WEDNESDAY HOMILY: Faith Straightens our Priorities
"My desire is to belong to God. Do not, then, hand me back to the world. Do not try to tempt me with material things. Let me attain pure light. Only on my arrival there can I be fully a human being. Give me the privilege of imitating the passion of my God. If you have him in your heart, you will understand what I wish. You will sympathise with me because you will know what urges me on." -St Ignatius of Antioch
PrintHYTHE, KENT, UK (Catholic Online) - "He was such an amazing orator. He built roads, rails, and built up the economy. He helped so many people. He made you proud to be a fellow countrymen." He just had one little problem. He killed millions of people in concentration camps. Adolph Hitler was elected legally. He passed laws legally. He did nothing illegal.
As a teenager in Europe, when I heard elderly people who had seen him speak, talk about how great a man he was, I was a bit shocked. History has made it clear that his priorities were more skewed than any. It doesn't matter if he got a lot of things right. The most important thing he got terribly wrong.
Today in America, there is a similar blindness as there was in Nazi Germany. We need to check our priorities.
There are many who would point out that we should not be so concerned about the fundamental right to life, because there are many other issues that are also important. However, if we can't get the first and most important human right correct, what are we doing?
Until abortion is once again made illegal and children in the womb are protected by law and by constitutional right to life that others now enjoy, we have got it all wrong. Unless we are willing to put the right people in government offices that have their priorities straight, we are wasting our time.
In today's Gospel, the Lord Jesus tells us, "you pay your tithe of mint and rue and all sorts of garden herbs and neglect justice and the love of God! These you should have practiced, without neglecting the others." (Luke 11:42). In other words, we are getting fixated on what is much less important to the detriment of what is most important.
When Jesus speaks to the Pharisees we need to allow his words to land in our hearts undefended. Let him tell us plainly without self-justification, "Woe to you! You are like unseen graves upon which people walk." Why? Why is the Catholic Church like the trampled dead under the feet of the masses? Because we are not living our faith! We have mixed up our priorities.
If you question this assertion, just look around at our Catholic families. That laundry list in the first reading is all too familiar: "sexual vice, impurity, and sensuality, the worship of false gods and sorcery; antagonisms and rivalry, jealousy, bad temper and quarrels, disagreements, factions and malice, drunkenness, orgies and all such things."
The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us about mortal sin, "Unrepented, it brings eternal death." This is a dogma, or most certain revealed truth of our faith, yet most Catholics live like the walking dead, moral zombies who are not aware that the soul in mortal sin lives a kind of spiritual death.
A people caught in sin generates a kind of hell on earth, a civilization where there is a habitual rejection of God. On the other hand, when we live in grace, life on earth becomes not a utopia, but a kind of heaven, where beauty, truth, and goodness flow into all sectors of public life, leavening culture, art, science, economic and political spheres.
So how do we straighten our priorities?
The Catholic Church needs a year of faith.
In this way, Catholics might just begin making their decisions based on things that really matter.
Right now, the average Joe Lunchbox in the pew makes most of his decisions as dead weight moves down a river, going with the current of the times. He views God through the eyes of the world rather than viewing the world through the eyes of God. He has become secularized.
Time to get things straight.
If every Catholic based their daily life decisions centered on their faith and all the implications it has for the public sector, the United States would be a very different country, and therefore the world would be a very different place.
The Second Vatican Council said that the Church "is sent forth into the whole world as the light of the world and the salt of the earth." (Lumen Gentium 9) When will the Church be seen as the light of the world? When it is rid itself of the spirit of this age and secularization.
St Ignatius of Antioch lived in a very hostile time, when a powerful Roman government did not see the value of faith in Jesus Christ. In fact he was condemned and martyred because he committed crimes against the state for he did not worship the emperor or the Roman gods. Is this much different of the absolute intolerance of the dictatorship of relativism?
God is calling us to great sanctity in our times to witness to the truth. He is calling us to a more difficult and subtle kind of martyrdom - simply having priorities based on the ...
As a teenager in Europe, when I heard elderly people who had seen him speak, talk about how great a man he was, I was a bit shocked. History has made it clear that his priorities were more skewed than any. It doesn't matter if he got a lot of things right. The most important thing he got terribly wrong.
Today in America, there is a similar blindness as there was in Nazi Germany. We need to check our priorities.
There are many who would point out that we should not be so concerned about the fundamental right to life, because there are many other issues that are also important. However, if we can't get the first and most important human right correct, what are we doing?
Until abortion is once again made illegal and children in the womb are protected by law and by constitutional right to life that others now enjoy, we have got it all wrong. Unless we are willing to put the right people in government offices that have their priorities straight, we are wasting our time.
In today's Gospel, the Lord Jesus tells us, "you pay your tithe of mint and rue and all sorts of garden herbs and neglect justice and the love of God! These you should have practiced, without neglecting the others." (Luke 11:42). In other words, we are getting fixated on what is much less important to the detriment of what is most important.
When Jesus speaks to the Pharisees we need to allow his words to land in our hearts undefended. Let him tell us plainly without self-justification, "Woe to you! You are like unseen graves upon which people walk." Why? Why is the Catholic Church like the trampled dead under the feet of the masses? Because we are not living our faith! We have mixed up our priorities.
If you question this assertion, just look around at our Catholic families. That laundry list in the first reading is all too familiar: "sexual vice, impurity, and sensuality, the worship of false gods and sorcery; antagonisms and rivalry, jealousy, bad temper and quarrels, disagreements, factions and malice, drunkenness, orgies and all such things."
The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us about mortal sin, "Unrepented, it brings eternal death." This is a dogma, or most certain revealed truth of our faith, yet most Catholics live like the walking dead, moral zombies who are not aware that the soul in mortal sin lives a kind of spiritual death.
A people caught in sin generates a kind of hell on earth, a civilization where there is a habitual rejection of God. On the other hand, when we live in grace, life on earth becomes not a utopia, but a kind of heaven, where beauty, truth, and goodness flow into all sectors of public life, leavening culture, art, science, economic and political spheres.
So how do we straighten our priorities?
The Catholic Church needs a year of faith.
In this way, Catholics might just begin making their decisions based on things that really matter.
Right now, the average Joe Lunchbox in the pew makes most of his decisions as dead weight moves down a river, going with the current of the times. He views God through the eyes of the world rather than viewing the world through the eyes of God. He has become secularized.
Time to get things straight.
If every Catholic based their daily life decisions centered on their faith and all the implications it has for the public sector, the United States would be a very different country, and therefore the world would be a very different place.
The Second Vatican Council said that the Church "is sent forth into the whole world as the light of the world and the salt of the earth." (Lumen Gentium 9) When will the Church be seen as the light of the world? When it is rid itself of the spirit of this age and secularization.
St Ignatius of Antioch lived in a very hostile time, when a powerful Roman government did not see the value of faith in Jesus Christ. In fact he was condemned and martyred because he committed crimes against the state for he did not worship the emperor or the Roman gods. Is this much different of the absolute intolerance of the dictatorship of relativism?
God is calling us to great sanctity in our times to witness to the truth. He is calling us to a more difficult and subtle kind of martyrdom - simply having priorities based on the ...
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Very touching and excellently written.
Thank you. This is a very inspiring article which gives the real truth. God Bless you Father.
Good morning, Isaiah 65:16 states in the NIV, "Whoever invokes a blessing in the land will do by the God of truth. He who takes an oath in the land will swear by the God of truth. For the past troubles will be forgotten and hidden from my eyes." Thus saith the Lord God of the Holy Scriptures. The question is does man know the God of truth? If man professes to honor God and follow the way of Jesus Christ man actually has made a vow to God and to Jesus Christ. A vow is, also, an oath, an oath of allegiance such as the Pledge of Allegiance Americans say to renew and profess their honor and devotion to the establishment of the country they live in to protect the land and what freedom means to those of that land. When man comes to Jesus Christ man is making a vow, actually it is a marriage vow, to love, honor and obey the desires of God through our belief that Jesus Christ is His Son and man is saved through the atoning blood suffered at Calvery for redeemption of sins. And, thus, man is indebted to Jesus Christ, The Master, for setting the prisoners of the sinful nature free. Now, the saved man is to be in bondage to Christ and not the flesh nature of the old creature. And with Salvation from mans own unrighteousness, the saved man gives graditude to God, mans Creator because of His gracious heart for calling man to reconciliation with God, Therefore, man is to stand up for what Thus Saith the Lord God in word and in deed. Those with Spirit eyes see the world as it is and the forked tongue of those who wear sheeps clothing yet are wolves in disguies. The God of truth convicts mans soul of error. Yet, man needs to, it's a mandate, to payheed and follow The Voice of Conviction of Righteousness, God's Righteousness, thru the Holy Spirit. As we watch our world today in the year of our Lord 2012, we see the fruits of deceit, the cloaks of unrighteousness, and the power struggle between Light and Dark, between good and evil...Step back and look at just the USA and observe the wave of spiritual corruption, moral decay that has been occurring over the past 30 to 50 years. The promoting of killing unborn babies, the promoting the acts of perversion called homosexuality and the attempts to bring down the church of Jesus Christ beginning with the Roman Catholic Church. This is truth of the modern world as we know it today. We, true believers of Jesus Christ, see that which is of God and that which is not. that which is a lie and that which is not. Adolph Hilter went to Catholic Schools, He was a great orator. He knew how to take control thru communication for the control of the masses and yet look what deception he brought forth thru the massive murders of women, children and men for whatever his reason was. Therefore, as we look back, does man learn about the cloak of unrighteousness and the forked tongue? Only if the Holy Spirit is present to show the saved man The Way , The Life and The Truth. A blessing is not invoked in the land if man is not doing the desires of God. Has anyone ever really sat back and thought what a blessing really is? Nevertheless, A man's word is his honor as old saying goes. It is the inward character of a man shaped and molded by the Great Hands of God with the Refiners Fire purifying the very soul of man that produces the integrity, the honesty, the alligance to the Holy One, Jesus Christ, for mans inner being has been washed and made whole thru the atoning blood and therefore man can go on and be productive in a world that God has blessed those He has called by His name to produce a new garden of righteousness and a new world of faith, strength, and power thru the Holy Spirit. If there is no peace in the world it is because there is no Jesus. For peace in the world, beginning within our own little world within ourselves, we have to know Jesus and then man can see what Jesus Christ saw. .....And then weep for the lost and the hurting and the weak to be saved from destruction but, also, from the eternal flames of fire, Gods Wrath.
Very well written. Very clear.
Paul-Emile Leray
Very well written. Very clear.
Paul-Emile Leray
This priest is right on. I would love to read more of his writings. First things first! Year of Faith! Being fully Catholic! Love it!