June 28^th 2020. Thirteenth Sunday of the Year

GOSPEL: Matthew 10, 37-42

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Translated from a homily by Don Fabio Rosini, broadcast on Vatican Radio

Don Fabio’s reflection follows the Gospel reading ...

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GOSPEL: Matthew 10, 37-42

Jesus said to his apostles:
“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,
and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
and whoever does not take up his cross
and follow after me is not worthy of me.
Whoever finds his life will lose it,
and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

"Whoever receives you receives me,
and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.
Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet
will receive a prophet’s reward,
and whoever receives a righteous man
because he is a righteous man
will receive a righteous man’s reward.
And whoever gives only a cup of cold water
to one of these little ones to drink
because the little one is a disciple—
amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward.”

The Gospel of the Lord: Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ

Kieran’s summary . . . In this week’s passage, Jesus says, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me . .” This translation makes it seem as if Jesus is making a moral point: that someone who loves their parents more than Christ is not at the moral level required for a disciple. But the Greek word for “worthy” actually means something different. What Jesus is saying is that if I love my parents more than Christ then I am not properly “adapted” to Christ. It is not my moral fibre that is the issue, but my priorities. If my priority is this natural life, then the life of grace will suffer. If my priority is relationships on a purely human level, then I will have difficulty loving as Christ calls me to love. The fact is that there are two types of life: the life of nature and the life of grace. If I am attached to my natural life, but still strive to follow Christ, then I may end up living a sort of moral rigorism. If my priority is the things of the flesh, but I try to keep the “rules” of Christianity, then those very rules will feel oppressive. My heart is attached to worldly things, so my conformity to Christian behaviour ends up being unwilling, not done with all my heart. What is the solution? The solution is to consider that this natural life is going to end someday anyhow! We cannot embrace the new life of the Spirit unless we turn away from the old life of the flesh. The choice is mine: will I continue making a priority of the natural life that I inherited from my parents? Or will I opt for the life of grace, which is offered to me by my heavenly Father? The cross is the instrument by which we leave our old lives behind and embrace the life of grace. God does not impose grace, he does not impose the cross, but we do well to accept them so that we can begin to live the life of the Spirit.

In the Gospel Jesus says that we will find our life if we lose it. In other words, there is a biological life and then there is life of the Spirit. If we are too preoccupied with our natural lives, then the life of the Spirit will be neglected

Jesus says in this Sunday’s Gospel: “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Surely something is wrong here? How can we find life by losing it? We only have one life, right? What Jesus means is that we have a life (of the biological sort) that we have received according to nature; and then we have another life that is according to grace, which we have received from Christ. In other words, there is a life that we get from our parents, and then there is another kind of life, the life Francis of Assisi chose when he returned his clothes to his father Pietro and said to him: “Up to today I have called you my father on earth; but from now on I will say with all confidence: “Our Father, who art in heaven”, because all my treasures lie in Him and in Him I have placed all my trust and hope” (Franciscan Sources 1043). Jesus says in the Gospel of John: "If one is not born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit".

If our natural life is our priority, but we still try to follow Jesus, then we will end up living a type of moralism: following rules that we would prefer not to have to keep because our real interest is in satisfying the desires of our natural life

There is nothing more Christian than this discourse, but we have an indomitable tendency to make compromises and to place our emphasis on fostering natural life, to the neglect of the life of the Spirit. We have certainty about the dynamics of natural life, whilst it demands faith to believe in the existence and importance of the life that comes from above. Furthermore, as well as requiring faith in God, the life of the Spirit calls on us to have freedom from our own plans and preoccupations. The result is that we end up keeping our clutches tight on biological life and, at the same time, we try to follow Jesus. But this cannot be done!  This is how Christianity degenerates into moralism, a keeping of rules that we keep only with difficulty because our main drive is the preservation of our natural life. In trying to keep these rules, we ask our nature to do the things that we can only do by grace. And so we make Christianity into something oppressive, something that requires forcing the will to do what we do not want to do. We mimic the Love that comes from the Holy Spirit with do-goodism. We substitute Hope, which is a theological virtue, with the instinct for survival, an instinct that is the last to die. Faith, consequently, is reduced to the business of simply "understanding" something, grasping the content of a belief, and it is taught as if it were a body of conceptual content.

Embracing the new life of the Spirit requires turning away from the old life. The cross is the instrument by which we make this transition to life

To receive the new life of the Spirit you have to leave your old life behind, and the instrument that enables you to do that is the cross! When the cross touches our life, our natural reaction is to defend ourselves from the pain it brings, but that is the opportunity to "surrender" to the Father by abandoning ourselves to him. Then we enter into his life. But "whoever has kept his life for himself will lose it", because the natural life to which we are so attached is going to end eventually anyway. We are all going to die one day; we are all going to lose our natural lives. So it is important that, before this happens, we will already have found life of a different sort.  Then, the day of our exit from this world is simply the end of a phase and we already possess the other kind of life. St. Paul said: "This life, which I live in the body, I live in the faith of the Son of God, who loved me". The choice is mine: will I carry on as if the only life that matters is the life I received from my parents? Or will I opt for the life that is received from our Father in heaven? The events in our lives give us opportunities to choose. God does not impose grace, but simply offers it. It is better to accept this grace, embracing the cross, when it arrives.

June 21^st 2020. Twelfth Sunday of the Year

GOSPEL: Matthew 10, 26-33

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Translated from a homily by Don Fabio Rosini, broadcast on Vatican Radio

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Don Fabio’s reflection follows the Gospel reading ...

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GOSPEL: Matthew 10, 26-33

Jesus instructed the Twelve as follows: ‘Do not be afraid of them therefore. For everything that is now covered will be uncovered, and everything now hidden will be made clear. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the daylight; what you hear in whispers, proclaim from the housetops.

‘Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; fear him rather who can destroy both body and soul in hell. Can you not buy two sparrows for a penny? And yet not one falls to the ground without your Father knowing. Why, every hair on your head has been counted. So there is no need to be afraid; you are worth more than hundreds of sparrows.

‘So if anyone declares himself for me in the presence of men, I will declare myself for him in the presence of my Father in heaven. But the one who disowns me in the presence of men, I will disown in the presence of my Father in heaven.

The Gospel of the Lord: Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ

Kieran’s summary . . . The passage this week from Matthew’s 

Gospel speaks about fear. Fear is often at the centre of 

humanity’s most desperate acts and errant behaviour. 

But it is important to distinguish fear of the Lord from

 fear of a purely human sort. Fear of the human sort can 

give rise to attitudes of slavery or violence. It causes us to 

act in desperate ways to maintain our physical wellbeing 

or security. Jesus tells us, however, that we should not give

 in to fear of this sort precisely for the reason that the worst 

that can happen is that our physical bodies might be destroyed.

 Fear of the Lord, by contrast, is holy and good because it is

 directed towards salvation of our souls. Say that my body

 is sick but my soul is joyful and illuminated, then I am 

living a blessed existence. But if my body is in perfect 

condition whilst my soul is degenerate, then I am living 

a horrible existence. We are living in an age when our 

beauty, health and wellbeing are prioritized to such an 

extent that we end up living an infantile self-obsessed 

existence. The more we are focussed on our own wellbeing, 

the more closed we are to what really matters. What really

 matters is that our soul lives a life of love, which involves 

turning away from oneself towards others. It is healthy and 

good that I have this fear of the Lord which makes me tremble

 at the prospect of not living a life of love. I am presented with

 the opportunity to use this fear in a constructive manner every

 time that I have to choose between my own physical wellbeing

 and my salvation. When a couple learns that the new child who

 is going to arrive in the family has Down Syndrome, then 

they have to choose between their own comfort/convenience/

wellbeing and living a life of love. Whole nations have 

eliminated Down Syndrome because these countries place

 comfort and wellbeing before love. Who ever heard of a 

Down Syndrome child who waged war or directed organised 

crime? When we put the health of the body before the health 

of the soul, then our health and worldly success become places 

of destruction and despair. Suffering and ill health, by contrast, 

can become moments of grace when we make the health of the

 soul our priority.

Jesus tells us not to fear men, because the most they can do is kill our bodies. Isn’t that bad enough? Yes, it is, but the salvation of our souls is infinitely more important.

"Don't be afraid of those who kill the body, but have no power to kill the soul." These words, in phase two or three of a pandemic, sound particularly relevant. We know what "killing the body" is, but perhaps we don't have clear ideas about what "killing the soul" involves. The text continues: "Be afraid rather of the one who has the power to make the soul and the body perish in Hell". The word "perish" corresponds to ruin, to the complete unravelling of all that we are. The passage began with the phrase: "Do not be afraid of men". This is the theme that Jesus wishes to focus on: the threat that men can produce cannot go beyond the physical. Men have no power to kill anything other than the body. And, understandably, someone might say: “Well, isn’t that bad enough?” Yes it is, but we're not talking about small things here. What we have to understand is that the loss of the soul is even more devastating. Physical pain is a very, very difficult thing, but loneliness and lack of love also make good health insufficient and unbearable. Also, we have seen the saints and others who shone like lights in the darkness of suffering and made sense of everything.

The most important moments of life are when we have to choose between body and soul, between wellbeing and salvation, between our own comfort or the call to forgo comfort in order to love others.

One of the most important crossroads of our existence is when we are presented with the choice between the soul and the body. Sometimes we do not perceive that this option is in front of us because we are distracted by temptation, but it occurs every time we have to choose between comfort and love, between health and salvation. And this choice happens to all of us sooner or later. Sometimes in a tragic way: welcoming a sick child into the family means bringing someone into your life who will give you so many problems and inconveniences. But it means choosing to love.

If I do not make the soul my priority, then my worldly health and success will be nothing but places of self-destruction

They say that there are entire nations where, due to the practice of prenatal screening, Down Syndrome has practically disappeared completely. Is this how to build a better society? Has anyone heard of a person suffering from Down Syndrome who has ever waged a war, or organized an economic system based on the hunger of poor countries, or guided organized crime? No, generally the people who do these things are healthy people. We are eliminating the least dangerous people. What kind of strategy is this? There are no dictators or oppressors of people with serious disabilities. Had Hitler been disabled, history would have been different.  No, those who oppress humanity are people with a healthy body but a hellish soul. It all changes when a person begins to understand that his priority ought to be the care of his soul, and that if he does not do that, his health, money and success will be nothing but places of self-destruction. In tribulation you often find out what matters most. In suffering you often become a better person, if your priority is the right one: the heart, the soul.

June 14th 2020. Corpus Christi
GOSPEL: John 6:51-58

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Translated from a homily by Don Fabio Rosini broadcast on Vatican Radio 

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Don Fabio’s homily follows the Gospel

GOSPEL: John 6:51-58
Jesus said to the Jewish crowds:
"I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
whoever eats this bread will live forever;
and the bread that I will give
is my flesh for the life of the world."
The Jews quarrelled among themselves, saying,
"How can this man give us his flesh to eat?"
Jesus said to them, "Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood,
you do not have life within you.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life,
and I will raise him on the last day.
For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
remains in me and I in him.
Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father,
so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.
This is the bread that came down from heaven.
Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died,
whoever eats this bread will live forever."
The Gospel of the Lord: Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ

Kieran’s summary . . . Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist. But it is important also to understand the sacrament existentially. Why is the presence of God in this food so important? Our culture makes the gratification of our cravings the most central thing. This gives rise to a view of human nature that is totally dominated by individual desires and sensual satisfaction, as if the human being was little more than an appetite to be appeased. If friendship, marriage, human work and achievement are all a function of satisfaction, then they become distorted and wayward. In the Christian view, friendship is a free gift to others, marriage is built on unconditional love, work is service to others. The flourishing of human nature depends on a vision of the person that is rooted in the self-giving nature of God who created us in his image and likeness. Our culture may be turned in on itself, but the Eucharist shows us a better way! Here we see that the nature of God (and consequently the nature of humanity) is self-giving. Jesus was born among us and was placed in a feeding trough. He came not to be served, but to serve. His flesh and blood are food and drink for us because he is love and gives himself to us as a gift without reserve. Jesus was not focused on satisfying his own desires but on giving himself so that our deepest desires would be satiated. And for us too, our deepest nature is fulfilled when we act with love. A single act of selfless love will give me more joy than any amount of gratification of my appetites.
 
Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist. But it is important also to understand the sacrament existentially. Why is the presence of God in this food so important?
How can Jesus give us his flesh to eat? We are so used to the reality of the Eucharist that perhaps we no longer grasp its sublime paradox. This event was chosen by the Lord to illuminate our memory and (therefore) our heart. This eating of bread and drinking of wine (which is truly his body and his blood) is the clearest and most direct way of making him present. In other times, the priority was to focus on the reality of the presence of the Lord in the Eucharistic species. Today, in this post-psychoanalytic era, which follows the most introspective period of the centuries, we thirst for the existential dimension of this sacrament, without forgetting the rest. How can the Lord feed us?

Our culture makes the gratification of our cravings the most central thing. This gives rise to a view of human nature that is totally dominated by individual desires, sensual satisfaction, as if the human being was little more than an appetite to be satisfied.
Humanity by nature tends to absolutize his needs and reduce himself to his appetites. We are in the most sensual of eras, where everything is a mouth to feed or an appetite to satisfy. The focus is on the aesthetic, on taste, pleasure, tasting, comfort and well-being. Today's culture seeks to transform stone into bread; it looks for aspects of enjoyment in every detail of experience. If you buy a chair, it is not so important that it does not help back pain, as long as it has a satisfying design. If you have to choose any object in common use, besides its usefulness, it must give you a dose of vanity, of presentability, of pleasure. Things may or may not work, but they must look good and give a good feeling. This is not "bad" or "good" but simply individualistic, sensual, in a world that holds up a very specific understanding of human nature, which the commercial world exploits and emphasizes: the human being is an appetite to be satisfied.

If friendship, marriage, human work and achievement are all a function of satisfaction, then they become distorted and wayward. In the Christian view, friendship is a free gift to others, marriage is built on unconditional love, work is service to others. The flourishing of human nature depends on a vision of the person that is rooted in the self-giving nature of God who created us in his image and likeness.
But if this is true, what is friendship? What is marriage? What is work, or time, or anything else? If this view of humanity - which perhaps no one explicitly affirms, but which many people follow in a practical sense - dominates, then all things become a function of satisfaction. The meaning of all things is consequentially distorted. In a correct Christian anthropology, friendship is a free gift to others; marriage is all about unconditional love; work is service to the people around me; time is the space in which love comes to fruition.
 
The Eucharist shows us a better way! Here we see that the nature of God (and consequently the nature of humanity) is self-giving. Jesus was born among us and was placed in a feeding trough. He came not to be served, but to serve. His flesh and blood are food and drink for us because he is love and gives himself to us as a gift without reserve. Jesus was not focused on satisfying his own desires but on giving himself so that our deepest desires would be satiated. And for us too, our deepest nature is fulfilled when we act with love. A single act of selfless love will give me more joy than any amount of gratification of my appetites.
We must begin from the school of the Eucharist. Here, we see the One who lifts humanity up and shows us the meaning of love in the divine sense of the word. In the Eucharist, we go beyond the childish vision in which the human being is mainly a mouth to be fed. Instead, we encounter the very hand of the Father who feeds us. We are challenged to be no longer children who ask, but to become, rather, fathers and mothers who look after others. This man, Christ, was born and placed in a manger to make it clear that he had come, not to be served, but to serve. He is the one who understands his flesh as food and his blood as drink because he is love, and everything that is his is a gift. To think of oneself as food and drink is to be free from one's ego. Curiously, this giving of oneself for others leads to the greatest possible fulfilment: authentic love. All the amusements that I can experience will never give me as much joy as a single act of true love.

June 7^th 2020. Trinity Sunday

GOSPEL: John 3:16-18

Translated from a homily by Don Fabio Rosini broadcast on Vatican Radio

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Don Fabio’s homily follows the Gospel

GOSPEL: John 3:16-18

God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him might not perish
but might have eternal life.
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,
but that the world might be saved through him.
Whoever believes in him will not be condemned,
but whoever does not believe has already been condemned,
because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

The Gospel of the Lord: Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ

Kieran’s summary . . . On this feast of the Trinity, it is a great opportunity to correct our image of God! The first reading proclaims, as Pope Francis often reminds us, that God’s name is “Mercy”. How often we think of God as a moralist, someone who is cold, someone who uses power arbitrarily to control and punish! A whole generation of people have left the Church because they were tired of being scolded by God, or because they were bored by this petty and mean-spirited God. And then we wonder why there are so few vocations to the priesthood and religious life! But these images of God are defective! The problem began in the Garden of Eden when Eve began to form a flawed idea of God. She stopped believing that God was loving and truthful. If we have a wrong name on God in our soul, then the consequences are enormous. To ruin humanity, it is sufficient to ruin our image of God. This is what the serpent did in Eden. In the Gospel passage this Sunday, we get a startling glimpse into the REAL life of God, the corrective to the false perspective of the serpent. It should be a wake-up call for all of us. God loves us so much that he sacrificed his Son for us. We discover that God is not a cold creator who uses his power arbitrarily. He is a loving and providential Father. His Son empties himself for us, even when we crucify him. And the Holy Spirit is speaking in our hearts, giving us the intuition that God is loving and merciful. Once this intuition takes hold in our hearts, then we begin to have the desire to live the life of fullness, the life that is lived by the children of God.

God’s name is “Mercy”. A name is not just abstract information about someone. In the Bible, a  name is linked to the deepest identity of a person. When we discover God’s name, as Moses did, our lives can be transformed.

In the first reading for this feast of the Holy Trinity, the name of the Lord is proclaimed. We discover, upon reading it, that God’s name is “Mercy”. The famous that we read on Sunday from John’s Gospel gives us a startling glimpse into the very life of God:  a life of unrestrained love that does everything to save us. In order to be saved, however, it is essential that we believe in the name of the only-begotten Son of God. But how important is this name? To us, a name seems only a word that acts as a sort of code for recognizing something. But in the Bible, it is quite different: the name reveals the secret identity of someone, their deepest truth. Knowing the name of a person means having experience of him. In a certain sense it means having an authentic contact with his reality. Knowing the name of God is not simply possessing more information: those who know the name of God have a radical change of existence. The great example of this is Moses. At the burning bush, he receives the revelation of the Name and his whole life is changed by it. Why is this? Because knowing the name of God means having truly understood Who He is. And this is something decisive.

In Genesis, Eve begins to believe in a wrong image of God, a god who is not loving and providential. Once the name of God is ruined in our hearts, then we too are ruined. Many people leave the Church because they have the wrong image of God. They consider him a moralist, not a loving Father.

In the story of the fall of Genesis 3, the denigration of the image of God begins in the heart of Eve. She falls into error when she is tempted to think that God is deceitful and bad. To destroy humanity, it is enough to ruin the image of God in his heart; that is, to put a false name on God in his soul. If God is not Father, then what is he? If he is not tenderness, what remains? If God does not love me unconditionally, then I am alone, after all. I must earn the right to exist and survive on my own strength. This leads to an insecure existence derived from an image of God alien to love. In the last part of the last century, an entire generation left the Church because God had been presented to them for a long time as a moralist. This led to a process of de-Christianization. People did not want to stay with a god so unpleasant, so petty. This process is ongoing still. We turn God into a moralist, and use him to scold our young people. Is it any surprise that they flee the Church having being scolded and bored?  And then we wonder why there are so few vocations!

On this feast of the Trinity, let us look at who God really is! He is a loving Father. He is providential. He is not cold. He does not use power arbitrarily. He sent his Son who loves us and gives his life for us. The Holy Spirit enables us to see the loving and fatherly nature of God.

For this reason it is worth celebrating the feast of the Most Holy Trinity: to correct our image of God. Like the disciples on the day of the Resurrection, we need to fix our gaze on the One who was pierced, and rejoice in who He is. We need the Liturgy, the inspiring tradition of the Church and the Word of God to make the name of God shine once again in our hearts. We need to remember that God is Father. He does not use his power in an arbitrary way. He is providential. He does not create in a cold and chemical way, but generates life because he loves life. None of us is a mistake. We need to look at our dear Lord Jesus Christ as he really is: a loving Spouse who gives everything for us, who loves us even when we crucify him. When we see the Father and the Son in this positive light; when we appreciate that they are utterly for us; that is the work of the Holy Spirit in us. It is He who gives us this true intuition of who God is. Once we have this intuition, then we begin to have the desire to live a life of fullness, the life that is lived by the children of God.