Fr. JC Maximilian

Of course all baptized people are consecrated to God, and each are called to participate in the building up of the Kingdom of God according to their own state of life and particular circumstances.  The Second Vatican Council, in renewing the ancient phrase “the universal call to holiness,” was echoing what saints have been urging all the Faithful throughout the history of the Church.

However, throughout the history of the Church there have always been men and women who, through a special grace of God, have chosen to follow Christ’s call in a special way; devoting themselves to Him with an “undivided” heart (cf. 1 Cor. 7:34).  These persons are described as living the “consecrated life,” and in 1996 Pope John Paul II wrote an Apostolic Letter, Vita Consecrata, devoted to those who have chosen this way of following the Lord.

Often when we think of the Consecrated Life, we think of nuns, and religious sisters and brothers, and certainly they are some of the more common examples of persons living the Consecrated Life.  Yet there are other forms of Consecrated Life.  There are hermits, consecrated virgins living in the world, the various secular institutes and societies of apostolic life — and there are the consecrated widows and widowers.

Since apostolic times there have been consecrated widows (cf. 1 Tm. 5:5, 9-10; 1 Cor. 7:8), and in his Apostolic Letter, Pope John Paul II encouraged the renewal of this practice, while adding widowers.  “These women and men, through a vow of perpetual chastity as a sign of the Kingdom of God, consecrate their state of life in order to devote themselves to prayer and the service of the Church” (John Paul II, Vita Consecrata #7).

Now you may be wondering why I am talking about consecrated widows and widowers, well there has been a movement of the Spirit in my life.  As some of you may know, my father died about 14 months ago.  The last 15 years of his life, he and my mother went to Mass almost everyday and lived a life of devotion.  I am not saying that they were saints (and I certainly am not), but they were actively and consciously trying to be the best Christians that they could be.  Several months after my father died, my mother mentioned to me that she knew that God was not calling her to marry again, but that she wanted to dedicate her life to prayer and serving the Church.  I gave her a letter that St. Ambrose wrote to the consecrated widows in Milan back in the 4th century, thinking that it might provide her something of a “rule” which she could adapt to the 21st century for herself.  She came back to me and asked if they still had consecrated widows in the Church, and I told her that I did not know.

So I did what any priest/son of the 21st century would do — I googled (OK, I actually used Pro Life Search)  “consecrated widows.”  I found that in some other countries, the bishops have resurrected the order, and while the Vatican is working on a Rite of Consecration of Widows/Widowers, in the U.S. there was no consecrated widows/widowers as done before the local bishop for the local diocese.  However, the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity (S.O.L.T.) had started a group of consecrated widows within their religious community.  I passed the contact number on to my mother, and to her delight she found out that two members of the group lived in the Diocese of Trenton.  They gather monthly for prayer and study/formation, so my mother and another woman joined them.  Then they were five, and the five of them attended this week the national meeting of the group.  Right now the group, which has only been around for 4 or 5 years, only take yearly promises, and the five from New Jersey made or renewed their consecration.  So my mother is now a consecrated widow of the S.O.L.T.  They promise celebacy, to live simply, and obedience to their rule.  They pray the Liturgy of the Hours, the Rosary and Mass daily.  They reflect on one of the rules in their Rule each day in meditation, they will continue to gather monthly for prayer and formation/study, and they have taken St. Josephine Bakhita as their patron saint, with an apostolate (at least of prayer) of helping women who are being exploited.

But it continues.  I have started a School of Community (part of Communion and Liberation, one of the new ecclesial movements) at my parish, and someone in the group asked me if I knew anything about consecrated widows, so I referred her to my mother.  And today another woman asked me about consecrated widows.  Clearly the Spirit is moving.

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The ashes that we use today are meant to remind of some important truths.

First, they remind us that we are sinners. Although we are the children of God, at the same time we are still children of this fallen world. Ashes are lifeless dust. Insofar as we still give in to our tendencies to selfishness and sin, we too are lifeless dust. Sin separates us from God, who is the source of all life. Without God’s redeeming spirit in us, we would have no hope of eternal life.

Second, the ashes reminds us that our sins, cause damage. These ashes are made from the palm branches we used on Palm Sunday last year. We waved the palms as a symbol of Christ’s victory over sin, however our sins forfeit that victory. Our sins destroy the life that God means us to live, just as the palm branches from last year’s Palm Sunday were destroyed to make these ashes.

Most importantly, the ashes remind us that in spite of our sins, in spite of our deep-seeded selfishness, God has not given up on us. Christ is our Redeemer! He claims us for his own. We still have a mission in His Kingdom; Jesus still calls us to be His ambassadors.

Yes, we are marked with ashes because we are sinners, but the mark is given in the sign of Christ’s cross, which won for us the grace of a fresh start and a new life. We are marked on our foreheads because Christ Jesus wants us to go boldly into the world as his representatives.

This is what St. Paul is talking about in today’s second reading. The Christians in Corinth had just gone through a crisis which had divided their church community. St. Paul is worried about them, so he encourages them to be generous with Christ, to put their whole lives under His rule. “We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God!”

Each of us needs to hear that call. We must stop resisting Christ, and put our whole lives under His rule. We resist Christ in two ways. First, we take what does not belong to us. These are sins of commission, and includes dishonesty, greed, lust, and gluttony. Second, we keep to ourselves what we should give to others. These are sins of omission; when we hold back help, patience, kindness, and forgiveness, we fail to be like Christ. One sin of omission is so common that we do not even notice it anymore, but it causes untold damage. It consists in failing to be true to our primary mission as Christians, the mission of spreading the faith. As St. Paul put it, “we are ambassadors for Christ, as if God were appealing through us.”

As we enter the Lenten Season, let us ask the Holy Spirit to enlighten our consciences so that we become more aware of how we have been resisting God’s call in our lives, and let us be moved to contrition. Let us ponder one of the phrases that can be said when we receive the ashes today, “Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel.”

[Due to the short, and busy, time from last Sunday and Ash Wednesday, this homily is largely paraphrased from one of the homilies for Ash Wednesday 2007 on ePriest.com]

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    Today’s Gospel reading is part of Jesus’ first major sermon, as recorded in St. Luke’s Gospel.  It is commonly called by Scripture Scholars as the “Sermon on the Plain,” and it serves a similar purpose as the “Sermon on the Mount” that is described in St. Matthew’s Gospel.  In St. Luke’s account, Jesus is standing in a grassy meadow in the foothills of the mountains of Galilee.  He is surrounded by a “great crowd,” and in the section of the sermon that we read today, Jesus is painting a simple, yet powerful portrait of a true Christian, or child of God.

Of course the true Christian is nothing else but a follower of Christ – in fact a true Christian is another Christ.  So as Jesus describes the characteristics of a child of God, Jesus, the Son of God, is indirectly giving us a portrait of Himself.  Jesus is showing us what kind of Lord He really is – a lavish one.

There are NO LIMITS to Jesus’ love and generosity.  No matter how ungrateful we are to Him, Jesus is still generous with us.  If we disobey Him, oppose Him, insult Him, or even abandon Him, Jesus keeps on loving us.  Quite simply, Jesus does not give up on us.  This is the kind of God that we are called to serve; one who places no limits on His generosity, no limits on His love.  God is always looking for more ways to shower us with his goodness.  And it is this limitless love of God that changes hearts.  It even changes the world.

Have you ever seen the movie, The Scarlet and the Black?  It came out in 1983, and starred Christopher Plummer and Gregory Peck.  It is based on the true story of Msgr. Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish priest who worked in the Vatican when Rome was being occupied by the Nazis, and Colonel Herbert Kappal, the Commander of the occupying Nazis.  Msgr. O’Flaherty organized a secret network to hide and protect the Jews who were being persecuted, and allied soldiers who had been shot down.  The drama of the story is the ongoing battle of wits between Msgr. O’Flaherty and Colonel Kappel.  The Irish Msgr. outsmarts the Nazis long enough to save thousands of lives.

The Nazis get penned in when the allied forces reach the outskirts of Rome, and Colonel Kappal arranges a secret meeting with Msgr. O’Flaherty.  Msgr. O’Flaherty is flabbergasted when  his unscrupulous enemy, Colonel Kappal, asks him to use his underground network to get his wife and children to safety in Switzerland.  At first Msgr. O’Flaherty is angered by the gall of Colonel Kappal, and chastises the Colonel for his evil ways, and then walks away in anger.  Colonel Kappal’s face is downfallen and filled with anxiety over what will happen to his family.  He is captured by the allied forces, and it is only when he is being interrogated that he discovers that Msgr. O’Flaherty, after his anger had cooled off, had a change of heart and successfully saved the Colonel’s family.  Msgr. O’Flaherty remembered that he was a Christian, and as a priest was truly an alter Christus – another Christ.  Colonel Kappal spent the rest of the war as a prisoner, and Msgr. O’Flaherty visited him regularly.  Eventually Colonel Kappal repented of his evil actions during the war, and was received into the Church.  This is just one example of the power of God’s limitless love.  God never gives up on us because He knows that He can save us, change us, and lead us closer to Him.

How often are we like Msgr. O’Flaherty, who at first allowed his anger to cause him to forget that he was a Christian?  Pride, shame, fear are some of the other things that can cause us to forget that we are Christians, called to be Christ to all those around us.  It is through us, the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ, that Jesus continues to live incarnate in the world so that all people can encounter His love in a deeply personal way.  While it would be best if we never forgot to be Christian in our daily activities, we should all be like Msgr. O’Flaherty who did put aside his anger, and put on Christ.

The limitless love of God is the reason why we should also NEVER doubt God’s forgiveness.  One of the Devil’s oldest tricks is to convince us that our sins are just too heinous to be forgiven.  Discouragement is one of Satan’s favorite disguises.  He loves to make us feel discouraged, because that takes away our hope.

Nothing can be further from the truth.  God’s mercy is like a huge furnace of love, and even our biggest sins are just like drops of water.  When we cast them into the furnace of God’s mercy the vanish.  As the psalmist put it in today’s Responsorial Psalm, “The Lord is kind and merciful.  As far as the east is from the west, so far has He put our transgressions from us.”

We should NEVER doubt God’s love and forgiveness.  When Jesus was hanging from the cross, looking down on the very people who had unjustly condemned Him and crucified Him, He said, “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.”  Colonel Kappal came to know the mercy of God.  He, who had ordered the arrest and death of so many people, did not become discouraged.  He humbly and honestly laid his sins before Jesus, Crucified and Risen, and allowed Jesus to redeem him.

If there is something buried in your heart, that you have hidden from God because you think that God will not be able to forgive you, NOW is the time to uncover it and lay it at the feet of Christ.  Jesus already knows what it is, and He has been longing for you to turn it over to Him, so that He can free you from it.  Do so now, in this Mass, and then make a definitive break with it by coming to the sacrament of Reconciliation.  We hear Confessions every Saturday; from 3:15 p.m. until 4 p.m. at St. Anthony’s, and from 3:45 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. at Our Lady of Sorrows.

If there is someone in your life whom you have not forgiven, then decide right now to forgive them.  We are God’s children, therefore we have His grace flowing through our hearts.  We need to access that grace to have the strength to forgive and start over.

When Jesus comes into our hearts again in Holy Communion, let us all thank Jesus for His limitless love, and let us promise to do our best to imitate God’s limitless love this week, so that as Christians we will be faithful reproductions of this beautiful portrait of Christ Jesus.  By being channels of God’s limitless love, we will bring people to Jesus, we will change hearts – we will participate in Christ’s love which will change the world.

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My diocese has a teen oriented website called, RealFaithTV (see the link on my sidebar), and one of the features of that site is a “Ask Father” section where the teens can send questions. I am one of the people who answers these questions. Here is my response to one of these questions, recently sent to me.

This question is from: Peggy
I was watching Fr. Groeschel one Sunday evening on EWTN and was confused about something he was talking about. He said that if we do not “shout it out” from the rooftops about our sins, that these sins will be revealed to others. My question is: Why bother with a confession that is done privately? Will our sins be revealed to others in the afterlife even when we have been to confession?

It is difficult for me to answer this question directly, because I am not sure what Fr. Groeschel was speaking about. We do need to “shout it out from the rooftops” that Jesus Christ, through His Passion, Death and Resurrection, has redeemed us from our sins. Elsewhere in Scripture it is written, “For there is nothing hidden that will not become visible, and nothing secret that will not be known and come to light” (Lk. 8:16). Jesus says those words in His teaching about not lighting a lamp and then putting it under a basket. The Good News of Jesus Christ can not be kept as a private, secret part of our life. By our baptism we are all called to publicly witness to Jesus – really we should help people encounter Jesus so that they too can develop a personal relationship with Him.

I am not sure how Fr. Groeschel related this to the sacrament of confession, so let me just briefly discuss the development of this sacrament. It is very important to keep in mind the spiritual reality that the Holy Spirit teaches us, particularly through the letters of St. Paul, that all the members of the Church form the Mystical Body of Christ Jesus. We are all parts, or members, of one Body. Jesus remains incarnate through His Church. We are His hands and feet and eyes and ears. When we commit a sin it has an effect on the entire Body of Christ. My sin does not just damage my relationship with Jesus, but on the supernatural, spiritual plane it damages everyone.

Throughout the Gospels Jesus speaks about forgiving sins, and caps it off with His words at the Last Supper when He takes the cup of wine and says, “This is my blood, the blood of the New Covenant, to be poured out in behalf of many for the forgiveness of sins” (Mt. 26:28). Jesus passes on this power to forgive sins to the Apostles (the first bishops, and bishops are the fullness of the ministerial priesthood), on Easter Sunday night when He says, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive men’s sins, they are forgiven them; if you hold them bound, they are held bound” (Jn. 20:22-23).

In the early Church, because they strongly emphasized the Mystical Body of Christ, the sacrament of penance was done publicly. Penitents would approach the bishop on Ash Wednesday to confess their sins, often in front of everyone in the church. Then they would be given a public penance, usually this entailed wearing a special garment which identified them as a penitent, which they would perform during Lent, and the bishop would reconcile them on Holy Thursday, welcoming them back to the Table of the Lord to receive Holy Communion. In the Fifth century, Pope St. Leo the Great wrote a letter to bishops that confirmed the practice of private confession of sins. So both public and private confessions existed for several centuries in the Church. Starting in the Seventh Century, with Irish monks, the practice of private confession became much more the norm in the Church. On the one hand, the privacy encouraged many people who were too embarrassed to confess their sins publicly to receive the grace of Jesus’ sacrament of Divine Mercy. On the other hand, it also encouraged more honest confessions. Sometimes, even today, people think that they can hide their sins by staying hidden in the crowd, but we really cannot hid our sins from God. If we do not humbly and honestly confess all of our sins, utterly throwing ourselves into the merciful hands of God, then our sins are not forgiven. Not because God is mean or unable to forgive our sins, but because He will not force His love and mercy on us against our will. If we are unwilling to confess our sins, that means that we are holding on to them and not giving them to Jesus to have them redeemed by His Holy Cross.

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Welcome to my new blog. I recently found out about StBlogs.net. I have been blogging, via Blogger, for about two years. I hope to move all my posts from my old site to here.

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How many of you have ever been to Niagara Falls? It is a pretty awesome sight. Recently I heard a story about a great circus performer named Blondin who stretched a long steel cable across Niagara Falls. As is typical, there were strong winds at the Falls, and without a safety net, Blondin amazed the crowd of spectators by walking, running, even dancing across the tightrope. He even took a wheelbarrow full of bricks and pushed it across the cable from one side of the Falls to the other. Then the great Blondin asked the crowd, “How many of you believe that I could push a person across the wire in the wheelbarrow?” Everyone cheered and raised their hands high because all of them believed that he could do it. “Then,” asked Blondin, “would one of you please volunteer to be that person?” As quickly as the hands went up, they went back down. Not a single person would volunteer to ride in the wheelbarrow and to trust his life to Blondin (from “Hot Illustrations”, copyright 2001 Youth Specialties, Inc.).

Each one of us here today believe in Jesus Christ. That’s why we came to Mass, but how much have we put that faith into practice? How often are we content to sit in the boat with Jesus and listen to His teachings and feel the comfort of His presence, but when He asks something of us, when He pushes us to leave our comfort zone, we resist? Jesus’ love and mercy is great, but we do not want the Cross, the real change of heart.

In this weekend’s readings we have wonderful examples of discipleship. In our first reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah we hear about his call to be a prophet. Isaiah was praying in the Temple, something he had done many times before, when God graced him with a vision of Heaven. After seeing the magnificence of the Lord sitting on His throne in Heaven, surrounded by the angels, Isaiah is humbled, and recognizes his own sinfulness and unworthiness. However, his call to be a prophet for the Most High is not determined by his abilities, power or self-worth. Rather it is determined by God’s summons. He recognizes that God is the deepest longing of his heart, the only source for true and everlasting happiness, so even without knowing all that the Lord will ask of him he says, “Here I am, send me!”

St. Paul, likewise, in today’s second reading, is humble and says, “For I am the least of the apostles, not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am.”

Finally, in today’s Gospel we hear about the call of the first Apostles. Jesus was not a stranger to Peter. Earlier in St. Luke’s Gospel, some of the miracles of Jesus are described, including the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law. It is because of this familiarity with Jesus, that Peter is willing to take Jesus just off the shore so that He might preach without being pressed in by the crowd. Imagine Peter’s reaction when Jesus asks him to “Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch.” Peter, James and John are the professional fisherman, while Jesus is trained as a carpenter. Fishermen know that the best time to catch fish is at night, not during the day, and Peter, James and John had been hard at it all night and caught nothing. They were tired and disappointed. Why does Peter do what Jesus asks him to do? Peter doesn’t obey because he understands; he doesn’t obey because he can figure it out. He obeys only for one reason: because Christ is the one issuing the command: “Master… at your command I will lower the nets.” Jesus knocks Peter out of his “comfort zone,” and Peter steps into Christ’s comfort zone. Peter recognizes, without fully understanding, the Divine in Jesus; that He is the Way, the Truth and the Life, and he obeys Jesus. St. John Chrysostom teaches, “God does not need our work, but He does need our obedience” (Homilies on St. Matthew’s Gospel, #56). In reward for his humility and obedience, Peter catches a great number of fish. In this wonderful, natural event, Peter sees the supernatural working. He sees the catch as a gift from God, and like Isaiah, recognizing that he is in the presence of God’s love, Peter acknowledges his sinfulness and unworthiness. And Jesus calls him.

“The awareness of God’s holiness and of our condition as sinners does not separate men from God, but rather brings men closer to him. Moreover, once a man has been converted, he declares his faith openly and becomes an apostle. He feels that God’s intentions are now within his reach, and they become lovable to him. His life then takes on its deepest meaning and value” (Pope John Paul II, Homily, February 6, 1983).

God is also calling us to step out of our comfort zone. Jesus is asking us to put out into deep water. As baptized Christians, we all share in the mission that Jesus gives Peter of being “fishers of men.”

Our comfort zone is made of three main sectors. First we need to look at our relationship with God. Maybe in the back of your mind you have thought that you should pray more or better. Maybe God has been nudging you to come to the Sacrament of Penance, and you have been ignoring Him. There are things we can all do to learn more about our faith, but so often we resist because “we don’t have the time.”

Another sector of our comfort zone is our own character and inner integrity. What is the area of our life that God is asking us to exercise more discipline over? Is there a hidden habit of dishonesty or self-indulgence we need to leave behind?

Finally there is the sector of our relationships with other people. Maybe we need to forgive someone, or need to ask forgiveness from someone. Maybe we need to get out of a bad relationship that is dragging us down and away from Christ. Maybe we have been neglecting a relationship. If we truly love our neighbors, then we will want them to come closer to Jesus since He is the only source of eternal life. Yet too often we fail to witness to Christ because it makes us feel uncomfortable. We do not want to leave our comfort zone. However, there can be no greater joy than bringing others to Jesus.

It surely made St. Peter uncomfortable, as a professional fisherman, to row back out into deep water in broad daylight, but he did it because he trusted Jesus, and our Lord asked him to, and his nets with filled to overflowing.

We say we believe in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. We must put that faith into practice. Jesus is asking us to “put out into deep water.” It may make us uncomfortable, but don’t settle for mediocre happiness. Leave everything and follow Christ. Say, “Here I am Lord, send me!”

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