Sermon by Fr. Richard Cipolla for Pentecost XIX.

Therefore, putting away falsehood, let every one speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. (Ephesians 4:24)

Book IV of the Aeneidis probably the most read and the most remembered of the twelve books of this seminal work in Western civilization  For it tells of the affair, the love-infatuation, between Aeneas, the man destined to found Rome,  and Dido, the founder and queen of Carthage.  How many thousands upon thousands of Latin students through centuries have translated these lines of great passion and betrayal and heroism? And what most of these students have learned from Book IV is about the terrible choice in life for a man: the choice between the comfort and genuine love within a relationship with a woman whose greatness is strongly delineated by Virgil, and the calling to be the hero that founds the Roman empire and Roman civilization.  Aeneas dawdles in Carthage, becoming Dido’s consort.  And this dalliance has a debilitating effect on both Dido and Aeneas. She forgets her calling to build Carthage as one of the great cities of that time and place.  He forgets his calling to found Roman civilization from the ashes of Troy. And in a harrowing scene, Mercury is sent by Jupiter to remind Aeneas, in the most strong terms, of his destiny. And Aeneas, frightened to his core, sets sail from Carthage to do what he has to do. Aeneas regains his virilitas as a man, a virilitas that will enable him to achieve his destiny given to him by the gods.

Virilitas in Latin does not mean merely masculinity or manliness. It means the quality of the vir, of the man-hero.  Both Vergil and his ultimate antagonist Turnus, are viri, are men-heroes, who are willing to sacrifice their lives for what they believe they are called to do and for what will give ultimate meaning to their lives through personal sacrifice.  Lest anyone think that virilitasis a virtue that only men can show forth, I offer the great women saints like St. Monica, St. Birgitta and St. Catherine of Siena, whose virilitas was a mark of their sanctity. The greatest of all the saints, Mary, is the model of virilitas at the foot of the Cross. Virilitas has nothing to do with machismo, nothing to do with old boy networks, still less with disrespecting women.  Virilitas encompasses courage and honor and a willingness to submit oneself to a calling to greatness based on truth, which involves a denial of self and a willingness to give oneself over to this calling. The ultimate and consummate vir is Jesus Christ.

I have written and spoken  many times about the lack of virilitas in the Catholic clergy, especially in priests and bishops.  It is precisely this lack of virilitas that has made possible the moral turpitude of the clergy that has scandalized the whole world, specifically with respect to pedophilia but also with respect to the homosexual network within the Church that has allowed the cover-up of these crimes and the financial improprieties within the Vatican itself.  But the current drama that is enfolding in the United States concerning the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is also about the lack of virilitas in our society.

There is a relationship between virilitas and veritas.  The vir understands truth and puts aside his or her wants and desires in the service of truth, that truth that is the defining essence of the goal of the vir. The vir, despite what he or she wants to do, decides, often with the intervention of the Divine, that he or she must do what he or she is called to do. The media have reduced the Kavanaugh-Ford drama to “He said, She said”.  But many have also completely ignored the very idea of truth by judging the situation on the basis of prejudices that make a mockery out of truth. When Dr. Ford’s story and allegations first came forth, Senator Chuck Schumer declared: “I believe her”.  He had never met her, had not asked further questions, but declared that she was speaking the truth.  This would be totally bizarre and almost comic and not worthy of belief if one did not see clearly that what is at stake in this situation is not truth but rather which side of the political divide will prevail in this nomination to the Supreme Court.  The stakes are high, and the stakes for most professional politicians are whether the moral liberalism of the Supreme Court decisions for the past decades will prevail or not.  So in this fight, truth is a mere word, a verbum nudum in the sense of nominalism.  Senator Schumer’s reaction, even if one does not take a cynical attitude, is based on the idea that the #MeToo movement, a product of real discrimination against and sexual violence against women, demands that statements made by a woman claiming sexual harassment must be taken as true.  This is not only illogical but denies the very objectivity of truth.

But virilitas has for too long been associated with being part of a network of boys will be boys and men will be men, with the silent supposition that hard drinking and bullying and seeing women as objects for satisfying lust is just part of the boy-man scene.  This cannot be denied.  And the #MeToo movement is the beginning of the end of the toleration of this most un-virile behavior and this perverted understanding of what it means to be a man.  One cannot believe Judge Kavanaugh’s insistence that he is innocent to the charges made against him by Dr. Ford just because he has a good reputation in the legal profession and because he is deemed to be a decent and honest man by many people.  But one also cannot call him a liar because he is a man, who has been charged by a woman with gross sexual impropriety.

Whatever the outcome of this drama on which the whole country seems fixated, the concept of truth itself has become relativized and has become a word whose emptiness is filled by strident voices in opposition.  Pilate’s question to Jesus, “What is truth”, that cynical question, has no answer in the present toxic polarized state of this society.  And yet, as Christians, we believe that there is an answer to this question.  But it has nothing to do with lawyers and courts and editorials and media pundits and politicians.  For the Christian, truth is concrete in a person whose name is Jesus Christ.  And this truth is the ultimate truth, for it is the truth of God who is truth.  Without the lens of truth who is Christ, all is seen through the lens of the grey mass of opinion, prejudice and cynical manipulation.

In this highly emotional and irrational atmosphere surrounding this Supreme Court nomination, the Catholic must be cautious not to deliberately or callously forget his or her obligation to truth in the name of getting someone on the Supreme Court who may overturn Roe v. Wade.  This is easy to do when faced with the virulent opposition from the political left to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.  Quite apart from Dr. Ford’s personal claims of suffering gross injustice at the hands of a man, there can be no doubt that she is being used by those who see legal abortion as a woman’s right.  But the Catholic cannot mirror the pro-abortion frenzy to stop a conservative from being appointed to the Supreme Court by a frenzy that never stops to consider the role of truth in all of this.  St. Paul’s exhortation in today’s Epistle to the Ephesians must be pondered by each Catholic in this country today.  Those who irrationally and selfishly support the crime of abortion as a right, those who wash their hands cynically and ask, like Pilate, “What is truth?” have abandoned the quest for the truth of the matter, for truth for them is irrelevant.  It is not so for Catholics.  The truth about what happened or did not happen between Dr. Ford and Judge Cavanaugh may never come into the clear light of day.  A judgment then will have to be made on the basis of one’s conscience. But this must not be confused with truth.  For the Catholic truth is not an idea.  It is a person, and his name is Jesus.

Father Richard Gennaro Cipolla

Window of St. Michael in St. Stanislaus Church, New Haven.

This Saturday, September 29 is the Feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of St. Michael the Archangel. The following churches will offer traditional liturgies:

Friday Septmeber 28: St. Mary Church, Greenwich, CT, 7:30 pm, Solemn Vespers for the feast of St. Michael, followed by benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament.

Saturday September 29th:

St. Mary Church, Norwalk, CT, 9 am

Sts. Cyril and Methodius, Bridgeport, CT 7:45 am.

St. Agnes Church, New York City, Solemn High Mass, 10:30 am.

Most Precious Blood Church, Little Italy, New York City, Solemn High Mass, 11 am, Sponsored by the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of St. George.

St. Josaphat Church, Bayside, Queens, Low Mass, 10 am. Celebrated by Fr. Stephen Saffron. Sponsored by the New York Confraternity of Our Lady of Prompt Succor.

St. Anthony of Padua, Jersey City, NJ, 11 am.

Sunday September 30th (transferred)

St. Stanislaus Church, New Haven, CT,  2 pm, Missa Cantata.

This relief of St. Michael is in the main reredos of the parish church in‎⁨ Niederrotweil⁩, ⁨Baden-Württemberg⁩, ⁨Germany⁩.

St Dominic’s Parish,in Brick, New Jersey, offered at Solemn Mass for the Feast of Exaltation of the Holy Cross on September 14. This was the parish’s first Mass in the traditional rite since the implementation of the Novus Ordo, celebrated by the newly installed pastor, Fr Brian Woodrow, who is the liaison for the Extraordinary Form in the Diocese of Trenton. Servers and musicians came to help from St John the Baptist Parish in Allentown, New Jersey.

The Mass was attended by a larger number of people than expected, around 325-350 in all. The liturgy concluded with the hymn “Lift High the Cross” sung by all with great fervor, and was followed by a dinner convivium in the parish hall.

Future Traditional Latin Masses at St Dominic’s are currently being planned for particular feasts throughout the liturgical year.

These photos and text appeared in New Liturgical Movement.

Sermon for the Feast of the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Given by Fr. Richard Cipolla on Sept. 15, 2018 at Church of the Most Precious Blood, New York

But standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Cleopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son!”
Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!” And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home. (John 19:25-27)

And a sword will pierce through your own soul also. (Luke 2:35)

She stood there and looked. She thought that she knew and understood what was the day of her fulfillment. She remembered that night, Joseph anxious that there was no room at any inn, her own knowledge that the time had come to give birth to her Son, not the best time, in the small city of Bethlehem crowded with people responding to the census directive from the Emperor. But she felt what was happening deep in her body and she knew that the time had come that was the time of fulfillment, fulfilling what the angel had told her just nine months ago. She remembered the birth, the absence of pain and instead a rush of joy. She remembered the smell of the animals, Joseph arranging clean straw in the manger, the baby’s cry, how she held him in the cold of the night. All this came welling out of her memory as she stood there transfixed, transfixed by her act of seeing her Son dying on a cross. She could not take her eyes off him for one second, and she knew now so deeply that it was not the birth that was her fulfillment. It was standing here at the foot of the Cross that was the fulfillment of her destiny, the fulfillment of her God given role announced to her by the angel. She was not alone, for her Son’s beloved disciple stood with her, when all the others had fled. But he seemed to be looking down, as if he could not bear to see the One he loved dying this painful and shameful death.

She stood there as a mulier fortis, a woman in the line of Sarah and Rebekah and Deborah and Esther and Judith and the mother of the Maccabees. She stood there and allowed her heart to be pierced, remembering that evening in the Temple when Simeon said to her: A sword shall pierce your soul. And so she stood there and it felt as if her heart were being pierced by a sharp sword, the same sword that pierced the side and heart of her Son. And in that moment she understood what she was born for, what she had lived for, as her Immaculate Heart wracked with pain and sorrow was joined to the Sacred Heart of her Son, as blood and water poured out from his side: the joining of the love of man to the love of God.

People often ask why this feast is celebrated in white vestments and not black or even violet. It is because of the joy that Mary experienced at that moment at the foot of the Cross that broke her heart. There seems to be a paradox in what I just said, but that apparent paradox is shattered by the incomprehensible love of God in Jesus Christ. That is why this feast is celebrated in joy after the joy of the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. This joy cannot be understood outside of the Church of believers. The world will never understand this joy whose depth is in suffering. But more and more, so many Catholics cannot comprehend this joy rooted in suffering that is in the end redemption, for their religious sensibilities have been dulled by a half a century of bathing in the tepid waters of sentimentality and intellectual vapidity, especially in their experience of the worship of God in the Mass.

But there are signs that the laity may be willing to come out of this tepid bath and are open to a cold shower that will brace them to reawaken their faith in the virile Jesus Christ who is their champion and Lord and to give them the courage to be men and women of strong and real faith that understands the relationship between joy and suffering, a relationship of love.

The events of the past several weeks have certainly caught the attention of both the Catholic faithful and the secular media. There were those who thought and declared that the clergy scandals brought forth at the turn of the last century were over and done with and let’s move on. That that was not the case and wishful thinking on the part of prelatial clergy is now absolutely clear. The terrible immorality of the clergy was not confined to a few whose infamous deeds vis a vis sexual molestation of children, mostly boys, were discovered 20 years ago. What is happening now is that the collapse of the noxious smoke screen that protected these child molesters may be about to happen. The smoke machine run by the bishops and the Roman curia is about to be short-circuited. Or so we hope. I wish I could say that the short circuit will be caused by the outraged laity. But it does not seem so. The genuine piety of the laity towards the Church is admirable and comes from their faith. But some bishops have relied on this for many years to get on with the status quo, not only with respect to covering up the terrible sexual scandals of the priests involving sexual predation of little boys but also with respect to the network within the Church that allows this covering up to happen.

It would seem obvious so far that the bishops cannot address and solve the moral problems that beset their own brethren. There is too much moral compromise already. When the chosen people of God in the Old Testament strayed from their faith and allegiance to the one true God and went hankering after the false gods of the people surrounding them, the true God used the pagan peoples surrounding the Jews, the Amalekites, the Hittites, the Jebusites, the Philistines, and ultimately the Babylonians who carried off the chosen people into exile: God used the pagans surrounding his people to not only punish them for their abandonment of their God but also to try them in the fire to bring them back to Him. The Amalekites and Jebusites and Hittites and Philistines and King Nebuchadnezzar are long gone. But it may be that God will use the secular powers of the government to chastise and purify his Church in our time. The Hittites today may very well be the Attorneys General of the United States, many of whom are not Catholic, some of whom are anti-Catholic. This gives us great pause and so it should. But what do Masses of Reparation and services of repentance called for the by bishops mean without moral accountability? Can the bishops think that such pious gestures—and I do not in any way discount the reality and graces of these Masses and prayers—can solve the deep and underlying problem of the moral corruption in the Church? No. It seems that those in the Church who can hold these bishops accountable are unable and unwilling to do that job. There is a lack of virility grounded in truth within the priests and bishops of the Church.

How do our clergy measure up to the virility of SS Perpetua and Felicity? Or the virility of St. Birgitta? Or the virility of St Catherine of Siena? Or the virility of the countless wives through the centuries who have with great sacrifice of themselves done what had to be done to raise their children as Catholics often with little help from their husbands? Or the ultimate virility of the Blessed Virgin Mary who stood at the Cross and did not flinch and allowed her heart to be pierced with the suffering of God? Men who are virile leaders of their people stand with them and lead them facing the same way as those they are leading to the Lord, and not facing their people in the manner of Father Feel Good who evacuates the seriousness of the Mass itself, that seriousness that is the Cross of Jesus Christ.

This feast of the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, should fill us great joy as we celebrate this Mass in the Traditional Roman Rite, as we all face that eternal East from whence shall come Him who will judge the living and the dead and whose kingdom will have no end. Maranatha . Come quickly, Lord Jesus.