of the boat, leave their father behind and follow Jesus as the first two
of his disciples, who will become his apostles at Pentecost. I have always been
impressed by the clarity of this scene and the cutting away of any small talk: Come
follow me. And they left their nets and followed him.

It is James and John who are chosen with Peter to walk up the mountain to witness
what we call Jesus’ transfiguration. It is James and John with Peter who
accompany Jesus after the Last Supper when he goes to pray in the Garden of
Gethsemane. But it is also James and John who pull Jesus aside one day to ask
him if he would see to it that one of them sat on his right and the other on his left
when they reached heaven. They, like Peter, did not really understand what
following Jesus meant. James found out after Pentecost, when he became a true
apostle who proclaimed the person of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior both in
Jersusalem and in Spain. Tradition tells us that he was martyred in Jerusalem and
that his body was then carried to Compostela in Spain where he was buried.

The pilgrimage to St James’ tomb in Compostela became, as we all know, one of
the most important pilgrimage sites in the Middle Ages and beyond. People
walked from all over what we now call Europe, some for hundreds of miles, to this
shrine, as pilgrims and penitents. There has been in the recent past a revival of
Catholics making this pilgrimage, as a sign of their faith in Christ and his apostle
James, who finally understood that the heart of faith in Christ is being willing to
partake of the suffering of the Cross, which alone leads to the joy of the
resurrection. I have been to Compostela and prayed at the tomb of St. James. I
wish I could tell you that I walked many miles over the mountains to get there.
The fact is that I officiated at a lovely wedding in the north part of Portugal, and
the groom graciously offered the use of his Mercedes after the wedding so I could
drive to Compostela. And so I went in style, but I did pray there, that I would
remember what Jesus told St. James about glory in heaven: no suffering, no glory.

This Saturday: Traditional Mass pilgrimage to the beautiful shrine church of Our Lady of Mt Carmel, 448 E 116th St, New York

A Connecticut atelier, Sacra Indumenta, provided vestments for the Solemn Pontifical Mass in San Francisco on July 1 (we posted our pictures yesterday here). Archbishop Cordileone was wearing a pontifical alb specially designed and tailored by owner Susan-Jayne Caballero, who operates out of Norwalk, Connecticut. Mrs. Caballero is well-known in Connecticut and the New York area for her beautiful heirloom-quality bespoke sacred vestments. But we were pleasantly surprised to find out, when we attended the Pontifical Mass in San Francisco, that her reputation has spread to the west coast. You can read more about this amazing firm on the Sacra Indumenta website.

These notes written by Susan-Jayne Caballero, will impress on you the detail that went into the design and tailoring of this one vestment piece:

This Pontifical Alb is 100% pure lightweight Irish linen with special commission Italian hand-made lace from a renowned lace designer in Italy, GALBIATI. The cuffs are lined in pure silk moiré in the crimson from Gammarelli in a shade designated for prelates (as opposed to Cardinal red). The lace is engineered into a continuous panel for the skirt with decorative floral and cruciform motifs and accompanied by coordinated paraments for the sleeve overlay.
I designed a completely custom new pattern with particular vintage details for the shoulder construction and worked with a close friend who is an historical pattern maker, and historical costume museum curator and embroidery artist (Shaina Dombrowik who owns Deciphering Designs). Since I own quite a few vintage pieces, I studied several and worked with Shaina to digitize a custom alb pattern to fit His Excellency that incorporates the vintage construction techniques.
This particular shoulder construction is seen on many vintage albs for securing the neck and shoulder intersection which eases the stress point at that intersection. It is essentially a bias cut godet and allows a bit of flexibility between the shoulder bands and the neck collar band where the micro bunch pleating has gathered in the fullness of the body of the Alb. See here a photo from an Instrgram post where I detailed this construction in progress before setting the collar band.

I added matching white floral embroidery to the placket end point as well as as to each point of the godets on the shoulder bands.
Throughout the entire neckline outer edge, shoulder inset and along placket opening in front, I detailed with 1/4” fine Cluny scallop lace which traditionally protected the placket and collar edges from wearing or soiling badly from perspiration and abrasion. It’s not just decoration! Similar to how collar and stole protectors guard chasubles and stoles and are changed out every so often.
The sleeve moiré silk and lace overlay are both basted on and can be removed fairly easily for cleaning and lovingly basted back to the linen sleeve body.
The tie is a double face cotton sateen with a small bunched pleat at the ends to help the ends lay flat and stay put and prevent it from curling with use. 

In addition, four of the acolytes at the Mass wore surplices made by Sacra Indumenta.

n.b. The silk Mass set, including the Spanish chasuble, were also made by an American firm, Altarworthy. For more information see:
https://www.liturgicalartsjournal.com/2022/07/vestments-commissioned-for-solemn.html?fbclid=IwAR0825M0-AxH-KCziVwHAybTJXJpdTvvSv6CRbmPoxWgl-W7i-

For further reading: we also posted an article by Susan-Jayne Caballero a few years ago on the art of creating sacred vestments.

Threads of Continuity: Stewards of Sacred Treasure

On Friday, June 24th, the Guild of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus will celebrate the patronal feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus with adoration from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm at Sacred Heart Church in Georgetown, CT.  Please come and spend time with the Lord!  Review the available slots and sign up: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/10c0e48aaaf29a5f4ce9-adoration