to the best of his ability

This famous passage from the First Apology of St. Justin Martyr reflects the way the Eucharist was celebrated in Rome about 150 AD, only about 55 years after the last New Testament books. It makes clear several important things:

1) the Eucharist was interpreted in a very realistic way in the early church

2) it was the principal, weekly worship celebration of the Christian Church

3) it took place on Sunday, not on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath

4) the meaning of the Eucharist and manner of its celebration was handed down by the apostles.

Monsignor Smith

No one may share the Eucharist with us unless he believes that what we teach is true, unless he is washed in the regenerating waters of baptism for the remission of his sins, and unless he lives in accordance with the principles given us by Christ.

We do not consume the eucharistic bread and wine as if it were ordinary food and drink, for we have been taught that as Jesus Christ our Savior became a man of flesh and blood by the power of the Word of God, so also the food that our flesh and blood assimilates for its nourishment becomes the flesh and blood of the incarnate Jesus by the power of his own words contained in the prayer of thanksgiving.

The apostles, in their recollections, which are called gospels, handed down to us what Jesus commanded them to do. They tell us that he took bread, gave thanks and said: Do this in memory of me. This is my body. In the same way he took the cup, he gave thanks and said: This is my blood. The Lord gave this command to them alone. Ever since then we have constantly reminded one another of these things. The rich among us help the poor and we are always united. For all that we receive we praise the Creator of the universe through his Son Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit.

On Sunday we have a common assembly of all our members, whether they live in the city or the outlying districts. The recollections of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as there is time. When the reader has finished, the president of the assembly speaks to us; he urges everyone to imitate the examples of virtue we have heard in the readings. Then we all stand up together and pray.

On the conclusion of our prayer, bread and wine and water are brought forward. The president offers prayers and gives thanks to the best of his ability, and the people give assent by saying, “Amen”. The eucharist is distributed, everyone present communicates, and the deacons take it to those who are absent.

The wealthy, if they wish, may make a contribution, and they themselves decide the amount. The collection is placed in the custody of the president, who uses it to help the orphans and widows and all who for any reason are in distress, whether because they are sick, in prison, or away from home. In a word, he takes care of all who are in need.

We hold our common assembly on Sunday because it is the first day of the week, the day on which God put darkness and chaos to flight and created the world, and because on that same day our savior Jesus Christ rose from the dead. For he was crucified on Friday and on Sunday he appeared to his to his apostles and disciples and taught them the things that we have passed on for your consideration.

Aliens no longer

One frequently finds articles and stories online about how hard it is for poor kids who have been admitted to Ivy League or other high-end, prestigious universities.  Despite the financial assistance they receive, it is not enough to afford them everything they need, much less make it possible for them to keep up materially and experientially with those kids from affluent families.  The universities, confronted with their discomfiture, promise to do even more.

Personally, I was more fortunate.  My parents had the means and the willingness to pay my tuition and fees.  I had to work to pay my other living and recreational expenses.  Even so, I could not dream of doing or having what the affluent kids at my school enjoyed.  My dad came from no financial means at all.  He worked and earned everything it took all the way through a dozen years of grad school, by the end of which he had a wife, a house, and three kids.  Even then, it was nonetheless an example of not being able to afford everything you need.

In hindsight, I do not consider myself deprived, though at the time there may have been some lament.  Everybody notices what others have that they do not.  When I hear stories of college students’ suffering, I recall my own experience, which makes me want to holler at them:  Of course you don’t have everything you want or need!  Of course you resent those who do have it!   Of course this causes friction in your relationships and disappointment in your lot!

Not only material things cause this friction and disappointment.  The same effect comes from the inevitable human shortfall in physical appearance and ability; social skills, friends, and relationships; academic and leadership ability; and even families – especially if there be a lack of loving parents who are still married to one another.  Aware of what we lack, we see or presume that others have it.  The result is a separation among people, a perceived distance of experience and expectation that leads to resentment and envy.  

It is a short and logical step from experiencing this universal insufficiency and disappointment to thinking that one is being willfully or programmatically deprived.  The groaning students contrive, or are instructed by reporters, politicians, or professors, that this grief and sadness is somebody’s fault, an intentional privation, a contrived and imposed privation, perhaps on the basis of disability, ethnicity, sex, or some other such identity.  Friction develops into accusation and conflict.

But this alienation is characteristic, even symptomatic of the human experience; the wealthy, handsome, and successful themselves do not escape it.  It is the result and evidence of original sin; we all experience it.  No program or payment can level this playing field or equalize this balance.  No human effort can eliminate the distance and disappointment that grows between souls. 

There is only one place where such alienation is itself completely alien, and that is the inmost being of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Nothing is withheld, everything is offered, all is received and gratitude returned.  This is perfect love, lived, offered, and sustained.  This is what we lack.

Everything that the Father has is mine, says the Lord to His disciples in the course of His farewell.  In withdrawing, He promises the coming of the Spirit, who will take from what is mine and declare it to you; that is, nothing that belongs to God will be withheld from them.  It is all theirs – ours – for the receiving.  

The unspeakable mystery of the Holy Trinity is no arcane point of theology, but the ground of our being, and its goal.  God alone withholds nothing.  To allow the Spirit of Truth (to) guide (us) to all truth is be rescued from our alienation from God, from our true selves, and from one another.

Monsignor Smith

Pentecostal parish

Tongues, as of fire

It moves around so much, it has no fixed position in our lives.  It invariably comes at a busy time of our year and of our lives, when the seasons are changing and our schedules are changing.  Pentecost is hard to lay holt of.

But Pentecost, the fiery, windy, wordy work of the Holy Spirit unleashed and poured out as promised is both reminder and renewal.  The moment the Apostles went from cowering in their chambers and in their fear, to confronting and converting the same populace that had crucified the Lord is a historical moment of beginning.  It is also an initiation and indication of the work He will do through, with, and in us by the same power He displayed then.

The Spirit of God is poured into His Church and into us to animate us.  Anima is the same word as spirit and soul.  Our Spirit is filled with and conformed to the Spirit of God, immortal, eternal, and active in the world.  No wonder our cup overflows!

The Spirit inspires (you see it in that word?  In-spire?) the Church to be the Church, that is the presence of Christ Jesus on earth, and the activity of that same Jesus on earth and in our time.  What the Apostles did that day – speak to the crowds of Jesus and bring about repentance and belief – is exactly what Jesus by the agency of His Church will do thenceforth and for all time.  They who were afraid have no more fear.  They will cure the sick, give sight to the blind, and raise the dead as signs of the Divine life that they both enjoy and offer.  By this does Christ reach and change the world.

This is what we commemorate, and this is also what we anticipate.  This is the alternative to fear, the remedy for both inaction and activism, and the confidence that comes of acting in concert with One who never fails.  Veni sancte spiritus!

This divine action that informs and inflames our identity as the Holy Church of God is named and claimed as a mystery commemorated in the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  The third of the Glorious Mysteries, it is scheduled at least every Wednesday and Sunday and comes whenever that triumphant cycle from Resurrection to Coronation is invoked.  

Since the weather has improved, and the daylit hours lengthened, I have been taking more walks, and longer.   The burble of the creek by the path is enhanced by the rhythmic rumble of the rosary prayed as aerobic and spiritual exercise.  Why stop after just one cycle, when the path winds on ahead and the earbuds offer only enclosure?

Some of the decades go to occasional dedications, to needs of the moment or the day.  Some others are recurring, frequent flyers if you will: the Pope, my mother, priests in difficulty.  One of these invariable offerings is the Third Glorious, the Descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles at Pentecost, and without deviation I offer that for the intentions of you, this parish.  You didn’t think I thought it all depended on me, did you?

Fire, wind, and even sometimes rain from heaven are all similes for the same saving Spirit not only falling but also landing, not only being poured but also filling, not just being given but being welcomed and received.  All could bring destruction, but instead bring life, help, and strength.  This is my prayer for you, for us in this place where we huddle together, not for fear but for nourishment.  

Not only the festival, but also the Spirit Himself is always moving.  This day and every day may the same Spirit of God be the heat and light in our lives, and the refreshment we both require and offer.  Come Holy Ghost!

Monsignor Smith

Love is who?

This year the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus falls on June 27, much later than usual because of the late Easter.  But all of June is the Month of the Sacred Heart, and we should focus on this theological and cultural gift we have as Catholics to remind ourselves that we know what  -- and Who – love is.  I found some words of Pope Saint John Paul II from 1999 to share on the subject.

Monsignor Smith

"The Church seems in a particular way to profess the mercy of God and to venerate it when she directs herself to the Heart of Christ. In fact, it is precisely this drawing close to Christ in the mystery of his Heart which enables us to dwell on this point - a point in a sense central and also most accessible on the human level - of the revelation of the merciful love of the Father, a revelation which constituted the central content of the messianic mission of the Son of Man" (n. 13). 

On the occasion of the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart and the month of June, I have often urged the faithful to persevere in the practice of this devotion, which "contains a message which in our day has an extraordinary timeliness", because "an unending spring of life, giving hope to every person, has streamed precisely from the Heart of God's Son, who died on the Cross.  From the Heart of Christ crucified is born the new humanity redeemed from sin. The man of the year 2000 needs Christ's Heart to know God and to know himself; he needs it to build the civilization of love" (8 June 1994; L'Osservatore Romano English edition, 15 June 1994, p. 3).

The faithful still need to be guided to contemplate adoringly the mystery of Christ, the God-Man, in order to become men and women of interior life, people who feel and live the call to new life, to holiness, to reparation which is apostolic cooperation in the salvation of the world, people who prepare themselves for the new evangelization, recognizing the Heart of Christ as the heart of the Church: it is urgent for the world to understand that Christianity is the religion of love. 

The Savior's Heart invites us to return to the Father's love, which is the source of every authentic love: "In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins" (1 Jn 4:10). Jesus ceaselessly receives from the Father, rich in mercy and compassion, the love which he lavishes upon human beings (cf. Eph 2:4; Jas 5:11). His Heart particularly reveals the generosity of God towards sinners. God's reaction to sin is not to lessen his love, but to expand it into a flow of mercy which becomes the initiative of the Redemption. 

Contemplation of the Heart of Jesus in the Eucharist will spur the faithful to seek in that Heart the inexhaustible mystery of the priesthood of Christ and of the Church. It will enable them to taste, in communion with their brothers and sisters, the spiritual sweetness of charity at its very source. By helping all to rediscover their own Baptism, it will make them more aware of having to live their apostolic dimension by spreading love and participating in the mission of evangelization. Each person needs to be more committed to praying the Lord of the harvest (cf. Mt 9:38) to grant the Church "shepherds after his own heart" (Jer 3:15) who, in love with Christ the Good Shepherd, will pattern their own hearts on his and be ready to go out into the highways of the world to proclaim to all that he is the Way, the Truth and the Life (cf. Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Pastores dabo vobis, n. 82). To this we must add effective action so that many of today's young people, docile to the voice of the Holy Spirit, may be taught to let the great expectations of the Church and of humanity resonate in the depths of their hearts and to respond to Christ's invitation to consecrate themselves enthusiastically and joyously with him "for the life of the world" (Jn 6:51).

Call to mind, call to glory

Not everyone gets a monument
but every one is worth remembering.

Memorial Day sneaks up on us this year, too soon after a late Easter and before we even realize that May is almost over.  Was it early like this before?  I don’t remember.

A day for keeping memorial turns our eyes toward memory.   It is important, it is laudable and encouraged, to remember the many souls who have served and sacrificed even their own lives for our good.  If we cannot call to mind family members or friends we know by name or story or portrait, we can wander amidst stone memorials that spread across green hills nearby, and spring up where roads meet for the traffic to circle with drivers unaware.  Open a book, go for a stroll, inquire with an elderly neighbor; you will find a life to remember.

Is it possible to remember someone you never knew?  Not only is it possible but even necessary, would be my assessment.  Equally vivid in my mind are the contours and characters of lives about whom I simply read, even decades or already half a century ago; and lives about whom I heard from friends who knew them, loved them, and lost them, for whom memory is not an option, but an obligation and an honor.

Memory, then, is where we may keep and cherish what is no more, treasuring intact, that is, re-membering what is dissolved or shattered to pieces.  Memory then can be swathed in sadness for what or who is lost to us in any other way.  

But memory’s most practical aspect, where resides our faculties of learning and knowing and understanding, reveals that memory is in fact rooted in the past but oriented toward tomorrow.  We remember how to find our way, where we left some item we need, or how to reach a friend.  We remember what works and what fails to work to achieve a desired goal.  We remember an insight, idea, or concept that when applied in the moment will transform our dilemma into opportunity.  What resides in memory is far from being lost!

As creatures we are distinguished to have intellect and will.  So also in having memory are we in the image and likeness of God, whose memory is the model of ours but more powerful and perfect.  God calls us into being by calling us to His mind.  When He re-members, He calls into being once again; or rather, He continues to hold in being for eternity.  

When we pray for God to remember, we are asking of Him something both similar to and different from what we ourselves do.  Remember your compassion and your mercy, O Lord, for they are ages old.  Remember no more the sins of my youth; remember me according to your mercy, because of your goodness, Lord.  (Psalm 25:6–7) His compassion and mercy never went away, never dissolved, but calling on Him to re-member them and re-member us in accord with them is to beg to be re-made according to the glory for which He called us to His mind in the beginning.

Memory, then is a light to our steps, not a dark path.  The Advocate, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name -- he will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you.  (Jn 14:26)  The God who gave us the ability to recognize and remember is the God Who reveals His promise as a memory and fulfills it daily in His memorial.  Do this in memory of me.  (Lk 22:19)  To remember both what God has already done and what He has promised to do makes our memory the ground of faith, the seat of hope.  To remember is thus the work of love.

It is good that our nation give a day to Memorial.  Not only monuments and mementoes, but doing the good work for one another that is calling to mind the good they have done for us.  Let our memories re-member their good work, and let their good deeds go with them. (cf. Rev. 14:13)  The mercy we re-member is God’s own; the good work of memory is ours to share.

Monsignor Smith

He knows

What did I know?  I was convinced and insisted that it would be a long conclave, likely four days at least.  When the white smoke came on the fourth ballot – my own mom was the first to alert me – I uttered the first of many weary words that day.  

It was the worst possible time.  I was doubly and triply obligated that day.  I was in a noisy room and had to put my phone to my ear to hear Cardinal Mamberti announce the Gaudium magnum from the loggia.  Robertum gave me pause, and Franciscum clinched it.  Hoo boy.  I was not encouraged.  

What did I know?  Not much, clearly.  Since that moment, every word and action by our new Holy Father Pope Leo XIV has shown the world something that Cardinal Mamberti said but, in our haste to know something else, most of us skipped over:  We have a Pope!

Now everybody knows he is an Augustinian who served as a missionary in Peru, became a diocesan bishop there, and was called by Pope Francis to high office in the Vatican.  Most shocking is that he is from here, the United States, the south side of Chicago, with garrulous brothers still there eager to assert his credentials, nay identity, as a White Sox fan.  I am not sure about other US priests, but this gives me pause – he will be unimpressed by our American “magic.”  Words he has uttered in the past have come out in snippets and clips, audio and video.  Factions and partisans have claimed him as their own and rejected him as from the other side.  All of this has been fascinating even as it has faded into irrelevance.  

What I have seen since last Thursday is the highest office in the Church be inhabited by a priest who has a reverence for that office and a love for that Church.  And while I have snarfed up every snippet and story I could find, one line has claimed my heart.  Our fellow countryman has declared, I must make myself small.

Yes, the brother of those Chicago Prevosts, former neighbor and close or distant relative of many now rising for recognition, and grade school through seminary classmate of untold number of Americans, is already fading from view, so that the Successor of Peter be seen and at work in the Church and the world.  Not only does he know it is not about him, he also is demonstrating to anyone with eyes to see that it is not about him.  Didn’t somebody close to Jesus say, He must increase, I must decrease?

To take up the mantle of the prophet is not to change its color or cut.  This is no time for individuality, much less idiosyncrasy.  The burden is enormous, larger than any human capacity or talent.  In time the personality of Leo XIV will be better known, but first the presence of Christ in His Church and the work of His Vicar on earth will be undertaken.   His doing papal things in papal ways for papal reasons is soft breeze of refreshment.  That this continue to be done with humility and in earnest is my fondest hope, nurtured by what I have seen and by contrary clues not seen.  

Whether he himself be strong enough, savvy enough, and well-served enough to bring right and good order to the household of the Church cannot now be known.  In my own lifetime a warmly welcomed Pope lived only 33 days.   Good men have stepped into these shoes only to be thwarted by malice and machinations, for Our Lord Himself warned us that there is an enemy, and he sows his choking weeds.  

For us to know now is not whether he be one of us or one of them, but that he is ours, and we are his.   Whatever we thought we knew, now we know that our obligation is to give him our prayer as if his life depend upon it, because our life depends upon him.  Praised be Jesus Christ!  We have a Pope.  

Monsignor Smith

So you want to be an apostle?

Nice chair you got there;
shame it's empty...

Who would want to be an apostle, anyway?

These days after Easter we walk through the beginnings of the Church, as the silly, selfish, and unaware group of disciples Jesus specifically chose for the work are transformed into Apostles.  Peter and Thomas are singled out so that everyone know of their betrayal of the Lord and rejection of the testimony of their friends.  

Then the Word begins to work and the Church begins to grow as souls are drawn to ‘the Way,’ as simultaneously comes the persecution.  Dragged from their homes and put in prison, beaten, and even killed, the believers do not turn away, but persist and draw yet more souls to join them.  James, the ‘brother of the Lord’ and first bishop of the church in Jerusalem, is beheaded by the king, who is delighted by this gruesome act and starts the hunt for his next victims.

So, really, who would want that job?  Part of their credibility is their testimony of their own foolishness and infidelity, for it is precisely there that the power of the Risen Lord reveals itself in His merciful forgiveness and insistence, Follow me.  Follow me, clearly, to the cross; follow me, insistently, to your own suffering and death.  Quite the recruitment slogan, that.

In our own time, all eyes turn to the Vatican Hill where a small group of men strangely dressed in a small but splendid chapel wrestle with this divine imperative and their own responsibility to respond with neither a king nor a counselor but rather another sheep for the slaughter.  Who will follow Peter whose following of Jesus led him to his own cross on this very hill?

Yes, wherever two or three are gathered, there is politics.  Yes, the will to power is strong even in the hearts of men consecrated to the Lord.  Yes, tribal allegiances and ideological blinders bend souls to grasping.  But look closely and you will also see souls aware of the deep reality to which they have been called and in which they must act.  

One of the greatest works of human genius and artistic expression is in the room for the very purpose of reminding these men of what is at stake for themselves and all who depend on them.  Michelangelo’s Last Judgment is beautiful and terrible all at once, and ‘in your face’ when as a cardinal elector you are forced to do what no tourist is ever permitted, to sit and stare and search it, fully illuminated, for untold hours.  Dated in both style and theology, as so much of greatness is, still it conveys truth in a way impossible to misunderstand.

They are all selfish fools slow to understand and quick to exempt themselves from pain and penalty, as the very words of Scripture have been reminding them for days and weeks.  Those same scriptures also point out that this is precisely the qualification that Peter, James, John, James, Philip, Bartholomew and the others brought to the recruiter who chose, called, taught, and sent them to extend His own risen life to the end of every road.  Therefore, among them is the one whose loins they must gird for him, and take where he does not want to go -- not if he is honest about himself and the call, anyway. 

The longer they sit there under the eyes of that recruiter who is also their judge, the more they recognize the selfishness and striving of some of their own companions, the longer they have to marinate in both their own embarrassing qualifications and their merited obligation, the more compelling His call.  In this condition, they deliver their charge to compel one of their own number to respond to that terrifying Follow me.

Because really, who would want to be this apostle, anyway?

Monsignor Smith