Episoder
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One of the great roles of Holy Mother Church is to teach us how to speak to God, to create in our hearts the proper dispositions of religion. She does this especially through her liturgy, where we have a ceremony prepared for us such that all we have to do is enter into it and make ourselves one with it, as far as possible, in order to become holy.One of the most powerful ways in which the Church teaches us the sentiments we should have in our souls, and creates those sentiments in us is through her hymns. There are hundreds upon hundreds of hymns that have been created throughout the centuries, providing the Church with a vast musical repertoire.Among them all, there are two, however, that seem to stand out above the rest, two hymns of sorrow, two hymns concerned with the most lamentable topic possible: death.One is the Dies Irae, about the Last Judgment; the other is the Stabat Mater, about Our Lady witnessing the death of Our Lord.Both were composed in the 1200s; both were used as sequences at Mass and were among the five sequences that were kept by Pope Pius V when he canonized the Tridentine Mass.Both of them were set to music by great composers on their deathbed. Mozart was composing music for the Dies Irae when he died at the age of 35; Pergolesi was composing music for the Stabat Mater when he died at the age of 26.Both of them were lost to the liturgy of the Church when the Novus Ordo Mass got rid of Latin and Gregorian Chant. We are blessed to be able to hold on to them and profit from them by holding on to the traditional Mass.We are more familiar with the Stabat Mater than the Dies Irae because we sing the Stabat Mater whenever we pray the Stations of the Cross during Lent.The Franciscans have a great devotion to the Passion of Our Lord and you know that St. Francis of Assisi received the very wounds of Our Lord in his body. Less than a century after the death of St. Francis, the Franciscan Jacopone da Todi composed the Stabat Mater. His composition is so beautiful and inspiring that over 300 composers have set the words of the hymn to music.The hymns has twenty stanzas. The first four stanzas set the scene by telling the story of what is happening; the next four stanzas make an appeal to the one listening to the hymn to have sympathy for this mother who is standing at the foot of the cross of her dying Son. Then there are ten stanzas addressed directly to Our Lady, making beautiful requests of her. Finally, the hymn ends with two stanzas addressed to Our Lord, asking Him that we may go to Heaven when we die.I would like for us to focus upon those ten stanzas in the middle of the hymn where we make our appeal to Our Lady.
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Once a man went off to the mountains for a hike. When he arrived at the trailhead, he read a sign that said, “For your safety stay on trail”. He did this for a little bit but soon he became curious about the glittery and shiny things that he saw in the forest next to the trail.So, he left the trail and entered into the forest as the sun started going down. As he got deeper into the forest, it got darker and darker. Pretty soon, he was lost. He tried to find his way back to the trail but he could not find it. He kept walking and walking for days without getting anywhere and without the light of the sun ever coming back, as in this forest, it was dark all of the time.The food in his backpack was running out and he finally just sat down on a rock, immersed in the darkness of the forest. A few more days passed and he was beginning to resign himself to death when he finally saw a glimmer of light off in the distance.After a time, he realized that it was not coming from the sun but was coming from a lady who was holding a child. He walked towards the light. He was very weak but he managed to reach the lady. As soon as he arrived at her, she said to him, “Adam, if you are willing to carry my child, I will show you the way out of this forest and up the mountain”.This story represents the history of the human race. God created us and gave us a path to follow. We strayed from that path and plunged our race into sin and the darkness of moral perversity.Centuries passed in a state of darkness for mankind. Finally, a glimmer of light appeared on the horizon. That light was the birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary.Her coming was like the first glimmer of dawn for the human race. It was like the announcement of the arrival of a rescue mission for a dying world.We don’t celebrate many birthdays in the liturgical year, but we celebrate the birthday of Our Lady because her birth is the source of our life. When we say in the Hail Holy Queen that Our Lady is “our life, our sweetness, and our hope”, we are not playing with words. We are completely sincere in saying that Our Lady is our life. We believe that we cannot live without her. We believe that the one who finds her finds life.
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Manglende episoder?
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Having seen how St. Pius X was totally consumed with love for God, we may wonder how he could also have room for a great love for his fellow man. And, we may say that, in the end, there was not enough room, for he died of a broken heart.
We all know that the spiritual life begins with humility. That virtue provides the foundation on which all else is built. But, then, once its roots have been well watered, the soul is able to grow and extend its branches and leaves, until it finally blooms flowers and starts to produce delicious fruits. Those fruits are the works of charity.
Today, let us look at some such works in the early priesthood of our patron: his almsgiving, his poverty of life, and his tirelessness in working for others.
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We know that Our Lord says that “where your heart is, there also your treasure is.” And I believe that this indicates that every man must have some love within him, some predilections, and that it is the central love of his heart that really directs and explains all of his activity.And when we try to plumb the heart of our sainted patron, I do not think that it is too difficult to find what was burning in its depths; indeed, we find there an overwhelming love of God. To say this may seem obvious and even trivial, but I believe that it can be missed in the hype about the many activities of our saint. For this reason, I want to speak today about St. Pius X’s love of God.Really, I believe that it was this great love of God in St. Pius X that makes of him for us our hero. There is a certain sadness that afflicts us at seeing all of the causes dearest to our heart failing in an apostate Western world. God has been forcefully driven from the public sphere by the revolution, the highest places in the Church have been occupied by secularized clerics, and civilization at large has descended into the sewer of base hedonism. Evil seems so triumphant and the blindness it engenders irremediable.We are tempted to ask ourselves: isn’t there anyone around to stand up for the rights of God? Are there any fighters for the good who are left? Must our age be one without champions?And then we look back at that great figure in white, that towering pontiff of 100 years ago who faced off against the same formidable forces that are triumphant today, the same one who said that “evil triumphs when good men do nothing?”And what do we see? We see Modernists cowering in fear, the immoral abashed at their behavior, the heretics hesitating to voice their opinions. We see the good rallied around the peasant Pope, young men and women rushing to consecrate their lives to God and Church, Catholics banding together in confraternities and guilds and political groups to fight the revolution tooth and nail.In short, we see this Rock of a Pope, standing in gigantic proportions, a look of calm and fierce determination on his face, pushing forward step by step into a world of darkness, with an entire army gathering around him, driving back all that is bad and wrong and evil in this world and the world below.This picture is not too far from the truth, as you know! And how can all of this be possible? Because of a most ardent love of God. Because of something we call an interior life.
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When the Israelites were traveling in the desert, God was with them every step of the way. He made His presence manifest to them by appearing as a pillar of cloud during the day and a pillar of fire during the night.He provided for them. He gave directions to them through Moses. He rained down food for them from Heaven every day except the Sabbath. Once, he caused water to flow forth from a rock to slake their thirst. Once, he caused a huge flock of quails to descend upon their camp in order to provide them with meat.Despite this constant presence of God with the Israelites, St. Paul tells us that, with most of them, “God was not well pleased”. God was not pleased with the Israelites because the Israelites were not pleased with God. They were not satisfied with His care for them. They were constantly engaging in complaining, which is the subject of this sermon.Once, when the Israelites came to a certain place in the desert, they started to complain about the food that God was giving them, because He gave them the same thing to eat all of the time. They cried out loud, “Would that we had meat for food! We remember the fish we used to eat without cost in Egypt, and the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now we are famished; we see nothing before us but this manna” (Num. 11:4-6).Consider what is going on in this situation: the Israelites were slaves to the Egyptians in Egypt. They had a terrible life where they had to work all day long under severe taskmasters. The Egyptians were systematically killing their own children. God delivers them from the Egyptians with great miracles. They have now gained freedom.Despite all of this, they are complaining because they don’t have the food that they want. They are looking back at their life of slavery and desiring to have that life back because they could have a variety of food. They are willing for their children to be killed and for them to be slave workers; as long as they get to eat their favorite food again!Bottom line: the Israelites had almighty God Himself taking care of them in the desert, feeding them and protecting them. Despite this fact, they were not content but complained.The same is true for us. God is with us every step of the way of our life. He is providing for us all of the time. Yet we are not happy. We complain.We have been set free from the slavery to the world by our baptism. We are fed with the very Body of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. Yet we feel sorry for ourselves. We think that God is not doing enough. We pine for the material things of this world.
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The role of the priest to preach to the faithful is a difficult one because we have to preach about things that exceed human understanding. Any topic about God is going to be something that is above us and that we are not fully able to grasp.This is particularly true for the topic of today’s sermon: God’s love for us. God has a love for you that exceeds all other loves. Just as God’s power exceeds all other power, just as His wisdom exceeds all other wisdom, so also His love exceeds all other loves.God’s love for us is infinite but we are finite. We only have a limited and finite understanding of an infinite love. What little we are able to understand is just a small part of the reality.How do we know that God loves us? How do we measure the love of God? We know that the essence of love is doing good to another. When you love someone, you look after them, you give them whatever you can so that they can thrive.We know that God has given us everything that we have and everything that we are. But this thought is too vague and often leaves us cold. We just think “everything comes from God” and we move on. I think it is important sometimes to zoom in on a single thing that God has done for us and look at it carefully.I want us to think about the fact that God has given us this Earth as our home, that He created it as a home for us, and that He prepared everything on Earth for us humans. We were the last things that He created. He waited until the end to create Adam and Eve and He said to them, “Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth.”I have made this place for you to rule over!
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As bad as it is to be physically impaired, however, it is even worse to be spiritually impaired. God has not only given us our senses to know reality; He has also given us a mind. We are supposed to use our mind to know the world around us, to understand the truth.We find this difficult because we are wounded by original sin with the wound of ignorance. This makes it laborious for us to discover the truth and it also makes us susceptible to being influenced in the wrong way in regard to the truth. There is a lot of noise for us to sift through.But there is another difficulty that we have independently of that wound. It is the fact that we have the wrong perspective on reality. We tend to think that we are the center of reality because we are at the center of what is perceiving reality. We tend to think that the world revolves around us because we are at the center of our perception of the world.This leads us to having a spiritual impairment or what might be called a “spiritual disability”. It is through the practice of our Catholic faith that we seek to overcome our spiritual impairment and see reality correctly. Our faith assists us to see reality as it is, with God at its center and with us as just little, tiny creatures.When the world turns away from God and exaggerates the rights of man, it increases spiritual disability. Ungodliness in society makes people detached from reality, unable to see reality. It makes people full of pride; it makes them think that they are god, not only that they are the center of reality, but they actually have the power to make reality.When spiritual disability becomes extreme, we give a special name to the condition that the person is in: we call it “madness”. After a century of deifying man, we have reached a point where we can say that a certain madness afflicts modern society. I think that, when people look back on this decade of the 2020s, they might well call it the “decade of madness” one day because society is so far from reality.There are stories of this madness that come out every week. This past week, a woman boxer had to quit a match after 45 seconds because she was being pummeled by a male boxer in the Olympics. Many were rightfully crying out how unfair it was for a man to be boxing against a woman and how it made all of that woman’s efforts useless.
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We live in times that are difficult in the Church and the world, in that they are collapsing in a certain sense. In such times, it is very important that we maintain the theological virtue of hope.People are tempted to think that God has abandoned His Church or abandoned the world, or to think that the grace of God is not working any more, that this world is too far gone. That would be to fall into the sin of despair.Today, however, I would like to speak about the situation in which there is too much hope, when hope goes too far. That is when we trust that some good thing is going to come to us, when in fact we have no reasonable grounds for doing so. For instance, if we thought that God would give us Heaven even if we were in the state of mortal sin, that would be a false hope.Such a false or immoderate hope is referred to as the sin of presumption.
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You belong to a counter-cultural movement called Traditional Catholicism. But the world at large does not at all share your traditional Catholic faith and in some respects is hostile to it.You come here to St. Isidore’s because you want the traditional Catholic faith, the same faith taught by the Apostles and held by Catholics throughout the ages. You come here to be instructed in the same moral law that they followed and to receive the sacraments in the traditional forms that have nourished souls throughout the ages. You come here to put your children in a school where they will be taught and formed in the Catholic faith.Then you leave St. Isidore’s and go out into a world permeated by a post-modern pagan, anti-culture. And there is this struggle to maintain a Catholic identity. What you do away from St. Isidore’s is just as important as what you do here for the maintaining of your faith.In today’s parable, Our Lord teaches us that we have to be just as prudent in attaining our supernatural goal as the world is in attaining its natural ends. We must be smart in using our material resources which come from God.
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I want to tell you an amazing but true story. It is a story you know well. It is about a Jewish man who claimed to be God 2000 years ago. He chose twelve uneducated men as His disciples. After teaching them for three years, He commanded them to go throughout the entire world preaching the message that He had given them.They accomplished this command with incredible success. Over a period of 1000 years, they and their followers built a new civilization called Christendom, a civilization greater than has ever been known in the history of man.But the native peoples in North and South America, as well as in Asia, had to wait many centuries before the message of Our Lord Jesus Christ was preached to them. Catholic missionaries did not even know that these places existed until the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Magellan. As soon as they knew they existed, they went there.In Korea, where Fr. Kim is from, it was not until the early 1600s that Catholicism arrived and it was brought there by a layman. Now, 400 years later, thanks to the efforts of the missionaries, 11% of the population of South Korea is Catholic.Why has there been all of this urgency, throughout the centuries, to bring the Catholic faith to the various nations? Because it is a matter of life and death, eternal life and eternal death. Our Lord said that those who believed and were baptized would be saved while those who did not believe would be condemned. And when He said condemned, He meant condemned to Hell.This is often what motivates souls to pursue a priestly or religious vocation. They realize that the main drama in this life is about the eternal destiny of souls. They realize that the real success after this life is over is going to be the salvation of souls.
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Holy Mother Church dedicates this Sunday to the capital vice of anger. Let us look at three different types of sinful anger and then a story that illustrates a Catholic view on anger.
First type concerns those whom we call “irritable”: they are angry too quickly and for a slight cause. These are people who blow up for no reason or who easily snap. Those who are around them know that they can lose their temper easily.Second type concerns those who are sullen. They are angry for too long because they are continually refreshing the memory of the injury done to them. They stew over their anger. Instead of trying to get rid of it, they foster it within themselves and keep it burning.Third type concerns those who do not rest until they have exacted revenge, or a certain punishment on those who have done them wrong. This is even worse than simply holding a grudge; it entails holding a grudge and passing into action in order to harm the other.The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni
This story has such a Catholic spirit on the question of anger. It shows how dangerous is the spirit of revenge and how we must imitate Our Lord’s spirit of forgiveness. -
We are tempted today by the false idea of religious indifferentism: this is the idea that all religions are equally good, that they all lead to Heaven.The Athanasian Creed is very clear in saying the opposite. Its opening words say the following: “Whoever wills to be in a state of salvation, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith, which except everyone shall have kept whole and undefiled without doubt he will perish eternally. Now the catholic faith is that we worship One God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the substance.”These words, while they represent what we believe, are very jarring to modern ears. Modern people say: “Why is this the case? How is it that we can be damned to Hell for a single false belief? “How can God damn me to Hell for the way that I think? Did He not give me free will? Why would He care what I think?”1. The truth is part of what gets you to Heaven. You cannot get to Heaven without the truth. The truth of the Trinity is a truth about God Himself. It is God telling you Who He is. If God tells you who He is and you refuse to believe it and worship something else, then you are not worshiping the true God. You are worshiping a false god!2. Heresy is a sin against God. We are obliged to obey Him because we are His creatures. If God tells me Who He is and tells me to believe Him, then I sin against Him by rejecting what He has said. I am saying that I do not believe Him. I am saying that I do not want Him. This is why belief in the Trinity was so important for Our Lord. Remember what He said:“Go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19-20). “He who believes and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believes not shall be condemned” (Mk. 16:16)This is why the martyrs throughout the history of the Church were willing to die rather than deny the faith. They realized that when they were being asked to deny the faith, they were being asked to make a choice: lose your physical life or lose your eternal life.
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When Our Lord came on this earth, He issued a new commandment, one that summarized and complemented the ten commandments given to Moses on Mt. Sinai.He did not issue this commandment from a mountain, accompanied by thunder and smoke, but He issued it in the midst of a last supper with His twelve Apostles.It was then that He said, “A new commandment I give unto you: That you love one another, as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another.” (Jn. 13:34)The teaching of Our Lord transformed the world. It made the world Christian and civilized in the truest sense. It did so by teaching the world how to love. He clarified that true love means:We love God above all things. We acknowledge Him as our Father, we worship Him as our God, we seek to honor Him in all that we do. We follow His will. We love Him by keeping His commandments.Love means giving ourselves; it is not about receiving. It is about doing good to others. It is about sacrificing ourselves. It is about spending ourselves; it is about giving away our lives.Giving ourselves for God and for others means suffering. Love requires suffering. It requires that we carry a cross. This is what Our Lord makes clear for us. Do you want to follow the commandment of love? Do you want to be a lover like Christ? Take up your cross! Die on the cross! Our Lord has the most astonishing words to say to us: “He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not up his cross, and followeth me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for me, shall find it.”
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The four sets of Ember Days are a beautiful part of our Catholic heritage. According to Pope Leo the Great, the Ember Days go all the way back to the Apostles. Think about the millions of Catholics for whom the practicing of fast and abstinence on the seasonal Ember Days was just part and parcel of their Catholic life.Despite their age-old practice, they were done away with in 1966 by Pope Paul VI and most Catholics today do not even know what they are.Let us hold on to these important practices so that we can love God more and live our faith better.
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The book of Job tells us that “the life of man upon earth is a warfare”. We are in a battle over our own souls. We are besieged by the cares of this world, by our daily grind, by the relentlessness of life.In this battle, sometimes we need to attack life head-on; at other times, we need to retreat, in order to recuperate our spiritual forces and renew ourselves for the battle. Sometimes, it is by retreating that we are able to gain a victory that otherwise was not possible.The faithful may ask themselves: why do priests, monks, and nuns need to go on retreat? They are doing holy things all of the time. It is clear that the Church thinks it very important for those who have dedicated their lives to God to take this time once a year, in order to maintain their spiritual stamina in the battle for souls.If priests and nuns need this time, how much more do the faithful need it, when they do not have as strong a spiritual life?There are several reasons why retreats are needed for everyone: priests, religious and layfolk.
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This feast represents the first stage of God’s great plan to save mankind from death. It is a mystery of life.We know that one of the most horrible scenes that can be imagined in this life is for children to be slaughtered in front of their parents.This is what happens daily before the face of God. He sees everything that happens in this world. In so many cases, what is happening is that souls are dying before Him because of sin.Sin kills the life of God in our souls and it makes us insensible to spiritual things. We become numb in our souls through sin; we become like spiritual zombies.God the Father cannot stand to see His children dying in this world, and then dying eternally in the next. He wants them to live! And so He decides on a plan to give them life.God decided that He would restore the souls of His children to life through a woman, an extra-ordinary woman. It belongs to women to give life. They bear life in their wombs and they bring it forth into this world.Eve was the first woman to do this. She was meant to be the mother of all the living. But she put her soul to death and then led her husband to the death of sin.This did not make God abandon His plan to have life come into this world through women. No, He decided to bring another woman into the world through whom eternal life would be communicated. Because He wanted her to be able to give life, He made her alive.The Immaculate Conception is about Our Lady being full of life so that she could give life to others. God made it such that, the very first moment of her existence, she should be full of His eternal life. Her soul had physical life and divine life at that moment.
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God is at the origin of two orders in creation, the natural and the supernatural.The natural order concerns God’s material reality and the things of this earth. The supernatural order concerns God’s spiritual reality, the things of Heaven.These two realms are very distant from one another. When we speak of two things being very far from one another, we say it is like the distance between heaven and earth.At the same time, they are connected. God does not separate them into two completely separate realms but He makes there to be an interaction between them. We ourselves are natural creatures but God has elevated us to the supernatural level.Many of the realities that we experience in our everyday natural level also exist on the supernatural level, only they are more elevated and sublime.I want to take one example of this today: that of motherhood. Let us look at the motherhood that God has created in our natural world and then look at supernatural motherhood.
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If you want to listen to the message of Fatima, and you believe that it provides a roadmap for salvation in our difficult times, there are two things you must do to honor Our Lady: recite the Rosary daily and make reparation on the first Saturdays of the month.Our Lady of Fatima asked for the daily recitation of the Rosary each of the six times that she appeared there. She stresses the daily Rosary so much because God has willed to communicate so much power and grace to the Rosary.Pope Leo XIII said, “The rosary is the most excellent form of prayer and the most efficacious means of attaining eternal life. It is the remedy for all our evils, the root of all our blessings.”
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In 1978, four businessmen pooled their resources to found the home improvement chain Home Depot. The point of the store was to provide a place where homeowners could go to buy tools and parts to renovate or repair their house. One of the slogans over the years was, “You can do it. We can help.”Home Depot represents something of the American spirit. We have a go-getter, do it yourself attitude. Why hire someone when you can just figure things out, buy the parts and do it on your own. Doesn’t that save a lot of trouble?What I want to point out in this sermon is that such a spirit is not proper in the realm of religion; it must not be translated to the religious sphere such that we become Home Depot Catholics, such that we pursue a do it yourself salvation.What do I mean by a Home Depot Catholicism or a Do It Yourself Catholicism?Home Depot Catholics come to church merely to acquire the material parts they need to keep their souls going and so attain salvation. Get Mass. Get confession. Get Communion. Throw some money in the collection basket. Go home. Save my soul.This is not the way that Our Lord established His religion, His Mystical Body. He established it in such a way that the members of the Catholic faith are not only united with Him, but they are also united with one another through Him. They all live the same life; they form one body together. And they are meant to live that reality by associating themselves with one another.
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