Want to know what love is

June is the Month of the Sacred Heart.  This year the Solemnity falls on Friday, the twelfth, and along with the next day’s Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, it marks the end of the annual liturgical feasts that move because they are calculated from the Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord, that is, from Easter.  That’s the original meaning of the phrase “movable feast.”   Move as however it might, the Feast of the Sacred Heart always falls in June. 

June is the Month of the Sacred Heart.  You will notice our Mary Altar of May (Mary’s month is May, the month of mothers) is now occupied by our small Sacred Heart statue; our large one is over the main doors of the church, visible as you leave.  

June is the month of the Sacred Heart; it is a time for us to reflect on the reality of God’s love for us in Christ, and the nature and requirements of that love that He has commanded us to emulate and made it possible for us to emulate.  Love one another as I have loved you.  

It is good to be Catholic, to have the divine reality arrayed across the calendar in ways that make it possible for us to understand, to remember, and to celebrate all that God is and does.  Other people associate certain months with other things, none of them as true and beautiful as life in Christ.  

This year, our nation’s bishops have decided to consecrate the country to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.  There are resources available for you to participate in the consecration at the USCCB website and linked from our Flocknote. 

Mark this month by exploring the Sacred Heart of Jesus, by entering into the mystery of God’s love enfleshed and inflamed.  Below is a prayer that has helped me grow in my devotion to the Sacred Heart.  I also like the Litany of the Sacred Heart.  From His pierced Heart flow blood and water that give life to the world, the font and wellspring of the Church’s sacraments.  Prayer to the Sacred Heart leads us to explore the mystery of reparation, which characterizes our participation in the Divine and redeeming love, during June, the month of the Sacred Heart.

Monsignor Smith

Efficacious Novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus

(said by St. Padre Pio for his intentions)

I. O my Jesus, You said “verily I say to You, ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you”, behold I knock, I seek and I ask for the grace of…

Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be. Sacred Heart of Jesus, I put all trust in Thee.

II. O my Jesus, You said, “verily I say to You, whatsoever you shall ask the Father in My name, He will give to you”, behold in your name I ask the Father for the grace of…

Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be. Sacred Heart of Jesus, I put all trust in Thee.

III. O my Jesus, You said, “verily I say to You, heaven and earth shall pass away but My words shall not pass away,” behold I encouraged by your infallible words, now ask for the grace of…

Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be. Sacred Heart of Jesus, I put all trust in Thee.

O Sacred Heart of Jesus to whom one thing alone is impossible, namely, not to have compassion on the afflicted, have pity on us miserable sinners and grant us the grace which we ask of Thee through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, your and our tender Mother.

Salve Regina. St. Joseph, Foster Father of Jesus, pray for us.

Mornings

The priest is the pontifex, that is,  
the one who builds the bridge between God and man.

Twenty-five years ago, I met young Lawrence Swink on the day he arrived to be accepted by the Cardinal Archbishop to become a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Washington.   As part of my work as secretary, I had set up the appointment and brought him and the other candidate up to the outer office, then took each of them individually in to meet with the boss and receive the good word.

He looked sharp in his grey suit and tie, the uniform he wore in those days before the collar and cassock.  He was confident and eager, but not without a certain trepidation that any reasonable person would have before being ushered into the inner sanctum of such a lofty personage, one who was about to deliver a judgment and set out a future course.  I tried to be reassuring and encouraging, as I remembered well what he was experiencing.

Nine years earlier, I had been in the same position in the same offices when a different secretary led me in to see a different Cardinal Archbishop, who then warmly welcomed me to the program and explained to which seminary he had assigned me.  There was another man with me that day, similarly in suit and tie and similarly embarking on the path to priesthood: a young Dan Leary, someone of whom you may have heard in more recent days.

Five years after accepting him to the program, the same Cardinal Archbishop ordained him a priest of Jesus Christ at the basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.  I saw that all happen, too; in fact, I had a very good seat.  I smiled at the memory of the eager young man in suit and tie and had every confidence that our time of working together was just beginning.  Little did I know just how together our working would one day be!

This week in the kitchen we now share, Father Swink showed me a photo he had just received on his phone.  It was from the first baptism he performed as a priest at Saint Mary of the Mills Church in Laurel, which was his first assignment.   I immediately recognized the two sets of parents, if not the radiant infants they happily held.  Both families are now regulars at Sunday Mass here, and while the babies are now grown tall as we are, the parents, like Father Swink, still look exactly like they did in the photo.  Pretty much, anyway.

A lot changes in twenty years, but most of it is circumstantial rather than essential.  Father Swink is still baptizing – he had two baptisms just this weekend – and still doing the work of priesthood with all the gusto he can muster.  He is still very much the same person he was when I met him that morning in 2001; most of what has changed stems from that other morning in 2006 when the hands of the bishop and the grace of Holy Order configured him to the person of Jesus Christ, the sovereign High Priest.  Grace builds on nature, and what an edifice stands on that foundation.

It is good to look back over the years and see what has changed, and what has not.  God’s grace continues to surge through the priestly ministry and person of Father Swink, eliminating any distance in time or space between us and the saving power of Christ’s passion, death, resurrection, and ascension.  Twenty years is but the blink of an eye compared to that distance, but two decades of such daily work is worth marking with gratitude and joy.  

We are both still the same guys who first met that earlier day, with one of the few notable changes being that now he sees me every morning, and I him, and very often at least one of us and sometimes both are not nearly as well dressed.  

Monsignor Smith 

More than just decoration

The ones who most need to remember
are the ones who benefitted most.

 Our nation’s annual array of federal holidays presents some that integrate easily into the life of the Church and the practice of the Faith.  Clearly Christmas is the most Catholic of them, with the perduring Madonna and Child stamp from the U.S. Postal Service illustrating this reality.  Thanksgiving acknowledges God and our obligation to render Him gratitude, an essential Catholic activity even if the once-a-year focus originated outside the Communion.  Yes, Abraham Lincoln’s religious disposition is an interesting question, but for another day.  After those two, the suitability of the other holidays becomes increasingly tangential, except for Memorial Day.

Originally known as Decoration Day, this is the holiday on which citizens would turn out to clean up and festoon the graves and monuments of the ones who had given their lives in the defense of our national integrity and freedom.  Burial grounds and markers are not unique to Christianity, but the whole concept of a cemetery, a word synonymous with dormitory, is uniquely Christian.  It is there that the mortal remains of the departed rest in peace, that is, sleep, in anticipation of the heavenly resurrection.  To visit these resting ones and care for their resting place is a most Christian activity.

It was 1971 when the name Memorial Day was fixed to the last Monday in May, a name that emphasizes another Christian and Catholic activity, remembering these departed ones.  The Church has a whole month dedicated to it – November – but she does not begrudge an added day for this specific group of people so worthy of remembering.  

We as Catholics know what to do with these memories that we nurture and share.  We allow them to lead to prayer for the forgiveness of their sins, the happy repose of their souls, and the consolation of the ones who love them.  The same gratitude that we stir up for our own dear departed every November is kindled now in May, but directed toward those who gave so much to protect and defend what we enjoy and treasure.  The best thanks we can give them is to offer for them what we now have that they now need: intercessory prayer.

Remembering and its opposite, forced forgetting, have been recurring themes for me this year.  After a period in our nation when monuments have been defaced or destroyed rather than decorated, and on my own undergraduate campus portraits and dedications removed and statues hidden, I have more than once confronted empty space where once there was an evocation of a person to be remembered.  This erases not only the memorial of the ones depicted, but also of the people who held their memories at such great value as to be worthy of the effort and expense of memorialization.  Generations are elided into oblivion.

Much as I regret it, I wish this destruction were limited to the hurly burly of our civic and secular culture, but it prowls in the life of the Church as well, where we should know better the obligations of memory and the grave disservice of forgetting.  

To remember the good that anyone has done, whether it benefit us personally, our families, or our nation, is to incarnate the very remembering we both desire and expect of our just and merciful God (cf. Rev. 14:13).  To allow our grateful memories to be added to the divine memory is to lend our mortal lives to the divine work of the Redeemer, making a sacrifice of propitiation unto the forgiveness of sins.  (cf. 2 Maccabees 12: 43-46)   While the opportunity to imitate our heavenly Father and share in His merciful forgiveness should be positive motivation enough, we also know and should dread the consequences of refusal. (Matthew 6: 15)

It would be vain foolishness to suggest that the ones we remember in gratitude on Memorial Day had no sins or lived their whole lives in ways worthy of emulation.  But it is yet more vain to think that we are able to assess the value of their lives, and even more foolish to withhold memory and gratitude according to our own criteria.  The yoke of grateful memory is easy, the burden of charity is light.  

This civic holiday catches us Catholics at our best.  Not only are we culturally and practically experts at feasting, but more specifically we bring our grateful memories to the Eucharistic feast that obtains for the ones we remember what we desire and hope for ourselves.  Remember this, and do not forget.

Monsignor Smith

Shadows on campus

How many times did I make this walk?

As I acknowledged last week, it has been a long time since I finished my undergraduate studies: forty years.   Much has changed since then in the world and in the lives of students.  

Princeton University announced this week that beginning next fall it will proctor all exams, reversing a mandate that had been in place since 1893.  So confident in the honor code was the university community in those days, faculty and students alike, that there was a rule forbidding the monitoring of students taking exams. 

Not anymore.  The advances of information technology, the internet, and most recently artificial intelligence, have made cheating so easy and so pervasive that desperate measures are being sought to force the students to think, write, and prepare their own assignments and exam responses rather than present something they
obtained from another source.   Such cheating may obtain a passing grade, or even an excellent one, but it undermines the whole purpose of being a student: to learn.

My college, too, has (or had) one of the most effective and rigorous honor codes in the nation.  Marked by the “single sanction,” that is, any violation would obtain the unique penalty, expulsion from the school, it was also administered entirely by the students in a clearly constituted process.   Arrival on campus of new freshman was the occasion of rigorous instruction in the expectations and consequences, along with the institutional and personal pride that membership in this society of trust bestowed.

One of the proverbial benefits was that a student could leave his wallet on his library carrel for an hour or a week without fear of losing it or any of its contents to sticky fingers.  I knew several guys who tested this proverb, and they did not find it wanting. 

The most practical benefit for me that I quickly identified and learned to exploit was that all exams were student scheduled, since we didn’t have to take them together as a class or in the presence of the professor or any proctor.  Since foreign language knowledge was most perishable, I would place that exam in the first available slot, always Saturday afternoon.  Then my hardest subject would be Monday afternoon, allowing two days and nights for intensive study but also some rest.  Freshman year that meant my calculus exams, with which my strategizing met its match.  After resting Monday afternoon, I would take another hard exam Wednesday morning, then my last one on Thursday.  The plan served me well for four years and many brutal (three-hour!) exams.

But the best illustration of the honor system came fall semester of sophomore year when I took my first economics class.  Of course I got the hardest instructor, Prof. Gunn, whose nicknames were “Tail-Gunner” and “Gunner John.”  Late in the semester, our second section quiz fell on a Friday, and that morning a chronic medical issue I had nursed for weeks became acute.  Minutes before the exam was to begin, I presented myself in Prof. Gunn’s office to ask to be excused from the test.  When he heard what I was dealing with he sent me off with a worried “Don’t bother with the exam – go take care of yourself!”  Later that afternoon, after a dramatic hour or two at the hospital produced a very happy result, I returned to the professor’s office.  He took a copy of the exam he had given to the rest of the class that day, put it in an envelope, and handed it to me and told me to give myself ninety minutes and complete it anytime over the weekend.  There are few exams on which I recall working so hard, or so carefully.

As you can doubtless see, all this led to my career as a bigwig economist (hah!).  No, it was part of a great and fruitful educational experience that taught me that whereas most people must develop long-term relationships in order to build trust, I was able to offer and enjoy trust as the foundation for forming and enjoying excellent long-term relationships.  

The trust I enjoyed motivated me to work harder and more carefully on everything I did, as on that economics exam.  This resulted in in my obtaining some pretty good grades, though I admit there were a few clunkers, too.  But mainly it helped with what was my number one priority: to learn. 

I pray that students in this time of artificial intelligence find a way to enjoy the same. 

Monsignor Smith

Decades

The decahedral vaulted nave
of Saint Gereon Church in Cologne has ten sides,
which makes it just like one decade,
and one of a kind in my experience.

Now once I mention decades it would be perfectly laudable if you were to assume that I am speaking of the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Indeed, the mysteries associated with the ten-counts of Hail Mary should be foremost in our minds in this month that we began by crowning Our Lady in the church.  But my reference is less pious, and honestly less impressive than the mysteries of our salvation in the life of the Divine Son of the Holy Virgin.

Before we kicked off the Month of Our Lady here last weekend with First Holy Communion and the May Procession, I slipped away to the southern Shenandoah Valley to the scene of my undergraduate education.   That effort was completed four decades ago, and I spent a few days enjoying the beauty of the place and the company of classmates and faculty in my reunion.  All the attention was heaped on the classes marking fifty and twenty-five years, but the keynote speaker for the kickoff was one of us, so we got the spotlight for a minute.  He was both affectionate and brutal, calling us out on a few things of which we might not choose to boast.  He did, however, ratify my recollection that classes were really hard.

Four decades is nothing to sneeze at and was a good reason to travel, but how about five?  Later this week I will slip away for an overnight in Wheeling, West Virginia, for the golden jubilee of priestly ordination for Bishop Mark Brennan.  Originally a Washington priest, he served as Vocations Director here when I first applied as a tentative and possible future priest.  That’s a pretty important role in the unfolding of my vocation, and like many of my peers I remain quite fond of him.  Now, you might suggest that a trip to Wheeling is hardly a posh vacation, but don’t forget that my dad’s family is from there and I am happy to have the occasion to revisit the place of many happy memories of my grandparents.  My hotel will be across the creek from the campus where my parents first met.   

Four decades and five, now how about two?  Later this month our own Father Larry Swink will achieve the twenty-year mark since he was ordained a priest of Jesus Christ.  A local boy in the truest sense – he grew up just up the road – it is good that he is at home now here with us.  Be alert for an opportunity to celebrate his priesthood later this month; Saint Bernadette is the best at throwing a party, but we are still pulling it together.

Four, five, and two decades, no small measure of time and life.  This is the function of the decades of the rosary, too, which mark out the events in the life of Our Lord at the same time they measure the minutes and meaning of our own.  Every day and every life reveal the love of God in the working out of His Divine will, our salvation, so the distinction between types of decades fruitfully blurs.

The gratitude that is the fruit of such reflective counting brings us back around to the beginning of the lives for which we are grateful, and on this Mother’s Day there is no more fitting gift and celebration than to offer a Rosary for our Mom and her intentions.  Five decades cannot be better spent.

Monsignor Smith

Priority

The first communion on the road

Which came first? is the opening line in an ancient riddle.   This weekend, first things come to mind.  It is the most beautiful weekend of the year as the seasons announce life coming back to the earth, and our children present themselves to receive for the first time the Author of Life Himself.  It is the time of First Holy Communion.

This is a great and glorious instant in the lives of our first communicants and their families, but that very first-ness brings both excitement and promise – promise of more, promise of second and third and beyond.  There is a lot of first-ness to be found in our relationship with Jesus.

The first thing the Church did, back before she even knew herself to be the Church, back when she became the Church, in fact how she became the Church, was to celebrate the Eucharist.  The disciples who had encountered the risen Lord on the first day of the week, then again eight days later, continued to worship God on this new day in a new way.  Not with Sabbath-worship on the seventh day, but with thanksgiving to God, and the breaking of the bread, on the first day.

The Sacred Scriptures describe this first action of grace, so they themselves clearly come later, that is, not first.  Communion with Jesus is the root and foundation of the Church, first when He passed through locked doors to say and give “Peace to you,” then as the Apostles anointed with the Spirit took bread and did this in memory of Him, saying, “This is my body.”

It is clear that to be in the Church, to live the life of grace, we need that communion – our bodies to be in union with this glorious body. This must come first, before we can even hope or attempt to do “what Jesus would do.”  Before the doing, before the imitating, there must be something else there, first.

This firstness is not, of course, something that the Church could make or take, but that Christ himself must and did give.  The firstness of this giving is essential to the communion, for it cannot be earned or bought or won.  Communion is necessarily something for us to receive, and the first foot forward is that of Him who gives.  Look at the faces of the children who come.  They bring nothing but their receptivity to what they He will give, and to Him Who gives.   Having received they return, their eyes alight with the gift to Whom they give their own flesh.

Also this month we celebrate the first giving of flesh, as we mark or devotion to our mother Mary, who gave her flesh to Him who became flesh and dwells among us.  This first giving is the first first communion, as God Himself, the Eternal Word, took flesh, and dwelt in the tabernacle, the Tower of Ivory that is His most pure mother.  For the unique response to the giving God is likewise to give, which makes room for that great first giving.  No one has done it better, but we all strive to imitate what she did, to give our flesh to be one with His flesh, to renew what she did first.

It is my hope that giving these first Communions to these receptive and rejoicing communicants is to kindle not nostalgia for something that was and will be no more, but delight and desire for what is coming into being, and what will be done.   Not only I, but parents, and grandparents, neighbors, friends, and cousins, all watch and see and smile, knowing the momentousness of this meeting, the union of heaven and earth in an innocent soul.

It is my hope that this also be their desire, as well as mine: to enjoy that same moment, not the firstness, but the communion.  That desire itself is a gift, given freely and without prejudice, nurtured in all who would receive, who would take the gift by giving themselves, giving their flesh to Him whose flesh gives life; to know, to enjoy, to experience this same second that comes second, flowing forth from the gift of God, who came first.

Monsignor Smith

Simplicity

It's not wine yet!  But with a little work, 
more time than you'd expect,
and a lot of local genius,
it will be very good wine.

How tiny a thing, and simple.  The bits of bread that fill the golden vessel to be offered upon our altar have precisely two ingredients, wheat flour and water.  

There is one more essential element that one might call an ingredient: human genius.  They do not grow on trees, these breads, nor fall from heaven in the night as did the manna flakes in the time of the Exodus.  The grain grows of its nature from the ground and the ear ripens to bear its fruit only after the field is cultivated and the grain sown.  Still then it is not ready to eat, for it must be prepared and ground into flour before it can be mixed with water and baked into bread.   All this is the work of human hands and know-how.  Simple, perhaps, but discerned and learned and perfected, not to be taken for granted.  

Similarly, the wine in the chalice is pure grape wine with no additives.  Yet wine does not flow of its own accord from the vines; rather, after cultivation and collection the grapes are pressed for their juice which is then subjected a process of very few steps of near infinite adjustability governing time and temperature, exposure and containment that produces a whole new and marvelous thing, astonishing, but still simple, with one ingredient.

Though both bread and wine are simple and universal, they do not occur of nature itself, but rather by man’s fruitful manipulation of the fruit of the earth: “the work of human hands” to which we refer as we offer them to the blessed Lord God of the universe.  Natural, but not occurring of themselves in nature, and simple, but not elemental, once made they become the elements of the great thanksgiving by which we receive the Risen and Victorious Son of God in His flesh and blood. 

All the great mysteries of our salvation, the sacraments, are rooted in goods found everywhere and at all times of human history.  They appear and are applied to the comfort and consolation of human life only as the result of human effort and understanding.  Water gushes from springs and flows in rivers, but to wash with it requires human effort and intention.  Olives grow and ripen on trees, but only after hands have pressed them for oil and applied this salve to a wound can their fragrant ointment do its healing work.  These found goods require human genius among their ingredients, so to speak, at that natural level, before our saving God both reveals and imputes the divine genius that provides for our good at the supernatural level.  

The logic of the divine Word become flesh and dwelling among us is exclusive as well as expansive.   The infant lying in the manger, son of the Virgin Mother, is the one Savior of all the fallen; the many infants lying in their beds, children of loving mothers, are not.  This, not that; bread, not meat; wine, not milk.  

Bread is everywhere and of wide variety, but it is one very specific thing, and nothing else will do.  Wine is both unique and universal.  Wheat bread and grape wine are indispensable definitions of the instruction and occurrence of the flesh of the divine Son of the heavenly Father and the Virgin Mother, the blood of the unique and universal Redeemer of the world.  

Marvelous to contemplate, easy to recognize and receive, our Eucharistic Lord is both the source and the result of instructions that are not complicated, though by no means easy.  Love one another as I have loved you is remarkably specific; and do this in memory of me  leaves no room for improvisation.  Expansive and exclusive.  Nothing else will do the work for which He sent His Word, at which He will not fail.

Next weekend in our parish, the risen Lord Jesus will come to become one with, to commune with some of our children for the first time in their young lives.  He will be adorable and admirable.  Docile to the will of His Father, He will be the bread that came down from heaven.  He will be food for them, entering their bodies and raising up their lives.  From the golden vessel to the tip of their tongue, His flesh will make them glory.  How enormous a thing, and simple.  

Monsignor Smith