Christ Truly Present

Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of the Lord

Holy Cross Parish, 13 June 2009

“… how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from dead works to worship the living God.”

One of the things which has come up time and again in my vacation reading for this year are all the opinion polls that claim to give us some insight into what American Catholics think and believe. Opinion polls as such have been with us for years. They are nothing new, but what seems to be new is a tendency on the part of some people participating in the polls to present themselves as “Catholic” even though they don’t go to Mass and certainly don’t believe what the Church believes and teaches. I am not saying they should not call themselves Catholic. I am simply asking how they can present themselves as part of a group when they don’t hold to its principles. Maybe it’s just that there never used to be so many opinion polls, but then again, once upon a time people had enough decency or shame not to speak out in public on matters where they had no real part. Being a poor or bad anything, Catholic included, ought to be reason enough to hold one’s tongue.

These opinion polls touch on a variety of topics but I have to say that I am doubly saddened when these secular opinion polls confuse people by placing in doubt the faith of the average Catholic in the pew when it comes to the great doctrine which today’s Feast of Corpus Christi, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of the Lord, explains and celebrates. Recent polls would claim that most Catholics do not hold to the teaching of the Catechism which is the faith of all times concerning the real presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. In the Catechism we read: “1377 The Eucharistic presence of Christ begins at the moment of the consecration and endures as long as the Eucharistic species subsist. Christ is present whole and entire in each of the species and whole and entire in each of their parts, in such a way that the breaking of the bread does not divide Christ.”

Shared ignorance is bad enough, but among the people I’ve been reading this summer and who are genuinely troubled by the results of these polls, there are those who take the pollsters’ information at face value and rush to find explanations for what they would class as a major crisis of faith within the Church at this moment in time. For some of them these doubts in the real presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist seem to be a new thing. In their articles they express very strong views concerning the reasons for what in any case must be described as a lack of faith within the body Catholic. I have run into any number of writers who blame faithlessness and ignorance regarding the true nature of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass on the poor state of Catholic liturgy. They blame on the way we celebrate Mass the ignorance or error concerning basic Catholic teaching of some people who may not even be practicing Catholics.

The longer I live the less ready I am to accept things at face value, without a challenge or some measure of analysis. In this case I’ve asked myself, “is that so? Is there something wrong with the way we celebrate the Eucharistic Sacrifice?” Granted, we always need to ask ourselves if we are truly devout in the way we participate at Mass. Furthermore, every priest with responsibility for the faith life of his parish has a particularly long examination of conscience to make with regard to how Mass is celebrated. Most importantly, he has to examine his conscience in terms of whether he has done enough to teach his people the doctrine of the True Presence of Christ Jesus, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, under the forms of bread and wine, and to teach them that the consecration changes those elements not for just a moment but really and permanently. The priest is duty bound to explain what is required for a worthy reception of Holy Communion: what it means to be in the state of grace before we dare approach Holy Communion; what is the sense of the one hour fast before Holy Communion; what the proper decorum is in church in terms of the way we dress and how we behave – especially in terms of the role of silence in the presence of the King of kings and Lord of lords. Like it or lump it, in the case of Holy Cross Parish, for example, Father Joe ends up being the enforcer. Your parish priest has no small role to play in seeing that you understand and are able to profess the faith of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church and in particular that you hold to what the Council of Trent expressed so well: “Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly his body that he was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation.” (CCC 1376)

To go back to my vacation reading, I doubt if the problem is as simple as to say there must be something wrong with the way we worship today if people have doubts about the faith and specifically about Jesus being really and truly present here in the Eucharist and reserved here in our Tabernacle. Poor catechesis over time is probably a bigger part of the problem, but even there to claim that alone is the cause would not be enough. The opinion polls might be an undesirable novelty, but weakness of faith and doubts are not new to our history. Time and again in the life of the Church over these two thousand years there have been priests even, men with exceptional training and knowledge, who have doubted this great truth. Part of the history of the feast of Corpus Christi and the spectacular processions held in many places throughout the world on this feast is to commemorate any number of Eucharistic miracles worked by our loving Lord, Who never leaves His flock untended, to bring these doubting priests back to faith and defend the faith of God’s People. I had the privilege of participating in the procession at Orvieto not far from Rome back as a seminarian and it really was beautiful and unforgettable. I don’t know of any really big processions in the United States, although I know of some which have begun in the last ten years and promise to grow and develop.

The feast of Corpus Christ is a time for us to celebrate our faith and thank the Lord Jesus for having given to us His Church His Body and Blood, as communion with Him and as nourishment for our journey through this life with our hearts set on the world to come, on eternity with God. Take this day as an opportunity for you to renew within your own heart and mind your faith, your appreciation of this great mystery. The pride and joy of this parish, the Adoration Chapel, offers to one and all an additional opportunity at any time of the day or night to be with Jesus, living and true, even though not visible in His human flesh as He was upon this earth.

Take this Solemnity of the Body and Blood of the Lord as an opportunity to see whether you are fully aware of the faith you are called to profess. How do you prepare for Sunday Mass? How do you come into church? How do you dress? Check out the way you genuflect when you come in or if the old joints no longer permit such bends how you bow to recognize Jesus enthroned in the Tabernacle. Let us check ourselves on our standing, sitting and kneeling, on how we participate consciously in this sacred action which brings Christ to us and binds us to His Sacrifice for our salvation upon the Cross.

When we were children our parents and teachers spent a goodly amount of time urging us not to give in to all sorts of peer pressure. For some odd reason today adults seem more pessimistic about succeeding in that regard. I think we need to try again and harder in that regard, not only for the sake of our children, but also for ourselves, and especially when it comes to matters of the faith. If we don’t make an honest effort I guess we’ll be at the mercy of the opinion polls… and that just cannot be.

St. Thomas Aquinas composed the hymns of the Latin office for this feast including the optional sequence entitled, Laud, O Zion. I’d like to close with a couple verses from that hymn:

“This the truth to Christians given: Bread becomes his Flesh from heaven, Wine becomes his holy Blood. Doth it pass thy comprehending? Yet by faith, thy sight transcending, wondrous things are understood.

Yea, beneath these signs are hidden glorious things to sight forbidden: look not on the outward sign. Wine is poured and Bread is broken. but in either sacred token Christ is here by power divine.”

Missionary Zeal from Home

Perhaps Not Silver or Gold

Holy Cross Parish, 31 May 2009

I want to thank you all for coming out this evening and providing me with an opportunity to reflect together with you on how best really to be missionaries from home. I think all of us are clear on what it means to be missionaries at home; it’s the “from home” part that gets tricky.

As I say, we know we are called to spread the good news of the Gospel, of our salvation in Christ, the message of God’s love for every person, the Heavenly Father’s love for us now and His love for each and every one of us by name from and for all eternity. We know what that means in terms of handing on the faith to our children (nobody is better than mom and dad are for showing the face of Christ to their own children); we know that we should never be ashamed of our Catholic Faith and always be ready to share with men and women of good will the reason for our hope. We know that this is not so much a preaching thing as a praying thing: it’s not so much a matter of words but of action.

The question for most folks, then, is another. If I haven’t actually been called full time to leave home behind to aid others elsewhere working as a missionary, how do I help from home? What do I do, for example, with all those requests from mission societies which come to me in the mail? Or what might the Papal Representative for the Antilles rightly expect of me when he comes begging?

Right at the outset, I’ll tell you that my response to that question is no doubt a bit different than you might expect. Most people want to know how best to employ that limited part of their budget to help those most in need. The question is fair enough, but I don’t think any of the Apostles would have asked that question and it isn’t the first priority of the Pontifical Mission Societies either.

There are four Pontifical Mission Societies, two of which are no doubt familiar to you, all of which are focused on prayer and sacrifice for the sake of spreading the Gospel. You know the Propagation of the Faith which benefits from the Mission Sunday Collection each October and you know the Holy Childhood Association which encourages little children to make personal sacrifices on behalf of small children their own age such that they too might know Jesus. The third society is St. Peter the Apostle, which works at promoting vocations specifically for the missions, and the fourth society is the Missionary Union, which is even bigger than the other three on prayer and formation in the faith from a missionary point of view.

We can do much good with our material gifts, but our world has as much need of our prayer and of our solidarity. That’s why I gave this little talk a title:

Perhaps Not Silver or Gold

I’m going to read a little reflection after I share with you the familiar passage from the Acts of the Apostles about Sts. Peter and John curing the man who used to sit begging at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple. Thereafter I would love to spend the rest of the time at our disposal for your questions and observations.

This is Acts 3:1-10: “Now Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour. And a man lame from birth was being carried, whom they laid daily at that gate of the temple which is called Beautiful to ask alms of those who entered the temple, he asked for alms. And Peter directed his gaze at him, with John, and said, ‘Look at us.’ And he fixed his attention upon them, expecting to receive something from them. But Peter said, ‘I have no silver and gold, but I give you what I have; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.’ And he took him by the right hand and raised him up; and immediately his feet and ankles were made strong. And leaping up he stood and walked and entered the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God. And all the people saw him walking and praising God, and recognized him as the one who sat for alms at the Beautiful Gate of the temple; and they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him.”

Most of the bishops I serve as papal nuncio, there are 18 dioceses and two missions sui iuris which make up the Antilles Episcopal Conference, most of those bishops have tiny dioceses which cannot support themselves either financially or in terms of vocations. Six of them have less than 10,000 Catholics and no real prospect for growth unless they were able by massive conversions to the Catholic Faith to move from being 8% or less of the population of their tiny islands to let’s say 75%. The Caribbean cannot really expect to grow in population as the options for development or employment are not all that great: tourism is not labor intensive enough and off-shore banking, which doesn’t benefit average folks anyway, seems to be on its way out.

Most of my islands live from what are called remittances: money that family from elsewhere (from Europe, Canada or the United States) sends back to the folks at home. If we leave Guyana and Suriname, on the South American continent, out of the equation, which are poor because they are under populated though rich in natural resources in need of a population to develop them, my islands have lots in common with the plains states. Tell me something upbeat about future options for Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas outside of the major population centers and I’ll buy you a plane ticket to come down our way for the time needed to solve problems for the future of our region, or maybe just one problem, namely how do you keep young and talented people from moving elsewhere to seek their fortune.

My Caribbean does not know the misery of Haiti; a few of the islands have a higher cost of living index than the United States (it’s not uncommon for people from Barbados to retire from there to the U.S.). Despite all the violence associated with gangs, with the drugs and arms trade, we’re safer than most any place in Latin America. Folks in the Caribbean are terribly impressed by our tornadoes, but hurricanes probably do more damage each year and they are something most of my islands have to contend with, earthquakes do their fair amount of damage as well, and although the devastation caused by Montserrat’s volcano is legend, other islands have known past events and cannot exclude future problems with mountains named La Soufriere spouting off. Believe it or not, the damage done to historical buildings by termites or discovering that years ago they didn’t bother with putting foundations under some of the big beautiful churches are probably even more daunting. So is the question concerning what to do with all those schools built decades ago by Dutch, Irish and French missionaries, which need repairs, modernization, but more importantly, need the same kind of priests, religious brothers and sisters from the Old Country that staffed them in the old days and gave those who are now the senior citizens of the islands a great education and an even better foundation in their faith. The teaching brothers and sisters of once upon a time are no more.

You may rightly ask “Archbishop, what can we do to help our fellow Catholics in the Antilles?” I could respond and say, well St. George’s in Grenada still hasn’t got things back together since hurricane Ivan hit them in September 2004, Dominica is probably the least developed of the islands and you have helped two years running now with rebuilding a little chapel on the west coast, the Cathedral parish of Roseau has been saving for years to repair termite damage only to find out that one of the islands historic buildings has no foundations under it, I’ve been able to funnel some money to a spunky little Sister of Saint Joseph of Cluny in Portsmouth, who won’t wait for government money to repair a Catholic school severely damaged by an earthquake in November of 2004, the litany could go on and on, and sometimes you just like to help and give someone a one time opportunity for studies or something. I have a small charity in London which will give me small amounts of money for special projects which I recommend to them and that’s just fine. I’m terribly impressed by Father Gregory Ramkissoon’s work called “Mustardseed”, which started in Kingston, Jamaica and reaches out to many other places to care for abandoned children, sometimes retarded, sometimes with severe birth defects, many times HIV positive from their mother’s womb.

If that is something which you want to do, I’ll be most happy to encourage you. Personally, I would be remiss however if I didn’t point out the need my people have for your daily prayer. Money will not solve the lack of vocations to the priesthood; money will not provide the religious women needed to promote girls and young women in a society where more than 80% of the children are born out of wedlock. I have a group of young men in Trinidad who are determined to become religious brothers some day and who want to devote their talents to counseling men. They have a building donated for their use which they would like to run as an institute to teach men how to be responsible, how to be good husbands and fathers. I don’t think it’s as simple as finding them the cash to cover their operating expenses. Good work might be done, but the whole project might not last longer than the life and strength of these five now young and zealous men will allow; they need prayer and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Over a hundred years ago one of the Italian priest founders of the Missionary Union wrote about how material generosity alone to the missions might also be a source of scandal or at least confuse people in terms of how Church is supposed to work.

While not wanting to discourage your material generosity in the least, I would simply like to ask you for something more. Pray and sacrifice for the spread of the Gospel! Make Mission Sunday each October something bigger, even more for Holy Cross Parish by way of information about the missions and by way of prayer! If Holy Childhood is not a going thing in the grade school and in public school religion, ask the diocesan director of the Pontifical Mission Societies to help you out with materials. I think the national office in New York has a pretty good website as well to help you with materials that can be downloaded.

The diocese of Wichita has been blessed in recent years with vocations to the priesthood and will no doubt help both Dodge City and Salina with their shortage of priests; that is missionary and that is great too. Pray also for missionary vocations from your parish, from your families and from your homes as well. The Antilles need your intercession before God to raise up vocations from their midst, but for now and immediately they could really use priests in many places and sisters in goodly numbers everywhere willing to give them a jump start. The archdiocese of Port of Spain, Trinidad, needs 30 priests today to cover its parishes and missions adequately and tomorrow will need even more. At one ordination per year for a diocese with nearly 300,000 Catholics, the need is urgent.

I don’t know if I can adequately explain my point to you, because it’s something I never experienced in Rwanda and it’s something I’d never really thought about until I arrived in the Caribbean. The closest thing I can come to by way of comparison would be the dilemma faced by those little German farm communities which almost every diocese here in the plains states has. Call that magnificent church out in the middle of nowhere “Cathedral of the Plains” or “Cathedral of the Prairie”, it is a monument to the sacrificial faith of people long since laid to rest in the cemetery. What they built with lots of “sweat equity” may be beyond the means of their great grandchildren to maintain. The parish might be smaller than back then and people’s priorities are certainly different. If you just restore the building with outside help, you may have created a museum to the memory of the pioneers and done little to show them the face of Christ. What to do? The Bishop of Paramaribo, Suriname, in consultation with his people, has made some choices. The grand old wooden cathedral with all the hand carving in cedar gets restored; the pilgrimage site to the place where Blessed Peter Donders gave his life in service to lepers is also a priority; the old Dutch Redemptorist house on main street must now go to others and be used for other purposes; all those wood frame school buildings will just have to wait.

Maybe it is best to let you ask questions or comment. The point I want to make is a very subtle one which many of the people in my territory do not comprehend. Let it suffice for me to say that I do not wish to discourage your generosity from the point of view of money, but I’d love to see Holy Cross Parish a powerhouse of pray for the spread of the Gospel. The Caribbean needs your prayers for vocations, for the guidance of the Holy Spirit on how best to be Catholic in troubled times.

Europe after World War II was a total disaster not only because of all the buildings destroyed, but because of the lives destroyed as well. Out of the ashes came a lively and zealous generation of Catholics, who restored what had been built up over centuries, but also who sent forth in great numbers missionaries who gifted other peoples with the faith. Knowledge of Jesus Christ, faith in the power of His Holy Name to liberate and save, is what counts. Four centuries earlier, St. Francis Xavier, the Patron of the Missions, expressed in a letter to his superior, St. Ignatius of Loyola, his desire to run through the corridors of Europe’s universities like a mad man shouting at people to think less of the education they so highly prized and more of their brothers and sisters who were dying all over the world without knowing Christ, without being baptized.

Peter and John gave the once crippled man something to jump, shout and dance about. They gave him Jesus. Your family, your neighborhood, your parish, our world await the same from you as you mission from home like St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower, the Patroness of the Missions.

Unleash the Power of the Spirit

30-31 May 2009 - Holy Cross Parish, Hutchinson, KS

“Come, Thou Holy Spirit, come!”

Pentecost Sunday is referred to as the birthday of the Church. On this feast the Holy Spirit enkindled in the hearts of the Apostles the fire of God’s love, the possibility of fulfilling the two great commandments of love for God and love for neighbor.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches us that the first gift of God to us His children, the gift of Himself, is none other than love, love in the fullest sense of that beautiful word. When the Fathers of the Church analyzed the Scripture passages assigned for the celebration of Pentecost they spoke of the sending of the Holy Spirit in terms of the giving of this gift of love. These great saints spoke of a horizontal and a vertical sending of the Holy Spirit at the beginnings of the Church. Jesus, on the evening of that first day of the week, the day of Resurrection, breathes upon the Apostles and gives them horizontally the gift of the Holy Spirit and the power to love their neighbor through the forgiveness of sins. Fifty days later, on those same people gathered in prayer in that same upper room Jesus now seated at the right hand of the Father, sends down vertically that same Holy Spirit, love given and love received, empowering them to love God in return and thus fulfill the first and greatest of all the commandments.

Pentecost is about power or empowerment; it is about our victory over Adam’s sin experienced through the triumph of love, lived out in this world on a trajectory that leads us to God and for all eternity. Pentecost is about hope and it is about truth. It marks the bestowal upon us of the fruits of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross.

For me among all the images from the world financial crisis of recent date I find both telling and haunting one picture in particular. It is the one which appeared in a lot of newspapers some months ago showing just some of the estimated 3,000 luxury cars, covered with dust, which had been abandoned at the Dubai airport by people on their way out of the country. To me this picture said better than many words “The party was over and everybody headed for home in a rush”. Dubai, which had been for some time the world’s boom town with its artificial islands for development (available at no small price), one set of them laid out like a big palm tree and another like the continents on the globe, Dubai, home of the tallest towers being built anywhere, so tall that what the author of the book of Genesis talks about when he describes the Tower of Babel would seem like a sand castle by comparison. 3,000 abandoned luxury cars! Mankind without God, sinful man on the strength of his own genius and his capability to touch the sky has once again been dealt a mortal blow. Pride comes before the fall.

Where is salvation? Where is lasting joy? Certainly not in petrodollars or in bullish or bearish stock markets! Where is love? Nowhere within the grasp of brains, beauty or charm, to say the very least! Faith teaches us something quite different and lets us look upon life from a very different perspective. Pentecost is God’s show of power; it inspires in us hope of something certainly more than human imagination alone can provide; Pentecost reflects the truth about God and about humankind – about what God wills for the good for you and for me. We are talking about God’s love for you and for me, each one of us by name, love from all eternity.

The Entrance Antiphon assigned for both the Vigil and Pentecost Sunday can be the same one. It is drawn from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans (5:5; 8:11). It reads: “The love of God has been poured into our hearts by his Spirit living in us, alleluia”. The verse for the Responsorial Psalm for both the Saturday evening and the Sunday Mass is the same too: “Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth”. When, how or where is Pentecost to be experienced today? The Acts of the Apostles tells us what others outside the upper room experienced that day: “Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven staying in Jerusalem. At the sound, they gathered in a large crowd, but they were confused because each one heard them speaking in his own language. They were astounded, and in amazement they asked, ‘Are not all these people who are speaking Galileans? Then how does each of us hear them in his native language?’” That was their experience and Pentecost is experienced yet today where men, women and children recognize the Hand of God working in one’s life! Pentecost is the Church in every day and time at its very best. Where is the Church at its greatest; where are we at our very best? When and where do we show ourselves gifted with, filled with the Holy Spirit like the Apostles, one with God and truly, successfully, enduringly one with our neighbor?

Somebody might say “I have no idea of what you’re talking about! Where is the rush in my life of faith? Where are the roaring wind of the upper room and its tongues of fire to be seen today?” Why isn’t Pentecost for us, the baptized and confirmed who are, in a very real sense, Christ’s messengers for today, why isn’t it dynamically and even somewhat dramatically characteristic of our life? The grace of Pentecost, the gift of the Holy Spirit in the life of each of the baptized and confirmed is most certainly the same. But the manifestation not only on Pentecost day but throughout the rest of the lives of the Apostles was truly something mightier than I’ve ever seen in a month of Sundays. Why is it that the fireworks are missing in my life or more to the point, why does God’s love either seem to die or perhaps better stated never get off the ground as the propelling force for most of us in our lives? What’s missing?

With genuine concern, some folks point to the homeless, the vagrant, and the desperately poor in our midst and ask why this is so when there are so many Christians around, so many people who should be on fire with God’s love for the sake of their less fortunate neighbors? Folks point to the divorces which never seem to get less as having something to do with the failure of love and this in the lives of the baptized and confirmed. Some folks are scandalized by the violence of war, the violence which troubles many homes, the violence of abortion, of embryonic stem cell research, of euthanasia, which is as much to say, the violence involved in all sorts of behavior unworthy of human beings let alone of people who claim to be Christian, behavior which simply tramples on the weakest and most vulnerable of society. How can this be?

“Come, Thou Holy Spirit, come! Shed a ray of light divine.”

Apart from all the really glaring stuff just mentioned, I ask myself how it is possible that fewer people who claim to be Catholic make it to Mass each and every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation. Why do people seem to miss the point?

St. Paul was both a great theologian and a realist; he knew the why of our failures; as he said to the Romans: “…we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies… we wait with endurance.” In hope we possess the Spirit of God in pledge of how things will be when Christ is all in all. The prosperity gospel preachers have missed the point when they tell people to expect material wealth or prosperity as a reward for professing Jesus. Those who despair of the triumph of love have lost out as well. For everything in my life which is genuinely already accomplished (already baptized, already confirmed), there is a hefty portion of not yet (not yet a saint, not yet safely in the bosom of Abraham). We learned once upon a time to pray for perseverance. The prayer to Saint Joseph for a happy death, as we know, is a prayer for the presence of a priest at our death bed, so that indeed the angels might lead us into paradise.

More than anything else, my thoughts this Pentecost turn to all those young people, young adults often enough, who don’t come running, who despite a Catholic upbringing wouldn’t qualify as being enthused about being Catholic, let alone classifiable as on fire with love of the Lord and love for their neighbor. What’s missing in the equation that we don’t find more young people confused or astounded like those devout Jews 2000 years ago who on hearing the Apostles’ witness were the first to come forward for Baptism? What’s missing? The devout Jews in Jerusalem on Pentecost day were humble, they were receptive; the people who put together the plan to build the Tower of Babel were not. How often is stubborn pride at the root of the failure of love in the lives of human beings! Here again is John’s Gospel for Pentecost Sunday: “’Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.’” We’re too quick to point the finger of blame, to introduce the lawsuit, to pose as victims, aren’t we? St. Catherine of Siena would probably say that the single greatest impediment to the Holy Spirit’s working within us is our pride. She prayed unceasingly and fervently for the gift of humility for herself and for others, such that she and we might receive the Holy Spirit or better unleash the Spirit’s power. As she prayed so must we pray in all sincerity, so must we!

Pentecost is a manifestation of God’s power in the world, in the lives of real human beings like you and me. Those devout Jews asked Peter how they were to respond to what they had seen and heard; he invited them to repent of their sins and to accept baptism. St. Augustine taught and the Church in every day and time teaches that the Church possesses two kinds of water for the forgiveness of sins: the saving waters of Baptism and the cleansing tears of penance. Pentecost, the birthday of the Church, is a celebration of triumph and a marvelous expression of hope in the power of God’s love dwelling in our hearts. It is also an insistent call to seek forgiveness for your sins, to renounce Satan’s pride and choose life in Christ.

People don’t talk as much about fulfilling their Easter duty as they used to. That was and is a Church precept which involves receiving Holy Communion worthily during the Easter Season, which ends today but for purposes of the precept was always extended until next Sunday, Trinity Sunday. Common sense made a good Confession part of the preparation for that Holy Communion. There was something very humble and forthright about how people observed this obligation of their Easter duty years ago. Did you get to confession during Lent this year? If you did, that’s been two months ago. Maybe it is time to approach the Sacrament of Penance again and see whether that might help unleash the Spirit in your life and allow love its triumph?

The vote is still out on social networking and how it might improve our world and make us all happier and more connected. No offence intended to anyone out there who is into FACEBOOK or TWITTER in a big way, but I’m not convinced! If it were possible to invest, I’d put my money elsewhere, I’d put it into renouncing pride, confessing my sinfulness and opening every corner of my life to the Holy Spirit already bestowed.

I watched a PBS special this week where one historian described Buffalo Bill Cody as the first celebrity in the modern sense of the word and sang the praises of the publicist who made the star of the Wild West Show even greater. Personally, I’d rather live a hidden life, but in the love of the Lord.

"The love of God has been poured into our hearts by his Spirit living in us, alleluia”.

“Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth”.

“Come, Thou Holy Spirit, come!”